3. Did Simon Wiesenthal once state in writing that "there were no extermination camps on German soil"?

Ernst Zündel Replies:
Rebuttal # 3

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People died in every one of them. That did not make them "death camps." The false premise always put forth is that the German concentration camps were somehow different not just in quantity but quality. When German concentration camps are mentioned, they are always equated with "death camps."

In truth, they were no different from any other wartime camps.

The next claim following the claim of German death camps is that only Germans were engaged in genocide - specifically, killing "undesirables" by gassing. Shortly after the war, it was vociferously claimed world-wide by journalists beholden to the Holocaust Promotion Lobby point view that in "all", then in ". . . almost all" then in ". . . just a few" and finally in ". . . none" of these concentration camps in the Altreich - that is, in Germany proper - did gassings of human beings occur.

Why this retreat?

It's really very simply: because these camps located in the Western sphere were readily accessible. It took the Holocaust Promotion Lobby almost 50 years to come clean on those concentration camps that were open to inspection and admit that no gassings took place in these camps, but in the end, they had no choice.

So they admitted it.

Today, no respectable scholar of the "Holocaust" will insist that ". . . there were indeed gas chambers and homicidal gassings in the Altreich," as so blithely and ignorantly stated by Nizkor.

To cite just one example, Christopher R. Browning, a star witness for the prosecution in the 1988 Zündel Trial, was forced to admit that after 17 years of research, he had never seen a single gas chamber or what purported to be a gas chamber.

Another well-known source on this topic is Martin Broszat's letter dismissed by Nizkor as irrelevant. As early as 1960, the director of the German Institute for Contemporary History admitted there were no gas chambers. He wrote to the German newspaper Die Zeit: "Neither in Dachau nor in Bergen Belsen nor in Buchenwald were Jews or other prisoners gassed." It does not follow from this statement, to use a crass example, that to say ". . . there were no murders in Boston, Chicago and New York" implies or proves that there were murders in San Francisco. It is a silly argument!

A third glimpse into information suppression or manipulation can be glimpsed by checking on what happened to author Hellmut Diwald who wrote in his book, "History of the Germans," first edition, 1978, pages 164-165 that the rooms displayed at Dachau as "gas chambers" were dummy chambers that the US military had forced imprisoned SS men to build after the capitulation of the camp. Sales were immediately stopped by the German government, the pages re-written and the book re-issued without the offending passages. The author was not consulted. (Journal for Historical Review, Vol 13, No 6, Nov-Dec 1993)

Anyone who makes a statement that there were gassings in the Altreich reveals gross ignorance of the whole scholarship field surrounding the "Holocaust" matter! No wonder that the Wiesenthal Center pulled out the rug from under Nizkor when it became clear that statements like that were going to be broadcast to the world!

One by one, the stories of gassings in Germany Proper have been long put to rest. It proved simply absurd and soon impossible to uphold such ludicrous, self-serving claims.

For skeptics, the finest source to double-check this matter is Dr. Faurisson's court testimony, as summarized in pages 286 - 351 of crucial testimony in the 1988 Zündel trial. "Did Six Million Really Die? Report of the Evidence in the Canadian "False News" Trial of Ernst Zündel - 1988." It stands as a beacon of scholarship. (Scroll down to Faurisson Chapter)

It was a different story with concentration camps that were in the Soviet domain. They could not be checked out for many, many years during the Cold War, and that is why the stories developed about the "massive gassings" in places like Auschwitz, Birkenau, Treblinka, Chelmno, Majdanek etc. and became so deeply entrenched.

In fact, some people will go so far as to speculate that maybe Cold War strategies by the Western and the Eastern victors to keep the Iron Curtain up were part of the underpinning to the unsavory Holocaust claims, because if people the world over knew that the systematic financing of much of the State of Israel was largely based on having people take on faith that these gassings did occur, the whole disgusting matter of the creation and the financing of the State of Israel by billions in sympathy and reparations based on that claim would come into serious question.

The claim that ". . . it was easier to conceal from the German people" what was going on in Auschwitz. . . " only shows up Nizkor's ignorance of European demographics. Hundreds of thousands of natives to Eastern territories such as Silesia lived in what is now Poland. The language spoken there was German. The entire social, financial and military system was coordinated with the Reich in a wartime occupation measure. Much of Poland, a Protectorate at that time, was treated as part of Germany. It made no difference where these camps were located because there were hundreds of thousands of Altreich-Germans in Poland, including the military.

What went on inside Auschwitz, furthermore, could easily be observed from the outside, for there were mostly barbed wire fences around most of the installations. Photos and drawings in the Ball Report are one fine way to check that out. This report is available from Samisdat to anyone willing to cover mailing costs.

And, finally, to claim that people like Wiesenthal ". . . have attempted repeatedly over the years to dispel several myths about the Holocaust. . . " is a little bit like saying that a person caught red-handed thieving was really only "checking" on someone else's thievery.

Both Jews and Gentiles call that chutzpah.