Matthew Ghobrial Cockerill vs. Thomas Dalton Debate
Embattled Narratives
Sometime in mid-spring of this year, Dr. Thomas Dalton asked me whether I would be willing to participate in a debate on the Holocaust which some student of history, a firm subscriber to the orthodox narrative, was challenging us to engage in. At that point, I was completely snowed under in a massive project and had no time to spend on intellectual jousting contests with some student, so I turned down this offer. Since Dr. Dalton had promised me to help with the project I was working on at that time, but did not quite live up to his promises, I also strongly suggested that he reconsider his priorities. However, Dr. Dalton considered this a great opportunity to attract attention to the revisionist viewpoint. I then lost track of it, and heard about it again only after the debate evidently had taken place.
Since CODOH and thus also Inconvenient History claim to be a podium for Open Debate on the Holocaust, it behooves us well not only to bring this debate to our readers’ attention, but to publish it in its entirety. A large part of the current issue is therefore dedicated to that exchange of essays. Later issues will feature critiques from our own bloggers.
A PDF file with low-resolution versions of the illustrations included by Matthew Cockerill can be downloaded at https://codoh.com/wp-content/uploads/Cockerill_Dalton_Holocaust_debate_2023.pdf.
—Germar Rudolf, Editor
This debate on the Holocaust was at the invitation of Matt Cockerill, a PhD student in history (somewhere), who runs the “History Speaks” page on Substack. We agreed on the format up front: he and I would issue opening statements, each without knowledge of the other’s. Then Matt would issue “Rebuttal I” against my statement, I would reply with “Rebuttal II” (to his opening and RI), he would have a “Rebuttal III”, and then two closing statements, with me having “the last word.” The debate was run over two months (April/May 2023), and posted on his Substack page. Below are the 7 segments of the debate, in order posted.
—Thomas Dalton.
Below are my and Thomas Dalton’s opening statements for this debate. It should be noted that these are “cold” openings; neither of us wrote our statements in response to the statement of the other. Two rounds of rebuttal will follow in the days and weeks to come.
It should be noted that we were unable to agree on the inclusion of some links Dalton wanted to add to his piece. These links (unlike, for example, Holocausthandbooks.com, which contains abundant online sources) did not contain online copies of books and articles. History Speaks considered them to be nothing more than promotional material for various publishing house, and thereby outside the scope of the debate. Such links will be available at Dalton’s personal website when he reproduces the debate.
— Matthew Ghobrial Cockerill
1. Opening Statement of History Speaks
Dear Thomas,
Thank you for agreeing to this debate and, in contrast to the craven Mike Enoch of The National Justice Party, not subsequently backing out. My introductory statement will describe the Holocaust and the devastating positive evidence for it. I will conclude by examining the three core claims of Holocaust “revisionism” that you mentioned in your Debating the Holocaust book—no policy to exterminate Jews, no extermination by gassing, far fewer than five to six million deaths—and showing they are each implausible.
The Nazi Holocaust, in which at least five million Jews were murdered, can be summarized by reference to three main stages of systematic extermination.
The first main stage of systematic extermination, which claimed the lives of nearly two million Jews from Yugoslavia, Poland, and the Soviet Union, was carried out by mass shootings, beginning in 1941; the most prolific killers was the Einsatzgruppen, but mass shootings were also carried out by the SS und Polizeiführer (SSPF), the Ordnungspolizei, the Wehrmacht, the Romanian military, local collaborators, and (in Yugoslavia) the Ustaše, among other bodies. The second main stage of extermination, the gassing of Jews at the Kulmhof camp in the Warthegau, and the Aktion Reinhardt camps of Sobibor, Belzec, and Treblinka II, was carried out between 1942 and 1943, and claimed the lives of about 1.5 million Jews. The final stage of extermination, in which about one million Jews were killed, was carried out in the gas chambers of Auschwitz-Birkenau, especially in 1943 and 1944.
The three main stages of killing already account for 4.5 million deaths, or perhaps slightly fewer. Over 700,000 Jews were also murdered by other means—for example, through overwork, starvation, and deprivation at ghettos and concentration camps; through the death marches out of the concentration camps during the end of the war; and by homicidal gassing at such locations as Majdanek, Maly Trostinets, Mauthausen, Stutthof, and Hartheim Castle.
Below, I will provide a brief glimpse into the evidence for each of the three main stages of the Holocaust described above.
Stage 1: Mass Shootings
Following the German invasion of the USSR, Jewish men, women and children were shot at a massive scale by mobile killing squads. The Einsatzgruppen—the most prolific killers in the “Holocaust by bullets”—themselves compiled copious, widely-circulated reports where they made plain that, with the exception of working Jews and their families, they were shooting substantially all Jewish civilians in Soviet regions under German occupation.
All documentary evidence shows that the Einsatzgruppen and other killing squads in the USSR targeted Jewish civilians and killed the overwhelming majority of them in the regions they occupied. Consider for example the nation of Lithuania (which had been annexed into the USSR under the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact). On 15 October 1941, just a few months after the Germans had conquered the country, Franz Stahlecker, commander of Einsatzgruppe A, reported that 71,105 Lithuanian Jews (out of a pre-war population of 160,000) had been liquidated. In November 1941, most of the surviving Lithuanian Jews—whom the Germans had concentrated in Vilna, Kovno, Siaulai, and Svencionys ghettos—were also murdered.
By 1 December 1941, the SD Einsatzkommando III Karl Jäger reported that Einsatzgruppe A had killed all Jews in Lithuania, except working Jews and their families:
“I confirm today that Einsatzkommando 3 has achieved the goal of solving the Jewish problem in Lithuania: There are no more Jewish in Lithuania, apart from working Jews and their families. I wanted to eliminate the working Jews and their families as well, but the Civil Administration and the Wehrmacht attacked me most sharply and issued a prohibition against having these Jews and their families shot.”
Lithuania was no anomaly. The Einsatzgruppen reports show a consistent pattern of the Germans massacring the vast majority of Jews—men, women, and children—in the German-occupied USSR.
In understanding the overall estimate of close to two million Jewish shooting victims—and why it differs from earlier estimates—it is important to reemphasize that mass shootings were not only caried out by the Einsatzgruppen, but also by the SSPF, the Ordnungspolizei, the Wehrmacht, local collaborators, and the Romanian military. Moreover, mass shootings were not confined to the USSR, but also took place in Yugoslavia (at the hands of the Germans and Ustaše) as well as in German-occupied Poland. When one accounts for all statistical reports of massacred Jews—from the Einsatzgruppen Reports, to the Kube-Lohse document, to the Stahlecker reports, among other sources—one comes to a figure of Jewish victims by shooting that is close to two million.
Stage 2: Kulmhof, Sobibor, Belzec, and Treblinka II
On the second main stage of extermination, murder via gassing at Kulmhof, Sobibor, Belzec, and Treblinka II, it should be emphasized at the outset that substantially all the Jews deported to the aforementioned camps vanished without a trace. The marginal number of survivors of these camps included several thousand Jews selected for forced labor and deported to work in camps in the west, as well as perhaps a few hundred escapees. Well over 99% of the 1.5 million deportees ‘disappeared’ in Kulmhof, Sobibor, Belzec, and Treblinka II. All eyewitnesses corroborate the claim that Kulmhof, Sobibor, Belzec, and Treblinka II were extermination camps, and these camps did not contain adequate space or infrastructure to house and feed any substantial number of internees, much less the 1.5 million persons deported there.
The documentary evidence proves these camps were extermination facilities. Regarding Sobibor, Belzec, and Treblinka II, in the well-known 27 March 1942 entry of Joseph Goebbels’s diary, the Nazi propaganda minister mentioned the process of deporting Jews there, and noted that Aktion Reinhardt director Odilo Globocnik was using a “pretty barbaric” procedure to “liquidate” Jews. At Treblinka II specifically, Nazi documents refer to Jews deported there being systematically killed. On 29 December 1942, Heinrich Himmler wrote a report to Hitler that described the execution of 363,211 Jews in various locations. As Hans Metzner notes, among these Jews listed as executed were the Jews of Bialystok, most of whom we know were sent to Treblinka II. The Stroop Report of May 1943—which contained many telegrams with information concerning the murder of the remaining Jews in the Warsaw Ghetto—also characterizations deportation to Treblinka II (“T.II”) as a method of execution. One of the telegrams cited by Stroop even states that “6,929 Jews were annihilated (vernichtet)” by transportation to Treblinka II (“T. II”).
With respect to Kulmhof, a 16 June 1943 letter from the Secret State Police of Posen to the SS- Sonderkommando Kulmhof described the Kulmhof Sonderkommando’s duty as the “fight against and annihilation of state enemies,” requiring “in particular a manly and strong mental attitude.”
Regarding material evidence, it should be noted that the Germans razed Kulmhof, Treblinka II, Sobibor, and Belzec—along with the gas chambers—long before the regions where the camps had been built were overrun by the Soviets. Nevertheless, various archaeological investigations have been undertaken which identified numerous, massive mass graves in these camps. For instance, an investigation of Belzec conducted by a team of archaeologists 1997 and 1998 discovered 33 mass graves, whose total surface area denier Carlo Mattogno calculated to be a total surface area of 5,919 square meters and a total volume of 21,310 cubic meters. In light of the very large percentage of Belzec deportees who were children, and the emaciated bodies of most adult victims, these colossal graves could readily accommodate hundreds of thousands of persons.
Finally—as usual—overwhelming testimonial evidence attests to extermination, via homicidal gassings, at these camps.
Stage 3: Auschwitz-Birkenau
Let me turn now to the third main stage of mass killing, gassing at Auschwitz-Birkenau. There is overwhelming testimonial and documentary evidence that Auschwitz was an extermination camp. The 2 September 1942 edition of SS physician Johann Kremer’s diary, for instance, describes a “special action” at Auschwitz, and remarks that in comparison, “Dante’s inferno seems almost a comedy,” concluding that Auschwitz is “justly called an extermination camp.”
Concerning evidence for gas chambers specifically at Auschwitz, consider for instance “Leichenkeller I” (“corpse cellar 1”) in Crematorium 2, a homicidal gas chamber which deniers have frequently alleged was merely a morgue. As Jean-Claude Pressac demonstrated in his Auschwitz: Technqiue and Operation of the Gas Chambers (1989) and Die Krematorium von Auschwitz : Die Technik des Massenmordes (1993), orders for a gas-tight door and hydrogen cyanide detectors were placed for Leichenkeller 1; these features are completely nonsensical for a morgue. Moreover, the room next to Leichenkeller I was described in contemporaneous German documents as an “undressing room,” something that perfectly corroborates the eyewitness testimony about undressing before gassing, but is an incoherent description of a morgue. A reference to an intended introduction of “pre-heating” equipment and processes for Leichenkeller 1 also discredits the idea that this was a morgue. The coup de grace is SS-Hauptsturmführer Bischoff’s 29 January 1943 reference to Leichenkeller 1 as a “gassing cellar.”
Despite denier rhetoric (“no holes, no Holocaust”), induction holes to accommodate the dropping of Zyklon B pellets into the gas chamber (via wire-mesh columns) have also been identified in the ruined ruins of Crema 2’s roof by independent investigators. Disturbances reflecting the existence of such holes are visible in Allied aerial photographs of Crema 2, taken by reconnaissance pilots in 1944. All categories of evidence—material, documentary, and testimonial—runs in the same direction, establishing the existence of homicidal gas chambers at Auschwitz beyond any reasonable doubt.
Nazi Jewish Policy
Naturally, the extermination operations described above were not ad hoc measures. Copious wartime statements by Nazi leaders corroborate the existence of a general policy—broadly recognized and accepted by German leaders—to murder Jewish civilians.
On 12 December 1941, Goebbels reported on a speech given by Hitler the same day,
“On the Jewish question, the Führer has decided to make a clean sweep. He prophesied to the Jews that, if they yet again brought about a world war, they would experience their own annihilation. That was not just a figure of speech. The world war is here, the destruction of the Jews must be the necessary consequence.”
Removing any doubt that “destruction” (Vernichtung) of the Jews might be meant metaphorically, Goebbels concludes by noting that, for the crime of allegedly starting the war, the Jews “will have to pay . . . with their lives.”
Hans Frank, the head of the General Government (German-occupied Poland), attended Hitler’s 12 December 1941 speech and reported to his colleagues back in Poland a few days later:
“In Berlin we were told, why are you making all this trouble? We don’t want [the Jews] either, not in the Ostland nor in the Reichskommissariat; liquidate them yourselves! Gentlemen, I must ask you to steel yourselves against all considerations of compassion. We must destroy the Jews wherever we find them, and wherever it is at all possible.”
On 3 May, 1943, the director of the German Labor Front Robert Ley proclaimed in a speech at a German armaments factory that “we swear we will not give up the struggle until the last Jew in Europe is annihilated and dead!” The aforementioned Hans Frank announced on 24 August 1942 that, apart from essential workers, Jews in the General Government would no longer be fed. Frank also declared that 1.2 million Polish Jews would be condemned to death by starvation, and commented that it was “self-evident” that if these Jews did not starve to death, that the “anti-Jewish measures” (i.e., deportation to death camps) would hopefully be accelerated.
In a meeting with the Hungarian Regent Horthy on 17 April 1943, Adolf Hitler said, of the Polish Jews under German occupation, that if they “did not want to work, they were shot” and “if they could not work, they had to perish.” At the same meeting, the German Foreign Minister Joachim von Ribbentrop declared that “the Jews must be exterminated or taken to concentration camps. There was no other possibility.” In his notorious Posen Speech on 6 October 1943, Heinrich Himmler spoke explicitly of a German policy to “exterminate” not only Jewish men but also women and children, and clarified that “exterminate” (ausrotten) meant “to kill them or have them killed” (“umzubringen, oder umbringen zu lassen”). In one of his final diary entries, written near the end of the war on 14 March 1945, Joseph Goebbels wrote that
“When you have the power to do so, you have to kill these Jews like rats. In Germany we have, thank God, thoroughly taken care of that already. I hope the world will take this as an example.”
The calls of German leaders to kill Jews were not merely personal sentiments, but formally codified in the law of the Schutzstaffel (SS). On 26 October 1942, an SS judge reported to the SS Main Legal Office Himmler’s decision that killing Jews would be legal for SS man, provided that their motive was political (i.e. ideological antisemitism) rather than personal (i.e. pecuniary, sexual, or sadistic). This principle was applied in the court- martial of SS man Max Täubner, who was court-martialled and punished for the sadism and exhibitionism he displayed while massacring Jews:
“The accused shall not be punished because of the actions against the Jews as such. The Jews have to be exterminated and none of the Jews that were killed is any great loss. Although the accused should have recognized that the extermination of the Jews was the duty of Kommandos which were set up especially for this purpose, he should be excused for considering himself to have the authority to take part in the extermination of Jewry himself.”
While Täubner was condemned for “apply[ing] Bolshevik methods during the necessary extermination of the worst enemy of our people” (emphasis mine), the court-martial emphasized that he was not being condemned for massacring Jews.
Thomas, how can you deny that German policy was genocidal when German (SS) law formally sanctioned the murder of Jews by SS men?
Finally, let me address a few of the eyewitnesses who have corroborated German extermination policy. It is well-known even by deniers that the testimonial evidence contradicts their case. Deniers typically respond to this by alleging—without evidence—that all or most witnesses at Nuremberg and other legal proceedings had been coerced into their confessions.
But this response fails to account for the numerous perpetrators who voluntarily confessed outside of trial, in completely non-coercive contexts. Such perpetrators include Adolf Eichmann, who confessed his knowledge of and role in German extermination policy to former Waffen-SS member Willem Sassen in Argentina, before the Israelis arrested him; former German Minister of Armaments Albert Speer, who privately wrote in a 1971 letter to the widow of a Belgian resistance leader that he had known about the extermination of the Jews and lied about this publicly; and the Palestinian-Arab Nazi collaborator Hajj Amin al-Husseini, who spent most of the war in Berlin, reported in his memoirs that, in mid-1943, Himmler told him that 3 million Jews had already been murdered.
Would you—Thomas—have our readers believe that these three men, and numerous others, voluntarily confessed to their complicity in imaginary crimes? Or do you believe that the confessions were coerced: that is to say, that Eichmann’s friend and fellow SS man Sassen, the Belgian widow to whom Speer was writing, and Al-Husseini’s Arabic publisher coerced false confessions out of them?
Debunking the Three Core Premises of Holocaust Denial
Holocaust deniers make three main claims. First, they contend that there was no German policy to exterminate the Jews. Second, they insist that gas chambers were not used to murder Jews. Finally, they argue that the Jewish death toll was much lower than the mainstream estimate of at least five million.
Not one of the three denier premises holds up in the face of the evidence I presented above. On the question of a genocide program, as I have shown, leading German statesmen explicitly and repeatedly referred to a wartime policy of exterminating Jews. I also showed that by 1942 it was lawful in Nazi Germany for SS men to kill Jews so long as their motive was political rather than personal. And I detailed how various perpetrators voluntarily, outside of trial, and without coercion confessed to their knowledge of the extermination policy.
On the question of gas chambers, I showed that a convergence of testimonial, documentary, and forensic evidence establishes the existence of homicidal gas chambers.
Finally, concerning the Jewish death toll: from sources I cited above such as the Einsatzgruppen Reports, the Kube-Lohse document, and the Stahlecker reports, we can collectively infer that close to 2 million Jews perished via mass shooting. In the Nazi camp systems, we can account for about three million more deaths simply by comparing the number of Jews deported to Nazi camps—including deaths in Kulmhof, the Aktion Reinhardt camps, the main KL system, and forced-labor camps—with the number of these Jews alive at the end of the war. Thus, the Jewish death toll in camps and through mass shootings is already close to five million.
This figure of nearly five million does not include the many hundreds of thousands of Jews starved or worked to death in ghettos established by the Germans or the Romanians, nor Jewish victims of the German-allied Ustaše regime in Yugoslavia. When these deaths are taken into account, the minimum plausible Holocaust death toll exceeds five million. (A figure of at least five million deaths is also supported by post-war demographic studies conducted by the Anglo-American Committee of Inquiry, among other organizations.)
The Holocaust is exhaustively corroborated, Thomas. What is your alternative narrative? Can you cite anything like the evidence I cited above to support it? Why did the European-Jewish population fall so disproportionately in World War II? How did millions of Jews ‘disappear’ in Nazi custody, particularly in the Nazi camp systems?
—Matt
2. Opening Statement of Thomas Dalton
At the outset, I want to thank Matt for the invitation to a debate on this most contentious topic. The specific claims of Holocaust revisionism are almost never explicitly examined, and rational debates of almost any kind are very rare. I intend to focus on, and defend, the primary revisionist claims in a logical, objective, and evidence-based manner; and I trust that Matt will do same for his side, while avoiding polemical or tendentious replies that bypass the substance of the issues at hand.
Here I will outline, in condensed form, some of the main revisionist assertions. Let me start, though, with a short recap of the standard or traditional viewpoint; this will serve to highlight the opposing claims of revisionism.
On the traditional view, the Holocaust was the deliberate murder of some 6 million Jews by the Nazi regime during World War II. Traditionalists claim that Hitler’s intention, from the beginning of the war, was to kill the Jews of Europe. Jews were killed in ghettos, they were shot en masse, and they were killed in concentration camps. In the end (they say), many Jews died in specially-constructed, purpose-built gas chambers that used either carbon monoxide or cyanide gas. The corpses were burned in crematoria or on open-air pyres, and the ashes scattered. Some of the most infamous extermination camps—including Treblinka, Sobibor, and Belzec— were completely dismantled and have all but vanished, as have the remains of the victims.
According to leading Holocaust researchers, the Holocaust is defined by three central conditions: 1) intentionality on the part of Hitler and other NS leaders (i.e. they deliberately killed Jews), 2) mass gassing in homicidal gas chambers, and 3) a rough total of 6 million Jews killed overall. On their view, all three conditions are required; lacking any one of the three, we have a tragedy, perhaps, but technically no “Holocaust.”
Researchers known as Holocaust revisionists challenge this conventional view on many levels. They believe that there was never an intention to kill the Jews; rather, the Germans (including Hitler) simply wanted them out of Germany. Revisionists believe that there were no homicidal gas chambers. And they believe that the number of Jews who died during the war, from all causes, comes to far less than 6 million—and perhaps only 500,000 or so.
Traditionalists often call revisionists “Holocaust deniers,” because they say the revisionists “deny” that the Holocaust happened. But this is obviously a misleading claim. Revisionists accept that Hitler wanted a Germany free of Jews, and that he forcibly removed many of them, seized their property, and sent many others to labor camps. They also accept that Hitler knew that many Jews would die in the process. Depending on your definition, this could certainly count as a “holocaust”—but perhaps not “the” Holocaust.
Revisionists do deny, however, that 6 million Jews died, and they do deny that the Nazis constructed homicidal gas chambers. They do not deny that a tragedy happened to the Jews, nor do they deny that many thousands of them died.
Some Troubling Facts
So, how can the average person begin to check these claims, to see where the truth lies? I will start with the “6 million” figure. Let’s ask this question: How plausible, in general, is this number? The war in Europe ran for roughly 2,000 days (or 5½ years: September 1939 to April 1945). If the Germans killed 6 million Jews over this period, then they must have averaged 3,000 per day—every day, 365 days a year, for five and a half straight years. And of course, they also must have burned, buried or otherwise disposed of those same 3,000 bodies per day. This fact, in itself, is highly implausible, especially given all the other urgencies of a world war.
But isn’t the “6 million” figure documented in hundreds of history books? The number itself is, but not the details. Given all that we supposedly know about this event, one would expect that there would be a clear and concise breakdown of the number, showing roughly where, and how, 6 million died. Experts like Raul Hilberg claim that there are three main categories of deaths: death camps, shootings, and ghettos. So, the experts should be able to show us, by year, how many died in camps, how many by shooting, and how many in the ghettos— such that the numbers add up to 6 million. But they cannot do this. The reader is invited to look at any mainstream published source for this information; it does not exist. One can find numbers individually for each camp, or for certain ghettos, but virtually never any totaling 6 million. This alone strongly suggests that there are serious problems with the overall picture.
Furthermore, we should ask when, theoretically, it would have been possible to determine the “6 million” death toll. And the obvious answer is: sometime well after the end of the war. And yet, this is not what happened.
Instead, we find references to 6 million dead or dying Jews during the war, and incredibly, even before the war—in fact, decades before the war.
In reality, the “6 million” number has a history that long precedes WW2. One can find various accounts of “6 million suffering Jews” as far back as the 1880s. In major newspapers like the New York Times and the Times of London, we find about two dozen occurrences of that number in the six decades before Hitler even came to power in 1933—including during World War One! And it shows up another two dozen times before the end of WW2. All this strongly suggests that the number was more symbolic than factual. It would be a miracle if the actual death toll were 6 million.
The Context
The situation in Germany prior to 1933, back to at least the 1850s, was of a powerful Jewish minority, vastly disproportionate to their size of 1% to 2% of the population. This is very well documented, for the German media, entertainment, academia, and several sectors of business. Furthermore, German Jews were believed by many Germans, Hitler included, of playing a role in Germany’s loss in WWI. (See my book, “The Jewish Hand in the World Wars, for details). Jews also had a prominent role in the postwar Weimar government. It was for such reasons that Hitler and others wanted to see Jews removed from Germany. And in fact, this is all they ever want-ed—ethnic cleansing. Hitler’s first letter on the topic, from 1919, speaks directly to this need to remove them. The same holds with all his speeches through the 1930s, even into the war years, Hitler, Goebbels, and others used words like Vernichtung and Ausrottung, which are flamboyant terms for removal or elimination. But they do not entail murder. The Western press always translated these terms in English as ‘extermination’ or ‘annihilation,’ in a literal or physical sense. But the press was doing that for decades before Hitler. NY Times articles dating back to the 1880s decry the “extermination,” “annihilation,” and even “holocaust” against the Jews in various countries—which never meant their physical killing. It really is striking how persistent this theme is. Again, one sees how any action against Jews is portrayed in the harshest possible terms.
The Gas Chambers
Let’s turn, now, to the infamous tale of the gas chambers. As it turns out, the standard gassing story is rife with problems. At Auschwitz, the Nazis allegedly crammed up to two thousand people into enclosed rooms—some partly underground—and dumped ordinary, lice-killing cyanide pellets (called Zyklon-B) on them from above. But this is senseless, because (a) the rooms generally had neither windows or ventilation, to later vent the poisonous gas, (b) the pellets would keep emitting poison for hours, killing anyone who went inside, and (c) there is no plausible way to remove the bodies in a timely manner. The technologically proficient Germans would never have designed such a preposterous scheme.
And for all that, cyanide gas killed only about 1 million Jews, we are told—all at Auschwitz. By contrast, more than 2 million were allegedly gassed in other camps with “exhaust gas from diesel engines.” This, unfortunately for our traditionalists, is even more ridiculous than the Auschwitz scheme. Diesel engines, it turns out, produce very little carbon-monoxide gas—far too little to kill people in any reasonable time. Even if the Nazis used regular gasoline engines, it would have been hugely impractical and inefficient to try to use exhaust gas to kill millions of people. They had far better sources of gas, and far better alternatives, than cramming people into rooms and pumping it with engine exhaust.
Body Disposal
Killing thousands per day is one major problem; even more difficult is disposing of the bodies. How do you completely eliminate a corpse? It is harder than one might think (just recall any of a myriad of murder-mysteries, in which the killer can never seem to get rid of the body). For the Holocaust, we have a standard answer: the bodies were burned in a crematorium. But the cremation furnaces were all equipped with single-body muffles (oven openings), and each took about an hour to burn one body. All of Auschwitz had a total of 46 muffles, and thus could dispose of, at best, perhaps 900 bodies per day. But at its peak, the camp was allegedly gassing 6,000 or 7,000 Jews per day. How was this possible? What happened to the bodies?
And that’s at the largest of the death camps. Smaller camps like Treblinka, Sobibor, and Belzec had no crematoria, no furnaces at all. (This is bizarre in itself: Why build a mass extermination camp and then have no good option for cremating the bodies?) Hence all the bodies, we are told, were initially buried, then later dug up and burned in the open air, over big log fires. But there are many problems here: This would have been technically impossible at the rate claimed—again, up to 7,000 or more per day. The Germans would have needed a mountain of chopped wood (seasoned and dry) for fuel each day, and would have had to dispose of another mountain of ash at the end of each day. Large bones and teeth, furthermore, cannot be burned to ash when using pyres. Hence they would have to be sifted out and crushed, somehow. Where are all these remains today?
Additionally, crematoria and (especially) open-air fires create a lot of smoke—smoke that would be visible from both ground and air. As it happens, we have ten reconnaissance air photos of Auschwitz from 1944. Of all these, not one photo shows even a single smoking crematorium chimney. Four photos show small fires burning, but only from a very small corner of the Birkenau camp—consistent with burning small amounts of trash or, perhaps, a few dozen bodies. Evidence of mass burning is strikingly and totally absent. How can we account for this? Once again, we must ask: what happened to the bodies?
Lastly, consider the ghettos—the combined site of some 1 million Jewish deaths, on the standard view. They were in existence only from 1940 through 1943. And yet, in those ghettos, around 1 million Jews perished of…what? The main ones were in the middle of large cities, and Jews could freely come and go. So, what did they die of? And at a rate of 250,000 per year, or about 20,000 per month, on average? That’s a lot of bodies, and there were no crematoria; so: what happened to the bodies? The same questions keep recurring, with no good answers. This suggests that far fewer than 1 million died in ghettos.
Survivors?
But what about all the Holocaust witnesses? Hundreds of people survived the camps, and lived to tell their stories. And indeed, we have hundreds of recorded statements, books, and films that “document” witness stories. Well—what, after all, did the victims witness? Enforced evacuation and confinement (true), people dying en route (true), people catching typhus and dying in the camps (true), dead bodies stacked in and around the crematoria (true), corpses being burned (true), people separated from family members and disappearing (true).
And all this amidst a major war. Such true facts get mixed with rumor and wild speculation, and suddenly we get crazy stories: 2,000 Jews being gassed in a crematorium cellar, “5 million dead at Auschwitz” (NY Times), “6 million exterminated,” etc.
And this ignores the many inconsistencies, logical absurdities, and outright lies by witnesses and survivors. Virtually every witness making substantive and verifiable claims about their time at a camp has said outrageous, ridiculous, and impossible things. They do so for fame, attention, money, and glory. Many likely believe their own lies, but many are assuredly outright and bald-faced liars. This makes it doubly-hard to tease out any elements of truth in witness statements.
Given all these issues, and many more, revisionists conclude that no mass gassings ever occurred—even if small, ad hoc, ‘test’ gassings may have occurred, that are utterly irrelevant to the larger Holocaust story.
Revisionists also conclude, based on existing evidence, that the total number of Jews killed comes to perhaps 500,000—a tragic figure, but far less than 6 million. Jews thus constitute about 1 percent of the 50 million people killed globally during the war. Their “holocaust” was clearly not so special after all.
Some Implications
Evidence, logic, and common sense all suggest that the revisionists are right. If so, this has huge implications for the present world. It would mean that people everywhere have, for decades, been given a false story of human suffering. It would mean an end to the primary guilt-tool deployed by Jewish groups against Germans, Swiss, and even Americans and the Allies who “didn’t try hard enough” to stop the massacre. It would fundamentally discredit the powerful Jewish interests in media and academia that promote the conventional story. And it would mean an end to the many privileges given to Jews and to Israel, based on the standard account. It might even mean a return of the hundreds of millions of dollars given to Jews and Israel as “reparations.”
One would think that honest Holocaust researchers would raise these troublesome issues, discuss them, examine them, debate them, and then strive for reasonable and consistent conclusions. And if these conclusions demand an end to the “6 million” or to the gas chamber myth, so be it; truth matters, after all.
But mainstream researchers do nothing of the sort. They refuse to consider such ideas, refuse to explore such alternative accounts, and refuse to engage with revisionist arguments. They won’t even mention their names!
Here is a simple test: Find any standard book on the Holocaust and look for the names of the major, living, and active revisionists: Germar Rudolf, Carlo Mattogno, or Jürgen Graf. Look for citations or references to their (literally) dozens of books on this topic. Look for references to my own dozen or so Holocaust articles, or my two books Debating the Holocaust and Holocaust: An Introduction. You will likely find: nothing. Instead, if anything, they prefer to attack and mock the deceased Robert Faurisson, or the long-inactive Arthur Butz, or inconsequential figures like Austin App. This tells us much about the integrity of conventional historians.
And then we have these questions: Why do governmental authorities and those in positions of power take such trouble to censor, ban, cancel, or punish revisionists? Why is Holocaust revisionism illegal in some 20 countries around the world? Why did the UN, in January 2022, bother to issue a formal condemnation of “denial and distortion of the Holocaust”—and without attempting to defend the orthodox view or even define ‘denial’ and ‘distortion’? Why does Amazon rigorously censor and block publication of any books remotely related to revisionism? At whose bequest do they operate? Why do mysterious, hidden actors routinely disrupt the free speech rights, and the business activities, of those willing to research and discuss this topic? What are they worried about?
Despite all this, there are signs of hope. In recent years, thanks to the Internet and to brave, independent publishers (like Castle Hill, Clemens & Blair, and Barnes Review), the alternative, revisionist view is getting a public hearing—not a ‘fair’ one, but at least some degree of notice. We can only hope that the growing influence of academic-quality Holocaust revisionism will cause conventional Holocaust researchers to finally engage with the many, serious problems with the orthodox account, and then to make the appropriate and corresponding changes. Only then will they regain some measure of credibility and respect.
3. History Speaks: Rebuttal I of Thomas Dalton’s Opening Statement
Thomas,
Below, I respond in turn to all the substantive points you made about the Holocaust in your opening statement. (I skip over your moralistic “implications” section, which does not directly bear on the historicity of the Holocaust.) I conclude with some remarks on your general argumentation style and the status of Holocaust denial as a form of pseudohistory.
Is the Six Million Figure Sacrosanct?
Following your introduction, you begin by attacking the figure of six million Jewish victims. It is true that six million is not an academically rigorous estimate. Rather it amounts to a symbolic representation of the Jewish dead in popular remembrance of the Holocaust. But this kind of phenomenon—the invocation of a clean, round, and not strictly accurate number to symbolically represent victims of a genocide—is hardly unique to the Holocaust, and indeed has analogues in remembrance culture for other genocides. For example, Ukrainians speak of 10,000,000 killed in the Holodomor while Bangladeshis speak of 3,000,000 killed in the Bangladeshi genocide, figures that cannot be sustained empirically. The use of such figures in popular remembrance does not imply that the Holodomor famine or the Bangladeshi genocide never happened.
But doesn’t the six million figure govern historical writing on the Holocaust, and chill serious research? Not at all. In fact, leading scholars in the field have rejected six million as an estimate of Jewish fatalities. Raul Hilberg—whom, strangely, you invoke in a paragraph deprecating the six million figure—provided an estimate of 5.1 million in The Destruction of the European Jews (1961). Hilberg’s eminence in the field discredits your claim that six million is a fixed dogma among historians.
Decades of Headlines about ‘Six Million Jews’ Prior to the Holocaust?
Next, you cite New York Times and other newspapers headlines extending back to the 1880s to suggest that the idea of “six million Jews”— dying or suffering or imperiled or persecuted—predates the Holocaust and the Nazis. I sincerely do not understand what your purpose is in this regard. Would you have our readers believe that New York Times headlines about six million Jews extending back to 1890 are evidence of a decades-long conspiracy (presumably involving the Times) to fake a genocide of Jews? If that is not your aim, what exactly is the relevance of these old headlines? What are you trying to argue?
Regardless of what this argument is supposed to imply, it is unsound because its core premise—that for decades before the Holocaust Jews or their ‘agents’ had an a priori fixation with the idea of six million Jewish deaths—is false. 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.
Linguistic Arguments
Next, you argue that Hitler and his colleagues only wanted to ethnically cleanse Jews, and that the documentary record of their statements, even during the war, do not support the idea of an extermination policy. In developing this argument, you focus on the meanings of Vernichtung (annihilate) and Ausrottung (exterminate). These two terms—which were frequently used by the Nazis to describe their treatment of the Jews—can indeed lend themselves to both exterminatory as well as metaphorical usage.
Unfortunately for deniers, there are two at least two occasions in which Nazi leaders defined Vernichtung and Ausrottung of Jews as literally meaning killing. In Himmler’s 6 October 1943 Posen speech, the Reichsführer- SS literally defines the Ausrottung of Jews as ‘killing Jews or having them killed’ (“umzubringen, oder umbringen zu lassen”), and Robert Ley’s 3 May 1943 speech describes Jews who have been vernichtet (annihilated) as gestorben (dead), while noting that the Nazis will not give up their struggle until the last Jew in Europe is dead.
Your argument is further discredited by the fact that—as the quotations in my opening statement showed—Nazi leaders did not just use words like “Vernichtung” and “Ausrottung” to describe what they were (systematically) doing to the Jews. They also used unambiguous words like “kill” (“umbringen,” Himmler 06/08/1943), “kill like rats” (“wie die Ratten totschlagen,” Goebbels, 14 March 1945), “starve to death” (“Hungertod,” Hans Frank, 24 August 1942), “shoot” (“erschießen,” Hitler, 17 April 1943), and “liquidate” (“liquidieren,” Goebbels 27 March 1942). Any candid reader of our debate will recognize from these and other examples I cited in my opening statement the murderous intentions of Hitler, Himmler, Goebbels, Frank, and other Nazi leaders towards the Jews.
Gas Chambers at Auschwitz
You make three arguments against the plausibility of homicidal gassing at Auschwitz. First, you say that the rooms identified as homicidal gas chambers “generally had neither windows or ventilation, to later vent the poisonous gas.” Your use of “generally” here is a weasel word that obscures the fact that the two underground gas chambers at Auschwitz—Crematoria Two and Three—were ventilated, as was Crematorium One. As to Crematoria Four and Five (and the bunkers), it is important to emphasize that they were located at ground level. The doors to these facilities could simply be opened by the Sonderkommando and the gas would dissipate harmlessly into the atmosphere. On the issue of Sonderkommando safety, it should be noted that they wore gas masks to protect themselves. In any case, the Sonderkommando were slated to be murdered eventually anyway, so it is unlikely that the Nazis were particularly concerned about their health and survival.
Your second argument is that that the Zyklon B pellets would emit poison for hours after the Jews were gassed, thereby “killing anyone who went inside” the gas chambers. However, multiple Sonderkommando testified that the pellets could be extracted from Crematoria Two and Three via a tin canister connected to a wire.
Paraphrasing the testimony of Sonderkommando Henryk Tauber, Robert Jan Van Pelt summarizes this process as follows:
“Within the innermost column there was a removable can to pull after the gassing the Zyklon ‘crystals,’ that is the porous silica pellets that had absorbed the hydrocyanide. Kula, who had made these columns, provided some technical specifications.”
Third, you contend that there was “no plausible way to remove the bodies in a timely manner” from the gas chamber to the crematoria. I am honestly not sure what you mean by a “timely manner.” (Can you specify the time constraints to which you refer?) However, regarding Crematoria Two and Three, a lift device was used to lift corpses from the gas chamber to the main floor in which the actual crematoria ovens were stored, thereby speeding up the body-removal and cremation process.
In sum, your forensic objections are easily answered, and fail to raise reasonable doubt about the reality of homicidal gassings at Auschwitz. Denier technical dilettantism cannot plausibly challenge the overwhelming documentary, testimonial, and forensic evidence—briefly discussed in my opening statement—for gassing at Auschwitz.
Gas Vans and the “Diesel Question”
On your argument about the implausibility of killing by diesel engines: it is apparently true that the latter do not emit enough carbon monoxide to asphyxiate people en masse. However, multiple perpetrators, including SS functionary Eric Fuchs—who helped construct the Sobibor gas chambers—and SS-Oberscharführer Walter Piller, attested to the use of gasoline engines in the exterminations at Kulmhof the Aktion Reinhardt camps.
The most parsimonious assumption is not that the witness references to diesel engines corroborate a grand conspiracy to frame the Germans—do you actually believe this, Thomas?—but that the these witnesses were simply mistakes. In any case, none of the witnesses attesting to diesel are more credible than the aforementioned Eric Fuchs. Fuchs helped install the gas chamber, was therefore in an ideal position to describe how it worked, and testified to the use of a gasoline engine (not diesel) at Sobibor.
Revealingly, you do not deny that gasoline engines are capable of killing people en masse. However, you argue that it was implausible that the Nazis would have used gasoline engines when more efficient means of mass killing were at hand. I assume here you are following the lead of the late Fritz Berg, who insisted that producer gas would have been more efficient for killing people, and therefore that the technologically savvy Nazis would never have used gasoline engines.
This underlying assumption here—that the SS would have used the most efficient method of killing available— can only be described as laughable. You have no evidence for your claims of absolute SS efficiency, and are relying entirely on Hollywood stereotypes. Invoking such stereotypes may beguile some, but among them will not be anyone who has read about the actual history of the SS.
In fact, the SS was a bunglingly inefficient organization, run by ideologues such as Himmler and Heydrich and infested with corrupt and criminal elements such as Rudolf Höss, who was a convicted murderer even before he was Kommandant of Auschwitz. Moreover, the actual conduct of the SS and the practical management of the concentration camps and Reinhardt camps was hardly a model of bureaucratic and technical efficiency.
Regarding Auschwitz, for example, the incompetent planning and construction of the camp led to the spread of epidemics in 1942, causing many deaths not only among inmates but SS personnel. The construction history of Auschwitz alone discredits the Hollywood caricature that the SS consistently acted with engineering skill and technical efficiency.
Cremation at Auschwitz
Your next argument—that at most 900 bodies could have been cremated in the 46 muffles of Auschwitz in a day—is based on a contrived extrapolation of maximal possible civilian-cremation efficiency in contemporary America to the context of a Nazi death camp. Of course, this is an apples-to-oranges comparison. Several critical variables differed in cremation at Auschwitz.
Firstly, multiple bodies at Auschwitz were cremated in a single oven, a practice prohibited in civilian cremation and criminalized in civilian society. Second, most bodies burned at Auschwitz were of children or emaciated adults, whereas most bodies cremated in modern America are those of overweight or obese adults. Third, while civilian crematoria are periodically turned off to accommodate the work and break schedules of free laborers, the Auschwitz slave force kept the Birkenau Crematoria running continuously. (The built-up heat from this continuous use increased the efficiency of the cremation process.) Fourth, and at a more general level, the goal of civilian cremation is to burn an individual corpse into a fine white powder, whereas the goal of cremation at Auschwitz was to burn corpses as quickly as possible.
In light of the four different variables mentioned above, we can make a general qualitative statement that cremation at Auschwitz was much more efficient compared to civilian cremation methods. More specifically, all documentary evidence on cremation capacity at Auschwitz contradicts your idea that a maximum of 900 bodies could be burned at Auschwitz in a day. For example, a 28 June 1943 letter from Karl Bischoff, the head of the Central Building Administration at Auschwitz-Birkenau, reported a maximal capacity of 4,756 corpses being burnt within 24 hours.
I trust the contemporaneous calculations of the Nazis—who were in a position to know the volume of their cremation capacity—over the napkin math of Holocaust deniers. Especially when such napkin math is premised on an apples-to-oranges comparison of civilian cremation methods versus cremation at Auschwitz.
Body Disposal at the Reinhardt camps
Your main argument here is that it would be technically impossible to supply adequate wood for open-air cremation at the Aktion Reinhardt camps. There are two unsubstantiated and probably false assumptions behind this argument impossibility’ argument concerning whether the Nazis could supply adequate wood for open-air cremation at the Reinhardt camps.
First, you are assuming—in contradiction to the testimonial evidence—that only the dozens of woodcutting slave-laborers stationed at the camps were involved in the procurement of wood for them.
Second, you are assuming that no wood was imported to the camps from elsewhere in German-occupied Poland, a lumbering country where forestry was abundant. (According to a 1921 New York Times article cited in the Holocaust Controversies White Paper on the Reinhardt camps, “Poland’s state forests alone furnished 3,439,047 cubic meters of building timber and 2,019,758 cubic meters of fuel wood.”) Both of these assumptions contradict the testimonial evidence, which indicates such imports took place. (There is very little documentary evidence of any kind—much less regarding the import of wood—concerning the Reinhardt camps; such evidence was systematically destroyed by the Nazis.)
Even if we adopt for argument’s sake your unsubstantiated assumptions about limitations on workforce and lumber supply, you are not able to cash out your claim of technical implausibility. According to all available testimonial and documentary evidence, a great many corpses at the Reinhardt camps—e.g. the vast majority in Treblinka—were not originally cremated, but interred in mass graves. What this meant in practice was that hundreds of thousands of exhumed corpses were decomposed and (therefore) dehydrated. Since water accounts for 60% of human weight, these dehydrated corpses required much less lumber to burn. Because these corpses were dehydrated by decomposition, they required much less lumber to burn than a fresh corpse would have.
It should also be noted that the cremations did not include all victims at the Reinhardt camps. Many such victims remain buried in mass graves at the camps. Thus, even assuming—without evidence—that no wood was imported to the camps, the forestry and workforce at hand would have been sufficient to procure sufficient lumber for the cremations performed.
Disposing of Bones, Teeth, and Ashes
You also raise questions about the plausibility of the Nazis disposing of bones, teeth, and ashes of victims at the camps. This argument did not impress me as likely to persuade a balanced reader, so I will deal with it summarily.
The manner for disposing of bones and teeth—or more specifically, crushing them into powder and then disposing of the powder—varied from camp to camp. A ball mill was used at Belzec and Kulmhof to crush bones.
The use of a ball mall was not unique to Belzec and Kulmhof. The ball mall used to crush bones at the Janowska concentration camp is pictured below.
At Auschwitz, eyewitness testimony—on which see the below picture drawn by survivor David Olere— indicates that some inmates had to grind up bones using a crude device that resembles a thick log.
vRegarding ash disposal, the ashes from Auschwitz victims were scattered into the Vistula river, or onto nearby roads. Ashes of cremated persons at the Reinhardt camps were often buried in mass graves. Sometimes—like the ashes from Auschwitz—the ashes of Reinhardt camp victims were distributed to other locations.
Body Disposal in Ghettos
Before addressing your claim about the impossibility of body disposal in ghettos, I have to call out an appalling factual error you made concerning the history of the ghettos. Specifically, you asserted that “Jews could freely come and go” to and from the ghettos. This statement is a travesty. In point of fact, Polish Jews were executed if they left the ghettos without the permission of their Nazi overlords, as were gentile Poles who gave Jews food and quarter:
Another problem with your framing of this issue is your construction of a straw man of 1,000,000 Jews dying in ghettos. This estimate is vastly higher than what the leading contemporaneous scholars believe. Using the seminal work of Wolfgang Benz’ Dimension des Völkermords. Die Zahl der jüdischen Opfer des Nationalsozialismus (Munich, 1991), and more recent research on eastern Europe, one can determine that the figure was much lower than 1,000,000, and probably about 450,000.
Now, to address your arguments on body disposal in ghettos: there is an important difference between Jews who perished in the ghettos versus Jews who were gassed or shot: most of the former were never cremated. For example, as one of my commentators pointed out, about 43,000 Jews who perished in the Lodz ghetto were buried in a cemetery called Ghetto Field. These bodies accounts for over 20% of the Jews who lived in the ghetto, a death rate commensurate with the overall estimates of death in the ghettos. (Of course, most of those who ‘survived’ ghettoization were deported to and murdered in extermination camps.) Similarly, as many as 3,500 Jews from the Bialystok Ghetto are known to have been buried at a necropolis on Żabia Street, which was established at the same time the Bialystok Ghetto was being established. Another major ghetto, Terezin (in Czechia), built a crematorium in 1942, and records indicate about 30,000 victims were cremated there, while many thousands more were buried in what became known as the Jewish Cemetery.
The reader will note that I have already accounted for the remains of about 100,000 ghetto victims out of about 450,000 estimated deaths in ghettos and labour camps. I could continue along these lines. But I could not account for every last bone or body. One reason for this is that mass graves—not just mass graves of Holocaust victims, but mass graves of Stalinist, Ottoman, and other atrocities—are often difficult to find, as perpetrators build over them. Thus, Nazi mass graves are still being found to this day. For example, in 2019 a mass grave containing at least 730 victims was found near the Brześć Ghetto.
Still, neither I, nor you, nor anyone else, can account for every cadaver in any genocide. Historians do not base casualty estimates for genocides or wars on skull counts, but on documentary evidence. (You yourself said in your introduction that 50 million were killed in World War II, Thomas; on what do you base this? Can you account forensically for the disposal of 50 million bodies during the war?) The denier insistence on this is not only pig-headed, but shows their epistemic double standard, in establishing a unique burden of proof for Holocaust claims that they would never accept in other contexts.
Witnesses
Your argument regarding Holocaust witnesses relies on the assumption that, if some witnesses to an event have made false or absurd statements, we can infer that the event likely did not happen. You might as well argue that the bombing of Dresden or the Battle of Mons did not happen, because of the existence of absurd witness accounts—involving, in the case of the former, the melting of numerous victims into a green-brown liquid; and in the case of the latter, supernatural beings on the field of battle—to this event. Your argument that the existence of unreliable witnesses to an event implies that the event never happened is blatantly erroneous, and you would never find it persuasive outside the tendentious context of Holocaust denial.
Your claim that “virtually every witness making substantive and verifiable claims about their time at a camp has said outrageous, ridiculous, and impossible things” is base calumny. Do you claim to have read “virtually every” witness accounts from survivors and perpetrators in the death camps? If so, how did you carry this research out?
Conclusion
One revealing feature of your arguments—which the attentive reader will have noticed after reading your opening or my rebuttal—is that they were all negative in nature. I imagine you would defend this style of argumentation by arguing that “orthodox” historians like me, not “revisionists” like you, bear the burden of proof in this discussion.
The line of reasoning that deniers bear no positive burden of proof for their claims—which are, to be sure, negative as a matter of formal logic—may seem plausible at first blush. But if one stops and thinks about the issue for a moment, or for that matter knows anything about how the historical method works, he will conclude that the denier has a positive case to make and a burden of proof to satisfy.
If one wants to deny documented historical events tied to concrete historical phenomena—for example, suppose one were to deny that Prussia ever invaded Denmark in 1864—one would need to provide an alternative explanation for the phenomena associated with it. The Second Schleswig War denier would need to provide an alternative explanation for, among other phenomena, how Schleswig and Holstein went from Danish to German territory in 1864; the denier would also have to explain why so much contemporaneous documentary and testimonial, pictorial, and material evidence exists (or was forged) concerning the war.
In the context of the Holocaust, a genuine historical revisionist account would develop an alternative narrative to extermination, which explained Jewish population losses and how millions of Jews disappeared in Nazi custody (especially in the Reinhardt camps and the KLs) during World War II. A revisionist would also describe how so many witnesses with different ideologies and interests—from Jewish victims to SS personnel at the camps; from Hitler’s Allies Horthy and Mussolini to Palestinian-Arab collaborator Hajj Amin-Al-Husseini; from killers testifying to their deeds in court, to Adolf Eichmann calmly discussing the extermination policy to his friend Sassen in Argentina—across various languages and generations, came to believe (or pretend to believe) in the systematic extermination of the Jews. Such a narrative would need to be supported with positive evidence of the kind and volume that supports the mainstream narrative of extermination.
However, deniers either decline to offer an alternative narrative as to what happened to the Jews—based on the assumption that they carry no burden of proof for their claims—or offer an outright ridiculous one: the idea that the Jews, or at least the 1.4 million who ‘disappeared’ in the Reinhardt camps in 1942 and 1943, were channeled out of the camps and resettled. The problem is that there is zero evidence of resettlements existing. (Common sense requires us to assume that there would be testimonial, infrastructural, economic, and communicative traces of a settlement—a nation, really—of 1.4 million Jews in 1940s Europe.)
The failure of deniers to explain how millions of Jews ‘disappeared’ in Nazi custody during the war—that is, their failure to offer a serious counter-narrative to extermination—puts them outside the scope of historical practice. Barring the uncovering of earth-shattering new evidence of settlements of Jews channeled out of the Reinhardt camps, both Holocaust denial and the ‘resettlement’ theory developed by deniers will continue to be stigmatized as pseudo-historical.
4. Rebuttal II: Reply to Opening Statement and First Rebuttal Thomas Dalton
NOTE: Matt and I were unable to reach agreement on embedded links to my books; he says, at the top of his opening statement, that such links are “nothing more than promotional material” and hence are “outside the scope of the debate.” But links to the books allow readers to find the books and pursue their own, independent investigation. As Matt well knows, Internet censorship, Amazon censorship, and so on, make it hard to find such books. Evidently he prefers that it stay this way. In any case, active links to books will be included in the text when I post this full debate on my personal website, www.thomasdaltonphd.com.
In his opening statement, Matt gave a good summary of some of the main points of the traditional Holocaust story; unfortunately, it doesn’t hold up under scrutiny. In his first rebuttal, he responded to my opening statement; but his points are deficient in many ways. I will respond to both of these essays here, distinguishing Matt (O) from Matt (R), as needed.
Matt (O) structures his statement around what he calls the “three main stages” of “systematic extermination”: (1) mass shootings, (2) the Reinhardt camps (Belzec, Sobibor, Treblinka) + Chelmno/Kulmhof,[1] and (3) Auschwitz- Birkenau. To my knowledge, this is a new structure, not used by conventional Holocaust researchers. I’m not sure of its purpose. Be that as it may, I will respond to the points he raises.
Stage 1:
Matt claims that “nearly two million Jews” were shot beginning in 1941, most by the Einsatzgruppen. It is unclear from where he draws this figure. Most conventional sources estimate far fewer shooting deaths: 1.5 million (Debois, Holocaust by Bullets), 1.4 million (Raul Hilberg, 2003), 1.3 million (Ron Headland, 1992). The “official” Israeli source, Yad Vashem, claims that only 1.25 million died by shooting. So we have some serious inconsistencies here.[2]
Perhaps, says Matt, I am focusing only on the Einsatzgruppen and ignoring the “hundreds of thousands of Jews” shot by other groups. I am unaware of any conventional source that has documented these many thousands of other shooting deaths. Matt owes us a list, by group and by year, of how many Jews were shot; and he needs to identify the source. Then I can evaluate this claim.
To justify his claim about the shootings, Matt focuses on a single small country—Lithuania—which had only 160,000 Jews, prewar. He cites the Stahlecker report, claiming 71,000 Jews shot. (I would point out that, even if totally true, this represents only about 3% of his claimed 2 million deaths; he has a long way to go.) He then cites the Jaeger report of December 1941, claiming that “all” (160,000?) Jews had been killed. But his link to a U Oregon site is unclear—where, exactly, is this passage?
Furthermore, Matt neglects to explain that many Soviet Jews, including men, women, and teens (“children”), were active partisans in the war, actively fighting against German troops. As partisans, they were liable to be shot under international rules of warfare.
Furthermore, Matt’s link to the “Einsatzgruppen Reports” directs to Itzhak Arad’s 1989 book, which is marginal in the current literature and rarely cited. Much more important is Headland’s 1992 book, Messages of Murder. And there, we find a (semi-) honest appraisal of the many problems with the so-called Einsatzgruppen shootings. Headland argues for a death toll of just 1.1 million. But there are immediate problems, as he recognizes. First, these are, allegedly, all victims—Jews and non-Jews alike. Traditionalists assume that Jews were the large majority, perhaps 90%, though this could be drastically in error.
But there are more fundamental problems, as Carlo Mattogno observes:[3]
“This analysis shows that the Einsatzgruppen reports contain chaotic and disordered numerical data which almost never coincide with the declared totals, the general reliability of which is therefore dubious, to say the least.”
Even the orthodox researchers concede this point. “It is not easy,” admits Headland (p. 92), “to obtain a clear picture of any distinct features” of the Einsatzgruppen reports; “the irregularity of the reporting frustrates us at every turn.” He continues:
“There is also evidence to suggest that some Einsatzkommando and Einsatzgruppen leaders deliberately exaggerated the numbers of persons shot for their own self-aggrandizement. […] If these exaggerations existed, there is no way to determine by how much and where the numbers were embellished.” (pp. 97-102)
It gets worse:
“The impossibility of determining an exact total becomes even more obvious when one examines closely the numbers given in the tables… Anything approaching a final total for the entire period of the war cannot be realized.”
But wait—this is a big part of the Holocaust, the “most well-documented event in history.” Why is this huge portion such a mystery?
The final dagger in the heart of the “mass shootings” story is the absence of bodies. If “nearly two million” Jews were shot, where are their bodies? Buried? Then they are still in the ground, waiting to be discovered. Burned? But when? And how, under the horrible conditions of a violent land war? And where are the ashes, which, if buried, remain as ash for centuries? And what about all the teeth and bones, which cannot be “burned to ash”? Where are those?[4] Lots of unanswered questions.
Stage 2:
I will focus on the three Reinhardt camps (Treblinka, Belzec, Sobibor), and pass over Chelmno/Kulmhof here; this latter camp is allegedly the site of some 250,000 Jewish deaths, but the evidence is so painfully lacking that it is scarcely worth the time here. Suffice to say that revisionists suggest only a few thousand Jews died there, at most.
But to Matt’s point: the reason that some 1.5 million Jews “disappeared” via the three Reinhardt camps is precisely because they were—transit camps. The entire purpose of the camps was to collect and concentrate Jews temporarily, disinfest them of disease-carrying lice, and then ship them on to points further East, into newly-captured Russian territory—many to forced-labor camps. That’s why all 3 camps were located in the far eastern portions of Poland, which made it easier to transfer Jews onto Russian-gauge railways and then to ship them out. Once they left those camps, the Jews were considered “exterminated” (from the Latin “ex-terminus”, “beyond the borders”—look it up), and hence no longer had to be tracked. They were now “gone.”
We know this because there is no evidence, even indirect, of (for example) 900,000 Jewish corpses at Treblinka. If they were buried, they are still there—but no one has found them. If they were buried and dug up, then there should be a huge volume of disturbed earth—which does not exist. If they were burned, there should be a mountain of ash, teeth, and bones—which does not exist. In recent years, a British archeologist, Caroline Sturdy Colls, was hired to find evidence at Treblinka using high-tech ground-penetrating radar; she found precisely nothing.[5]
Matt (R) does make one valid point, namely, that we have no good documentation for the 1.5 million Jews who were ‘ex-terminated’ through the Reinhardt camps, into captured Soviet territory (on the revisionist view). But as I stated above, the Germans had no need to continue to track all these Jews; they had more important matters on their hands, after all. Matt falsely suggests that the Germans shipped them all to one location, making a “new nation” of Jews, for which we have no evidence. But that’s not what happened (Madagascar was such a plan, but it was never implemented). The transferred Jews were dispersed over a very large area, some to labor camps, many abandoned, all soon to be swallowed up by a resurgent Soviet army—and thus lost to the Western world, for decades. This, in fact, explains the mysterious “disappearance”: the Jews went behind the Iron Curtain, losing touch with everyone in the West.[6] It’s not that hard to explain.
The Diesel Question
What about Belzec? That camp allegedly experienced some 550,000 gassing deaths—all by “carbon monoxide from diesel engines,” a story that is laughably incoherent. (Engine exhaust cannot be pumped into a “hermetically sealed” room without the engine stalling; and diesels produce only a small fraction of the carbon monoxide needed to kill masses of people in any reasonable time.)
Matt (R) insists that all the witnesses—and consequently all the orthodox experts who believe them—are simply “mistaken” when they say that the Germans used diesel engines to gas Jews at the Reinhardt camps. Really, he says, it was gasoline engines. And we know this thanks to one man, Erich Fuchs, who testified that one camp— Sobibor—used gasoline.
In his testimony (in 1963!) Fuchs describes his visit to Sobibor to set up the chambers:[7]
“We unloaded the motor. It was a heavy Russian gasoline engine (presumably a tank or tractor motor) at least 200 horsepower (V-motor, 8 cylinder, water cooled). We installed the engine on a concrete foundation and set up the connection between the exhaust and the tube.”
He goes on to describe an experimental gassing of 30 or 40 Jewish women:
“I fixed the motor on a definite speed. […] About ten minutes later, the thirty to forty women were dead.”
Some problems with Fuchs’s statement: First, it is counterintuitive that the Germans would use a Russian tank or tractor engine when they had their own high-quality engines. A foreign machine would have been difficult to operate and hard to repair—bad qualities for the key element in your mass-extermination scheme. Second, many Russian tanks of that era were in fact powered by diesel engines, not gasoline. Third, ten minutes is an extremely short time to cause death, given a lightly packed chamber with lots of fresh air to be displaced. But we must keep in mind that Fuchs gave his statement while on trial in 1963 for Nazi-era crimes; perhaps uncoincidentally, he got off with a very light sentence (4 years for complicity in 79,000 murders).
But overall, the consensus is clearly toward diesel at all three camps. Mattogno and Graf[8] cite the German edition of the Encyclopedia of the Holocaust:
“Belzec, Sobibor, and Treblinka were built within the framework of the Operation Reinhardt. […] These extermination camps used carbon monoxide gas, which was produced by diesel engines.”
Noted traditionalist Léon Poliakov cited the Gerstein diesel statement in his book Harvest of Hate; immediately following which he wrote:
“There is little to add to this description, which holds good for Treblinka and Sobibor [as well as Bełżec]. The latter installations were constructed in almost the very same way, and also used the exhaust carbon monoxide gases from Diesel motors as the death agent.” (p. 196)
The current editions of the online encyclopedias at both Yad Vashem and USHMM explicitly refer to diesels. And in an authoritative 2010 Oxford University Press book, Karen Orth is equally insistent: “Chelmno and the Reinhard camps killed with carbon monoxide gas generated by diesel truck motors”.[9] Other sources simply do not specify the engine type, as if it were irrelevant; more likely they do not want to raise this troublesome issue.
And yes, as Matt (R) admits, the Germans had a much better alternative than gasoline engines: namely, “producer gas” (or “wood gas”) engines that explicitly produce carbon monoxide as fuel, rather than as a waste product. He wants to laugh this off, but it didn’t take a genius to know that producer-gas engines, which were built by the thousands at that time, would have worked much better (had the Germans insisted on the idiotic scheme of gassing people with engine exhaust). Every schoolboy knew that producer vehicles were poisonous and dangerous if maltreated. It would have taken any SS man about a minute to decide to use producer gas over diesels or gas engines. But our experts are insistent: “oh no, they were diesel engines.” Right.
Back to Belzec
The conventional story is that the 550,000 Belzec corpses were first buried, and then most were later exhumed and burned to ash, and then the ash was deposited back into the corpse pits.[10] If true, then contemporary excavations should confirm all this. And in fact, a detailed sample study was done in the late 1990s by Andrzej Kola (Matt refers to this study, but fails to cite Kola by name [why?], or to cite Kola’s [now obscure] report). As Matt says, citing Mattogno’s important revisionist book Belzec, there were some three dozen grave sites with a total volume over 20,000 cubic meters. The problem, though, is that this doesn’t begin to hold the required 500,000+ bodies.[11] Based on the excavation data, Mattogno (p. 91) concludes that “it is possible to infer, from what has been discussed above, an order of magnitude of several thousands, perhaps even some tens of thousands” of deaths.[12] But certainly not hundreds of thousands. This is surely why Kola’s work is never mentioned in conventional circles.
While we are addressing Reinhardt, let me respond to Matt’s (R) comments on body disposal. On the wood needed for open-air burnings—all three Reinhardt camps burned all their corpses on open-air fires—Matt claims that the mountain of dry wood was supplied, apparently, by a large network of workers and wood-cutters operating across Poland. And in any case, since the bodies were buried first and then exhumed, that they lost a lot of water and thus were easy to burn.
Again, if Matt had read my Debating the Holocaust (chapter 8), he would have a better understanding of the problems involved here. There are many variables at work, but in general, we can say that an average body requires about 160 kg of dry wood to burn it to ash—not ‘cooked,’ not ‘charred,’ but burned to ash. Thus, Sobibor would have required a total of 36 million kg (41,000 tons) of wood; Belzec, 88 million kg; and Treblinka, 144 million kg. For the latter camp, it comes to 1,400 tons of wood per day, every day, for four solid months in a row. This is an absurd amount; there would have been a convoy of wood-haulers entering the camp every day.
But what about the ‘desiccated corpses’ claim? Matt forgets (or doesn’t realize) that they were only buried for a few months, on average; some only for a few weeks—when exhumation and burning commenced. They were not neat, dried, jerky-like corpses; they were rotting, moldy messes.
What about those bones and teeth? Matt (R) is unimpressed; he says, with a wave of the hand, “the manner…varied from camp to camp,” some using a “ball mill,” some using “crude logs” (!). But it’s not so easy to dismiss. We are talking femurs, pelvic bones, and skulls of 1.5 million Jews (at the Reinhardt camps)—which could never have been burned in open-air pyres. We are talking 48 million enamel-coated teeth. These things would have been a nightmare to dispose of; or else, they are still there, in the ground, just waiting to be dug up.
And where is that ash? Oh, right, it was “buried in the ditches from which the corpses had been removed” (Arad, 1987, p. 171). Well then! We have an easy task: just dig up, or probe, the soil at the three camps and confirm the ash content, consistent with 1.5 million bodies. Wait—they tried that, at all three camps, and found almost nothing. (Best not to talk about that, either…)
Lastly in this Stage 2, I want to mention the cited Himmler report of late 1942 in which over 360,000 Jews are claimed to have been executed “in various locations”. But I would remind Matt, and the reader of this debate, that, on the revisionist view, some 500,000 Jews died or were killed during the war. Reports like the one alleged to be from Himmler may, in fact, have been correct, but they are entirely consistent with the revisionist death toll.[13]
Stage 3:
Matt’s third stage is “Auschwitz-Birkenau”. But this requires a bit of clarification. The alleged “extermination” facility at Auschwitz covers two physical locations: 1) the Auschwitz Main Camp (or “Stammlager”) located in the village of Oswiecim; and 2) Birkenau, located about 3 km away, just outside of town.[14] By focusing on Birkenau—which was indeed the alleged site of most mass-gassings—Matt overlooks or ignores the gas chamber Krematorium #1 at the Main Camp, and the alleged 20,000 Jews gassed there.[15]
But let me also focus on Birkenau, which had four crematoria (K2 – K5) built as two matching pairs (K2/K3 and K4/K5). Oddly, on this most-important aspect of the Holocaust, the site of some 1 million Jewish gassings, and the only gassings using cyanide gas (Zyklon-B), Matt (O) allots all of three paragraphs; perhaps it is best for him not to call too much attention to this. In his (R) he adds three more paragraphs, but these do little to aid his case.
Also, Matt (O) neglects to mention the two small converted farmhouses (“Bunkers”) at Birkenau, the alleged site of some 250,000 gassing deaths.[16] But the whole story of the Bunkers is ludicrous—old, wooden farmhouses, with old windows and old (non “gas-tight”) doors, and no ventilation, converted by the super-efficient Nazis into high-tech, high-volume killing machines. Right. Best to ignore that story too.
Kremas 2 and 3 were built, and operated, very differently than Kremas 4 and 5. K2/K3 allegedly had the “wire- mesh columns” to introduce the Zyklon, whereas K4/K5 had only holes in a sidewall in which to sprinkle the deadly pellets (a farce). As Matt rightly says, the semi-underground K2/K3 rooms had ventilation (as did K1), whereas K4/K5, and the two bunkers, had none. But ventilation-less rooms make no sense, even at “ground level.” This is not like opening a couple windows on a spring day; you’ve got a room jammed with hundreds of dead bodies, intermixed with Zyklon pellets that continue to emit deadly fumes for at least two hours. In K4/K5, the three gassing rooms had a total of two exterior doors, and hence would have taken hours, perhaps a day, to “air out”—which is entirely opposed to the streamlined, rapid-fire assembly-line of death that orthodoxy depicts.
The “wire-mesh columns” that Matt alludes to are attested only by two marginal witnesses. Further, there is no physical evidence today, in the Krema ruins, of any such devices (or attachment points, or related fixtures, etc.). Nor have the ceiling holes been found in the ruins. Matt’s link is to the well-known 2004 Keren study, which is a joke; I invite any reader to track down this study, read it, and then say, “yep, they found those wire- mesh holes!”. The study is an embarrassment to serious researchers.
Additionally, it was only the pair K2/K3 that are alleged to have had such devices; the other pair, K4/K5, simply had “vents in a side wall” into which Zyklon pellets were sprinkled—an entirely amateurish and frankly idiotic scheme that never would have been used.
We should note here that crematoria, in themselves, are nothing suspicious, especially in a prison-like facility during wartime. On the standard view, something like 1.4 million people in total were sent to Auschwitz (main camp + Birkenau), and, they say, about 400,000 were officially registered (for forced-labor purposes) while the remaining 1 million were “gassed upon arrival.” Of the registered, half were Jews; of the gassed, 90%.
Since the Germans anticipated many hundreds of thousands of inmates, they also knew that many thousands would be dying of various causes—from old age and suicide to illness and disease, if nothing else. A high groundwater table in the area precluded mass burials, and therefore incineration would have been the preferred option for body disposal. Hence, one crematorium at the Main Camp and four at the much-larger Birkenau. The newly-deceased would be placed in a cool, partially underground corpse-cellar, their clothes removed (“undressed”), and the bodies would await their turn at incineration—a slow process, requiring about one hour per body.
But Matt (R) does not like my estimate of a maximum of 900 bodies per day, total, for all five Auschwitz crematoria. He prefers the Bischoff estimate of 4,756 per day—a number that entails 4.8 bodies per muffle per hour, which is ridiculously high. If we want ridiculous figures, why not go with Höss’ estimate of 7,800 per day? Or the Soviet Special Commission report of 1945, that claimed 9,300 per day? If we are in fantasyland, all problems vanish. Better to listen, not to Bischoff but to Kurt Prüfer, lead designer of the furnaces; he said:[17]
“In Auschwitz in my presence, two corpses were inserted into each muffle instead of just one, and that the furnaces of the crematory could subsequently not stand the strain.”
If even two corpses were not sustainable, what makes us think that figures of 4 or 5 bodies per hour are possible, over the long term?
Also, Matt’s (R) statement that the Birkenau crematoria were “running continuously” is patently false, or at least highly misleading. He is apparently unaware that K4 burned out after just three months of use, likely because they attempted to burn more than one body per hour.
Matt (O) cites details from a French pharmacist, J-C Pressac, who is now an obscure figure, rarely cited by mainstream Holocaust researchers; this could be because, in 1994, he stated that only some 710,000 people (Jews and others) were gassed at Auschwitz. Hence, the number of Jews gassed would have been in the 600,000s—something unacceptable to our orthodoxy. (Latest figures are even lower than this. Meyer [2002] estimates only 356,000 gassed Jews.[18]) The whole gassing story collapses into a pile of absurdities.
Ghettos?
In my opening statement, I offered a rough number of 1 million ghetto deaths, on the conventional view. My figure was based on Hilberg (2003, Appendix B), who claimed, under “German-controlled ghettos” and “Theresienstadt”, “over 700,000” Jewish deaths. But this supported his low overall figure of 5.1 million. To scale up to the “6 million”, the ghetto deaths would have to be correspondingly scaled up by 20%, arriving at “over 840,000.” I used 1 million because it fit best with other estimates to reach a total of 6 million.[19]
But Matt (R) is unhappy about this. He prefers “probably about 450,000” ghetto deaths but can cite no source for this figure, which is a large portion of the overall Holocaust.
Matt also castigates me for holding an “epistemic double standard”, claiming that I place “a unique burden of proof” on conventional Holocaust claims. But it is his side, not mine, that claims that the Holocaust “is the most well-documented event in history.” This “documentation” surely includes the locations of the majority of victims, and concrete analysis showing their rough number. If so, it is surely not too much to ask for forensic evidence of, say, 50% of claimed fatalities in all major categories. But we don’t have this; not even close.
Matt tosses out a few random statistics for three ghettos, but ignores the single largest one: Warsaw. That allegedly had over 400,000 Jews in it. How many died there? And where are the bodies? Mainstream literature has no answers to these questions.
Confessions, Documents, Policies
In his next section, Matt (O) examines the documentary record, looking for evidence of a mass Holocaust of Jews. He begins with a quotation from Goebbels’ diary. I know something about that diary, having published the most extensive study ever of his diary references to Jews: Goebbels on the Jews.[20] I highly recommend to Matt, and the reader, to track down a copy and read it; it is extremely revealing—mostly for the utter lack of homicidal references to Jews.
The complete diary consists of near-daily entries for over 20 years, and, in hard copy, is larger than most any encyclopedia. It is massive (believe me, I know!). One would thus expect, on the standard view, to find countless references to the mass murder of Jews, to their gassing, to Auschwitz, and so on. This was a private diary, after all. Instead, virtually every entry on Jews talks of their confiscation, quarantining, transfer, and deportation. There is not even one entry, out of thousands, that mentions gassing Jews.
To the point, Matt partially cites the Goebbels entry from 13 Dec 1941. Here is the full passage:
“As concerns the Jewish Question, the Führer is determined to make a clean sweep [reinen Tisch—lit. ‘clean table’]. He had prophesied to the Jews that if they once again brought about a World War, they would experience their own destruction [Vernichtung]. This was not just an empty phrase. The World War is here, and the destruction of Jewry must be the necessary consequence. This question must be seen without sentimentality. We are not here in order to have sympathy with the Jews, rather we sympathize with our own German people. If the German people have now once again sacrificed as many as 160,000 dead in the Eastern campaign, then the authors of this bloody conflict must pay with their lives [mit ihrem Leben bezahlen müssen].”
This, indeed, is the first diary reference to Jewish fatalities. But, does “a clean sweep” sound like mass murder? Why be so coy—in your own diary? Hitler’s prophecy of the Vernichtung of the Jews, we recall, was from January 1939—well before the war. It was spoken at a major live event, to a global audience. At that time, Vernichtung clearly did not mean mass murder. What makes us think anything changed? And even Matt (R) admits that such terms can have both “exterminatory as well as metaphorical usage.”
Further, Goebbels is not saying that “all the Jews” must pay with their lives, or even “most of the Jews”; only “the authors of this [war]”. That can only refer to the Jewish leadership and top influence-peddlers. And for them, yes, Goebbels says that they must pay.
More insight comes from the next daily entry:
“The early curfew in Paris has been abolished, but a plethora of Jews remain to be pushed out ([abgeschoben] of occupied France to the eastern region. In many cases, this is equivalent to a death sentence. The remaining Jews will think hard before stirring up trouble or sabotage against the German troops.”
Hence the Jews are to be “pushed out” to the East. If deportation is sometimes the “equivalent of a death sentence,” and many will “pay with their lives,” we are left wondering how, exactly, and in what numbers, they will die. I trust that there is a clear difference between (a) many dying from disease, exposure, lack of medical care, periodic shootings, etc, and (b) all dying in a complex and systematic gassing operation. There is no doubt that concentrating and deporting thousands or millions of people in wartime would lead to many deaths. But this is not genocide. The next entry (Dec 18) is telling:
“I speak with the Führer regarding the Jewish Question. He is determined to take consistent action and not be deterred by bourgeois sentimentality. Above all, the Jews must leave the Reich [aus … heraus]. We discuss the possibilities for especially clearing out (räumen) Berlin as quickly as possible. […] German intellectuals and elite have no anti-Jewish instinct at all. Their vigilance is not sharp. It is therefore necessary that we solve this problem, since it is likely that, if it remains unsolved, it will lead to the most devastating consequences after we are gone. The Jews should all be pushed off [abgeschoben] to the East. We are not very interested in what becomes of them after that. They have wished this fate upon themselves, they have started the war, and they must now pay the price.
Once again, Jews are to be “pushed off to the East.” And, “We are not very interested in what becomes of them after that.” Harsh and brutal, perhaps, but clearly far less than genocide.
Matt then quotes Hans Frank. First, “liquidate” (liquidieren) does not imply murder. To ‘liquidate’ is to ‘make fluid,’ and to dissolve, in some sense. In reference to masses or organizations, it means to dissolve the social unit or organization so that it no longer exists as a unit. For example, Germans often “liquidated” a given camp or prisoner facility by dismantling it and shipping people out. In no such case was everyone killed. To “liquidate” Jewry is to dissolve their social organization (“destroy” it), and then ship the people out (Ausrotten, ‘root them out’), so that they no longer exist in society as a social unit.
But let’s look at more of what Frank said. This is from his memo of December 16:
“What is to happen to the Jews [after evacuation]? […] We have in the General Government an estimated 2.5 million Jews—perhaps with those closely related to Jews and what goes with it, now 3.5 million Jews. We can’t shoot these 3.5 million Jews, we can’t poison them […].”
Obviously he and Goebbels, at least, were unaware of any program of genocide. They were thinking strictly in terms of mass evacuation and deportation.[21]
In both his pieces, Matt cites Himmler at Posen, using his language to make a point about mass murder. But as usual, Matt gives us an incomplete picture. Here are the full, relevant passages from both the Oct 4 and Oct 6 Posen speeches, including the key German words:
Oct 4: “I am thinking now of the evacuation [Evakuierung] of the Jews, the extermination [Ausrottung] of the Jewish people. It is one of those things that is easy to say: ‘The Jewish people will be exterminated [ausgerottet],’ says every Party comrade, ‘that is quite clear, it is in our program: deactivation [Ausschaltung] of the Jews, extermination [Ausrottung]; that is what we are doing.’”
Oct 6: “We were faced with the question: what about the women and children? – I decided to find a clear solution to this problem too. I did not consider myself justified to [only] exterminate [auszurotten] the men – in other words, to kill them or have them killed and allow the avengers of our sons and grandsons in the form of their children to grow up. The difficult decision had to be made to have this people disappear [verschwinden] from the earth.”
From October 4, Himmler is clearly equating Ausrottung (‘extermination’) with evacuation. It is, furthermore, a kind of ‘deactivation.’ If “every Party comrade” knows this, it obviously cannot be a Reich secret about mass murder. October 6 is different; here, Ausrottung means killed. But Himmler seems to be referring to the partisan (fighter) Jews and their families; such people must “disappear from the earth.” He never says “all Jews” or “millions of Jews,” in either speech. And no mention of gassing, Treblinka, Auschwitz, and so on.
But let me grant Matt the point for a moment. Even if Himmler called for the killing of all Jews—even then, that doesn’t mean it was possible, or that it happened. Leaders proclaim, assert, and demand all kinds of things, many of which never materialize. If they want or demand impossible things, or insist upon something that, after the fact, never happened, we should hardly be surprised.
Matt’s (O) next link, to something “Hitler said,” goes again to a Tweet; Twitter is not an authoritative source for anything. It shows a book page—but what is the book? Once we know, then we can evaluate.
Matt then quotes Ribbentrop, but this one hurts his cause more than helps it. If the Jews are to be either “exterminated” or “sent to concentration camps”, then the evident meaning is: Jews are either shipped out (‘ex- terminated’) or confined (and not killed). Ribbentrop obviously did not mean “either killed or killed”!
But then he cites Goebbels’ diary again, from very late in the war (14 Mar 1945). At this point, the outcome was clear. The chief instigators—on the Germans’ view, Jewish capitalists (to the west) and Jewish Bolsheviks (to the east)—were responsible for the deaths of 4.5 or 5 million German soldiers and perhaps 2 million civilians.
Finally (and for the only time in his diary!), Goebbels called for Jews to be killed en masse. Where was such talk in 1940 or 1941 or 1942??
But What About those “Six Million”?
In his rebuttal, Matt (R) admits, helpfully, that the 6M is “not an academically rigorous estimate,” and indeed, that it is merely “a symbolic representation.” This agrees with the revisionist view. But then he moves on to excuses: All mass-killings do this, he says; and after all, some traditionalists, like Hilberg, have argued for less (5.1 million); and that the decades of “6 million” dead or suffering Jews, prior to WW2, tell us nothing (pay no attention to that man behind the curtain!).
First, it is elementary morality to point out that just because “everyone does it” doesn’t make something right. Yes, every aggrieved party has incentive to exaggerate their dead—precisely my point. Hilberg argued for 5.1 million his whole life, and yet never could justify even this reduced total—which no one else ever really endorsed—with a breakdown by cause and by year (even a rough one). Matt could have mentioned Gerald Reitlinger, who defended a total of 4.2 million. But today, 4.2 million would get you branded as an evil revisionist! Maybe even, God forbid, a “denier”!
But Matt once again misses the point. When Yad Vashem says “nearly six million Jews had been murdered,” and the US Holocaust Museum says “The Holocaust was the systematic, state-sponsored persecution and murder of six million European Jews,” and when the Holocaust Encyclopedia (2001, p. 139) says “The round figure of 6 million admits of no serious doubt”—what do you think they mean? They are not accepting Hilberg, or Reitlinger, or any such estimate. Of course, they never really tell you what they would accept—this is part of the strategy—but based on common sense, they should accept 5.9 million, 5.8 million, maybe 5.5 million. But not fewer, surely. (Or are they “mistaken” on this issue too?)
And then what about all those NYT stories, dating back to the late 1800s, of “6 million” dead or dying Jews? Obviously it is not a “decades long conspiracy”. What it is, is a fixation on a symbolic number—“6” has special meaning in the orthodox Jewish community—that came to represent “all the Jews” or “all suffering Jews.” It was like a shorthand for Jewish suffering: “6 million” dead, dying, or suffering.
Matt would do well to read my Chapter 3 in Debating the Holocaust, or my recent article “The Holocaust of Six Million Jews—in World War I.” There he would find a detailed and specific list of such citations, including the fact that there was (1) a Jewish “holocaust” in Russia between 1903 and 1911 in which “6 million” died or were persecuted, (2) a Jewish “holocaust” during World War One, in which another “6 million” died or were threatened, and then, incredibly, (3) a third Jewish “holocaust” during WW2 in which yet another “6 million” died. It beggars belief, to say the least.
In a further attempt at defense, he refers to Mathis’ silly article, claiming, in all of two short paragraphs (and one table), that between 1857 and 1939, there were NYT references to “1 million Jews,” “2 million Jews,” etc up to “10 million”, such that “6 million” had no special preponderance. But (a) Mathis gives us no actual quotations at all (unlike what I do), and (b) there is no claim that there were “1 million dead/suffering Jews,” “2 million dead/suffering”, etc. Nor is there any connection with those other figures and a “holocaust.” Mathis has a lot more documentation to do before he convinces anyone.[22]
Bottom line: Matt still owes us a plausible breakdown, of rough figures, by year and by major cause, that adds up to (or close to) 6 million. From his (O), he seems to want to defend the following:
| Mass shootings: | “nearly 2 million” |
| Reinhardt + Chelmno: | “about 1.5 million” |
| Auschwitz-Birkenau: | “1 million” |
| Ghettos, marches, other: | “over 700,000” |
| TOTAL: | about 5.2 million |
Is this correct? If so, he risks being branded as a “revisionist”, since virtually all major sources insist on something close to 6 million (Hilberg is the lone exception, but no one else is willing to go there.) Furthermore, is it too much to ask to break those numbers down by year: 1940, 1941, 1942, 1943, 1944, and 1945? I presume that is possible, since this is, after all, “the most well-documented event in history”. I await these figures; they would tell us much.
And not just him: Matt needs to show us that other major players in the Holocaust fiasco can do this. Otherwise, a mere list of numbers from some random blogger like Matt holds no water. (If Matt can document his particular expertise, such as with a list of publications, he owes us that too.)
Coerced Testimony
In order to wrap up this rebuttal, I’ll say little here about testimony by captured Germans, other than to point out the obvious: a “judicial” system run by victorious allies, out for revenge, and hell-bent on “proving” German crimes, had plenty of incentive—and no inhibition—to use the most vicious means of obtaining testimony. See, for example, the testimony by Julius Streicher,[23] or the book Cruel Britannia by Ian Cobain.
Then there is the fact that high-profile testifiers like Rudolf Höss and Adolf Eichmann have included such transparent absurdities in their statements that they can only have come from coercion or torture. Obviously, when there is a gun to your head, you will say anything.
To close here: My “alternate narrative” is of some 9 million European Jews who were first encouraged, then compelled to leave Europe, by a National Socialist government that came to power in 1933 and which was then thrust into a war in 1939, on two fronts. In their eyes, Jews both within and outside of Germany were belligerent and destructive people, and who therefore had to leave the Reich.[24] Over the course of the war, some 500,000 perished in a variety of ways, none in gas chambers. Many thousands of others were sent far away (many behind the Iron Curtain), separated from family members, losing touch, and often changing names along the way, “never to be seen again.” This was the tragedy of the Jews during the war. But it was not “the Holocaust.”
5. A ‘Dodgy’ Rebuttal: Kulmhof and Aktion Reinhardt
Thomas,
Below, I will respond chronologically to the points raised in your rebuttal. This chronology skips over your challenge that I substantiate my specific estimates of Jewish deaths in the various stages of the Holocaust. I do however respond to your challenge in the form of an appendix, posted below my conclusion.
Before I respond to your arguments on the Reinhardt camps, I need to grumble a bit about how you have dodged mine.
You skipped over Kulmhof entirely, disregarding my arguments and documentary evidence, while making the bare assertion that “the evidence is so painfully lacking that it is scarcely worth the time here.”[25]
You also failed to address the documentary evidence I previously provided on, for example, Treblinka II. Specifically, you ignored Himmler’s reference to the fact that (Bialystok) Jews, whom we know were sent to Treblinka, sent there were executed. You elided the Stroop Report’s description of deportation to Treblinka II as a method of execution.[26] Nevertheless, I will address your Reinhardt camp arguments.
Reinhardt Camps: Incomplete Physical Evidence & Resettlement Theory
One of your core premises is that the physical evidence for 1.4 million Reinhardt-camp deaths is incomplete. That premise is true.[27] But I deny altogether its significance for your case.
The physical evidence for the victims of every genocide or war in history is ‘incomplete.’ If you deny exterminations at the Reinhardt camps (or deny the Holocaust more generally) because of incomplete physical evidence, you should also deny the historicity of every other genocide and war.
Moreover, the ‘incomplete’ physical evidence for Reinhardt-camp exterminations is still enormous. At Belzec alone, Andrzej Kola’s 1997 and 1999 excavations identified 33 mass graves, loaded with ash. Your own Carlo Mattogno calculated[28] the total surface area of the graves to be 5,919 square meters, and their total volume at 21,310 cubic meters. (And we are only discussing physical evidence; the compelling documentary and testimonial evidence for exterminations at the Reinhardt camps converge with the physical evidence.)
Regardless, you use the premise of incomplete physical evidence to argue for an alternative theory of what happened to 1.4 million Jewish deportees. Specifically, you contend that these Jews were channelled out of the Reinhardt camps and resettled in the ‘Russian East.’ Your justify your conclusion through a binary framing of the issue, according to which resettlement and extermination are the only logically possible explanations for the disappearance of 1.4 million Jews in Belzec, Sobibor, and Treblinka.
Your binary framing of the issue is correct. As a major denier work explained:
So the only possible explanations for the ‘disappearance’ of 1.4 million Jews from the Reinhardt camps are resettlement or extermination. One must embrace one theory or the other.
But why would one prefer resettlement theory to the standard extermination narrative? There is evidence for extermination at the Reinhardt camps—not just the ‘incomplete’ physical evidence; there is also documentary evidence like the aforementioned Stroop Report, and literally all eyewitnesses. Conversely, there is literally zero (0) evidence of any kind for the existence of eastern settlements to accommodate any number of (much less all 1.4 million) Reinhardt-camp Jews.[29]
I would now ask our readers to give me a moment to illuminate how ridiculous denier resettlement theory is.
A resettlement of the 1.4 million Reinhardt-camp deportees would have amounted to a community (a country, really; “Jewlantis”) with a larger population than contemporary Estonia. And yet—in contrast to, say, the Daunians, a preliterate, ancient civilization in what is now southern Italy, for whose communities we have considerable archaeological evidence—there is no evidence for Jewlantis, a European nation that supposedly existed within living memory.
You attempt, Thomas, to diminish the absurdity of resettlement theory by asserting that there is no reason to assume all 1.4 million were resettled in one “new nation” of Jews. Okay. Let us suppose the 1.4 million were deposited into 24 settlements with an average population of 57,000; that would be equivalent to twenty four Greenlands. But whether we are talking about one Estonia (“Jewlantis”), twenty four Greenlands, or for that matter thirty five Leichensteins, common sense still requires us to assume there would be physical evidence (infrastructure, homes, human remains, etc), as well as testimonial, infrastructural, economic, and communicative traces of these nations, not to mention train records of the actual deportations from the Reinhardt camps to the East. But you have literally nothing. There is no evidence for “resettlements.” [30]
I have by now indulged your resettlement daydream quite enough. The bottom line is that, by setting up an extermination-resettlement dichotomy, you (like Graf, Mattogno, Kues, and Rudolf) have boxed yourself into a position best described as a joke.
Diesel Revisited
Your claim that only “one man,” Fuchs, attested to the use of gasoline engines is false. As noted in an extensive post on this matter published by Holocaust Controversies, eyewitnesses to gasoline engines include SS men Erich Bauer and Franz Hödl; SS-Oberscharführer Walter Piller; Kulmhof gas van driver Walter Burmeister.
These are higher quality witnesses than any who can be used to support the existence of diesel engines. Fuchs, Piller, and Burmeister were all SS personnel who were in a much better position to know about the mechanics of killing than horrified Jewish camp inmates, with their bird’s-eye view of the killing process.
You insist that the Nazis could not have used gasoline engines to kill people because a more efficient method of killing—by producer gas—was available. I previously exposed your underlying premise of supreme SS technical efficiency as a Hollywood myth. In any case, gasoline engines easily emit sufficient levels of carbon monoxide to kill people in enclosed spaces (“gas chambers”).[31]
More Dodging: This Time on Auschwitz
On Auschwitz, you have ignored the documents I provided that prove Leichenkeller 1 was a homicidal gas chamber. These include Bischoff’s (29 January 1943) reference to LK1 as a “gassing cellar”; orders for gas-tight doors with peepholes to be equipped to LK 1; and the 6 March 1943 letter from Auschwitz to the Topf company contemplating the installation of a “pre-heating” system in LK1.[32] It is just as well that you ignored these documents, since they collectively demolish your theory that LK1 was a morgue.
You ignored the Allied reconnaissance aerial photography of the roof on Krematorium 2, which clearly shows disturbances atop the roof corresponding to the induction holes.[33] You declined to comment on Johann Kremer’s (2 September 1942) diary entry, which describes a “special action” at Auschwitz, remarks that “Dante’s Inferno seems almost a comedy” in comparison, and concludes that Auschwitz is “justly called an extermination camp.”
Still, I will respond to the Auschwitz-related arguments you made in the rebuttal.
Rebutting Dalton’s Auschwitz Arguments
Your argument against the plausibility of homicidal gassing in the Auschwitz-Birkenau Bunkers turns on a heavily exaggerated notion of how frequently they were used. Hence your erroneous estimate of 250,000 victims (the actual figure is around 100,000).
The process of gassing in the Bunkers was very different than the process of gassing in the Krematoria. Victims were not murdered in the Bunkers in an assembly line-fashion throughout the day; rather, the occasional execution would occur in the evenings.
The limited scale of the gassings, and the timing of gassings at night, could easily accommodate a process of natural overnight ventilation of the Bunkers. To quote from Pressac’s essay, “The Machinery of Mass Murder at Auschwitz”:[34]
“[T]he doors were to be opened and remain open for the whole night. By daybreak it would be possible to remove the bodies without danger and transport them to burial pits dug in the birch forest.“
Regarding Krematoria IV and V, assuming that they were not mechanically ventilated, the Sonderkommando— wearing their gas masks—could have simply opened the doors and windows of the Krematoria after a gassing, allowing the hydrogen cyanide to dissipate naturally in the atmosphere. I recommend to our readers this piece by the chemist Harry W. Mazal, who explains this process in terms of Graham’s Law of Diffusion.[35]
Still More Dodging: German Policy and Quotes from German leaders
After discussing the Reinhardt camps and Auschwitz, you proceed to examine my section on German extermination policy, as well as my quotes from German leaders attesting to that policy. Or at least, you examine some of these quotes.
You completely ignore the 26 October 1942 report on Himmler’s decision to generally legalize the ad hoc murder of Jews by SS men, provided that such killings were not motivated by personal (pecuniary, sexual, sadistic, etc) reasons; you also ignore the Täubner court-martial, in which the judge clearly states killing Jews is a lawful act for SS men. You fail to address Hans Frank’s 24 August 1942 announcement that Polish Jews would no longer be fed, and that 1.2 million would be condemned to death by starvation. You do not acknowledge Robert Ley’s 3 May 1943 statement that the Nazis would not give up their struggle until the last European Jew was dead (gestorben).
On Dalton’s Wordplay and Selective Quoting
In discussing Hans Frank’s (December 1941) and Joseph Goebbels’ (March 1942) references to the “liquidation” of Jews, you argue that they meant this in a non-homicidal sense. You offer a non-homicidal definition of liquidate, namely “to ‘make fluid,’ and to dissolve, in some sense.” If Goebbels or Frank were talking about “Jewish power,” “Jewry,” or “Jewish-German marriages,” this non-homicidal definition would make sense. But Goebbels and Frank were taking about a specific group of Jewish people: deportees to the death camps of the East. What could it even mean to “dissolve” or “make fluid” the Jewish deportees?
The word liquidate, as applied to people—as opposed to concepts, organizations, institutions, and so on—plainly means to kill. It meant to kill in Nazi propaganda films about the Katyn massacre (which described the “liquidation” of the victims), and meant killing when Goebbels and Frank discussed liquidation of Jews deported to the East. In the context of these passages, recognizing that Goebbels and Frank were native German speakers is enough to prove that they were discussing the killing of Jews.
More troubling than your linguistic games is your misuse of Hans Frank’s December 1941 speech, which you quote as follows:
“What is to happen to the Jews [after evacuation]? […] We have in the General Government an estimated 2.5 million Jews—perhaps with those closely related to Jews and what goes with it, now 3.5 million Jews. We can’t shoot these 3.5 million Jews, we can’t poison them, […]”
Read in isolation, this passage sounds as if Frank is dismissing the idea of killing Jews. But you have mendaciously cut Frank off in mid-sentence! Right after your quoted portion, Frank goes on to say
“[B]ut we somehow must take steps that lead to [their] successful extermination.”
You also omit an earlier portion of the speech in which Frank declared
“Gentlemen, I must ask you to rid yourselves of all feeling of pity. We must annihilate the Jews, wherever we find them and wherever it is possible.”
It is only through these highly selective omissions that you can use this speech—a copy of which is pictured below, with the relevant portions highlighted by me—to maintain that Frank was “unaware of any program of genocide.”
Regarding Himmler’s 6 October 1943 Posen speech, you helpfully concede that the Reichsführer-SS was describing the killing of Jews and their families. However, you suggest that Himmler “seems to be referring to” the killing of only a subset of Jews: “partisan (fighter) Jews and their families.” This interpretation is contradicted by the speech itself. Himmler speaks of making the Jewish people (Volk) disappear from the earth. Himmler’s use of the racial term Volk shows that he was talking about the Jews as such, not merely partisans.
Another argument you make regarding the 6 October 1943 Posen speech is that Himmler’s call to kill Jews was merely aspirational, rather than an expression of ongoing Nazi policy. You write:
“Even if Himmler called for the killing of all Jews—even then, that doesn’t mean it was possible, or that it happened. Leaders proclaim, assert, and demand all kinds of things, many of which never materialize.”
The problem with this argument is that Himmler is not merely calling for the murder of Jews. Using the past- tense (Präteritum) verb mußte, Himmler is referring to a decision that has already been made, and to something that has already been happening. He says that “[t]he difficult decision had to be made to have this people disappear from the earth.”[36] Himmler is reporting on and attesting to the ongoing murder of the Jews. His statement is horrifyingly empirical, not aspirational.
The same problem applies to your treatment of the 14 March 1945 Goebbels diary entry, in which the Nazi Propaganda Minister advocated “kill[ing] Jews like rats.” You correctly interpret this as a call “for Jews to be killed en masse,” though you seem to believe that this is an aspirational (rather than empirical) statement by Goebbels. But after calling for the Jews to be killed en masse, Goebbels goes on to write:
In Germany we have, thank god, thoroughly attended to this already. I hope that the world will take this as an example.
Confessions and Coercion
You raise the issue of coerced confessions, focusing specifically on Rudolf Höss (tortured by Jewish-British soldiers bent on revenge) and Adolf Eichmann (extrajudicially kidnapped by Israelis).
We learned about Höss’ torture at the hands of British soldiers from his memoirs. But these memoirs also emphasize that he was treated well (not tortured) by the authorities at Nuremberg and by the Polish authorities to which he testified. Why accept the reliability of the memoirs for the allegations of torture, but not on Auschwitz as an extermination camp?
Various colleagues of Höss who were interrogated on the matter—from Hans Aumeier, to Pery Broad, to Eduard Wirths, to Wilhelm Boger, to Wilhelm Clausen—similarly confessed to the role of Auschwitz as an extermination camp with mass gassings of Jews. Would you have our readers believe that all these men were tortured into false confessions?
As to Eichmann, more pertinent than anything he said at trial is what I mentioned in my opening statement: before his kidnapping by the Israelis, Eichmann confessed his involvement in and knowledge of the extermination of the Jews to pro-Nazi friends in Argentina. Are you suggesting that Eichmann’s fellow SS alumnus Willem Sassen, who recorded his discussions with the former, tortured or hoodwinked Eichmann into making a false confession of genocide?
Eichmann’s is far from the only confession that cannot possibly be spun as coercive. In 1971, Albert Speer confessed in a private letter that he knew about the Holocaust and had lied about this in his book and at trial. The Palestinian-Arab Nazi collaborator Hajj Amin al-Husseini, who spent much of the war in Berlin, confessed in his memoirs that he too knew about the exterminations.[37] I have yet to hear an even vaguely coherent explanation for these non-coercive confessions from any denier, and you avoided them altogether in your rebuttal.
A Dodge by History Speaks? Disposal of Ash and Human Remains at the Camps
In this post, I have avoided your argument that the Nazis could not have possibly disposed of so many bodies and so much ash. I did so because I extensively debunked these same arguments in my previous rebuttal, which devoted entire sections to (1) cremation capacity at Auschwitz, (2) body disposal at the Reinhardt camps, (3) the grinding of bones and teeth into ash, and (4) body disposal in ghettos. You have not significantly modified your arguments, and I do not here have the space or inclination to repeat myself.[38]
Conclusion
Your rebuttal fails to raise reasonable doubt about the Nazi extermination of the Jews. You largely failed to respond to the formidable body of positive evidence I produced for the Holocaust—the non-coercive confessions, the numerous wartime references to extermination of the Jews, Himmler’s express legalization of murdering Jews by SS men, the abundant documentary evidence for LK1 being a gas chamber rather than a morgue, documentary evidence that the Germans saw deportation to Treblinka II as a form of execution, and so on. When you did respond to my arguments, you did so in a singularly unpersuasive fashion.
You were also unable to provide any evidence for the existence of Jewish resettlements, despite your endorsement of resettlement as an alternative explanation as to how millions of Jews (or at least the 1.4 million Jews in the Reinhardt camps) disappeared in Nazi custody. Unless you can find evidence of resettlements, your alternative explanation as to what happened to the Jews, and your Holocaust denial more generally, cannot be considered legitimate forms of historical inquiry.
Appendix: Statistical Questions
2,000,000 Jews shot?
The starting point for data on mass shooting victims is Richard Korherr’s famous report, which indicates that 633,000 Jews were killed by Einsatzgruppen in the occupied Soviet Union between June 1941 and summer 1942.[39]
To get the full figure of Jews shot by the Germans between June 1941 and autumn 1942, we have to not only take into account Korherr’s figure, but also numerous other shootings not claimed by the Einsatzgruppen (nor listed in the headlines of the Einsatzgruppen Reports). I have designed the following table, which lists and adds up the victims of such mass shootings:
The mass shootings enumerated in my chart add up to 447,000. By adding this figure Korherr’s 633,000 figure to the mass shootings mentioned above, we increase our total to about 1,080,000. And this is just through summer 1942.
To our figure of 1,080,000 must be added about 325,000 Jews listed as shot by the SSPF[40] between September and December 1942, in a report sent by Himmler to Hitler.[41] (Himmler describes 363,211 executed Jews in the report, but tens of thousands of these—notably the Jews of Bialystok—were killed by gassing in Treblinka II, not by bullets.) Now we are at about 1.405 million.
The next step is to add Jewish fatalities listed on 30 July 1943 Katzmann Report. This report describes the murder of 434,000 Jews in Galicia (Poland), between July 1941 and July 1943; about 180,000 of these Jews were shot by the SSPF, while about 250,000 were deported to Belzec and gassed.
At the time Katzmann wrote his report, 21,000 Jews were still alive in Galicia. These Jews were shot by the end of November 1943. So we add 21,000 to the 180,000 shooting victims mentioned in the Katzmann report, to confirm a figure of about 201,000 Galician Jews shot to death. This should be added to our previous figure of 1.405 million.
Our total figure of Jewish deaths from mass shooting has risen to about 1.606 million. To this we now add the victims of mass shootings at the camps. The most notorious of these was Operation Harvest Festival (3-4 November 1943), in which about 43,000 Jews were shot by the SS and the Ordnungspolizei. Another major camp in which shootings took place was Maly Trostenets.[42] According to Yad Vashem, most of the camp’s 65,000 Jewish victims were shot.
After taking into account these and other mass shootings at camps, our total figure of shooting deaths approximates 1.7 million. Now, we can account for the Jews who were shot in or near ghettos. I do not have the space here to conduct a chapter-and-verse calculation for all these victims.[43]
Suffice it to say that many tens of thousands of Jews were shot during the liquidation of ghettos—such as in Głogów Małopolski (5,000 in 1942), Majdan Tatarski (3,800 in April 1942), Krakow (2,000 on March 13-16 1943), and Warsaw (7,000 on 16 May 1943). Many tens of thousands more were also shot before the ghetto liquidations, in the course of police actions, reprisals (especially after ghetto uprisings), deportations to death camps, and other killing operations.
Our final count can be topped off by adding the tens of thousands of Jews shot in Yugoslavia by the Ustaše and the Germans between 1941 and 1944; many tens of thousands more shot by the Romanians after summer 1942;[44] as well as the victims of scattered German shooting actions in 1943 and 1944.[45]
Having accounted for all of the various types of mass shootings, and scrupulously avoided double-counting, we have arrived at a final mass-shooting death toll of almost two million.
More Than Five Million Total Deaths
To calculate a comprehensive death total for the Holocaust, we must combine the nearly 2,000,000 mass shooting deaths with the number of Jews who died in German camps (including the Reinhardt camps, KLs, and assorted forced-labour camps). From a comparison of deportation records with immediate postwar statistics on camp survivors, we can confidently say that about three million Jews ‘disappeared’ in the camps.[46] About 2.7 million of these Jews were gassed; the rest were worked to death, perished from disease and neglect, or died on death marches near the end of the war.[47]
Thus, the mass shooting death count plus camps count already gets us to nearly 5,000,000. Add to this figure the hundreds of thousands[48] of documented deaths in the ghettos of Poland, Ukraine, and Terezin, and the figure of Jewish dead is surely above 5,000,000, though still several hundred thousand below the familiar 6,000,000.
6. Summarizing a ‘Dodgy’ Debate
Thomas,
My closing statement will proceed by summarizing the main points we have covered in our debate—across two opening statements, three rebuttals,[49] and over 20,000 words—before I draw some conclusions and implications from all this.
In my opening statement I presented a diverse range of evidence for the conventional “Holocaust” narrative of at least five million Jews systematically murdered by the Nazis. I divided the Holocaust into three main stages: (1) mass shootings of nearly two million Jews; (2) homicidal gassing of 1.5 million Jews at Kulmhof and in the Aktion Reinhardt camps; and (3) homicidal gassing of about 1 million Jews at Auschwitz-Birknenau.[50] After providing evidence for each of the three main stages, I corroborated at a more general level a broad German policy to exterminate Jews.
Regarding the first main stage of the Holocaust: You accepted in your opening statement and rebuttal that large numbers of Jews were killed in mass shootings; your denialism in this regard is confined to the number of Jews shot, which you estimate at far lower than my figure of nearly 2,000,000. Thus, I will not dwell much here on mass shootings, but I will link to and strongly recommend to our readers the detailed appendix I wrote in my final rebuttal, corroborating my estimate of nearly two million Jews killed by bullets.
On the second main stage: You engaged in what proved a common Dalton debate tactic: skipping entirely over my evidentiary submission on Kulmhof. (You specifically said “the evidence is so painfully lacking that it is scarcely worth the time here.”). On the Aktion Reinhardt camps, you also dodged documentary evidence, including Himmler’s 29 December 1942 report to Hitler, which listed Jews deported to Treblinka II as having been executed;[51] as well as the May 1943 Stroop Report, which described deportation to Treblinka II as a form of execution.
While largely ignoring my documentary evidence on the Reinhardt camps, you denied exterminations there based on an argument from incredulity that you developed in your opening and reiterated in your rebuttal. You passed this logical fallacy off as some kind of technical demonstration that disposing of so many bodies, bones, and teeth at the Reinhardt camps was impossible, and that the Nazis did not have enough wood to burn the corpses. I debunked your claims in great detail.[52]
Both in your opening statement and in your rebuttal, you devoted considerable space to emphasizing that diesel gas would have been an implausible means of mass execution at the Reinhardt camps. In view of the fact that some witnesses alleged the use of diesel gas engines at the camps, you argued that the technical implausibility of mass gassing by diesel casts doubt on the entire extermination narrative. I exposed your argument as a complete non-sequitur. Far stronger testimonial evidence exists that the Nazis used gasoline engines, and the witnesses referring to diesel engines were simply mistaken about this ultimately trivial detail.
On the third main stage, Auschwitz-Birkenau, my opening statement and rebuttals focused on building documents related to Leichenkeller I, the homicidal gas chamber in Krematoria Two and Three.[53]
You simply dodged this abundant evidence, dogmatically insisting LK1—referred to in the documents I cited as a “gassing cellar” in need of “gas-tight doors,” “hydrogen-cyanide detectors,” and a “pre-heating system”—was a mere morgue.
As with the Reinhardt camps, your only attempt to cast doubt on extermination at Auschwitz amounted to arguments from incredulity. Specifically, you contended that it would have been impossible to burn more than 900 corpses daily in the Auschwitz crematoria. As I noted in my rebuttal, your argument in this regard is based on an erroneous extrapolation to Auschwitz of conditions in civilian cremation.[54]
Another argument from incredulity you made—both in your opening and your rebuttal—is that it would have been impossible for the Sonderkommando to safely ventilate the gas chambers. In response, I provided evidence about the technical process for removing Zyklon-B pellets from Krematoria Two and Three, and described the natural aeration process for the bunkers and Krematoria Four and Five.[55]
After describing the three main steps of extermination, I provided in my opening statement general evidence of Nazi extermination policy and the genocidal intentions of Nazi leaders towards the Jews. You predictably dodged what I consider to be the most damning of these documents: the 26 October 1942 report by an SS judge, noting that Himmler had legalized the ad hoc killing of Jews by SS men; and the Täubner judgment in which an SS court upheld this principle.[56]
But the dodging did not stop with these legal documents: you ignored Frank’s 24 August 1942 statement announcing that the Polish Jews would no longer be fed, Hitler’s 17 April 1943 remark to Horthy that Polish Jews who could not work had to perish, and Ley’s 3 May 1943 speech proclaiming that the Nazis would not give up their struggle until the last Jew in Europe was dead.
When you did address my quotations from Nazi leaders in your rebuttal, you attempted to whitewash them through a series of disreputable tactics. First, in attempting to spaghettify Goebbels’s 27 March 1942 reference to “liquidation” by “a pretty barbaric procedure” of Jews deported to the Reinhardt camps, you argued that “liquidating” a person or group of people does not imply killing. Second, you selectively quoted Hans Frank’s 12 December 1941 speech to make it imply that he was saying Jews could not be systematically killed. Third, you claimed that both Himmler’s 6 October 1943 Posen Speech and Goebbels’ 14 March 1945 diary entry— both of which you conceded called for the killing of Jews[57]—were merely advocating such killings rather than attesting to German policy.[58]
Dalton’s Epistemic Nihilism
The attentive reader will by now have noticed a peculiar quality of your argumentation style: virtually every argument you made in this debate has been negative in character. You nitpick at each category of evidence I present for the Holocaust—using crank epistemology, for example, the desire for a comprehensive physical record of all victims—that nobody uses in the context of any other war or genocide.
Yet you are unable or unwilling to provide positive evidence for a narrative—an alternative explanation—of what happened to the Jews during World War II, and how millions disappeared in Nazi custody. This is not history in the usual sense. And I suspect that your argumentative style is unlikely to satisfy even a reader temperamentally inclined to skepticism about mainstream narratives of World War Two.[59]
A Recurring Issue: The Problem of the ‘Disappeared’ Jews
A foundational problem for Holocaust deniers is their lack of an explanation for how millions of Jews disappeared in the German camp systems. The problem of the ‘disappeared’ millions is one that anti-deniers have brought up for decades, and it repeatedly came up in our debate.
To be sure, Mattogno, Graf, Rudolf, and other more sophisticated deniers,[60] who presumably know the basics about how history is written, have recognized their epistemic obligation[61] to offer an explanation for the disappeared Jews. They have hypothesized that the Jews were channeled out of the camps and resettled. You embraced this theory in this debate, contending that a proportion of the disappeared Jews—the 1.4 million Jews sent to the Reinhardt camps—were resettled in the Russian East.
But resettlement theory is a joke, Thomas! As I have repeatedly written in this debate, there is no evidence for resettlements of Reinhardt-camp Jews. And this lack of evidence is an absurdity, given that a 1.4 million Jews would have amounted to a country larger than contemporary Estonia.[62]
To quote myself at greater length:
“Common sense […] requires us to assume there would be physical evidence (infrastructure, homes, etc), as well as testimonial, infrastructural, economic, and communicative traces of these [resettlements], not to mention train records of the actual deportations from the Reinhardt camps to the East. But you have exactly (precisely) nothing.”
Conclusion
In the course of this debate, I have focused on debunking the specific claims of Holocaust deniers: that there was no German policy to murder Jews; that gas chambers were not used to murder Jews; and that the Jewish death toll was far below five to six million. Now, I want to focus on another question. Does denial—in addition to being wrong—even amount to historical discourse? I conclude it does not.
To understand why, I will need to say a few words about the practice of history.
History is not simply about marshaling 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.
But you have failed to provide a credible positive narrative to explain these two striking historical phenomena. On the first point, you offered no explanation whatever for how so many eyewitnesses and investigations came to believe (or pretend to believe) that the Germans exterminated Jews systematically, including by gassing. In Debating the Holocaust, you dismiss the idea of a conspiracy to frame the Germans—“Holohoax”—sensibly noting that there is zero evidence for such a conspiracy. But how then, on your account, could so many “false” confessions to gassing have been extracted if the Allies were not trying to frame the Germans?
On the second point, or the question of how millions of Jews disappeared in Nazi custody, you embrace the “resettlement theory” of Mattogno, Graf, Rudolf, and Kues. But this narrative is embarrassed by its lack of evidence. As I have noted repeatedly, there is no evidence of resettlements of millions or—if we are limiting the discussion to Jews who disappeared in the Reinhardt camps—1.4 million Jews.
The lack of an alternative explanation for how the Germans were framed (you apparently believe they were framed without intent?), and how millions disappeared in Nazi custody, puts Holocaust denial outside the scope of serious historical discourse. Denial will continue to be dismissed as an absurd conspiracy theory until you find evidence for either the existence of a conspiracy to frame the Germans or the existence of resettlements for the millions who ‘disappeared’ in Nazi custody.
7. Thomas Dalton: Closing Statement
NOTE: In closing, I reiterate here my earlier note: Because Matt and I were unable to reach agreement on embedded links to my books (‘too commercial,’ he said), the following contains no such links. Active links will be included in the text when I post this full debate on my personal website, www.thomasdaltonphd.com, and also at the publishing site of Clemens & Blair (www.clemensandblair.com).
I hereby offer my closing statement in this online Holocaust debate. I want to thank Matt for the opportunity to present my case and to defend it vigorously. Under the conditions, he has been fair and reasonable in “allowing” me (as the publisher of this debate) to make my claims without interference or undue censorship—which is rare these days.
Due to the agreed-upon structure of the debate, this closing statement will reply both to (a) Matt’s second rebuttal, and (b) his closing statement. I will distinguish them as Matt (SR) and Matt (CS), respectively. I will also try to avoid abusing my privilege here of having the “final say” by not introducing new arguments or claims that Matt cannot rebut; rather, I will stick to analyzing his prior claims and assertions, and to summarizing my own view.
The Big Picture
For any such major event as the Holocaust, it is well-advised to never lose sight of the big picture. This is especially true here, where discussion can often devolve into minutiae about individual documents, scientific matters, minor death statistics, and the like. I’m happy to argue those points, but here, in a limited-format debate, we must keep our eye on the ball. And here, “the ball” is the 6 million (or near) Jewish deaths, where they occurred, and how. Without a good grasp on this, all is lost for the orthodox cause. Without this, all else pales into insignificance.
Sadly, on this most essential point, Matt falls well short of the mark. Not to blame him alone—this is true for all orthodox Holocaust researchers, none of whom can give a cogent account of the 6 million, how they died, where, and when. And not in micro-detail, but simply in plausible, round numbers.
Let me try to recreate Matt’s claims about the (almost) 6 million—where in fact, he seems to defend a figure of around 5.2 million, as I will explain below. This in itself is worryingly low, and threatens to shift him into the dreaded “denier” category, but I will let that slide. More troubling is the method and technique by which he allegedly defends his figure—virtually the same deficient method and technique employed by major researchers; he is in good company, at least! The problem is this: they never give a clear, concise calculation that leads to (or close to) 6 million.
Let’s look back over Matt (SR) and Matt (CS) to see what death statistics he offers. In the former, we find:
- “1.4 million Reinhardt camp deaths”;
- “around 100,000” Auschwitz bunker gassings;
- Hans Frank’s claim that “1.2 million” would be starved to death;
- “1.605 million” total mass shooting deaths;
- “1.7 million” shootings in masses plus camps (implying 100,000 in camps);
- “almost 2 million” shot in masses plus camps plus ghettos (implying 200,000 to 300,000 in ghettos);
- “about 3 million” camp deaths, of which 7 million gassed, 0.3 million disease/other.
- “hundreds of thousands” of “documented deaths in the ghettos”—which, in note 18, we discover to be “about 450,000” (source?).
Now, from this, let’s try to reconstruct the 6 (or “at least 5”) million deaths. (I’m not sure why we, the readers, must do this, but such are orthodox tactics. If one wants clear and transparent calculations, one must turn to revisionist writings.)
First, I will take Matt’s “almost 2 million” shooting deaths to be 1.9 million, for the sake of calculation. This is evidently composed of:
- 6 million Einsatzgruppen shootings
- 2 million ghetto shootings
- 1 million camp shootings
His Einsatzgruppen figure is roughly in line with conventional (though unsubstantiated) estimates; see my Table 12 in Debating the Holocaust (p. 90).[63] But where does Matt find 200,000 ghetto shootings? I find no substantiation for such a figure, and of course, no evidence of victims’ remains. And of the 100,000 camp shootings, his largest component is “Harvest Festival” in which he claims some 43,000 victims, of whom around 18,000 are conventionally assigned to Majdanek—in one day! Imagine: lining up and shooting 18,000 people in one day: 750 per hour, every hour, for 24 hours. Wow! (Next… next… ) And then the bodies were allegedly “buried in trenches” at Majdanek. I’ve been to Majdanek; I have stood in those trenches; and there is no physical possibility of packing 18,000 thousand bodies into them. Obviously they aren’t there now—so, where did they go?
Matt’s 1.4 million Reinhardt deaths (Belzec, Sobibor, Treblinka) is about in line with orthodoxy, though he gives us no details. Let us say: 800,000 at Treblinka, 400,000 at Belzec, and 200,000 at Sobibor. (Correct, Matt?)
Therefore, his 3 million camp deaths must therefore imply 1.6 million at: Auschwitz, Chelmno, Majdanek, and assorted “other camps” – is that right? Everyone accepts 1 million at Auschwitz, so we are left with 600,000 for Chelmno, Majdanek, and others. But Chelmno can’t defend even the conventional figure of 250,000, and Majdanek is now officially only around 75,000, which leaves the others with at least 275,000—right?
(Whew! Matt is really making us work here!)
If the Auschwitz bunkers killed only 100,000 (citation for this?), then 900,000 died in the crematoria. K1 in the main camp killed 20,000 max, which is peanuts; K4 and K5 combined have never been claimed to kill more than 80,000; which leaves 800,000 killed in K2 + K3. Wow—an impressive figure! I would like to see anything that even remotely sustains such a figure. And God forbid we should ask for a monthly breakdown (see my Table 27, Debating, p. 203).
Then, what about those “450,000” ghetto deaths (all causes)? First, where are even a fraction of these bodies? Second, is there any citation in a documented source for this number? Third, Matt argued above for about 200,000 ghetto shootings, which leaves 250,000 non-shooting deaths—evidence for this?
So: If I attempt to add all this up, I get the following three components:
- 7 million shooting deaths (excluding ghettos, covered below)
- 0 million camp deaths (2.7 million from gas)
- 45 million ghetto deaths, all causes
If I round the ghettos up to 0.5 million, I have 5.2 million total. Did I miss anything? The reader will have to excuse my incompetence, if I am unable to create a better calculation. I’m doing my best here! Perhaps Matt wants to throw in another 200,000 or 300,000 “miscellaneous deaths”, getting him to 5.5 million. I guess he can do this if he wants; when we are pulling numbers out of the air, pretty much anything goes.
Oh, and what about Hans Frank’s “1.2 million” starved to death? Did that happen? Or was that just a wish? The same with Robert Ley—he might have wished for Jewish deaths, but he was in no position to make that happen, or to confirm that it did in fact happen. And if the 1.2 million does not figure into the 6 million, then Frank’s claim was mere speculation and thus we can dismiss his entire statement.
And let’s say that Matt does indeed at some point tighten up his numbers and gives us a clear tabulation leading to 5.2 million, or 5.5 million, or (God forbid) 6 million. Then what? Then I have to say: Congratulations Matt Cockerill! You—an uncredentialed and unpublished blogger—have managed to succeed where dozens of scholarly experts have failed: you have provided a clear and concise calculation leading up to your chosen figure. You are now entitled to join the pantheon of illustrious Holocaust scholars as the lone man to enumerate, and defend, the 6 (or whatever) million.
But the reader of this debate should ask: Why is this? Why do none of the “experts” offer clear figures leading to 6 million, and then defend them? None? Matt surely knows some of these experts; in his (SR) he cites Pressac, Van Pelt, Gutman, Berenbaum, Longerich, and Benz. I might add Arad, Bartov, Browning, Dawidowicz, Evans, Gilbert, Kershaw, Laqueur, Lipstadt, Piper, and Reitlinger. Do you know them, Matt? Can you cite where any of them even begins to enumerate a breakdown for the 6 million, and to defend it? I can’t. But you yourself can do it! Congratulations, once again!
Of course, it would be cheating to simply take the highest published death estimates for each category, to obtain your total. (You wouldn’t do that, would you?) In fact, if I take the highest recent estimates for just the 6 “death camps”, I can present a figure of 4.4 million—just for 6 camps! Nothing yet for ghettos, nothing yet for shootings! If I then add 2 million shooting deaths, and 1 million ghetto deaths, I can argue for a figure of 7.4 million Jews! Wow! 6 million? That’s denial! … Obviously, nothing is gained by doing so.
In sum, if Matt has such a compelling case for his 5, or 5.5, or 6 million deaths, he should work to convince not me, but his fellow expert traditionalists. Show them the data and the evidence, and get them to publish such numbers in a reputable venue. Then we will really be getting somewhere!
A Few Assorted Replies
Obviously there are many points that neither Matt nor I can address in a limited format. I have elected to deal with the most significant matters, whereas Matt seems anxious to press on marginal issues. But let me add a few words in response to some of his concerns:
- In his (SR), Matt mentions Kola’s finding of 33 mass graves, with 21,000 cubic meters of volume. Yet he ignores Mattogno’s entirely reasonable assessment that, based on the physical evidence found in core samples (not merely “total volume”), that Kola found evidence of hundreds, perhaps some thousands of bodies, at A fair revisionist estimate is 40,000 deaths at Belzec, and so we would expect evidence consistent with that figure, which is what Kola found. Matt also ignores the utter abandonment of Kola by orthodox researchers, suggesting that Kola’s study is highly damaging to the orthodox cause—which it is.
- Also in (SR), Matt cites Pressac’s claim that bunker victims (“100,000”) were buried in “the birch forest.” There is utterly zero evidence for such a I have personally stood there, at the foundation remains of Bunkers 1 and 2; there is absolutely nothing in the area, or in the Birkenau documentation, that substantiates mass burial “in a birch forest”.
- Statements by Himmler and Goebbels about killing Jews never specify numbers or methods. Yes, the Germans did kill Jews—many And by the end of the war, they were surely wishing that they had killed more. On the revisionist estimate, at least 500,000 Jews died in camps, ghettos, and shootings. The quotations by Himmler and Goebbels don’t affect this in the least.
- Matt never addresses in any substantive way the disposal of bodies, ashes, bones, or teeth in any of the 6 death camps, the ghettos, or by the Einsatzgruppen. “Bone mills” and “hammers” won’t cut it. Those things don’t vaporize the evidence. Ash, bone shards, and teeth fragments remain intact in the ground for centuries; they are thus still there, somewhere; why can’t we find them?
On this last point, let me reiterate here my proposal for a “Grand Experiment” that I outlined at the end of my Debating. If we want to confirm the gassing, burial, and burning thesis, we have a relatively easy way to do this, empirically. Purchase 1,000 live hogs of various sizes, in a weight range of 10 to 200 lbs. Herd them tightly into an enclosed room, with a ceiling slightly higher than the largest hog. Ensure that the room is ‘hermetically sealed.’ (Add a “peephole,” if desired.) Take a large modern diesel engine, remove the catalytic converter, and then route the exhaust pipe into the room. Record what happens. As we recall, on the traditional view, all the animals will be expected to die within 10 or 20 minutes. If nothing happens, switch to a gasoline engine. If, however, the engine repeatedly stalls, or the walls are blown out, or the animals simply refuse to die after, say, 1 hour, then just shoot each one.
Dig a pit in the ground of size 145 cubic meters—roughly 6m × 6m, and 4m deep. Pack all 1,000 dead hogs into the pit; this would approximate the claimed seven bodies per cubic meter. Cover the pit with dirt and wait six months.
Construct a typical Reinhardt-like pyre, using metal rails about 30 meters in length, raised one meter above ground. Exhume the dead hogs, and weigh each corpse. Then stack as many as possible on the pyre, in any configuration desired. Record the maximum number stacked, if less than 1,000. Presuming all 1,000 can be piled up, then load the pyre with approximately (1,000 × 45 × 0.56 =) 25,000 kg of dry hardwood.[64] Light the pyre, and record what happens.
If the traditionalists are right, the hog corpses will be largely burned to ash—except for their teeth and large bones. Gather up and weigh the full mass of ash, teeth, and bone. Then sift through the entire mass and extract all teeth and bones; weigh these. Pulverize the teeth and bones to dust, using only hammers or a 1940s-era grinder. Combine this pulverized mass with the other remaining ash, return to the original pit, measure the volume, and bury with dirt. Take core samples every, say, five years, and record the results.
Either side may conduct this Grand Experiment, but with their far greater financial resources, I would suggest that our orthodox defenders undertake it. Or better: that they fund a neutral party to conduct it. Either way, this relatively simple procedure could resolve many unanswered questions and contentious claims. It would go a long way toward settling the Holocaust debate. May the best man win.
An Alternate Narrative
Finally, Matt (CS) presses me for an alternate narrative. I have already sketched this out, but for his sake I will do it again, with more detail.
Some 9 million Jews came under German control during WW2. If we allow that the war ran for 5.5 years, and we assume a typical natural death rate (from old age, disease, accident, suicide, homicide, etc) of 1% per year for large populations, then around 90,000 Jews died each year of the war—or about 500,000 total, simply of natural causes, during the war. This in itself is a remarkable fact: 500,000 Jewish deaths, even if the Germans never killed a single one. Are these “Holocaust victims,” Matt? How do they figure into the 6 million?
Based on the actual forensic evidence, actual transportation statistics, and actual camp registrations, revisionists estimate that around 280,000 Jews died in the camps (most of typhus); another 150,000 in ghettos (most of natural causes); and around 140,000 in mass shootings (most of whom were partisan fighters). This gives a total of about 570,000 Jewish deaths that we might plausibly attribute to German actions.
Of the 1.4 million shuttled through the Reinhardt transit camps, as I said, the vast majority were shipped on to the east into captured (former-Soviet) territory, and then either interned in labor camps or released. This would have occurred between roughly mid-1942 and mid-1943. The total captured area was huge; if we combine the Reichskommissariat Ukraine, the Reichskommissariat Ostland, and occupied Soviet territory, the area is roughly twice the size of France, amounting to some 400,000 square miles (about 1 million square kilometers). That’s an average of about 3 Jews per square mile; no surprise that we can’t find them. As the Soviets recaptured all that land over the subsequent two years, they would have swallowed up all 1.4 million Jews, who were then quickly ‘locked up’ behind the Iron Curtain, for decades. There, with new lives, new names, new families, they were ‘lost’ to the West—and thus “disappeared.”
With this, I draw our debate to a close.
Endnotes
| [1] | Early on, Matt mentions “Hartheim Castle” as a further “gassing site”, though apparently without realizing that this “castle” (also called a “schloss” or “palace” or “mansion”, depending on the source) is actually part of the Chelmno/Kulmhof camp facility, not something in addition to it. [Typo on my part: The Chelmno castle/palace was apparently unnamed, and was destroyed by the Germans in mid 1943]. |
| [2] | Source details are in my book Debating the Holocaust (4th ed), 2020, Castle Hill, pp. 89-98. |
| [3] | Mattogno, C. 2018. The Einsatzgruppen in the Occupied Eastern Territories. Castle Hill, p. 271. |
| [4] | And not merely “hundreds” or even “thousands”, but “hundreds of thousands”. There should be so many bodies, or so much ash, out there that we should be inundated by evidence. But we have virtually nothing. |
| [5] | The reader is invited to search on Sturdy Colls and review any of her small handful of articles or books. |
| [6] | Matt’s (R) link under “zero evidence” (of resettlement) goes to—his own YouTube video. Is this legit? |
| [7] | Details in my book Debating the Holocaust (pp. 149-150). |
| [8] | In their book Treblinka (2016), Castle Hill, p. 43. |
| [9] | “Camps” in Oxford Handbook of Holocaust Studies (2010), p. 370. |
| [10] | Another idiotic alleged process, one that would never have been implemented by the efficient Germans. |
| [11] | Sometimes basic math is all we need to expose the absurdity: 500,000 bodies packed into 20,000 cubic meters means (500k/20k=) 25 bodies per cubic meter! Recall that a cubic meter is roughly a box that is 3 ft x 3 ft x 3 ft. Picture such a box, and then imagine fitting 25 dead bodies into that box—impossible. |
| [12] | “Tens of thousands”—say, 30,000 or 40,000—at Belzec is fully compatible with the revisionist thesis. |
| [13] | If, say, another 100,000 Jews died or were killed in 1943, and another 100,000 in 1944, that would virtually match the revisionist estimate. |
| [14] | I know it well, having visited on two separate occasions. |
| [15] | Notably, this is “the” gas chamber for 90% of Auschwitz tourists, most of whom never see the far more consequential ruins at Birkenau. Also notably, K1 has been significantly altered and modified since the war in order to conform to expectations of a “gas chamber”; this is why French anti-revisionist Eric Conan wrote that “Everything there is false.” Hence, good strategy on Matt’s part to bypass this one. (In his (R) he includes a quick, passing notice to K1 that contains no details at all; fewer questions that way.) |
| [16] | In his (R) he adds a quick, passing, parenthetical mention to the bunkers, which, as he knows, will go unnoticed by virtually every reader. |
| [17] | Cited from G. Rudolf, Lectures on the Holocaust (2011), p. 385. |
| [18] | F. Meyer, Die Zahl der Opfer von Auschwitz. Osteuropa 52(5). |
| [19] | See my Debating the Holocaust, pp. 76-77. |
| [20] | Thomas Dalton, Goebbels on the Jews (2019), Castle Hill. |
| [21] | Matt needs to sharpen up his citations. His link to “Frank declared…” directs to a Tweet; the actual source is Nazi Conspiracy and Aggression, vol 12, chap 16—for those interested in following up. |
| [22] | And who the hell is “Andrew Mathis” anyway? Does he have any proven expertise in this field, or any field? When you click on his profile, you find out that he “enjoys skinny-skiing and going to bullfights on acid.” Now there’s a reliable source! |
| [23] | In Streicher, Rosenberg, and the Jews (T. Dalton, 2020, Castle Hill). |
| [24] | There is a long history of commentary, by the Germans and others, of opposition to belligerent and troublesome Jews; see Thomas Dalton, Eternal Strangers (2020, Castle Hill), esp. pp. 60-65. |
| [25] | You showcase your ignorance of Kulmhof by claiming that the euthanasia Hartheim Castle was “part of the Chelmno/Kulmhof camp facility.” Schloss Hartheim is in Linz, Austria; Kulmhof was almost 1,000 kilometers away, housed near the village of Chelmno in West-Central Poland. [Typo noted above; T.D.] |
| [26] | As I previously noted, one of the telegrams cited in the Stroop Report states that “6,929 Jews were annihilated (vernichtet)” by transportation to Treblinka II (“T. II”). |
| [27] | Obviously, I believe the physical evidence is much more thorough than you do. I consider, for example, that the 33 Belzec mass graves identified by Kola could readily accommodate hundreds of thousands of corpses, particularly given that the majority were children or emaciated adults. Nevertheless, I accept that the physical evidence is ‘incomplete’ insofar as it does not account for every last body of the 1.4 million victims at the Reinhardt camps. |
| [28] | See Carlo Mattogno, Belzec: Propaganda, Testimonies, Archaeological Research and History (Castle Hill Publishers, 2004), p. 73. Available online at https://holocausthandbooks.com/dl/09-b.pdf. |
| [29] | Logically speaking, we must prefer an explanation supported by incomplete evidence to one supported by zero evidence, even if we disagree about how compelling the extant evidence for exterminations at the Reinhardt camp is. |
| [30] | At one point, you attempt to explain this lack of evidence for resettlements by insinuating that the Germans may have simply dumped the 1.4 million Jews somewhere in the Russian East, without provisioning them with food or infrastructure. (You claim that the Jews were “dispersed over a large area,” with many “abandoned.”) In this connection, I should mention that the 1.4 million Jews sent to the Reinhardt camps were mostly children and elderly Jews, deemed unfit for labour by the Germans. ‘Abandoning’ these Jews in the ‘Russian East’ without providing them food, money, and housing would have been a death sentence, genocide in another form. |
| [31] | I would also note parenthetically that killing by producer gas would be a more dangerous process (for the killers) than killing by gasoline engines, because of the extremely high concentrations of carbon monoxide producer gas engines omit. So both SS technical incompetence as well as safety concerns could explain the preference for gasoline engines. |
| [32] | Heating might make sense for a morgue, to prevent the freezing of corpses. But “pre-heating” makes no sense whatsoever. I mean, pre-heating for what? Homicidal gassing, quite obviously. Zyklon B evaporates more rapidly in higher temperatures. |
| [33] | The evidentiary weight of these photographs is such that deniers such as John Ball have been forced to claim, without evidence, that the photographs were forged or secretly “edited.” |
| [34] | See Jean-Claude Pressac (with Robert-Jan Van Pelt), “The Machinery of Mass Murder at Auschwitz,” in Anatomy of the Auschwitz Death Camp, Yisrael Gutman and Michael Berenbaum, eds. (Indiana University Press, 1994), pp. 183-245, p. 212. |
| [35] | It is important in this regard to recall that Krematoria IV and V (unlike the mechanically ventilated Krematoria II and III) were at ground level. |
| [36] | „Es mußte der schwere Entschluß gefaßt werden, dieses Volk von der Erde verschwinden zu lassen.“ Quoted by Peter Longerich in the following article: https://www.spiegel.de/politik/der-ungeschriebene-befehl-a- 430d6d39-0002-0001-0000-000019864687 |
| [37] | Al-Husseini lived at freedom in the Arab world after the war, and was never prosecuted for his Nazi collaboration. |
| [38] | I strongly encourage our readers to examine the arguments from my previous post (contained in the four sections linked above), and to judge them against Thomas’s challenges. As to you, Thomas, I hope you reflect on the concept of “argument from incredulity,” which is what your concerns about the ‘implausibility’ of body disposal at Auschwitz and the Reinhardt camp amount to. |
| [39] | As Gert Robel showed, in a chapter he authored for Wolfganz Benz’s Dimension des Völkermords. Die Zahl der jüdischen Opfer des Nationalsozialismus (De Gruyter, 1991), Korherr’s approximate figures can be corroborated by examining the Einsatzgruppen Reports through April 1942, and counting only those mass shootings claimed by the Einsatzgruppen themselves, (data on these shootings appear in the ‘headlines’ of the reports). One must also examine the Stahlecker Reports and the Jäger Report. The killings listed in these sources sometimes overlap; but if one avoids double-counting one arrives at an estimate close to Korherr’s 633,000. |
| [40] | These shootings were not included in Korherr’s report, since they were carried out by the SSPF, not by the Einsatzgruppen. |
| [41] | Himmler’s report was based on Meldung 51. The latter was not circulated by the RSHA and Korherr therefore had no access to these data. |
| [42] | It should be clarified that, contrary to a misperception one encounters occasionally, none of the victims of Harvest Festival were shot at Maly Trostenets. |
| [43] | There were literally hundreds of ghettos, in which about 450,000 Jews perished. Parsing out the victims of mass shootings from this total—450,000 deaths from all causes—would require an essay, and we are operating under a word count. |
| [44] | We have already accounted for mass shootings conducted by the Romanians before summer 1942 (see my above chart). |
| [45] | For example, at least 1,600 Jews were shot by the German 22nd Reserve Police Battalion in February 1943, and 4,000 Jews from Oszmiana shot up to the summer of 1943. |
| [46] | These camps include not only the Aktion Reinhardt camps and Auschwitz, but other camps in the main KL system, and assorted forced-labour camps. |
| [47] | Jews were also shot in the camps. But these shooting victims must be excluded from our ‘camp deaths’ figure to avoid double-counting, as I already counted them towards our “mass shooting” estimate. |
| [48] | I went into considerable detail in my last submission about how I sustain a figure of 450,000 Jewish deaths in ghettos. I will not repeat myself here. One semantical clarification must however be made. One cannot add each of the 450,000 ghetto deaths to my figure of nearly 5,000,000 Holocaust deaths in camps and mass shootings. Rather, ghetto deaths caused by mass shooting have to be subtracted from the “ghetto deaths” total, because I have already counted these as “mass shooting” deaths. (If we do not subtract these deaths from the ghetto deaths total, we will have engaged in double-counting.) |
| [49] | The reader may wonder why Thomas only wrote one rebuttal while I wrote two. The answer is that Thomas chose to write one rebuttal—with a word limit twice as long as each of my two rebuttals—rather than two. |
| [50] | This figure adds up to nearly 4.5 million, but does not include deaths from other concentration camps such as Majdanek, Mauthausen, and Dachau; deaths in forced-labour camps; deaths in ghettos; or victims of “death marches” at the end of the war. As I explained previously, when all these deaths are accounted for, one arrives at a figure of total Jewish deaths greater than five million. |
| [51] | This document does not mention Treblinka. However, it indicates that Jews from Bialystok—whom we know were deported to Treblinka II—had been executed. |
| [52] | To your questions about the allegedly inadequate fuel for cremations at the Reinhardt camps, I pointed out that the bodies required much less fuel (wood) to cremate than you assumed, because of the large percentage of bodies that were children and/or decomposed (and thus dehydrated). I also noted that Poland was a lumbering country, and thus the large quantities of wood needed to cremate the bodies could have been easily delivered to the Reinhardt camps. As to bones, I pointed to the Nazis use of ball mill machines to crush bones more efficiently at the camps. As to ashes, they were frequently buried in the mass graves from which the bodies had been exhumed and burned; for example the colossal 33 mass graves Kola found in his archaeological study of Belzec were loaded with ash.[1] |
| [53] | It is common ground among the leading Holocaust deniers and mainstream historians that LK1 in Krematoria Two and Three were twins: that is, they were identical rooms, and served the same purpose. The disagreement between deniers and the mainstream is whether LK1 was a homicidal gas chamber. |
| [54] | At Auschwitz, multiple bodies could be legally burned at once in a single muffle; most cadavers were of children or emaciated adults; the Krematoria ran continuously; and the goal was to burn bodies as quickly as possible. None of those conditions apply to civilian cremation. |
| [55] | My claim that the latter—which, critically, were on ground level—could be naturally ventilated through opening its windows and doors is supported by Graham’s Law of Diffusion. I also emphasized that the Sonderkommando wore gas masks. |
| [56] | The court condemned Täubner, who had murdered Jews in a particularly sadistic and exhibitionist fashion, for “apply[ing] Bolshevik methods during the necessary extermination of the worst enemy of our people” (emphasis mine). However, the court emphasized that he was not being condemned for the act of killing Jews: The accused shall not be punished because of the actions against the Jews as such. The Jews have to be exterminated and none of the Jews that were killed is any great loss. Although the accused should have recognized that the extermination of the Jews was the duty of Kommandos which were set up especially for this purpose, he should be excused for considering himself to have the authority to take part in the extermination of Jewry himself. |
| [57] | On the Second Posen speech, you half-heartedly suggest that Himmler may have only calling for the killing of partisan Jews. But you accept that Goebbels was calling for the killing of Jews en masse. |
| [58] | This interpretation is discredited by the fact that both speeches clearly described the killing of Jews as a policy that had already been carried out. |
| [59] | Of course, the incorrigible neo-Nazi—who constitutes the normative denier, although not every denier is a stock characters of this variety—will happily be “persuaded” by bad arguments for denial. |
| [60] | This is a category to which I’d assign you, Thomas, for what it’s worth. |
| [61] | If a reader does not understand why such an epistemic obligation exists on the part of deniers, I would point him or her to the conclusion section of this essay, where this is explained in more detail. |
| [62] | You pointed out in your rebuttal that there need not have been only one resettlement; I rejoined that postulating more settlements, say 24 settlements of 57,000 (“twenty four Greenlands”), would hardly address the problem of absurdity. |
| [63] | Debating the Holocaust: A New Look at Both Sides (4th ed.), 2020, Castle Hill. |
| [64] | This is equivalent to about 46 cubic meters of solid wood. This would just about perfectly fill the space below a 30m × 2m pyre that was one meter high. The background calculations for this can be found in Debating. |
Bibliographic information about this document: Inconvenient History, Vol 15 (2023), No. 3; originally posted in seven parts at https://historyspeaks.substack.com/p/history-speaks-debates-thomas-dalton
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