Letters

The Web/Net may be the last battlefield in this whole enterprise. Hoaxery has pretty well driven opposition almost totally from the printed media, and with the severe reprimand even from the land’s national legislature by a unanimous vote condemning any and all who question Establishment hoaxery, it would seem the matter is becoming increasingly dangerous. Maybe the next step will be traveling ad hoc kangaroo courts pursuing any trace of criticism with condemnations for the perpetration of intellectual “genocide” and summary disposal via lynchings of one or another.

James J. Martin, Colorado

Re the recent work of Samuel Crowell I would like to contribute the following thoughts.

His first significant contribution was his “Technique and Operation of German Anti-Gas Shelters in W’orld War II,” which was posted on the CODOH website last March. I believe that this remains his most important work and that the matter of the Majdanek door, which he raised more recently, is distracting us from the more important matters he raised.

The gas shelters (actually also about bomb or air raid shelters) article showed that some of the documents in Pressac’s list of “criminal traces” can be interpreted in terms of air raid and gas shelters. The idea was not completely new; for example it is to be found in Faurisson’s original rebuttal of Pressac’s 1989 book, published in the Spring 1991 Journal of Historical Review, and I posted related ideas on my website in August 1996. The difference was that Crowell’s list was so long as to in effect propose a new paradigm to add to the existing ones in the interpretation of documents (mainly the typhus-delousing-cremation paradigm, but there are others, e.g. the labor-industrial).

If Crowell’s article is only half right then his proposal, in my opinion, has to be accepted, and we must henceforth be alert to such interpretations of documents. For example, the “Gasskammer” that comes up in documents has been assumed to be a misspelling of “Gaskammer” and interpreted by revisionists as a reference to a delousing gas chamber. To interpret the word, as Crowell does, as a builder’s abbreviation of “Gasschutzkammer” (gas shelter) would seem far fetched, but not if Crowell’s paradigm is accepted. That is important.

If he is wrong then it is equally important that such be demonstrated.

My feeling for the current situation is that the sensational nature of Crowell’s Majdanek door theory is obscuring the more important matters that he has raised. Crowell’s friends at CODOH seem to be acting as though the Majdanek door were somehow the summa of his work.

I have been observing revisionists long enough to expect that his critics will do the same. Crowell must stand or fall on the Majdanek door. Thus will the serious questions be buried.

As for me, I said on my website that “my hunch is that he is mostly right” in arguing the paradigm. I am sad to admit that I do not expect there to develop a discussion that will help either confirm or discredit my hunch.

Arthur R. Butz 1 Nov. 1997

Professor Butz touches on an interesting irony when he notes at the top of his letter that CODOH’s emphasis on the replica of the Majdanek door on display at the USHMM is “distracting us from the more important matters he raised. ” Where Butz is interested in certain scholarly work that needs to be done, in this instance on specific technical issues, CODOH is interested in creating an open debate in the public arena for revisionist theory in general. In short, “us” (we) are working toward the same goal, but from different perspectives. Between us, dispite frustrating distractions, we'll do it all—create a cultural context in which open debate is accepted as a norm, one where we can settle intelligently the historical and technical issues that interest all of us.

Just read “God Bless the Hillel Rabbis” and the only way I can describe the way it’s written is to say “beautiful.” Obviously, I have read your technical material and Holocaustian polemics over the years and always admired them. But what is written in this short piece is so much more powerful and elegant, like a cheetah running across the veldt. Your words run across the landscape of the Holocaust that way, and humanize those who prefer the truth to myth. Such is at least half the battle.

David Duke, Louisiana

My congratulations. I discovered your website yesterday and bookmarked it straightaway. I was particularly interested in the material about Mr. David Irving, whose work I first came across about seven or eight years ago. I remember how impressed I was when I read a library copy of Hitler’s War Volume 1. I am privileged to contribute a weekly article to the online magazine The New Australian (http://www.newaus.com.au/), a site dedicated to Austrian economics, free markets, political freedom and individualism. I want to thank you for your page and assure you that I am an ally in your fight.

S. Michael McMillen, Australia