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National Journal, first published: 02/05/2009 |
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A young and brilliant historian Hitler's War The Leuchter Report |
Irving vs Lipstadt Jail in Austria Irving's trip to Poland |
My questions to Irving and his reply The missing answer on question four |
David Irving’s evidence for the mass murder Irving's death toll The absurdities do not end |
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Part 6 |
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The case of the missing murder weapon
The diesel gas chamber story |
The evolution of the extermination legend
The results of the excavations at Treblinka (1945) The results of the archeological drillings at Belzec (1997-1999) Sobibor or the scientific report that never was |
Two important documents Irving deliberately ignores The three Reinhardt camps were transit camps |
Once a "Holocaust denier", always a "Holocaust denier"! A warning to David Irving An advice to David Irving |
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Jürgen Graf, April 2009 David Irving and the "Aktion Reinhardt Camps" The evolution of the extermination legend Almost immediately after the three Reinhardt camps had been put into operation, Jewish and Polish groups started spreading all kind of fantastic rumours about mass killings in these camps. The knowledge of these stories is of vital importance for an understanding of how the currently dominant historical version of these camps came about and what level of credibility can be ascribed to it. Let us begin with Belzec. According to the self-styled "eyewitness" Jan Karski, Jews were exterminated at Belzec by means of quicklime in trains [24]. However, most "witnesses" mentioned killing by electricity. On July 10, 1942, the Polish government in exile in London received the following report: "According to information from a German who is employed there, the place of execution is at Belzec, near the station. […] Once discharged, the men go into a barrack on the right, the women into one on the left, to undress, supposedly for taking a bath. Then the groups go together into a third barrack with an electric plate, where the execution occurs." [25] In a book published in Stockholm in 1944 and translated into English a year later, the Hungarian Jew Stefan Szende described how million of Jews had been killed at Belzec by electricity in "the underground premises of the execution building": "When trainloads of naked Jews arrived they were herded into a great hall capable of holding several thousand people. This hall had no windows and its flooring was of metal. Once the Jews were all inside, the floor of this hall sank like a lift into a great tank of water which lay below it until the Jews were up to their waists in water. Then a powerful electric current was sent into the metal flooring and within a few seconds all the Jews, thousands at a time, were dead." [26] In its official report on the German crimes in Poland, presented by the Soviets at the Nuremberg trial, the Polish government wrote the following about Belzec: "In the early months of 1942, reports came in that in this camp, special installations for the mass execution of Jews were being built. Under the pretext that they were being taken to a bath, they were undressed completely and pushed into the building. A strong electric current passed through the floor of this building." [27] The horror stories about Sobibor were quite different. While the Jewish witness Zelda Metz claimed that at this camp the Jews were "asphyxiated with clorine"[28], the Soviet witness Alexander Pechersky depicted the alleged mass murder in the following way: "As soon as they all have entered, the doors are closed with a heavy thump. A heavy black substance comes down in swirls from openings in the ceiling. One hears frantic screams, but not for very long because they change to gasping suffocating breaths and convulsions." [29] The case of Treblinka is even more instructive. While some of the earlier witnesses indeed mentioned gas chambers, none of them claimed that the murder weapon was a diesel engine. On August 17, 1942, the Polish underground newspaper Informacja biezaca spoke of a mobile gas chamber which moved along the mass graves[30]. Three weeks later, on September 8, the same paper described the alleged gassings as follows: The victims were exposed to a gas with retarded effect, whereupon they left the gas chambers, walked to the mass graves, fainted and fell into the graves [31]. However, the main killing method depicted by the witnesses was hot steam. On November 15, 1942, the Resistence Movement of the Warsaw Ghetto published a long report in which it stated that between late July and early November, two million Jews had been exterminated at Treblinka in steam chambers [32]. In August 1944, the Red Army conquered the area around Treblinka, and a Soviet commission questioned former inmates of the camp. What murder weapon would it opt for – gas or steam? As a matter of fact, it chose neither, but claimed in its report that three million people had been killed at Treblinka by pumping the air out of the execution chambers! [33] In September 1944, a professional atrocity propaganda monger, the Jew Wassili Grossman, honoured Treblinka with his visit. In his pamphlet The Hell of Treblinka Grossman confirmed the figure of three million victims; as he obviously did not know which of the three killing methods (steam, gas and pumping the air out of the chambers) would finally prevail, he prudently mentioned all of them in his booklet [34]. At the Nuremberg trial, the accusers of Germany chose the steam version. On December 14, 1945, the Polish government issued a document which was presented by the Soviets in Nuremberg and according to which "several hundreds of thousands" of people had been exterminated at Treblinka by means of steam[35]. But in 1946, the official version changed. As it was simply not credible that the Germans should have used all kind of completely different killing methods in the three Reinhardt camps, the steam chambers, electric killing installations etc. were relegated to the dustbin of history and replaced by diesel engines. The reason for this choice was undoubtedly the Gerstein report. In early 1946, this report – which decades later was brilliantly analyzed by French revisionist Henri Roques [36] – had monopolized the attention of the historians, and Gerstein, who claimed to have witnessed a gassing of Jews at Belzec, had identified the murder weapon as a diesel engine. That’s how the diesel gas chamber myth was born. It would be quite interesting how our intellectual titan, the blogger S. Romanov, would react if presented with the statements of all these eyewitnesses. Most probably he would argue that the witnesses had actually seen a gasoline engine, but unfortunately failed to identify it correctly. The first witness had identified it as a train wagon the floor of which was covered with quicklime, the second as an electrified plate in a barrack, the third as an electrified plate in a huge subterranean basin, the fourth as a ceiling with openings through which a black liquid was poured, the fifth as a mobile gas chamber moving along mass graves, the sixth as a steam-generating boiler, the seventh as a pump by means of which the air was pumped out of the chambers, and the eighth as a diesel engine! But these minor differences were entirely irrelevant, as the Aktion Reinhardt Holocaust was a proven historical fact! Does David Irving know these eyewitness reports? If he has not read the revisionist literature, he cannot possible know them as they are never ever mentioned in the official literature. In his "standard work" about the Reinhard camps, Yitzhak Arad quotes an excerpt from the report of the resistance movement of the Warsaw Ghetto, but shamelessly distorts the text by replacing the embarrassing "steam chambers" by "gas chambers"! [37] If Irving has read the revisionist literature, he does indeed know these ludicrous stories, but there is really not much he can say about them. The results of the excavations at Treblinka (1945) It is universally admitted that none of the three Reinhardt camps had crematoria. According to the "Holocaust" historians, the bodies of the gassed Jews were burned in the open air in 1943. This alone suffices to make the official version highly improbable from the beginning. All "normal" concentration camps, such as Dachau and Buchenwald, for which no mass killings are claimed, had crematoria, so why didn’t the German build crematoria at the "extermination camps" where they would have been a hundred times more necessary? Based on several cremation experiments, Carlo Mattogno assumes that 160 kg of wood are necessary to cremate a human body with a weight of 45 kg [38]. He calculates that the burning of 870,000 corpses would have left 1,950 tons of human ashes, plus 11,100 tons of wood ashes. The total volume of ashes would have amounted to approximately 48,000 cubic meters. Since human teeth and bones cannot be completely destroyed through open air cremations, myriads of teeth and bone fragments would have been scattered at the site of the former camp. Had the Soviet and the Poles found but 10% of these ashes, teeth and bone fragments, they would have had a very serious case against the Germans. They would have summoned an international commission – just as the Germans had done after discovering the mass graves at Katyn – and presented the results of the forensic investigations at the Nuremberg trial. They would not have been forced to resort to the "steam chamber" nonsense. In November 1945, a Polish team headed by the judge Zdzislaw Lukaszkiewicz carried out an excavation on the area of the former camp Treblinka and subsequently wrote a report which was published thirty years later (!) [39]. On the first day of the excavations, the diggers found "a large amount of Polish, Soviet, German, Austrian and Czech coins, plus fragments of pots and pans", but no human remains. On the second day they discovered "all kind of tableware, different household objects, shreds of garments, a large amount of more or less seriously damaged Polish documents, the badly damaged identity card of a German Jew and more coins". On the third day, they found "a considerable amount of human ashes and human remains". On the fourth days, they discovered "fragments of all kind of cutlery, a large number of rags, Greek, Slovak and French coins, plus the remainders of a Soviet passport". On November 13, Lukaszkiewicz ordered the excavation to be stopped, because he considered the discovery of further graves "improbable". That the Poles found any human remains at all will come as a surprise to nobody. According to the Höfle document, 713,355 Jews were sent to Treblinka in 1942, and the deportations continued until August 1943, albeit at a much slower rate. Under these circumstances, one cannot but assume that several thousand deportees must have died at the camp. The results of the archeological drillings at Belzec (1997-1999) In 1997, the United States Holocaust Museum and a similar Polish organization decided to undertake archeological drillings and diggings within the area of the former camp at Belzec. The work was conducted by a team of archeologists led by Professor Andrzej Kola who published the results in 2000[40]. In his aforementioned book about Belzec, Carlo Mattogno performs a very detailed analysis of the Kola report, which I will presently summarize. It goes without saying that the only rational method would have consisted in digging up the whole territory of the former camp, but this is precisely what Kola and his team did not do. They proceeded in the following way: Drilling was conducted in the designated area at 5 m intervals with a manual drill 8 m long and with a diameter of 65 mm. Altogether 2,277 drillings were sunk, and mass graves were identified by 236 of them. The earth samples taken in this way were then analyzed to determine their contents. The research resulted in the discovery of 33 graves in two separate areas of the camp. The 32 graves had a total surface of 5,919 square meters and a total volume of 21,310 cubic meters. Although Kola and his team discovered not only human ashes and bone fragments, but also a certain number of unburned corpses, they inexplicably failed to excavate them. Their book contains a photographic documentation of objects found in the area of the camp. The photographs show the most insignificant junk: horseshoes, keys and padlocks, pots and scissors, combs, coins and bottles, but not a single photograph shows a corpse or part of a corpse! On the basis of experimental data, the maximum capacity of a mass grave can be set at 8 corpses, assuming that one third of them are children. Theoretically, the surface area of the Belzec graves would thus have been sufficient to inter 170,000 corpses. If this had been the case, the revisionists would be forced to admit that Belzec had indeed been an extermination camp, for 170,000 people could not possibly have died from "natural causes" in a camp which existed only for nine and a half months. On the other hand, Belzec could not have been a total extermination camp: According to the Höfle document, 434,000 people were deported there, and if 170,000 of them had been killed there, the other 264,000 would have left the camp alive. As a matter of fact, the capacity figure of 170,000 corpses is based on two entirely unrealistic assumptions: A maximized surface/volume of the graves and a maximum density of corpses in them. As to the first point, Kola remarked: "In the first zone, as we can suppose, the connecting of smaller neighbouring graves into bigger ones by the destruction of the earthen walls separating them was observed. […] Additional disturbances in archeological structures were made by intensive dig-ups directly after the war while local people were searching for jewelry. This fact makes it difficult for the archeologists to define precisely the ranges of burial pits." [41] Already in 1946, the prosecutor of the town of Zamosc had stated that the camp site had been "completely dug up by the local population in their search for valuables"[42]. As to the second point, of the 236 samples taken in connection with the graves, 99 contained no human remains at all, while more than half of the remaining 137 show a very thin layer of human ashes. Carlo Mattogno concludes: "Although it is impossible to establish the number of the deaths, it is nonetheless possible to infer, from what has been discussed above, an order of magnitude of several thousands, perhaps even some tens of thousands." [43] Personally, I consider the latter figure ("some tens of thousands") extremely unlikely, although I cannot exclude it with absolute certainty. Probably several thousand Jews died at Belzec. Sobibor or the scientific report that never was About the third Reinhardt camp, Sobibor, a young and talented revisionist, Thomas Kues, furnishes the following information: "In an article published in The Scotsman on November 26, 2001, we read that Polish archaeologist A. Kola and his team had discovered seven mass graves at the Sobibor site. […] Despite seven years having passed since the drills and diggings were reportedly made, not a single article, paper or scientific report has appeared on them, neither in English, Polish, nor in any other language." [44] Why was "not a single article, paper or scientific report" published about the result of the drillings and diggings, "neither in English, Polish, or any other language"? The answer to this question is all too obvious! |
