Cautious Mainstream Revisionism

1. Political and Psychological Observations:

“Number of Auschwitz Victims: New Insights from Recent Archival Discoveries”

This is the title of an article by Fritjof Meyer which appeared in the German periodical Osteuropa in May of 2002.[5] According to the article, Meyer, born in 1932, is a “Diploma DHP, Diploma Political Scientist, and Diploma Economist.” The question arises, of course, why the “leading editor of Der Spiegel,” Germany's biggest news magazine, did not have his article published in Der Spiegel, or at least a short summary.

In this chapter, I will consider Meyer's article from political and psychological points of view. After that, I will analyze several of his statements, which will support my conclusions made in this chapter.

In his introduction, Meyer writes:

In his last sentence, Meyer writes as a political scientist who declares that Auschwitz must be an admonition to all Germans, if not all humans, based on the collapse of civilization – a term not defined by Meyer – that allegedly took place there. Was it a collapse of civilization that Auschwitz had choirs, orchestras, kindergartens, a dental clinic, huge kitchens, microwave delousing stations,[6] a hospital, a swimming pool[7] and soccer fields. Let me quote from page 7 of the Jerusalem Post for January 25th, 1995. (I trust the Jerusalem Post will not be accused of anti Semitism.)

Inscription on the Auschwitz-Birkenau memorial until April 3, 1990, propagating the “antifascist” number of four million victims in 19 languages.

Of course, Mr. Meyer refers to something else, i.e. the industrial mass murder of innocent human beings. That they are in a grotesque, if not insurmountable contradiction to the well-established and proven facts mentioned above, is not acknowledged by Meyer. For him, facts which do not fit into his image have “a purely propagandistic character”.[8]

All it needs to find out where the real geographic location of a collapse of civilization was, is to consider the history of the camps of “automatic arrest,” or the vast open meadows on the Rhine where the western allies imprisoned hundred thousands of Germans without shelter; or else at Hiroshima, Nagasaki, Dresden, Nemersdorf, or any of countless other locations of Allied holocausts. And this collapse of civilization was not committed by Germans, but it was inflicted upon Germans (and their allies).

I also do not understand why the alleged murder and cremation of half a million people is more conceivable and convincing than the alleged murder and cremation of several millions. The average person can not comprehend the mass murder of even ten people.

Subsequently, Meyer praises Jan van Pelt, the Jewish Dutch professor of architectural history, for his “breakthrough.” Needless to say, he neglects to mention that van Pelt is not an architect, and that he lacks expert knowledge of the subjects he dealt with. This is what Meyer writes in regard of van Pelt's appearance as “expert witness” during David Irving's defamation suit against Deborah Lipstadt:[9]

I agree with Meyer that what Irving presented to the London High Court were to a remarkable degree confused views. I do, however, not understand how Irving's lack of competence in this field can be shunted onto his Revisionist colleagues – apart from the fact that Meyer has abandoned all pretense of objectivity when he labels Irving's Revisionist colleagues, including myself, as National Socialists, which, in the common understanding of the term, is almost equal to calling somebody a devil incarnate. Additionally, he offers no reasons why our opinions are “nonsensical.”

Such presumptuousness and collective slander can be found otherwise only in Meyer's footnotes, the context of which clearly indicates Meyer's bias:

Again, skeptics and dissenters are depicted as devils by Meyer. He can no longer avoid confronting revisionist works, however, for he relies on revisionist sources to support his observations on the operation times of the Auschwitz/Birkenauer crematories, as we see in Footnote 19. Caught in a dilemma, the protector of political morality must have asked himself: 'How can I avoid lending credibility to Revisionists?' The answer was simple: declare all the other articles in “Dissecting the Holocaust” to be “unbearable,” “pamphlet”-like, and “unworthy.” The only exception is the article by Mattogno and Deans. Meyer feels no need to prove or to document anything he says; his pronouncements are all ex cathedra.

How can one explain such behavior? There are two possibilities. Perhaps he takes himself seriously. In that case he is politically blind; an extremist who denies other scientists their due respect and dignity. After all, Meyer belongs to those journalists who, in their majority, applaud when we “unbearable,” satanic, “unworthy” creatures are thrown into prisons. Or, on the other hand, he might simply be aware of 'whose song he must sing,' and cover his posterior by acting accordingly. With his partial revisionism (=partial denial), he too runs the risk of becoming a victim of the Court of Public Decency if he is not careful. If Meyer had needed different arguments for a different subject, such as the difficulty of committing mass murder with diesel exhaust for example, he probably would have quoted the article by Fritz Berg in the same anthology. In that case he would have had to label all the others as unbearable, pamphlet-like, unworthy, etc.

Mayer is correct when he remarks that historiography which is recognized as such by him has not accepted Auschwitz as a subject of research. I wish, however, he would have defined why he thinks this is “understandable!” I expect that we disagree already regarding the criteria to determine whether or not historiography has accepted a certain topic as a research subject. For this reason I would like to introduce something really basic here: a definition of “research.” Research is that activity of the human spirit which critically compares appearance and reality, without uncritically accepting the former as being identical with the latter. Real research occurs only when results are uncertain at the outset, every result is a possibility, and all results are open to public criticism. Mr. Meyer is well aware that such an open-minded investigative research of the Holocaust is not possible in many countries of Europe, for certain results are punishable by law. He also knows that in nearly every country where the subject can legally be researched, it is still socially and economically ruinous to present unorthodox views. We can also safely assume that Meyer's article caused him quite some trouble, and we can also assume that he knows what would happen if he had leaned too far out of the window.

In other words, for political reasons it is simply not possible for historiography to present “Holocaust” as a subject for research and investigation. It is significant that Meyer himself belongs to those who support this political 'Verbot' of research: He ostracizes and slanders all those who differ with him in essential points, going so far as to deny their dignity as human beings. Either he is unfamiliar with the basic rules for scientific research, or, more probably, he is simply indifferent to science and the scientific method.

Regarding the existence or non-existence of a building, often referred to as a “gassing bunker”, it would have been appropriate for Meyer's to mention in his footnote 5 that Graf's statement in his 1994 book is no longer supported by him today and that other revisionists never agreed with him on this.[10] Meyer's “Apologists for National Socialism ('Revisionists')” doubt” is therefore not only polemic, but also wrong in its generalization. The real argument is not about the existence of the(se) building(s) but about their purpose.

But now, after so much scolding it is time to praise Mr. Meyer a bit. He is the first to not only quote a revisionist source, but at least partially agreed with it (he quotes Mattogno again in his footnote 32, page 637.) He acknowledges that Revisionists have “very industriously gathered details,” even though equating our work with that of Soviet propagandists like Ilya Ehrenburg. Has Meyer noticed that Ehrenburg contributed not a single detail to historical research, and that Revisionists do not advocate mass murder or a resort to institutionalized torture like the NKVD or SMERSCH in their “investigations?” Really Mr. Meyer, can't you see that there is a qualitative difference between revisionist research and Soviet propaganda?

Meyer's acknowledgement that Revisionists have knowledge about many details implies another acknowledgement: he is familiar with the general body of Revisionist literature. We can assume that Meyer has been accumulating Revisionist publications for years, or at least monitoring them. This prompts me to examine more closely some of Meyer's factual statements.

2. Meyer's Methodical Deficiencies

At the very outset, Meyer makes the following statement:

The idea of a key document gets our attention right away, giving us hope of some new insight or discovery of a general nature. A little further on, Meyer continues:

In order to support his contention that “the cremation time took one and one half hours¹³ for each oven chamber,” Meyer also quotes the following source:

Meyer continues with Höß's testimony concerning the time a cremation oven could be used uninterruptedly:

Pope John Paul II at the old memorial, praying for at least three million victims too much during his June 7, 1979, visit to Auschwitz-Birkenau.

I am not going to deal here with the question of whether Meyer's statements are correct or not, since Carlo Mattogno deals with them in the following article in this issue of The Revisionist. However, I would like to make some remarks concerning Meyer's methodology.

To begin with, let me respond to the problem of the “key document.” Meyer uses it to bolster his contention that another “key document,” which is often quoted by researchers on the cremation capacity at Auschwitz, contains false and exaggerated figures.[11] He quotes J. C. Pressac, who calls the newest document an “internal propaganda lie of the SS” on account of its exaggerated figures of crematory capacity.[12] The question is, however, how Meyer can know for sure that Prüfer's letter is not just another propaganda lie told by the chief engineer of Topf & Son?

I am also surprised about Meyer's attempt to establish the actual capacities of the various crematories, which is unfortunately too typical for those who Robert Faurisson called “paper historians.” Why does Meyer rely on statements made by Auschwitz prisoners and testimony obtained through interrogation by Soviet torturers? Why doesn't he consult professional cremation experts, or at least visit the nearby crematorium at Hamburg? Since Meyer extensively quoted the work by Mattogno and Deana in other regards, why not quote it with regard to the capacities in question?

This reminds me of something that happened in 1993, while I was completing my doctorate at the Max Planck Institute for Solid State Research. On January 20, I was participating in a seminar headed by my PhD supervisor, Prof. Dr. Dr. h.c. Hans Georg von Schnering, a colorful professor who was well known for his exacting standards. At that day, a certain Dr. Harald Hillebrecht was giving a lecture on laboratory measurements he had carried out. He mentioned a value of a certain compound's physical property which seemed so improbable to my supervisor that he interrupted to ask where he could have gotten such a figure. When the lecturer answered that it was “word of mouth,” from one of his colleagues, Prof. von Schnering fairly exploded with disdain:[13]

Meyer's procedure can be easily compared with this, yes it is even worse, since Meyer does not resort to the voluntarily made remarks of an expert to establish technical data, but he uses statements of people who were either no experts on cremation technology at all (the witnesses Höß, Wetzler, Tauber, Schultze), and/or who testified under duress (Höß, Sander, Prüfer, Schultze). This is not a method that deserves to be called “scientific.” It is also no defence for Meyer when arguing that Carlo Mattogno has quoted these NKVD-compiled testimonies of the Topf engineers as well.[4] Of course, it is permissible to quote statements made by experts, even if they were made under questionable circumstances, but only in order to underline other results that were gained with reliable scientific methods, which is what Mattogno does. It is, however, unacceptable to use such isolated statements as reliable evidence for anything.

But this is not the extent of Meyer's methodological deficiencies. At the beginning of his article he writes:

Apparently Meyer believes that the documents and witnesses suggest that there were only attempts to convert the basement morgues of the crematoria into “gas chambers.” He contends that the real location of horror was elsewhere. As usual, he supplies no evidence for his contention. Only in his email response to an early version of this article, Meyer very generally refers to “those 'criminal traces' of Pressacs,” but he must have missed that these “criminal traces” do not at all prove what he and Pressac claim they do.[14] Fact is that with his statement, Meyer contradicts key Auschwitz witnesses such as Henryk Tauber, Miklos Nyiszli, and Filip Müller. He can not use ignorance as an excuse, since he quotes from Jürgen Graf's book on leading Auschwitz witnesses. Meyer is openly contradicting the “body of evidence” (insofar as one can take the witnesses seriously – but that is a different matter.)

Only after I asked him by email, Meyer claimed that his claims would be supported “by observations of the important witness Henryk Tauber,” but he does not mention, which of Tauber's observations he refers to.[4] As a matter of fact, Tauber explicitely states that the gas chamber of crematorium II was in full operation in summer and fall of 1943.[15] Tauber also reports of uninterrupted extermination activities right into the fall of 1944, and of course about the usual four million victims.[16] There is nothing in Tauber's statement that would indicate, homicidal gassings in the crematoria had been abandoned after initial experiments.

That Tauber makes technically impossible claims – up to eight corpses in one oven chamber, flames belching out of the chimneys, self-burning corpses, female corpses used to ignite other corpses, accumulation of boiling human fat – , is a different matter and proves nothing else but that this witness is simply a vulgar liar when it comes to the alleged mass extermination. If considered in an isolated way, such testimonies cannot prove anything, not even any kind of thesis put forward by Meyer.

U.S. President Gerald T. Ford laying down a wreath to commemorate at least three million victims too much at the Auschwitz-Birkenau memorial.

About the other two witnesses, Meyer made some quite remarkable statements, since he considers Miklos Nyiszli's book with its “extreme statements” to have been “obviously edited” and that Filip Müller's report is nothing but a “novel” – which, in Meyer's view, does allegedly not reduce the credibility of this witness when he testified in court (IMT, Frankfurt Auschwitz Trial).[4] But why did he not publish such far-reaching statements in his article, but instead hides them in an email, which he denied me to publish?

Meyer really cannot plead lack of knowledge when it comes to witness accounts, since he himself quoted Jürgen Graf's book on the most important Auschwitz witnesses, and in his email to me he listed the names of many witnesses he relies upon (again without reference),[17] which indicates that he knows what he is writing about. But why did he not quote his evidence where it was necessary, that is, in his article? It is of no help to anybody to hide them in private lists that he forbids to be published.

3. Meyer's factual Deficiencies

I have already addressed Meyers naïve acceptance of Tauber's absurdities, which do not support Meyer's claims. Meyer makes another error in his footnote 3 when introducing an argument which allegedly supports the failure of the conversion of the morgues into gas chambers:

Here a person incompetent in exact sciences and technology is plagiarizing another! Since 1993 I have pointed out over and over again out that the difference in density between air and gaseous cyanide is negligible, apparently in vain. But even if Meyer's argument were true, it is too weak to establish that those places once designated to have been the, “the absolute center” of the “geography of atrocities,” as Prof. Van Pelt so lyrically phrases it, has been relegated to the trash pile. Considering the security gigantic problems which would have arisen from an assembly-line-style of murder with hydrogen cyanide, does Meyer really believe the SS would have been discouraged by the question of whether cyanide laden air should be blown out from above or below? But it does not stop there. Meyer continues:

Can anyone explain why the alleged bunker for mass murder would be more suitable than the basement morgues of Crematories II and III with their allegedly poor ventilation, when the alleged bunkers had no ventilation apparatus at all?

In his reply, Meyer maintains that Bunker Ii had a ventilation system according to the former camp commander Aumeier.[4] If the revisionist thesis is correct that the(se) farmhouse(s) was/were indeed delousing facilities,[18] such a ventilation system would have been mandatory indeed. Meyer also knows that most witnesses re. these houses state that there was no ventilation system. What Meyer does here is to selectively pick one witness account and ignore all the rest, simply because it fits into his thesis. He cannot, of course, come up with anything more substantial like a document indicating that there was a ventilation system in these farmhouses. However, this still does not prove Meyer's thesis that the original plan to use the morgues of the crematories was abandoned in favor of the farmhouses due to an inefficient ventilation system.

Objectively seen, however, Meyer may not be totally wrong here. As a matter of fact, the ventilation systems of the crematory morgues were planned to ventilate morgues, but neither homicidal mass gassing cellars nor delousing chambers. However, the reason for this is not the wrong direction of ventilation, but the mere fact that the performance of this ventilation system would not have sufficed.[19] Due to the dangerous nature of hydrogen cyanide, it is also quite likely that it would have been used in buildings outside of the camps immediate vicinity, for example in those farmhouses.[20] This would have been the proper way of arguing, no matter if one talks about homicidal gassings or delousing gassing.

In his footnote 5, as already mentioned above, Mr. Meyer hopes to prove the existence of the so-called bunkers. And what scientific evidence does he offer as proof?

One could have added the German tabloid Bild of Nov. 11, 2001, which carried the same story. Methodically seen, it is more than questionable to rely on daily newspapers in the first place, because journalists frequently report superficially and unreliably. Imagine what all we would have to accept as true if we believed everything in the tabloid papers!

However, those newspaper articles do not mention anything about recently found foundations of what Meyer calls “Bunker I,” but about an existing residential building which a researcher from the Contemporary Jewish Center for Documentation in Milano claims to have identified as the former Bunker I – wrongly so, as Carlo Mattogno has shown in a detailed study.[21] Apparently Meyer has confused something here. Pictures of the foundations of a former building outside of the Birkenau camp with an unknown history were published by J.-C. Pressac in 1989. However, these are the remnants of Bunker II, not Bunker 1, at least according to Pressac.[22] We must therefore conclude that there are still not material traces of Bunker I, which does, of course, not prove that such a building with an unknown purpose did not exist.

This is aside from the fact that Meyer is again disseminating shithouse science, this time from the German Press Agency. Carlo Mattogno proved efficiently and scientifically that the GPA report consisted of outdated and warmed-over hoaxes.[23]

It is also significant that Meyer's article does not mention open air burnings of bodies in deep ditches, which are prominent in eyewitness testimony. These allegedly took place in deep ditches near the bunkers which Meyer prizes so highly. Meyer merely mentions in passing:

Meyer is right: The question of where the victims of these alleged mass murders could have been cremated during “Operation Hungary” (and before the crematories were completed) has heretofore not been recognized as a problem. He too fails to recognize the real problem however. The simple fact is that witnesses claimed the bodies were burned in deep pits, and this is a physical impossibility because of the high water table around Birkenau.[24] Furthermore John Ball, on the basis of numerous Allied aerial photographs, proved in 1992 that no large scale burnings took place at the time, either on pyres or in pits.[25] Meyer's transfer of the site of the alleged mass murders to the so-called bunker(s) increases the scope of the alleged problem. He contributes nothing toward solving the problem, he merely disguises it. Once again he presents a problem in a way which contradicts his own sources: He changes deep ditches into above ground pyres.

Also, concerning the hotly debated question of alleged openings for the insertion of Zyklon B in the ceiling of Cellar Morgue 1 of Crematories II and III, which might or might not have ever existed, Meyer makes another assertion which is as dogmatic as it is unfounded:

This question, central to the dispute, is of a material nature and is solvable by objective means. It should have been one of the main questions to be addressed in his article, if only he were interested in facts. But no, Meyer takes refuge behind an assertion in parenthesis. No wonder his point is completely mistaken.[26] If it were any different, one could have expected arguments.

Inscription on the same monument in 1995

“May this place where the Nazis assassinated a million and a half men, women and children, a majority of them Jews from diverse European countries, be forever a cry of despair and of warning for mankind. Auschwitz-Birkenau 1940-1945”

4. The Numbers of Victims

In his short 1998 article on the evolution of Auschwitz victim numbers, Thomas Ryder predicted the continuing lowering of these numbers in the near future.[27] He may have been overly optimistic about the rapidity with which the numbers would decline, but he was certainly correct about the tendency.

Meyer's latest contribution to the numbers game states:

After a short reference to the fact that the number of four million originated with Soviet propaganda, Meyer gives details about the statements made by Auschwitz Commandant Rudolf Höß. Regarding his treatment by his British captors he reports:

Meyer goes into detail about the various and well documented tortures which Höß underwent, and shows that the numbers which he gave could not possibly be correct. It would have been appropriate for Meyer to acknowledge the researchers who first reported on Höß's tortures and on the impossibility in his confession. Courtesy between scientific researchers demands no less. The fact that one dislikes A. R. Butz, W. Stäglich and R. Faurisson does not give anybody the right to trample on academic custom and courtesy.[28]

In keeping the style of his article, Meyer ends with a political statement:

However, Meyer did not succeed in verifying the barbarity of the National Socialists here. As far as Auschwitz is concerned, he succeeded only in confirming the barbarity of the official historians, who trample on the most basic fundamental rules of scientific research. This is yet another offense against civilization which must be rectified.

5. Conclusions

In his contribution, Meyer reduced the numbers of victims of Auschwitz once more, he more or less abandons the crematories of Auschwitz-Birkenau as locations of mass murder; for the first time, a revisionist source was quoted and at least partly acknowledged as being correct; furthermore, he has publicly accepted the fact as correct that former Auschwitz commandant Höß had been tortured, and he doubted the veracity of Höß' statements. In his private writings, he also admitted that the highly praised books of authors frequently referred to as “key witnesses,” Miklos Nyiszli and Filip Müller, have been edited or are nothing but novels, and he once again characterized Mattogno's work as acceptable. We may therefore hope for the future. It moves after all!

However, considering the massive methodical as well as factual deficiencies of his article, it sounds funny when Meyer accuses us revisionists in his footnote 19, we had “missed the points presented in this [his] study […].”[29]

Notes

First published in Vierteljahreshefte für freie Geschichtsforschung 6(4) (2002), pp. 371-378; translated by James M. Damon.