Another English Traditionalist Catholic Priest Goes Revisionist
James Mawdsley, Is “Fear of the Jews” ruling the world? No more; 13:36 minutes; https://youtu.be/BqVgXY_8DtQ; https://rumble.com/v4yrn73.
James Mawdsley, Twists to gas chamber accounts in WWII Germany and Austria: showers, delousing, US & Soviet built; 37:10 minutes; https://youtu.be/cxrdHcNjtJ0; https://rumble.com/v4yrsek.
James Mawdsley, Extermination Camp? Homicidal gas chambers? Majdanek? Vanishingly improbable; 56:09 minutes; deleted by YouTube; https://rumble.com/v4yrwyz.
When Pope Benedict XVI (Joseph Ratzinger) lifted the excommunication of four Bishops from the traditionalist Catholic Society St. Pius X in early 2008, he was ambushed by Swedish TV. They had recorded but held back an interview with the English traditionalist Bishop Richard Williamson, during which they had provoked him into making revisionist statements about the Holocaust. That interview was published right after the lifting of the Vatican’s ban, with the clear aim of getting former Hitler-Youth member Joseph Ratzinger into deep trouble.[1] It worked. This tragedy, however, had much more severe repercussions for Williamson, who was not only prosecuted by the German judiciary, but moreover kicked out by his Society St. Pius X.[2]
Other than in this one interview, Bishop Williamson never become publicly vocal about his views on the Holocaust. Once burned, twice shy.
Now we have another case of traditionalist insubmission: English traditionalist priest Fr James Mawdsley posted a video on his religious YouTube channel “Scripture and Tradition – Fr JM” in May of 2024 titled “Twists to gas chamber accounts in WWII Germany and Austria: showers, delousing, US & Soviet built,” which made quite a splash and attracted my attention. In it, he makes a frontal assault against homicidal gas-chamber claims made for several German and Austrian wartime concentration camps. I will discuss this video, and the one that he made shortly afterwards on the Majdanek Camp, below.
Before I do this, a little bit of pre-history is due. Fr Mawdsley has had his Catholic YouTube channel since early 2022. It currently has 161 videos and a whopping 27,300 subscribers. The word “Jews” appears in 13 of his video titles. The oldest, titled “Appeal to Pray for the Conversion of the Jews,” starts out by saying that one thing that could contribute to the solution of all problems in the world is to pray for the conversion of the Jews. Another video is titled “Should we be afraid of the Jews? No. Pray for them, especially on Good Friday.”
He zeroed in on the Holocaust in a short video posted just prior to the one on the German camps, titled “Is ‘Fear of the Jews’ ruling the world? No more.” Lobbying against censorship and globalist forces, he states that he cannot go “deeper into these things without discussing the Holocaust, and this involves the choice between truth and lies.” He then brings up the downward revision of the death tolls claimed for the Auschwitz and Majdanek camps, and briefly mentions the fact that the orthodox 6-Million victim figure has a history predating the Second World War. Announcing that his next videos will be looking more thoroughly into the orthodox Holocaust narrative, he predicts that his YouTube channel will come to an end, evidently expecting it to be shut down soon. He has made this prediction in earlier videos critical of Jewish influence, but so far it has not happened.
The second video reviewed here goes into some details of the propaganda tales told about the German camps at Buchenwald, Dachau, Sachsenhausen and Mauthausen (now in Austria). While the video is generally of high quality when it comes to accuracy, there are some issues that could be improved. I will list them here briefly in the hope that they may get addressed in a possible future second edition:
| Time | Issue |
|---|---|
| 2:14 | The claim that the Buchenwald shrunken heads are most-likely of South-American origin is unsubstantiated. If that topic is brought up, a close-up photo of the heads would be conducive, showing their traces of war-paint, clearly originating from American indigenous populations. Also, it is important to notice that the prosecution had these heads disappear after this psyop was over. |
| 12:09 | “And this shower room is in a different location in Dachau, but the film will make you want to conflate the two doors, thinking that the [delousing] gas chamber is connected with the shower room.” The important point to stress about the alleged homicidal gas chamber at Dachau is its six floor drains. So many drains make sense only, if a lot of water was expected to have to be drained from the room. After all, this was not supposed to have been a water-drowning chamber, but a gas chamber.[3] |
| 12:48 | On the Dachau homicidal gas chamber/shower room, Mawdsley talks about “piping which is genuinely plumbed for showers, as these pipes are.” While there is reason to believe that the room was equipped to serve as a shower room indeed (see the previous point), we still have no conclusive evidence for any piping in the ceiling. That would require opening the ceiling and investigating whether it contains any piping. The original hot-water furnace in the basement has been removed, but any piping leading upstairs must still be in the walls and ceiling, or at least traces of it. Such research would require the Dachau Museum’s cooperation, which will not happen under the current paradigm. The Dachau gas chamber is the museum’s most-valuable asset, the driving engine of Dachau’s tourist industry, and the mainstay of Germany’s self-flagellation culture. Finding water pipes would collapse all this. |
| 12:47 | Mawdsley states that the OSS, after Dachau’s liberation, had the ceiling in the shower room/gas chamber lowered by adding a false ceiling with false showerheads. Then the OSS operatives presumably even took flagstone from an adjacent room to make the room look sealed. (Similar at 30:51: “reengineering of a fake gas chamber in Dachau”; and again at 33:39). However, wartime blueprints show a lowered ceiling for this room right from the building’s inception. Furthermore, the time between the camp’s liberation and its visit by members of U.S. congress, showing them visit this room with a low ceiling, allows for too little time for major reconstruction projects. Hence, it is unlikely that any major restructuring took place. Furthermore, there is no evidence that tiles/flagstones were removed from another room. I know the source that claims this, but there does not seem to be any corroborating evidence for it, so I would not even mention it. Apart, a shower room needs tiles, whereas a gas chamber does not. |
| 14:15 | It is claimed that there were only two small cremation ovens at Dachau. However, there were four Kori furnaces at that Crematorium, plus a Topf double-muffle furnaces in the old cremation shed elsewhere in the camp.[4] |
| 18:05 | When turning to the Sachsenhausen Camp, Mawdsley takes a number of shortcuts that hurt his case. He states that the claimed use of “liquified gas” was not practicable, but he leaves the uninformed reader in suspension, in vain waiting for an explanation why this was so. The Soviet Sachsenhausen gas-chamber claims clearly describe a small delousing chamber equipped with a device similar to a DEGESCH circulation chamber. In other words: they relabeled a small delousing chamber as a mass-gassing device, which is ludicrous already due to the device’s small size. The gas allegedly used – liquid hydrogen in bottles – simply didn’t exist. The whole story was made up.[5] |
| 18:12 | This also undermines Gerhard Schirmer’s witness tale, which Mawdsley summarizes next. If the Soviets had a fake homicidal chamber built by German PoWs after the war, as Schirmer claimed, then why did they not use it in their propaganda? Schirmer also claimed that the U.S. built a fake homicidal gas chamber at Dachau, but that he could not know. In other words, he clearly mixed hearsay and third-party information with his recollections. |
| 18:44 | Another missed opportunity is the assertion that the orthodoxy claims 100,000 gassing victims for Sachsenhausen – when in fact the Soviets claimed 840,000 murdered Soviet PoWs alone for this camp, in addition to other prisoners. That fact highlights the mendacious nature of the Soviets, showcasing the weakness of the orthodox case right from the start. |
| 18:51 | When mentioning the actual death toll of some 20,000 Sachsenhausen victims, no source is given. It probably is the revisionist paper by Mattogno just cited. The viewer should be informed about this. |
| 20:50 | As long as the film’s section on Mauthausen is, it is also weak when addressing the gas-chamber claims. Their absurdity could be exposed much better: A brick heated up in the cremation furnace was supposedly put in a box, then Zyklon B was poured on it, after which the box was closed. Had the brick been too hot, the evaporating gas might have exploded. If that didn’t happen, a cloud of suddenly evaporating gas would have wafted into the room before the box could be closed. The room adjacent to the alleged gas chamber where this is said to have happened had no ventilation. Thus, this silly brick procedure would have endangered everyone in the building. Considering the actual technology available (DEGESCH system), these claims merely prove the mendacity of those who invented this ludicrous tale, and the total lack of critical faculties of those who take it seriously.[6] |
| 27:37 | Calling mass gassings on sick prisoner in April 1945 “too melodramatic,” as Mawdsley does, is not an argument against their occurrence. In early 1945, Mauthausen and its subcamps got swamped with inmates evacuated from other parts of Germany. With logistics collapsing throughout Germany and Austria, there was no prospect of doing anything to any of these inmates with any prospect of success – neither mass murder nor mass feeding, mass curing or whatever else comes to mind. To claim that the SS would have had the ability and composure to devise and implement a plan to mass murder inmates at that point in time is simply delusional. |
| 32:40 | Here, Mawdsley turns conspiratorial by floating the idea that a former U.S. soldier and OSS operative who had been captured by the Germans during the war and was held as a PoW at Mauthausen, later in life died during a plane crash that was possibly engineered to bury alongside with him some embarrassing knowledge he might have had on Mauthausen gas-chamber propaganda. Such unfounded speculations take time away from better arguments that could have been made. |
| 34:48 | Starting at this point, Mawdsley pitches his Christian traditionalist message. Whether that is a good or a bad thing is a matter of personal preference. There are a million different ways to turn revisionist, and if some come along this particular path, its fine with me. I myself was a traditionalist Catholic when I converted to revisionism back in 1989/90. Not that the two events were causally connected; they were not. But I learned around this time that quite a few people in that community were sympathetic to historical revisionism. Williamson and Mawdsley are no exception. |
While this list of critical remarks may look bad, the video is actually quite good. I just want to make sure that people don’t make flawed or weak arguments based on a video they saw. The enemy is vicious in attacking any weak spot, so it is important to weed them out.
When I learned about the video just analyzed, I contacted Fr Mawdsley. In the course of our ensuing conversation, he indicated that he was working on his next Holocaust video project addressing the Majdanek Camp. He asked me to review a beta version and submit suggestions for improvement. I gladly complied and submitted my suggestions just in time for him to make corrections before his scheduled posting date.
The video had only a few minor issues, which he gladly fixed before posting the final version. That video did not last long on YouTube, though. The long-feared process of shutting him down on YouTube commenced with this video getting taken offline not long after its initial publication. It is now only available on Rumble, and probably also on Bitchute. Mawdsley promptly posted a video on this act of censorship, throwing it right back into YouTube’s face.[7] He is switching to Rumble for good, he states.
I can give his Majdanek video my full approval regarding its historical assertions, so I cannot compile a second long list of nagging. The religious aspects of this movie are again a matter of personal preference, faith and belief. I stay out of this minefield.
Endnotes
| [1] | See Richard A. Widmann, “The Case of Bishop Williamson,” Smith’s Report, No. 159, March 2009; https://codoh.com/library/document/the-case-of-bishop-williamson/. |
| [2] | See Nicholas Kollerstrom, “Bishop Williamson Vindicated, then Ousted,” Inconvenient History, 5(1) (2013); https://codoh.com/library/document/bishop-williamson-vindicated-then-ousted/; Richard Williamson, “The fourth German showtrial against Bishop Richard Williamson,” Bishop Williamson’s Eleison Comments, Number CCXCI (291), 9 February 2013; https://codoh.com/library/document/the-fourth-german-showtrial-against-bishop/. |
| [3] | For a detailed analysis of the evidence on Dachau, see C. Mattogno, The Dachau Gas Chamber: Documents, Testimonies, Material Evidence, Bargoed, Wales, Castle Hill Publishers, 2022. See also my documentary “Probing the Holocaust, Part 1,” Dec. 2017; starting at 10:19; https://holocausthandbooks.com/video/probing-the-holocaust/. |
| [4] | For a detailed analysis of the evidence on Dachau, see C. Mattogno, F. Deana, The Cremation Furnaces of Auschwitz: A Technical and Historical Study. Part 3: Photographs, 2nd ed., Bargoed, Wales, Castle Hill Publishers, 2021, pp. 43-50 and 155-165. |
| [5] | On Sachsenhausen, see C. Mattogno, “Sachsenhausen Concentration Camp: Occupancy Reports and ‘Extermination Operations’ 1940 to 1945,” Inconvenient History, Vol. 15, No. 2, 2023; https://codoh.com/library/document/sachsenhausen-concentration-camp/. See also the chapter on the Sachsenhausen gas chamber in C. Mattogno, Inside the Gas Chambers: The Extermination of Mainstream Holocaust Historiography, 2nd ed., Castle Hill Publishers, Uckfield, 2016, pp. 150-180. |
| [6] | On Mauthausen, see both publications mentioned in the previous footnote. In Inside the Gas Chambers, the chapter on Mauthausen precedes the one on Sachsenhausen (pp. 130-150). |
| [7] | “Senseless to continue on YouTube,” June 15, 2024; https://youtu.be/2Ny3p16a5TQ. |
Bibliographic information about this document: Inconvenient History, 2024, Vol. 16, No. 2
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