Critique of the Matt Cockerill vs. Thomas Dalton Debate, Part 1

Matt Cockerill writes on page 45:

“Does denial – in addition to being wrong – even amount to historical discourse? I conclude it does not.”

My Response

Actually, Holocaust revisionism does amount to legitimate historical discourse. I will examine in this article the development of the official Holocaust story, and why Holocaust revisionists have correctly disputed this false narrative.

When U.S. and British troops entered German concentration camps at the end of World War II, they discovered huge piles of dead bodies and emaciated and diseased surviving inmates. The horrific scenes were filmed and photographed for posterity by the U.S. Army Signal Corps. Prominent newsmen and politicians were flown in to Germany to see the harrowing evidence at the camps for themselves. Films of the horrific scenes at the camps were made mandatory viewing for the vanquished populace of Germany, so that their national pride would be destroyed and replaced with feelings of collective guilt.

Nothing has been more effective in establishing the reality of the Holocaust story in the minds of the American general public than these terrible scenes encountered by troops at the German concentration camps. Today many state laws make viewing films of these awful scenes of the German camps mandatory for school children. Proponents of showing these graphic films to school children say that the trauma induced from watching these films is necessary to teach our children about the dangers of racism and anti-Semitism.

What school children and the general public are usually not told is that most of the inmates in these camps died of natural causes. When American and British forces took control of the German concentration camps, they were followed by military personnel charged with documenting evidence of German war crimes. One of these was Dr. Charles P. Larson, a prominent American forensic pathologist, who performed autopsies at Dachau and some of its sub-camps. At Dachau Dr. Larson performed about 25 autopsies a day for 10 days and superficially examined another 300 to 1,000 bodies. He autopsied only those bodies that appeared to be questionable. Dr. Larson stated regarding these autopsies at Dachau:[1]

“Many of them died from typhus. Dachau’s crematoriums couldn’t keep up with the burning of the bodies. They did not have enough oil to keep the incinerators going. I found that a number of the victims had also died from tuberculosis. All of them were malnourished. The medical facilities were most inadequate. There was no sanitation…

A rumor going around Dachau after we got there was that many of the prisoners were poisoned. I did a lot of toxicological analysis to determine the facts and removed organs from a cross-section of about 30 to 40 bodies and sent them into Paris to the Army’s First Medical laboratory for analysis, since I lacked the proper facilities in the field. The reports came back negative. I could not find where any of these people had been poisoned. The majority died of natural diseases of one kind or another.”

Dr. Larson did report that some inmates had been shot and that the living conditions in the German camps were atrocious. The average daily caloric intake of the inmates was far short of requirements, thus accounting for the extreme emaciation of many of the inmates. However, since Dr. Larson’s autopsy reports were inconsistent with a German program of extermination or genocide, they were not introduced into evidence at the Nuremberg trials.

Dr. John E. Gordon, M.D., Ph.D., a professor of preventive medicine and epidemiology at the Harvard University School of Public Health, was with U.S. forces at the end of World War II. Dr. Gordon determined that disease, and especially typhus, was the number one cause of death in the German camps. Dr. Gordon explained the causes for the outbreaks of disease and typhus as follows:[2]

“Germany in the spring months of April and May [1945] was an astounding sight, a mixture of humanity traveling this way and that, homeless, often hungry and carrying typhus with them…

Germany was in chaos. The destruction of whole cities and the path left by advancing armies produced a disruption of living conditions contributing to the spread of disease. Sanitation was low grade, public utilities were seriously disrupted, food supply and food distribution were poor, housing was inadequate and order and discipline were everywhere lacking. Still more important, a shifting of population was occurring such as few times have experienced.”

Dr. Russell Barton, an English physician who later became an American psychiatrist, entered Bergen-Belsen with British forces as a young medical student on May 2, 1945. Dr. Barton’s first impression of the camp was one of horror; some inmates were dead and piled up outside the huts, others were in various stages of dying, disease, and dehydration. Barton examined the camp’s well-equipped kitchens and found record books listing the food that had been cooked and distributed going back to 1942. Dr. Barton determined from his examination of the camp records that there had been no deliberate policy of starvation at Bergen-Belsen.

Dr. Barton made inquiries with inmates, including Jewish doctors, who told him that Bergen-Belsen had not been too bad until the autumn of 1944. Then, as the Russian armies were advancing, the inmates said they had been given the choice of remaining in the camps about to be overrun by the Soviets or being repatriated back to Germany. Many chose to return to Germany. As a result, from the autumn of 1944 to early 1945, some 53,000 people were moved into Bergen-Belsen, which had room for only 3,000 inmates. The overcrowding was extreme and the staff at the camp resented it. Josef Kramer, the commandant of Bergen-Belsen, and Dr. Fritz Klein, the medical doctor at the camp, didn’t know what to do with the huge influx of inmates. Dr. Barton concluded that the horrific conditions at Bergen-Belsen were attributable to overcrowding and the collapse of the German economy at the end of the war rather than to an intentional program of extermination.[3]

Dr. Barton’s testimony is consistent with statements from Violette Fintz, a Jewish woman who had been deported to Auschwitz in mid-1944, then to Dachau, and finally to Bergen-Belsen in early 1945. Fintz compared conditions in the various camps:[4]

“Belsen was in the beginning bearable and we had bunks to sleep on, and a small ration of soup and bread. But as the camp got fuller, our group and many others were given a barracks to hold about seven hundred lying on the floor without blankets and without food or anything. It was a pitiful scene as the camp was attacked by lice and most of the people had typhus and cholera. […] Many people talk about Auschwitz – it was a horrible camp. But Belsen, no words can describe it. […] From my experience and suffering, Belsen was the worst.”

Bergen-Belsen is typical of the other German camps. The sharp increase in the number of deaths at the camps in 1945 was due to disease and overcrowding rather than an extermination program. The woeful scenes on liberation of the camps were not typical of camp conditions throughout their existence. By the end of the war as many as two or three inmates were sleeping on a single plank, three tiers to a bunk, in packed wooden barracks. Ill-clothed and ill-fed, exposed to virulent epidemics, camp inmates were dying in horrifying numbers throughout the last months of the war.[5]

The fate of Anne Frank, who is known around the world for her famous diary, is typical of many Jews who died in German camps during the war. Anne and her father were first deported from the Netherlands to Auschwitz-Birkenau in September 1944. Anne’s father contracted typhus at Auschwitz and was sent to the camp hospital to recover. He was one of thousands of Jews who remained at Auschwitz when the Germans abandoned the camp in January 1945. He survived the war and died in Switzerland in 1980.

In the face of the advancing Soviet Army, Anne Frank was evacuated to Bergen-Belsen, where she died of typhus in March 1945. While Anne Frank’s fate was tragic, her story is not consistent with a German plan of extermination against the Jews. Along with thousands of others at Bergen-Belsen, Anne died from a typhus epidemic and not from a German plan to commit genocide against European Jewry.

The Allies were no more effective in stopping deaths in the camps than the Germans had been. For example, there were some 55,000 to 60,000 inmates in Bergen-Belsen when the British took control of the camp. Despite the best efforts of the British, almost 14,000 inmates died at Bergen-Belsen in the months following the British takeover.[6] Likewise, at Dachau, the death rate remained high in the month after the Americans liberated the camp.[7] The high death rates in these camps were primarily caused by typhus and other diseases rather than by an Allied extermination program.

After the war, it was claimed that Dachau and other camps liberated by the Allies in western Germany had homicidal gas chambers. In fact, the U.S. Army produced a film supporting the notion that Dachau had a gas chamber. The Army film narrator states in this film:[8]

“Hanging in orderly rows were the clothes of prisoners who had been suffocated in a lethal gas chamber. They had been persuaded to remove their clothing under the pretext of taking a shower for which towels and soap were provided.”

Today it is no longer claimed that anyone ever died in a gas chamber at Dachau.[9]

Defenders of the Holocaust story have conceded that there were no homicidal gas chambers or extermination camps in Germany. We are now told that homicidal gassings and extermination camps were located solely in Poland, in areas captured by the Soviet Union and made off-limits to western investigators. As Dr. Martin Broszat of the Institute for Contemporary History stated in a 1960 letter to the German weekly Die Zeit:[10]

 “Neither in Dachau nor in Bergen-Belsen nor in Buchenwald were Jews or other prisoners gassed.”

Simon Wiesenthal also stated in 1975 and again in 1993 that “there were no extermination camps on German soil.”[11]

Many of the most outlandish claims have also been quietly dropped by defenders of the Holocaust story. For example, it was claimed at the Nuremberg trials that the Germans made soap from the bodies of Jews. The judges at Nuremberg stated in their verdict that “in some instances attempts were made to utilize the fat from the bodies of the victims in the commercial manufacture of soap.”[12] In April 1990, officials at Israel’s Yad Vashem Holocaust Center admitted that the human soap stories were not true. Yad Vashem archives director Shmuel Krakowski stated:[13]

“Historians have concluded that soap was not made from human fat. When so many people deny that the Holocaust ever happened, why give them something to use against the truth?”

The stories of human lampshades being made from human skin have also been quietly dropped by defenders of the Holocaust story. Gen. Lucius Clay, military governor of the American Zone of occupied Germany, stated regarding the case of Ilse Koch:[14]

“There is no convincing evidence that she selected inmates for extermination in order to secure tattooed skins or that she possessed any articles made of human skin.”

Years later in an interview, Gen. Clay stated about the material used in the lampshades:[15]

“Well, it turned out actually that it was goat flesh. But at the trial it was human flesh. It was almost impossible for her to have gotten a fair trial.”

I have already commented at length in another article on the unfairness of the International Military Tribunal (IMT) and later Allied-run trials.[16] The absurdity of these trials, however, cannot be overstated.

For example, many defenders of the Holocaust story maintain that the 42-volume Trial of the Major War Criminals (The Blue Series) supplies a massive compilation of damning evidence against Germany’s National Socialist regime. In his book Made in Russia: The Holocaust, Carlos Porter confronts the evidence directly by reproducing page after page from the Blue Series. Porter shows that many of the charges made at Nuremberg are so bizarre that most defenders of the Holocaust story have long since let them lapse. In addition to killing Jews in homicidal gas chambers, the Germans at Nuremberg were accused of:

• building special electrical appliances to zap inmates to death with mass electrical shocks;
• killing 20,000 Jews in a village near Auschwitz with an atomic bomb;
• forcing prisoners to climb trees and then killing the prisoners by cutting down the trees;
• killing 840,000 Russian prisoners at the Sachsenhausen concentration camp using a pedal-driven brain-bashing machine, and then burning the bodies in four mobile crematories;
• torturing and executing people at the Yanov camp in Russia in time to music created by a special orchestra selected from among the prisoners, and then shooting every member of the orchestra;
• grinding the bones of 200 people at one time as described in documents and photographs that have disappeared;
• making lampshades, handbags, driving gloves for SS officers, book bindings, saddles, house slippers, etc. out of human skin;
• killing prisoners and concentration camp inmates for everything from having soiled underwear to having armpit hair; and
• steaming people to death like lobsters in steam chambers at Treblinka.

After this incredible survey of Nuremberg atrocity evidence, Carlos Porter provides numerous examples of improper prosecution tactics at Nuremberg. The defendants at Nuremberg were rarely able to confront their accusers, since affidavits from witnesses who had been deposed months before sufficed. The prosecution made it difficult for the defense lawyers to have timely access to the documents introduced into evidence by the prosecution. Also, photocopies and transcripts were usually submitted into evidence instead of the original German documents, which in many cases seemed to have disappeared. Finally, the defense had access only to those documents which the prosecution considered material to the case. The defense had no right to review the tons of remaining documents that might help them defend their clients.[17] Obviously, Holocaust revisionists have rightly criticized the unfairness and absurdity of the IMT.

Holocaust revisionists have also rightly criticized the reliability of the eyewitness testimony to the so-called Holocaust. It would be impossible for me to discuss every eyewitness account of the “Holocaust.” To illustrate the unreliability of eyewitness accounts of the Holocaust story, I will analyze the eyewitness accounts of probably its three most famous survivors: Elie Wiesel, Simon Wiesenthal, and Viktor Frankl.

Elie Wiesel, whose autobiography Night written in 1956 helped him win the Nobel Peace Prize, never mentioned homicidal gas chambers in his book. Instead, Wiesel wrote that Jews were killed en masse by being thrown alive in burning pits.[18] If there had been homicidal gas chambers at Birkenau, one would think that Wiesel would have mentioned these gas chambers in his autobiography. Also, if there had been burning pits at Birkenau, these would have shown in some of the Allied aerial photographs taken of Birkenau in 1944.

Wiesel also mentions in Night that he had surgery on an infected foot in January 1945. The German authorities at Birkenau gave Wiesel and other hospital patients unfit to travel the option to remain in the camp. Wiesel and his father decided to evacuate Birkenau and travel to Buchenwald with the Germans rather than be liberated by the Soviet Army.[19] If Birkenau had been a place of mass exterminations, why would Wiesel choose to travel with his supposed killers? Also, why would the German authorities at Birkenau leave behind thousands of witnesses to their genocide if a policy of genocide had taken place at Birkenau?

That Wiesel survived his internment at Buchenwald is, of course, the result of a miracle. Wiesel stated:[20]

“In Buchenwald they sent 10,000 persons to their deaths each day. I was always in the last hundred near the gate. They stopped. Why?”

Today no credible historian believes that 10,000 Jews per day were executed at Buchenwald.

A remarkable witness himself, Wiesel assured us that he had met other remarkable witnesses. Wiesel stated in one of his books that after Jews were executed at Babi Yar in the Ukraine:[21]

“Eye witnesses say that for months after the killings the ground continued to spurt geysers of blood. One was always treading on corpses.”

Wiesel repeated this claim later with some embellishment:[22]

“Later, I learn from a witness that, for month after month, the ground never stopped trembling; and that, from time to time, geysers of blood spurted from it.”

This story lacks all credibility. Wiesel did not seem to know that photos taken at Babi Yar shortly after the alleged mass executions of Jews show no indication of any mass grave site or any disturbance of the foliage or ground cover.[23]

Famed Nazi-hunter Simon Wiesenthal also reported a trip to a German camp hospital in his book The Murderers Among Us. Wiesenthal wrote that he tried to commit suicide by cutting his wrists while incarcerated by the Germans. Instead of letting him die, the Germans sent him to the hospital where they nursed him back to health.[24] If the Germans were intent on committing genocide against European Jewry, why would they make the effort to send both Wiesel and Wiesenthal to the hospital to restore their health?

Viktor Frankl’s book Man’s Search for Meaning has been ranked by the Library of Congress as one of the 20th century’s 10 most influential books in the United States. Frankl described his experiences at Auschwitz in his book as if he had spent many months there. Actually, Frankl was in Auschwitz only for a few days in October 1944 while in transit from Theresienstadt to a sub-camp of Dachau. Frankl has admitted this to the American evangelist Robert Schuller:[25]

“I was in Auschwitz only three or four days. […] I was sent to a barrack and we were all transported to a camp in Bavaria.”

Frankl’s short time in Auschwitz is substantiated by the prisoner log from the sub-camp of Dachau, Kaufering III, which listed Frankl’s arrival on October 25, 1944, six days after his departure from Theresienstadt.[26] Frankl’s descriptions of his long stay at Auschwitz in Man’s Search For Meaning are false and inaccurate.

Thus, contrary to Matt’s statement, any historian who objectively studied Holocaust revisionism would conclude that Holocaust revisionism constitutes legitimate historical discourse.

Did 6-Million Jews Die During World War II?

Matt Cockerill writes on page 11:

“As Andrew Mathis has shown, between 1857 and 1939 there were more New York Times headlines invoking one million Jews, two million Jews, and three million Jews than six million. The idea that the figure of ‘six million Jews’ was a unique and longstanding fixation before the Holocaust is false, and the product of denier cherry picking.”

My Response

The figure of 6-million Jewish deaths had been used and predicted long before the end of World War II. An ancient Jewish prophecy had promised the Jews their return to the Promised Land after a loss of 6 million of their people.[27] According to the book Breaking the Spell by Nicholas Kollerstrom, publications and speakers had referred to the death or persecution of 6 million Jews on at least 166 occasions before the end of World War II.[28]

In an article appearing in the June 25, 1940 issue of the Palm Beach Post, Dr. Nahum Goldmann, who was the administrative committee chairman of the World Jewish Congress, said “if the Nazis should achieve final victory 6 million Jews in Europe are doomed to destruction.” Not a single Jew had been interned and Hitler was still pleading for peace at this time. Yet the so-called Holocaust and the 6 million Jews doomed to destruction was already predicted.[29]

The number of 6 million appeared again on January 4, 1945, when the Jewish chief of Soviet atrocity propaganda, Ilya Ehrenburg, stated that this is the number of Jews that had died in World War II.[30] On January 8, 1945, the New York Times published an article in which Jacob Lestchinsky, a Communist correspondent for the New York Jewish Daily Forward, estimated that the Jewish population in Europe had been reduced from 9,500,000 in 1939 to 3,500,000. Lestchinsky stated:[31]

“Of the 6 million European Jews who have died, 5 million had lived in the countries under Hitler’s occupation.”

How Ehrenburg and Lestchinsky came up with their numbers fully four months before the end of the war is anyone’s guess.

Immediately after the end of the war in Europe, an article in the Pittsburg Press on May 13, 1945, was headlined “Nazis Destroy 6 Million Jews.”[32] In June 1945, some Zionist leaders were also able to state that 6 million Jews had died during the war. These Zionist leaders made this statement even though the chaos in Europe at the time made any definitive demographic studies impossible.[33]

The Allies gave special attention to the alleged extermination of 6 million Jews at the IMT. For example, chief U.S. prosecutor Robert H. Jackson declared in his opening address to the Tribunal:[34]

“The most savage and numerous crimes planned and committed by the Nazis were those against the Jews. […] It is my purpose to show a plan and design to which all Nazis were fanatically committed, to annihilate all Jewish people. […] The avowed purpose was the destruction of the Jewish people as a whole. […] History does not record a crime ever perpetrated against so many victims or one ever carried out with such calculated cruelty.”

The number of 6 million Jewish deaths used at the IMT is based primarily on the hearsay evidence given by the written deposition of German SS-bureaucrat Wilhelm Höttl.[35] The verbal but never cross-examined testimony of Dieter Wisliceny, who said that 5 million Jews had died during the war, is also used to substantiate the figure of 6 million.[36] These two men claimed that they heard these statements from Adolf Eichmann, but Eichmann later disputed that he ever made these statements.[37] Thus, the prosecution’s claim at the IMT that 6 million Jews died in World War II is based solely on hearsay evidence from two German SS-bureaucrats seeking exemption from punishment whose only source later said that he never made the statement.

The 6 million Jews murdered by National Socialist Germany during World War II was regarded as a proven fact by the end of the IMT. Sir Hartley Shawcross stated in his closing address that “more than 6 million” Jews were killed by the Germans, and that “…murder [was] conducted like some mass production industry in the gas chambers and the ovens of Auschwitz, Dachau, Treblinka, Buchenwald, Mauthausen, Majdanek and Oranienburg.”[38]

In December 1981, the Canadian Jewish News reported concerning the Federal Indemnification Law (BEG) that by the end of 1980, “The number of successful claimants is 4,344,378.” A Focus On article noted that between October 1953 and the end of December 1983, the West German government had paid a total of 4,390,049 claims to individuals under the BEG legislation.[39] The great majority of these successful restitution claims were from Jews. Raul Hilberg estimated that about two thirds of these allowed claims had been from Jews.[40] Using Hilberg’s conservative estimate would mean that over 2.9 million BEG restitution claims to Jews had been made by January 1984.

This estimate of 2.9 million successful Jewish BEG claims understates the number of successful BEG claims to Jews because, as of 1985, Jews in Poland, the Soviet Union, Hungary, Romania, and Czechoslovakia were not eligible for BEG restitution. Also, some European Jews who survived World War II died before the German BEG restitution law was enacted in 1953. The Atlanta Journal and Constitution newspaper estimated that only half of the Jewish “Holocaust” survivors around the world in 1985 had received restitution under the BEG.[41] If this 50% estimate is accurate, it means there would have been approximately 5.8 million successful BEG restitution claims if all Jewish survivors of World War II had been eligible to receive BEG restitution.

Since the number of BEG compensation claims is larger than the number of BEG claimants, the exact number of Jewish recipients of BEG compensation cannot be obtained. Nevertheless, these BEG compensation figures indicate that not anywhere close to 6 million Jews died during World War II.[42]

The book The Dissolution of Eastern European Jewry by Walter Sanning is probably the most scholarly study ever written on 20th century Jewish demography, especially in its analysis of World War II related Jewish population changes. Sanning bases his study almost exclusively on Allied, Zionist, and pro-Zionist West German sources. His analysis includes evidence given by the wartime U.S. Assistant Secretary of State, the Institute of Jewish Affairs, the American Jewish Year Book, official census publications, and the pro-Zionist Institute for Contemporary History in Munich. Sanning keeps his book as free of emotion as possible in order to contribute to a genuine discussion underlying the charge of German genocide.

While it would be impossible for anyone to give an exact number of Jews who died in the German camps during World War II, The Dissolution of Eastern European Jewry proves that not anywhere close to 6 million Jews died during the war. Sanning calculates that the worldwide losses suffered by Jews during World War II are approximately of 1¼ million.[43] He estimates that 15,967,000 Jews were alive in 1941 before the German invasion of the Soviet Union, and that the Jewish population was reduced to approximately 14,730,000 after the war.[44]

Importantly, Sanning shows that many of these Jewish losses were caused not by the direct impact of the war or by a program of German genocide, but by Soviet barbarism. Sanning states that hundreds of thousands of Jews lost their lives during the Soviet deportation to the east or in the Siberian labor and concentration camps. Sanning concludes that the food supply, shelter, and clothing provided to the Jewish inmates in the Soviet camps was woefully inadequate, and that medical attention was almost completely lacking.[45] Sanning’s conclusion is supported by Jewish historian Gerald Reitlinger, who states: “In Southern Siberia the death-rate was very high for… Jews.”[46]

Matt Cockerill’s statement that Holocaust denial does not amount to historical discourse is obviously wrong regarding the number of Jews who died during World War II. Very reasonable people can disagree on how many Jews died during this war.

Matt Cockerill writes on page 45:

“History is not simply about marshalling negative evidence to discredit historical narratives you dislike or disbelieve. The practice of history involves constructing, corroborating, and refining positive narratives which explain historical phenomena. In the context of the Holocaust, a genuine revisionist (as opposed to denialist) account would develop an alternative narrative to extermination that explained what happened to the Jews during World War II. More specifically, a genuinely ‘revisionist’ theory would explain (1) how so many eyewitnesses and investigators across various eras, cultures, and languages, came to believe in the extermination of the Jews. A revisionist theory would also (2) offer an alternative explanation for how millions of Jews disappeared in Nazi custody during World War II.”

My Response

Holocaust revisionists have constructed positive narratives that explain what happened to Jews during World War II. For example, based on the autopsies, research and testimony of people such as Dr. Charles P. Larson, Dr. John E. Gordon, M.D., Ph.D., and Dr. Russell Barton, we know that none of the camps in Germany had homicidal gas chambers. This was not the view of most historians immediately after the war. The research of Holocaust revisionists has forced mainstream historians to acknowledge that these camps were not extermination camps.

Holocaust revisionists have also proven that there were no homicidal gas chambers in Auschwitz-Birkenau, Majdanek, Chelmno, Belzec, Sobibór and Treblinka. Reports, articles, testimony, books and videos from Fred Leuchter, Walter Lüftl, Germar Rudolf, Friedrich Paul Berg, Dr. William B. Lindsey, Carlo Mattogno, John C. Ball, Dr. Arthur Robert Butz, Dr. Nicholas Kollerstrom, Dr. Robert Faurisson, Wolfgang Fröhlich, Dr. Ing Franco Deana, Dr. James H. Fetzer, Richard Krege, Arnulf Neumaier, Cyrus Cox and David Cole have proven that there were no homicidal gas chambers at any of these camps.

Matt wants revisionists to explain “how so many eyewitnesses and investigators across various eras, cultures, and languages, came to believe in the extermination of the Jews.” A major reason is the Allied-run trials after the war. These trials, which received worldwide coverage, were blatantly unfair to the German defendants.

Not only were some key witnesses such as Rudolf Höss tortured into making confessions, but witnesses were hired to give false testimony in many of these trials. The book Innocent at Dachau states that false witnesses were used at most of the American-run war-crimes trials at Dachau. Joseph Halow, a young U.S. court reporter at the Dachau trials in 1947, described some of the false witnesses at these trials:[47]

“[T]he major portion of the witnesses for the prosecution in the concentration-camp cases were what came to be known as ‘professional witnesses,’ and everyone working at Dachau regarded them as such. ‘Professional,’ since they were paid for each day they testified. In addition, they were provided free housing and food, at a time when these were often difficult to come by in Germany. Some of them stayed in Dachau for months, testifying in every one of the concentration-camp cases. In other words, these witnesses made their living testifying for the prosecution. Usually, they were former inmates from the camps, and their strong hatred of the Germans should, at the very least, have called their testimony into question.”

Stephen F. Pinter, who served as a U.S. Army prosecuting attorney at the American-run trials of Germans at Dachau, confirmed Halow’s statement. In a 1960 affidavit Pinter said that “notoriously perjured witnesses” were used to charge Germans with false and unfounded crimes. Pinter stated:[48]

“Unfortunately, as a result of these miscarriages of justice, many innocent persons were convicted and some were executed.”

The use of false witnesses has also been acknowledged by Johann Neuhäusler, who was an ecclesiastical resistance fighter interned in two German concentration camps from 1941 to 1945. Neuhäusler stated that in some of the American-run trials “many of the witnesses, perhaps 90%, were paid professional witnesses with criminal records ranging from robbery to homosexuality.”[49]

The largely Jewish control of the mass media is another reason why so many people believe in the extermination of the Jews. The mainstream Holocaust narrative is the only one presented to the general public. By contrast, Holocaust revisionist publications are typically banned by the major media. A prime example is that of Amazon, by far the largest book seller in the world, which has banned the sale of all Holocaust revisionist publications.

Robert Jan van Pelt describes the power of the Jewish-controlled media. Errol Morris had made a movie about Fred Leuchter titled Mr. Death and needed some help. Van Pelt writes:[50]

“The problem came in the second part of the movie, which included video footage of Leuchter’s trip to Auschwitz. Following his own rigid rule only to show his subjects and never to include voiceovers, narration, or any form of outside expertise, Morris had tried to tell Leuchter’s trip entirely through his eyes, using only his celebrated editing skills to introduce a measure of ironical distance that would allow the audience to perceive Leuchter’s self-delusion. In this case, Morris’s magic did not work. At a trial screening at Harvard, one half of the audience thought that Morris agreed with Leuchter’s conclusions about Auschwitz and the other half came to agree with Leuchter’s conclusions about Auschwitz. Not surprisingly, both views horrified Morris.”

Morris turned to Deborah Lipstadt for help. Lipstadt saw the rough cut of the movie, agreed that Morris was in trouble, and had him contact Robert Jan van Pelt and his writing partner. Van Pelt came to be involved with Mr. Death, first as a consultant, and then as a “talent” to make the movie more acceptable to the official Holocaust narrative.[51]

Matt also wants Holocaust revisionists to offer an alternative explanation for how millions of Jews disappeared in Nazi custody during World War II. While no one can say exactly how many Jews survived the “Holocaust,” it is notable that the Conference on Jewish Material Claims Against Germany, Inc. (Claims Conference) states:[52]

“In 2021, the Claims Conference will distribute approximately $658 million in direct compensation to over 260,000 survivors in 83 countries and will allocate approximately $654 million in grants to over 300 social service agencies worldwide that provide vital services for Holocaust survivors, such as home care, food and medicine.”

The over 260,000 Holocaust survivors in 83 countries in 2021 is a remarkably large number of survivors for an event that occurred 76 years prior to the year 2021. These survivors have lived extremely long lives. There would not be 260,000 Holocaust survivors in 2021 if 6 million Jews had died in the so-called Holocaust. The total compensation in 2021 of $1.312 billion in direct compensation and grants is also a lot of money to still be paying more than 260,000 survivors of the “Holocaust.”

So, the alternative revisionist explanation for what happened to the Jews is that most Jews survived World War II. These Jews traveled to 83 countries, with many Jews receiving substantial compensation for their pain and suffering during the war. The revisionist alternative is that Germany did not have a program of genocide against Jews during World War II, and that far less than 6 million Jews died during the war.

Endnotes