Rigging Holocaust Testimony

In late June of 1996, I moved to England’s beautiful sunshine coast, taking up residence with my family in Pevensey Bay, right in the middle of 1066 country. That move had been suggested by a number of friends, among them British historian David Irving, who suggested that I finish my PhD studies in the UK. Several weeks later, Irving asked me whether I would join him in his van delivering his latest book Nuremberg: The Last Battle. He had to drop off a pallet of it at Gardners, which had their main warehouse in Eastbourne, a few miles west of where I lived, and then deliver another couple of pallets headed for the U.S. at a London freight forwarder.

It honestly baffled me why he would ask me to accompany him, but since I had nothing better to do at that time, I agreed. During the ride from Eastbourne to London, Irving revealed the reason why he wanted me to join him. He told me that he was preparing a libel lawsuit against Deborah Lipstadt and her British publishing company Penguin book. Irving didn’t like the way Lipstadt had maligned him in her 1993 book Denying the Holocaust. He told me that most media outlets he had threatened with lawsuits in the past had agreed on settling out of court, so he hoped the same here. In case Lipstadt and Penguin wouldn’t settle, he planned on presenting evidence demonstrating how writings such as those by Lipstadt lead to censorship, stigmatization, ostracism, persecution and even prosecution of scholars voicing responsible but dissident views on the Holocaust. He wanted me to play a crucial role in this as a young fledgling scholar testifying, and supporting with documents, how my livelihood had been turned upside down as a result of my forensic research into Auschwitz, resulting in a landslide of persecution. I have described that history in my book Hunting Germar Rudolf. Irving moreover assured me that my research results would not be part of my possible testimony, as he wanted to keep the Holocaust itself outside the courtroom. He wanted to focus only on the devastation which writings such as Lipstadt’s have on people. I assured Irving that I would be happy to assist.

History took a completely different turn, though. Lipstadt and Penguin Books decided to put the Holocaust itself centerstage during that trial. Irving was utterly unprepared for this. First of all, because he had not expected to have to address this topic at all in court. But more importantly, because he was not an expert on that topic. In fact, he had never written a single article about it, let alone a book, and had done no research in that field either. In fact, when I visited him in late spring of 1996 in his London abode, he showed me a copy of my book Grundlagen zur Zeitgschichte (English: Dissecting the Holocaust, now in its 4th edition) standing in one of his bookshelves. However, as he was quick to point out, he prided himself on not having read it. “I never read other people’s books. I only consult primary sources,” he told me. But that, he hadn’t done either when it comes to the Holocaust.

As was to be expected, the resulting trial was a disaster for him, as he didn’t know what he was doing. He rejected offers by us revisionists to join him in the courtroom in order to organize his defense. He merely wanted me to write an expert report critically analyzing and “expert report” submitted by Jewish-Dutch historian of architecture Robeert Jan van Pelt on Auschwitz.[1] When all this was unfolding in the fall of 1999, the British media were starting a witch hunt against me. Regional TV stations in the south even showed portraits of mine during news reports, claiming that I was part of a “new breed of dangerous Nazis.” Germany was asking for my extradition to throw me into prison for my forensic research. To top it off, in early 2000, Her Majesty’s government answered an inquiry by a Labour member of parliament, saying that “the police have also been informed” of me being in the country. That all threw a few monkey wrenches in my ability to prepare the promised expert report for Irving, especially because I decided in November of 1999 that the ground in the UK was getting too hot for me. I left the country in late November 1999 and flew to the U.S., with the plan to never return to Europe unless they come to their senses and stop the witch hunts. I’m waiting for this to this day…

In the end, Irving couldn’t make use of my quickly cobbled-together expert report[2] for several reasons. As a consequence, Dr. van Pelt’s narrative ultimately prevailed. Ever since, mainstream media as well as the Holocaust orthodoxy have been crowing that the “evil deniers” have been thoroughly defeated and refuted during that cataclysmic London libel trial. The problem with this claim is that revisionist arguments and the plethora of evidence backing them up have never been presented during that trial. Irving’s ignorance in this field may have been exposed, but that’s as far as it goes.

In 2002, van Pelt’s expert report appeared in a revised and expanded edition as a book.[3] Both in his 1999 expert report and in his book, van Pelt made ample use of the term “convergence of evidence.” This concept means that different items of evidence of various types, while not conclusive by themselves, still prove a claim beyond reasonable doubt, because they all point to, hence converge in, one and the same conclusion. That term was introduced into this discussion already in 1994 by California-based science historian Michael Shermer, who, in an article published in his periodical Skeptic Magazine, tried to refute revisionist claims about the Holocaust.[4] Shermer later expanded on that article by writing an entire book about it,[5] although he got a Jewish commissar assigned to his side to make sure Shermer doesn’t get off the orthodox track: Alex Grobman, the Jewish founding editor-in-chief of the Simon Wiesenthal Center Annual. That makes you ponder, “why would that have been necessary?” Well, after his initial 1994 Skeptic article, Shermer had accepted an invitation by the California-based Institute for Historical Review, back then the world’s leading revisionist institution. During the resulting panel discussion on July 22, 1995, Shermer showed professional courtesy to the revisionist scholars and made several concessions toward their position.[6] Five years later, the revisionist position had been buttressed by the discovery of many new documents heretofore hidden in Moscow archives. Hence, Jewish pressure groups must have been nervous about Shermer making even more concessions. With Commissar Grobman on his side, however, Shermer backpaddled completely in his 2000 book.

Enter Italian Holocaust historian Carlo Mattogno into the fray. That’s like putting the revisionist fox in the orthodox henhouse. He put pen to paper and utterly, devastatingly shredded both Shermer’s[7] and van Pelt’s[8] delusions about Holocaust evidence presumably converging into their “truth.” Mattogno demonstrated on the one hand that both van Pelt and Shermer misrepresented and/or misinterpreted documents, forcing them to converge into a preordained point, although their actual contents as well as historical and documental context proves the exact opposite. On the other hand, Mattogno shows that, yes, there is a convergence of anecdotal evidence, meaning of witness accounts telling similar stories. However, these tales do not converge into a truth, but demonstrably into falsehoods, clearly showing that these witnesses must have been groomed in one way or another to tell the same lies.

Mattogno’s – and in extension the revisionists’ – week point is that he does not provide any evidence for such grooming. In the books on other so-called extermination camps he co-authored with others, Mattogno provides more cases of witness testimonies converging into lies. The most glaring of them is the case of the Sobibór Camp, where early witness statements converge on an absurd tale that was subsequently ditched by the orthodoxy and replaced by a completely different narrative.[9] More to the point, early witness claims about the three “Aktion Reinhardt” camps – Bełżec, Sobibór, Treblinka – are surprisingly divergent either with regard to each other or to what the orthodoxy’s claims to be true. I have laid this out succinctly in the respective chapters of my book Nazi Gas Chambers: The Roots of the Story.[10] Again, we have several circumstantially smoking guns, but no direct proof of anyone rigging the anecdotal record.

That has now changed. In a paper published  in this issue of Inconvenient History titled “Oskar Strawczynski and the Cross-Pollination of Holocaust Memory,”[11] U.S. researcher Thomas Olson takes a deep look into the background of survivor testimony on the Treblinka Camp, which is claimed to have been the deadliest among the so-called pure extermination camps with some 800,000 victims. Olson reveals how survivors of the Treblinka Camp created an association for themselves, which cooperated closely with the Central Jewish Historical Commission. That commission spearheaded Jewish efforts to document what presumably happened during the war, and to create “evidence” for criminal investigations. As such, they all cooperated closely with Poland’s Main Commission for the Investigation of Nazi Crimes in Poland, whose Investigative Judge Zdzisław Łukaszkiewicz ultimately wrote the Treblinka narrative as it is told to this day.

More to the point, Olson documents that these Treblinka survivors met regularly with the main purpose of recording their testimonies. However, this was not done by having every witness submit their own recollections independently. Instead, as documents about the applied methods state explicitly, witnesses were encouraged to meet, to recount what they “knew” to others, and to read written accounts to them in order to “jog” their memory. Participants could provide “additional information, corrections” to what a witness knew off hand. The resulting written testimonies were often the work of several authors, recognizable by some of these accounts being written by several distinct handwritings.

With regard to witness testimony, the argument of “converging evidence” makes sense only if the witness accounts are independent from each other, all pointing in the same direction. If they have been polluted by outside information, especially by what other witnesses claim to know – a process Irving once called “cross-pollination” – then these accounts are no longer independent, and cannot be used to argue that they reinforce each other’s reliability or credibility. In fact, the intentional and systematic cross-pollination of witness testimony committed by those Jewish survivor organizations in Poland completely pulls the rug out from underneath the “convergence” approach. If anything, it proves the opposite.

I am looking forward to more deep-diving archival studies by Thomas Olson. We are proud to have him on our team of fiercely independent historical researchers.

Check here for all of Olson’s papers published so far.

Endnotes