Piles of Documents

While researching my last article about piles of stuff, I ran across an article by Cynthia Lee that was issued by UCLA Today on November 7, 2008 titled “Physician’s Photos a Haunting Reminder of the Holocaust.” The original article is only available on archive.org, so I will be addressing the reissue found on the UCLA Asia Pacific Center’s site.

The University of California Los Angeles (UCLA) claims that it values “free and lively debate” and that they strive for “excellence and diversity.” I doubt that an open debate about the Holocaust would ever take place at UCLA, and I’m pretty sure that diversity refers to race, not ideas.

The first statement that Lee makes in the UCLA article is “Los Angeles photographer and UCLA urologist Dr. Richard Ehrlich wanted his photographs of this vast and rarely visited German repository to bear witness to the cold-blooded, dispassionate bookkeeping the Nazis employed to document the unimaginable atrocities they committed.”  Hmm, but I was assured that the Nazis destroyed all incriminating documents. Is this article actually going to reveal Nazi documentation referring to homicidal gas chambers and a plan to exterminate European Jews?

First, let’s talk about the repository of Nazi documents that are being housed in Bad Arolsen, Germany. Lee says about the atmosphere: “The dim florescent lighting barely illuminates the rooms where floor-to-ceiling metal shelves and cabinets are laden with some 50 million aging documents and artifacts – neatly indexed file cards, worn maps and record books with handwritten entries, and yellowing stacks of papers, their official time and date stamps now faded.” Further down in Lee’s article it says, “As a photographer known for work that captures the rich colors of nature and eye-pleasing landscapes, Ehrlich found himself conflicted by his artistic instinct ‘to make photographs that were visually pleasing‘ and the ugliness of what he saw.” Thing is, the repository was created after the war. The Nazis had nothing to do with the “dim florescent lighting” and the “floor-to-ceiling metal shelves.” The Nazis had nothing to do with making the piles of documents look “ugly” or “haunting.”

Of course, Lee knows that the Nazis weren’t the ones who created the spooky atmosphere of the document repository, despite leading her audience to believe so. When it comes to Holocaust affirming, it is important to set up a haunting scene so as to take the reader out of reality and put them into something like a horror movie. Once that happens, the architects of the Holocaust narrative can liberally use artistic license to paint the scene they way they want you to see it.

There is only one paragraph in Lee’s article that details information of what the documents contain.

First, Ehrlich mentions a transferring document for Anne Frank. Yes, Anne Frank was transferred to Bergen Belsen, where she died of typhus. Then we have the original Schindler’s list. Schindler’s List is known to most as a movie directed by Steven Spielberg. This movie was based on a novel, a work of fiction. Again both Lee and Ehrlich are invoking the horror movie. The average person will hear “Schindler’s list” and take that for evidence of the Holocaust narrative because they have heard of the movie and know that it shows Germans doing terrible things to Jews. The list itself only contains the names of 801 Jewish men that worked at Oskar Schindler’s factory in occupied former Czechoslovakia, who had been transported there from the Nazi concentration camp at Plaszòw in German-occupied Poland. Neither of these two documents the “unimaginable atrocities” that the Nazis supposedly committed. Neither of them confirm the claims that Jews were gassed as part of a plan of genocide.

Next, Ehrlich says that there were documents that accounted for head lice. This may sound weird and creepy to the average American, who gets most of their knowledge about Nazis from entertainment products. It’s not weird or creepy if you know that deadly diseases, like typhus, are spread via head lice, and there were problems with typhus outbreaks in the camps. The fact that head lice was carefully documented actually shows an intent to save lives through curbing the spread of disease.

Finally, a letter from “Heydrich” is mentioned. This letter apparently was inviting participants to a discussion of the final solution. “Heydrich” is probably Reinhard Heydrich, and the letter is most likely referring to the Wannsee Conference, which I have covered here. In short, the Wannsee conference discussed the deportation of Jews from Germany.

Through endless repetition, Holocaust affirmers have gotten the majority of their audience to believe that the “final solution” means killing all Jews. However, in all the 50 million Nazi documents there is not one that defines the final solution to mean this. According to my robot assistant, Bill (ChatGPT), “While there is no single Nazi document that explicitly defines the Final Solution in precise terms, there are several key documents that provide evidence of the Nazi regime’s intent to carry out the systematic extermination of Jews and other targeted groups.” So I am still left wondering where are these documents are that show the “cold-blooded, dispassionate bookkeeping the Nazis employed to document the unimaginable atrocities they committed”?

Thanks to Hermod on the CoDoH forum, I was able to find a Huffington post article that admits that there are no Nazi documents about anyone being murdered in homicidal gas chambers (see below). In Lee’s UCLA article, Ehrlich is quoted as saying, “They had 50 million pieces of paper in relation to 17.5 million lives … They were so anal and so compulsive about writing down everything they did.” Thus the Holocaust affirmers are trying to have it both ways. The Germans kept meticulous records that documented everything that they did, but there are no records of gassing or genocidal intent. Instead of admitting there is lack of evidence, the Holocaust fabulist will insist that that lack is proof that the Nazis tried to destroy incriminating evidence.

In the end, Lee’s article does not provide Nazi documents that show the “cold-blooded, dispassionate bookkeeping the Nazis employed to document the unimaginable atrocities they committed,” and it is unscholarly for her to have made such a claim in the first place.