Inconvenient History

Auschwitz, Buchenwald and Alfred Hitchcock’s First Horror Movie

1. Auschwitz-Birkenau as Seen through the Eyes of a Recuperating Trooper I was a tank soldier, a member of a unit consisting of 70 Panther tanks which was pulled out of the Normandy invasion-opposition front and transferred to the Eastern front in mid-June 1944. By countless attacks by day and by night, we broke the…

War Is Declared!

“Article 1 – The Legislative Branch; Section 8 – Powers of Congress To declare War, grant Letters of Marque and Reprisal, and make Rules concerning Captures on Land and Water.” —Constitution of the United States[1] Revisionists are typically quick to condemn President Franklin Roosevelt for his actions, which cast the United States into the Second…

America Goes to War

With the onset of war in Europe, hostilities began in the North Atlantic which eventually provided the context – or rather, pretext – for America’s participation. Immediately, questions of the rights of neutrals and belligerents leapt to the fore. In 1909, an international conference had produced the Declaration of London, a statement of international law…

The Black Swan

The Black Swan, by Nassim Nicholas Taleb. Revised edition, Penguin Group, New York, 2010, 379 pp. This book is about the profound subjects of thinking, knowing, understanding, and then acting (or just as often, refraining from acting) on understanding. While it concentrates on how to think, know, and understand, it necessarily, and very valuably, strays…

Safe Among the Germans: Liberated Jews After World War II

Safe Among the Germans: Liberated Jews After World War II, by Ruth Gay. Yale University Press, New Haven, 2002, 347 pp. Perhaps unintentionally, the title of this fascinating study of the infamous Displaced-Persons camps in postwar Germany is very generous to Germans. It suggests that, in some act of contrition, those Germans who survived World…

The Case For Auschwitz

The Case For Auschwitz, by Robert Jan van Pelt, Indiana University Press Bloomington, IN 2002. 570 pp., with notes, bibliography, indexed. It is strange that an event, or rather a series of events that have marked the history of the 20th century perhaps more strongly than any other with the possible exception of the annihilation…

The Gas Vans: A Critical Investigation

By Santiago Alvarez and Pierre Marais, The Barnes Review, Washington, D.C., 2011, 390 pp., illustrated, with notes, bibliography, indexed. The Gas Vans fills a significant hole in Holocaust literature, often forgotten in the public mind and limited to minor entries in the most important Holocaust tomes (gas vans are mentioned on 4 pages out of…

The Three Photographs of an Alleged Gas Van

Between 1945 and 2012, the entire literature about the gas vans has presented exactly three photographs which allegedly show such vehicles. Sometimes it was explicitly claimed that the vehicle had been used for homicidal purposes, sometimes this was implied. In 1994, these photographs were subjected to a critical analysis by Udo Walendy[1] and Pierre Marais.[2]…

Three Books on Treblinka

During recent years there have appeared from time to time new books on the Treblinka “death camp”. Compared with the vast number of Auschwitz-related publications, and considering the fact that, according to the exterminationist point of view, Treblinka claimed the second-highest number of victims among the six “death camps” (the victim figure given usually varies…

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