Raul Hilberg’s Incurable Autism

Raul Hilberg, Sources of Holocaust Research: An Analysis, R. Dee, Chicago, 2001, hardcover, 218 pp., $26.-

1. The Destruction of European Jewry

Fifteen years ago, Robert Faurisson stated the opinion that Raul Hilberg was the only representative of the official version of the “Holocaust” for whom he felt a certain measure of respect, although only on the basis of the quantity of his work. In Faurisson's estimation he “stood far above Poliakov, Wellers, Klarsfeld and their consorts.”[1] It is undeniable that this Jewish historian, who was born in Vienna in 1926 and emigrated to America, has written a massive work on the history of the Jews during the National Socialist period,[2] the result of many years of intensive document study.

Based on the massive amount of documentary materials which he utilized, Hilberg could have written a book entitled “The Persecution of European Jews” which would have won him the reputation of a first rate historian. He squandered this opportunity because the title that he chose for his three-volume opus is not “The Persecution of European Jews” but rather The Extermination of European Jewry. Hilberg set out to prove, not only the persecution of the Jews, that is, the methodical deprivation of legal rights and deportations to camps and ghettos, but their actual extermination as well. He alleges this occurred primarily through mass killings in “homicidal gas chambers” which were constructed in “extermination camps.” However, in all the mountains of German documents from World War II he was unable to find any evidence whatsoever of such an extermination, and he found just as little material evidence.

In my book Giant With Feet of Clay; Raul Hilberg and his Standard Work on the “Holocaust,” I have demonstrated in detail the many ways in which Hilberg vainly attempts to prove that Jews were murdered in chemical slaughterhouses.[3] He ignores the principle, acknowledged in historiography and jurisprudence, that eyewitness testimony is the least credible kind, much inferior to both material and documentary evidence. He turns the hierarchy of evidence upside down, inevitably giving eyewitness evidence precedence over documentary evidence. As for material evidence, he does not deign to consider it.

While Hilberg easily establishes the persecution of Jews on the basis of an infinite number of wartime documents, he resorts exclusively to eyewitness testimony to back up his allegations of murders in gas chambers. In other words: without the testimony of a few eyewitnesses, we would have no “Holocaust.” There are few differences between the first English edition of his work, published in 1961, and the second edition, published in 1985.

The German version is based on this edition. For example, in his first edition Hilberg refers to two orders by Hitler for the extermination of Jews. The first order, allegedly given in 1941, concerned Soviet Jews. The second order, allegedly given after mass murder had begun in the USSR, was for the extermination of all Jews.[4] In the second edition of Hilberg's major work, all reference to these phantom orders has disappeared without a trace. This obviously represents a great concession to the Revisionists, although Hilberg says not a single word about it. Revisionists have always emphasized the total absence of such orders; thus it seems very strange that Hilberg, who was just 59 at the time, would have been certain that his second edition was “definitive.” Did he really believe, in 1985, that his theses were so unassailable that no real changes would be necessary in future editions? Did he really believe that all significant “Holocaust” research had already been completed? Hilberg's newest book suggests that the answer to both questions is “yes.”

2. Sources of Holocaust Research; or the Tricks of a Paper Historian.

Let me say at the beginning: Sources of Holocaust Research is a thoroughly wretched book. Its only virtue is that it again demonstrates the indefensibility of the official version of the fate of the Jews during World War II. Comparing it with The Destruction of European Jewry, we find that Hilberg presents not a single new argument worthy of the name. He practically ignores the investigations performed by other authors in the course of the past fifteen years, and he still refuses to mention the name of a single revisionist historian. Furthermore he gives hardly any credit to the two most knowledgeable Auschwitz experts in the exterminationist camp, Jean-Claude Pressac and Robert Jan van Pelt: He refers to Pressac one time[5] and he finds van Pelt unworthy of even having his name mentioned. On page 243 Hilberg writes that there is “no finality” in Holocaust research and results are “constantly in flux” but he obviously is thinking solely of isolated, secondary questions and details to be clarified by future historians. He implies that in all its important points, the “Holocaust” has been exhaustively researched (by Raul Hilberg.)

This leads us to ask: “Exhaustively researched on a basis of what evidence?” Hilberg admits at the beginning of the first chapter that there is very little material evidence for the alleged mass murder of millions.

Here, Hilberg is regurgitating the usual hackneyed excuse for lack of material evidence: He claims the Germans destroyed all evidence of their crimes. Everyone who is at all familiar with revisionist research knows how untenable this allegation is. Crematorium II of Birkenau, which according to official historiography was the principal murder site of the Third Reich, is still sufficiently preserved to allow architectural and chemical investigation. The “gas chambers” of Auschwitz I and Majdanek can easily be inspected to ascertain whether it would have been possible for them to fulfill the alleged function. Furthermore, the existence of former mass graves can be established by air photos, ground penetrating radar, and other means. Hilberg, however, who is a “paper historian” to use Faurisson's expression, is not the least bit interested in forensic procedure. The “complex of Holocaust events,” according to Hilberg, cannot be reconstructed by means of physical remains. He continues:

No logical person can fathom how boxcars, boards from horse stables, bolts of cloth, coins, luggage, shoes, fishing boats and rusty weapons establish genocide committed in homicidal gas chambers.

In contrast to The Extermination of European Jewry, which was published entirely without photographic illustrations, Sources of Holocaust Research contains three such illustrations (on pages 17, 58 and 59.) The first photograph shows a Jewish wedding in Holland in 1942. The second shows two bearded Hungarian Jews who had just arrived in Auschwitz in 1944, and the third a “bearded man in a fresco by Fra Angelico at the beginning of the 15th Century.” If Hilberg had included an illustration of the ceiling of the morgue of Crematorium II at Birkenau, the observant reader would have noticed that those four rectangular openings through which, according to witnesses, Zyklon B granules were poured into the gas chamber, are nonexistent. Consequently poison gas could not have been introduced in the way witnesses have described. It is easy to understand why Hilberg chooses photos that are capable of arousing emotions but contribute absolutely nothing to understanding the “Holocaust.”

Sources of Holocaust Research is more than 80% shorter than The Destruction of European Jewry, for which we are grateful; but even so, 255 pages of paper still had to be covered with printer's ink before they could be published as a book. In order to accomplish this, the author resorts to the same tricks he used in his main work: he overwhelms the reader with a flood of information that has nothing whatever to do with the Holocaust. Distracting the reader with such themes as the prehistory of aryanization, newspapers, pamphlets, cards, and tickets, he includes the expropriation of Jewish ski outfits as well as a discussion of the literary styles of documents and decrees. He even throws in an essay by a person named Wolf Gruner concerning “the exclusion of Jewish merchants from flea markets and the role of pawnshops in the expropriation of Jewish property.”

In this way, he succeeds in filling his 255 pages without having to deal with sensitive subjects such as the known capacities of Auschwitz crematories. Any analysis of such chimeras as “assembly line murder in extermination camps” would collapse like a card house in the wind if its author dealt with significant topics.

3. Hilberg's Documentation Problems

On page 22, Hilberg attempts to explain the lack of documentation about Jewish extermination as follows:

As his source for this he gives an “Order from Goebbels” with the following addendum:

From this formulation we perceive that the alleged order of Goebbels is not be found. Its existence cannot be proven. If Goebbels really gave such a verbal order, it remained a dead letter. Documents relating the National Socialist Jewish policies have survived by the ton; in his opus magnum, Hilberg quotes thousands of these, including many which were rejected as evidentiary material during the Nuremberg trials. In addition, there are no fewer than 88,000 pages of documents of the Central Construction Office of Auschwitz Concentration Camp in a Moscow archive[8] that have been available to researchers since the early nineties. Not a single one of these documents provides any evidence of homicidal gassings whatsoever.

The total absence of documentary evidence for alleged mass murders in gas chambers presents a huge problem for all orthodox “Holocaust” historians. In an attempt to solve this problem, Hilberg resorts to the same kinds of tricks that he used in his main work.

He liberally supplies his readers with documents proving deportation, which nobody denies, but avoids the subject of extermination. An example of this is his printing of the timetable of the German Railway System dated 16th January 1943, beginning on page 86. We recall that in The Destruction of European Jewry he dedicated seven boring pages to the diabolical German Railroad.

To explain the lack of documentation, Hilberg alleges that extermination orders were given verbally. For example he says Odilo Globocnik, the SS and police commander for the Lublin district, imparted genocidal instructions to Sobibor commander Franz Stangl on a park bench. His source for this is Gitta Sereny's book Into that Darkness,[9] whose utter worthlessness is known to everyone familiar with it.[10]

In addition, Hilberg resorts to an ancient trick abandoned long ago by more versatile champions of Exterminationism such as Jean-Claude Pressac. This is the trick of “decoding” and “interpreting,”[11] that is, reading something into documents that is not there. Thus he writes on page 132:

A close examination of the documents in which the prefix “Sonder” occurs shows that it was occasionally used to designate “execution,” but in most instances had an entirely different meaning. As Carlo Mattogno has demonstrated, the “Barracks for Special Use” were simply barracks built for storage of the property of Jews who had been sent to the camp. The same was true of the “Bathing Facilities for Special Purposes” which were planned but never completed. These were envisioned as special facilities to combat typhus epidemics.[12]

The situation with mass executions of Jews on the Eastern Front was quite different. The first thing to be noted is that these events are documented, thus nobody denies they happened. Debate over these shootings concerns the number of victims and nothing else. The second thing to be noted is that we are dealing here with suspiciously extensive evidence in the form of “action reports” in which numerous massacres are listed with five figure numbers of victims. That the Germans would have allowed such inculpating evidence to fall into the hands of their enemies has evoked commentary from the British-Jewish historian Gerald Reitlinger. Although he believes that exterminations of Jews were real, his capacity for critical thought is far greater than Hilberg's. He makes the following observation:[13]

The question of authenticity of the Einsatz reports has not been resolved. The alleged numbers of murdered Jews are often demonstrably false, as they contradict other documents as well as forensic investigations.[14]

On page 145 Hilberg reproduces a card sketch, which, along with other evidence, is intended to support his allegations concerning executions in the East. On this card the numbers of Jews shot by Einsatz Group A in various regions are represented by coffins. The highest number of shootings is given for Lithuania, where, he alleges, no fewer than 136,421 Jews had been murdered as of 1942. This number does indeed appear in one of the Einsatz reports, where it is reported:[15]

Simple addition shows that the total number of allegedly liquidated Jews, when added to those still living in ghettos, is a great deal higher than the number of Jews present before the German invasion. This is only a part of the puzzling statistics, however:[16]

The same operational report for the adjoining country of Latvia states that around 25% of the Jewish population there had fled with the Bolsheviks. No corresponding exodus is mentioned for Lithuania, however. This is very puzzling because the Lithuanian Jews had as little reason to expect good things from the Germans as did the Latvian Jews. Jewish participation in the Bolshevik terror there had been proportionately much greater than in Latvia and had enraged the native population.

A large part of the Lithuanian Jews had lived in regions, which had been annexed to the Reich after the German conquest of Lithuania. At the time of the Einsatz report these Jews were still alive. According to Gerald Reitlinger, there were 40,000 such Jews in the area of Grodno at that time.[17] According to the Korherr report,[18] 18,435 Jews still resided in the Königsberg region at the end of 1942.

According to statistics prepared in Lithuania and based on original documents from the war years,[19] there were 3,693 children plus a large number of elderly persons (up to age 90) who were living in the ghetto of Vilnius at the end of May 1942. Since they were unfit for work, one would expect that these Jews would have been the first victims of any policy of extermination. In a report on schools in Vilnius, the Jewish American author Abraham Foxman points out that in October 1942, 1500 to 1800 children were receiving instruction there.[20]

Finally, material evidence of a mass murder of Jews in the alleged numbers is totally nonexistent. In the Lithuanian city of Marijampol in 1996, it was decided to erect a monument to tens of thousands of Jews who had allegedly been shot by the Germans. They began excavations at the site designated by eyewitnesses in order to locate the mass grave, but lo and behold, there was nothing there.[21] Even if the Germans had posthumously exhumed and cremated those tens of thousands of corpses, as Hilberg and his consorts allege, any mass grave would still be easily identifiable because of altered configurations of the soil.

Under these circumstances, a conscientious historian would not unquestioningly accept field reports as an infallible source.

4. Eyewitness Accounts

Hilberg's only evidence of mass murders in “death camps,” are eyewitness reports. Regarding these reports he feels compelled to make the following confession on page 55:

In other words, eyewitnesses have a tendency to make up stories. The logical conclusion would be that eyewitness testimony in principle should be approached with great caution. This is not Hilberg's conclusion, however. He accepts the crudest nonsense that “Holocaust Survivors” can dish out, as long as it bolsters his contention.[22]

Three prominent examples of this are Filip Müller, Rudolf Vrba and Elie Wiesel. Vrba and Wiesel appear as crown witnesses of Jewish exterminationism just two times each in Hilberg's major work, but he quotes Filip Müller's book Sonderbehandlung[23] no less than twenty times, which is only six times fewer than the number of times he quotes the commandant of Auschwitz, Rudolf Höß.

In his disgusting bestseller, Müller relates that he nonchalantly ate cake in a cyanide drenched gas chamber. (This was no small feat since he would have to have been wearing a gas mask.) He also describes how “special unit” commandos gathered boiling fat from the burning bodies of gas victims with soup ladles and spread it over the bodies as a kind of supplementary fuel. At the beginning of his “Report of Experiences” entitled I Can Never Forgive,[24] Vrba describes the high points of a visit by Himmler to Birkenau in January of 1943. He alleges that Crematorium II was initiated into service with the gassing of 3000 Jews. It has been firmly established that Himmler last visited Birkenau in July 1942 and Crematory II was not placed in service until March of 1943, but this does not bother Hilberg in the least.

It also does not bother Hilberg that Wiesel, in his depiction of mass murders at Auschwitz in his book La Nuit,[25] tells us that the murder weapon was not gas chambers at all. He claims that Jews were burned alive in fiery pits: still another gruesome fairy tale from orthodox Holocaust historiography. The only possible conclusion, which a serious historian can reach, is that Müller, Vrba and Wiesel are bald-faced liars and swindlers, but Hilberg treats them all as credible sources in The Destruction of European Jewry.

In his newer book Hilberg merely points out that none of the three authors wrote his book by himself:

In Hilberg's works Jewish witnesses never lie, although they do make mistakes now and then:

Hilberg fails to mention that a new suit to revoke the elderly Demjanjuk's citizenship has been under way for several years. This time he is alleged to have committed crimes in the Majdanek, Sobibor and Flossenbürg camps. As usual, the charges were “proven” entirely on the strength of eyewitness accounts.[27] But this time, we can be certain that the witnesses will not make “erroneous observations” and there will be no “lapses of memory.” Right, Professor Hilberg?

In Hilberg's universe, Jewish witnesses never lie; they just make honest mistakes. Likewise, German “perpetrators” never give testimony under coercion. Occasionally however they may be “possibly confused” or “indifferent to the accusations made against them.”

In Hilberg's own words:

The truth is that Rudolf Höß had been beaten for three days by a British team of torturers under the command of the Jewish sergeant Bernard Clarke when he signed the confession,[29] as Hilberg very well knows.

The only two false witnesses to the “Holocaust” whom Hilberg identifies as such are non-Jews. They are the Catholic Pole Jan Karski and the Swiss “Binjamin Wilkomirski” (actually Brune Doessecker.) Karski, who was a courier for the Polish exile government in London, traveled to Poland during the war. After his return he described an alleged mass murder of Jews in Belzec camp. According to Karski, the Jews were crammed into boxcars partially filled with quicklime, which slowly ate the flesh from their bones. The train full of martyred human flesh rattled and shook with their bellowing, as though bewitched. Hilberg made the following commentary on Karski's statement:

The assertion that trains of deportees never departed Belzec is unproven. Otherwise, Hilberg's criticism of Karski is correct. However, the principal witness for the alleged annihilation of Jews in Belzec is not Karski but rather Kurt Gerstein. An honest historian might characterize Gerstein's testimony as follows:

Hilberg never criticizes Gerstein's lurid fantasies, although he makes no mention of him in Sources of Holocaust Research. In his main work, he quoted him six times as a witness to exterminations of Jews in Belzec. Why does Hilberg reject the garbage of Jan Karski but not the equally malodorous garbage of Kurt Gerstein? Apparently it is for reasons, which have nothing to do with forensic verification. The “quicklime” method of mass murder has not been yet disavowed by orthodox historiography as has the “diesel exhaust” method described by Gerstein. Furthermore the Gerstein report is the corner stone of the orthodox conception of Belzec Camp, in which Hilberg claims that 550,000 Jews were murdered.

The second false witness placed in the stocks by Hilberg is the infamous liar Bruno Doessecker alias “Binjamin Wilkomirski.” This is what Hilberg says about Doessecker's book Fragments:[31]

In contrast with the falsifications of non Jewish Wilkomirski, the testimony of the hairdresser Abraham Bomba is anything but a nonentity for Hilberg:

Unfortunately, Hilberg spares us additional quotations of Abraham Bomba, for Bomba tells later that 60 to 70 Jewish women were crammed in a “gas chamber” of 16 square meters, and that they were sitting on benches as well-wasn't that just a little crowded?

We have to ask ourselves: why does Hilberg withdraw credibility from the liar Binjamin Wilkomirski but continue to support the equally fantastic liar Abraham Bomba? Whatever his reasons, they cannot be scientific.

5. Hilberg's Cheating Ways

Hilberg is not content with merely dropping embarrassing testimony of his star witnesses. In at least three places he resorts to outright deception:

a) Beginning on page 136, he writes:

Hilberg's cheating is evident in the first sentence, in which he claims that in this message Himmler is addressing anew the issue of the mass shootings. From the letter itself, however, it is entirely clear that Himmler is referring to the high death rate from natural causes which accompanied the “large scale emigration movement;” that is, deportations of Jews to the East. He is clearly ordering that the bodies of deceased Jews be either buried or cremated so that no rumors can arise, such as those about rendering bodies into soap.

b) In the section adjoining this passage, Hilberg further clouds his record with yet another dishonesty:

Here Hilberg is playing the trick of inventing something that does not exist. He is building a correlation between alleged mass gassings of Jewish prisoners and a topic, which he himself introduces.

The truth is that prisoners were constantly being transferred from Auschwitz to other camps. Naturally, the people responsible for production were reluctant to have their skilled workers taken away, and they did everything they could to hinder such transfers. It was for this reason and no other that the above mentioned Director Wielam expressed concern about a “removal of skilled prison workers.”

c) In conjunction with the loss of Jewish manpower, Hilberg writes on page 192:

Everyone who has read the Korherr Report knows that it deals with Jews who were deported rather than “Jewish dead.” The reason why Korherr does not include “the 363, 211 Jews who had been shot” could be simply that the 363, 211 alleged murders do not exist.

6. The Ossified Historical Concept of Someone Afflicted with Autism.

If Raul Hilberg were not so deliberately deceitful, one could almost feel sorry for him. In 1961, when he published the first edition of The Destruction of European Jewry, it is possible that he might have believed his theses, by and large. The revisionist literature then in existence was of rather moderate quality, with exceptions such as Paul Rassinier's Le Mensonge d'Ulysses. Revisionism was not yet able to seriously challenge the official version of the destiny of the Jews during the Third Reich. In the following years and decades, however, revisionists steadily gained ground. Then came the first Zündel trial in Toronto early 1985, shortly before publication of Hilberg's second “final” edition of his opus magnum. Called as crown witness for the prosecution, Hilberg was caught in a murderous cross-examination by Zündel's defense attorney Christie, who reduced him to a truly pitiable figure.[33] More than fifteen years have passed since then, and orders from Hitler for extermination of Jews still have not been found. Exterminationist authors such as Gerald Fleming and Jean-Claude Pressac have burrowed through mountains of Auschwitz archives in Moscow without finding the slightest evidence for the existence of homicidal gas chambers. Meanwhile revisionist authors relentlessly continue to publish new books and articles, which expose the fragility of the orthodox “Holocaust.” Even the disciples of Jewish annihilation are forced to drastically reduce the numbers of victims. Raul Hilberg in his old age is forced to survey the ruin of his life's work. He realizes that nothing except transient political connections keep him from being unmasked as a charlatan and pseudo scientist.

One would expect an appropriate silence from such a person in such a situation. But no: Hilberg writes a book entitled The Sources of Holocaust Research obviously expecting the customary acclaim from fawning journalists. Instead of praise, however, the book has been met with ridicule by investigative historians. Like an autistic child he clings to his ossified picture of history. He persists in “unlocking” and “interpreting” documents, meaning that he is still trying to impart meanings, which they never had.

At the very beginning of his book we encounter this amazing statement:

Wouldn't Mr. Hilberg have done better to analyze his sources, before he committed his 1,300 page “definitive” work to paper?

Notes

First published as “Der unheilbare Autismus des Raul Hilberg” in Vierteljahreshefte für freie Geschichtsforschung, 7(1) (2003), pp. 107-114. Translated by James Damon. Quotations retranslated from the German translation of this book: Die Quellen des Holocaust. Entschlüsseln und Interpretieren, S. Fischer Verlag, Frankfurt/Main 2002. All page numbers refer to this German edition.