Letters

A More Accurate Picture

May I congratulate you on the excellent Journal of Historical Review and your Institute's publications, which permit a free and more informed discussion of issues relating to the so-called “Holocaust.” Together with others publications, such as Dissecting the Holocaust (E. Gauss, ed.), a truer picture is slowly seeping through the filters of official censorship, which permit people to gain a more accurate picture of those years. While I do not necessarily agree with all the views expressed, I am gravitating toward a revisionist view of the 1939-1945 Holocaust.

N. M.
Ireland

Polite Suggestion

I want to make a polite suggestion. So many of my friends and relations personally saw the Nazi death camps during the last days of World War II that I myself am convinced that there was a deliberate policy of extermination of Jews, Poles, gypsies, and homosexuals by the Nazi leadership. Numbers of the specific events can be challenged, but it is my personal view that the IHR would be far more effective if it were to concede that a holocaust did occur and focus on the ADL's distortions of truth. Andy Killgore's and Dick Curtiss' publication would be an ideal example to follow.

Paul N. McCloskey, Jr.
Redwood City, Calif.

Crackdown Against VHO in Belgium

The Foundation Vrij Historisch Onderzoek was dissolved by court on Feb. 22, 2002, and the VHO post office box address was closed. Our new postal address is: Postbus 46, B-2600 Berchem 1, Belgium.

Some people are putting pressure on the government to stop our activities altogether and because of legal problems this is likely to happen this year. Nearly five years ago half of our stock was seized, and since then we have not had an opportunity to defend our case in any court. We have also had to contend with minor seizures, interrogations, and so forth.

In fact, VHO activities are being continued under the similar name Vogelvrij Historisch Onderzoek (www.vho.org). The Dutch word “Vogelvrij” has two meanings: “free as a bird” and “living like an outlaw,” which is how revisionists in Europe today are obliged to live.

With regard to the article by Brian Renk in the Sept.-Dec. 2001 Journal, “Convergence or Divergence?,” p. 43, col. 1, final sentence: Renk writes that Germar Rudolf had earlier established that the three objects on the roof are all on the southern half of the roof. Actually, it was not Rudolf, but rather Jean-Marie Boisdefeu, a Belgian revisionist researcher, who discovered all this. He also described this extensively, with illustrations, in his two-volume book La Controverse sur l’extermination des juifs par les Allemands, published by VHO (1996 and 1998).

S. Verbeke
Berchem, Flanders, Belgium

Unfounded Assertion

Samuel Crowell’s article, “Beyond Auschwitz” (March-April 2001 Journal, Vol. 20, No. 2, pp. 26-35) is spoiled by his totally unfounded assertion that “some portion of non-working Hungarian Jews could have been killed,” but that their number “could not have been more than a few tens of thousands at most” [p. 33].

While it can not, of course, be excluded that some Hungarian Jews were executed for real or alleged violations of camp regulations, the killing of “a few tens of thousands” would have been possible only as part of a limited extermination policy. Obviously, the first victims of such a policy would have been those unable to work, but as Crowell himself admits, many Hungarian Jews unfit for labor, including children and old people, survived the war at Auschwitz and other camps. So who were the magical “tens of thousands” who “could have been killed”? As Crowell does not believe in the gas chambers, such mass killings would have had to have been carried out by methods other than gassing, most likely by shooting. But if so, how come there is no eyewitness testimony at all to such mass shootings?

Equally absurd is Crowell’s claim that up to 55 percent of the deported Hungarian Jews may have perished before the end of the war is equally absurd. Raul Hilberg, who supports the gas chamber and mass extermination claims, puts the number of Hungarian Jewish victims at 180,000, which means that the majority of the Hungarian Jewish deportees must have survived. Therefore, how does Crowell, who rejects the gas chamber legend, arrive at this impossibly high percentage? In reality, the number of Hungarian Jews who died in the camps can not possibly have exceeded some tens of thousands.

Being well acquainted with the documents, and having remarkable linguistic skills, Crowell could make a substantial contribution to revisionist research. He should therefore refrain from making irresponsible statements that damage his credibility.

Jürgen Graf
[by e-mail]

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