I am repeating the introduction in each of this 11-part ZGram series. Read it until you know it by heart!
=====
A mainstream Jewish writer, giving his readers the standard Jewish slant on well-worn Holocaust orthodoxy in response to the then upcoming Irving/Lipstadt-Penguin Trial, made amazing and telling pre-emptive admissions in an article published in the February 2000 Atlantic Monthly. This 19 page article, significantly titled "The Holocaust on Trial" by D.D. Guttenplan, is so far the most comprehensive and extensive write-up on the subject of Revisionism and the Holocaust that has appeared in the global mainstream press.
The choice of the title itself speaks volumes. It is an open acknowledgement - long overdue! - that Revisionism, far from being a fringe movement run by a few crackpots and "Hitler lovers", is in fact a vibrant, legitimate historical discipline of far greater spiritual depth and political importance than has been admitted by those who would like us to listen to the B'nai Brith and Anti-Defamation League type smearmongering just a little bit longer.
Holocaust orthodoxy is not yet a sacred religious dogma of Judaism. It is, in fact, the central core of the Zionist political agenda. This agenda has had diabolical, monstrous results. It gave us World War II, the Morgenthau Plan, Operation Keelhaul, the Nuremberg Trials, an Israeli state, German reparations to maintain that state, more than half a century of Bolshevic occupation of the heartland of Europe, deliberately media-induced, all-permeating "Holocaust thinking" and, as a by-produce, permanent, bloody wars and upheaval in the Middle East. It is also the backbone of the New World Order.
Understanding this Zionist agenda is of crucial relevance to every person on this earth who prefers truth over lies, unfettered scientific and historical inquiry to back up that truth and demolish those lies, and freedom over slavery for future generations.
Leuchter's findings, Irving's adoption of these findings, and the subsequent Errol Morris documentary film about Leuchter played a central role in the lengthy Irving-Lipstadt/Penguin litigation, as the court transcripts reveal. This illustrates the crucially important role played by the much-maligned Fred Leuchter in the demolition of this edifice and relic of World War II propaganda lies.
Guttenplan's choice of the Title, "The Holocaust on Trial" - was borrowed from a Zundel publication - the 1988 'consumerized" version by Reporter Robert Lenski of the 1988 Zündel trial, reviewable on the Zundelsite. (Use the Zundelsite-specific search engine for topics of specific interest!) The title signifies acknowledgment by the back door of the importance of the two Zundel Trials and their seminal impact on Holocaust historiography.
It is only fitting that Ernst Zundel should review the Atlantic Monthly article. In this article, Guttenplan is continuing the traditional modus operandi of the "in-elite" by talking about us, around us, past us and against us. Who better than a German to respond to the continued blood libel against the Germans - and to assure more balance, sanity and honesty?
Who better than Ernst Zundel, battle-scarred veteran of this herculean struggle and originator/catalyst of the all-important Leuchter Report?
I yield my ZGrams to Ernst Zundel. The Internet allows this veteran of Holocaust Revisionism to have his say - his way!
(Paragraph pairs are numbered and separated by a line. )
=====
Part III
17. Guttenplan: The problem is not a lack of evidence. The destruction of European Jewry was, in Hilberg's central insight, essentially a bureaucratic process, the result of "a series of administrative measures." In their pursuit of the Endlösung - the Final Solution to the Jewish question - the Nazis left all the detritus of any large organization: memoranda, requisition forms, purchase orders, files, and blueprints.
Approximately one million Jews were murdered at Auschwitz, for example, and all of them had to be taken there by train from somewhere else, in the middle of a war in which the railways were the lifelines of the German army. The gas to kill them - Zyklon B - had to be paid for. And the ovens that disposed of the bodies had to be specially built - by Topf and Sons, a German firm that patented the design. Finally, for each Stück - "piece," as the Nazis referred to a Jew - processed, certain items had to be accounted for: money, jewelry, personal effects, dental gold, hair.
ANSWER TO 17. Raul Hilberg, Guttenplan's hero, is not so sure that he would agree. Judge for yourself:
In his 1961 edition of his book The Destruction of the European Jews, Hilberg wrote on p. 177 that there were two Hitler Orders.
At the 1985 trial of Ernst Zündel, Hilberg continued to insist that these orders existed, stating that he would not be correcting what he wrote in 1961 in his new forthcoming edition (Trial Transcript, pp. 851-852)
In fact, Hilberg deleted all references to a Hitler order in the body of his work in the new edition published in 1985, shortly after his testimony in the Zündel Trial.
Holocaust historian Christopher Browning noted this as a major interpretational change in Hilberg's work, noting that there was only one reference to a Hitler order buried in a footnote in the new edition ("The Revised Hilberg". Simon Wiesenthal Annual, Vol. 3, 1986)
Invoices for Zyklon B prove no genocidal extermination campaign. They prove the contrary! There are thousands of such invoices from Air-, Naval- and Army as well as SS authorities for this delousing compound, used in every German military facility all over Germany and Europe. Nobody is going to suggest that the SS leadership or the Wehrmacht gassed its own soldiers - in spite of the invoices!
As to blueprints in the Auschwitz, Moscow and German archives, they speak of delousing facilities, morgues, and crematories to dispose of victims of epidemics and Allied bombing raids. Every city in every civilized country in America, Canada, England, France and, yes, Germany, had such crematories.
Crematories are no proof of a plan for or actual act of "genocide" or 'judeocide." They are a public health measure to prevent the spread of disease and epidemics, just as is the "fumigation" of living quarters, like prisoners' barracks, and the delousing of clothing, bedding, uniforms and people - as the Germans did in World War II. Germany had no DDT, the environmentally destructive American chemical, so they used environmentally-friendly Zyklon B in their facilities. By diabolical spin-doctoring, evil propagandists turned this German life-saving measure into an alleged policy of "mass murder."
As to the dead being referred to as "Stück", meaning "piece" in the cremation process, would it have been less offensive to Guttenplan's Jewish sensibilities if the Germans had called the dead "cadavers"? His obsession shows in that the Germans - sorry, the Nazis! - referred to Jews as "Stück." He does not tell us what the Germans called Polish, Czech, Hungarian, French, Dutch and German dead.
===========
18. Guttenplan: Hilberg's mapping of this bureaucracy fills three volumes, but the essential facts of the Holocaust are contained in a series of tables at the end. "Deaths by Cause," for example, shows that more than 800,000 Jews died as a result of "ghettoization and general privation," more than 1.3 million were killed by "open-air shootings," and up to three million were murdered in camps - as many as 2.7 million of these in death camps: specialized extermination centers such as Sobibar, Treblinka, and Belzec. By comparison, 150,000 died in other camps, including concentration camps such as Dachau and Buchenwald. In "Deaths by Country," Hilberg's list ranges from the up to three million Jews of Poland to the fewer than 1,000 from Luxembourg, and in "Deaths by Year" he charts the genocide's rise and fall. But in all three tables the total is the same: 5.1 million Jews.
ANSWER TO 18. Guttenplan could do the world and himself a favor if he did not take everything a fellow Jewish propagandist like Hilberg says as Gospel Truth and Carved-in-Stone - as some divine revelation. It might be instructive for him to peruse the court transcripts of the cross examination of Dr. Hilberg in the 1985 Zündel Trial on this topic. <http://www.lebensraum.org/english/dsmrd/dsmrd09hilberg.html>
The first thing he will find is a Hilberg admission that he is not a statistician. The second thing is his admission of the unreliability of Central and East European census figures. Hilberg's claim that ". . . as many as 2.7 million of these were [murdered] in death camps" is an assertion at best - a bold-faced lie when one begins to look at the detailed historical and statistical records since compiled by other researchers, based on documents which have surfaced and become available since Hilberg published his judeo-centric thesis.
To give you a flavor of Hilberg skating on thin ice, here are a few quotes from the Hilberg testimony in 1985, as per the above-named Kulaszka book:
Griffiths read from page 29 of the pamphlet:
With the help of one hundred pages of cross-checked statistics, Professor Rassinier concludes in Le Drame des Juifs européen that the number of Jewish casualties during the Second World War could not have exceeded 1,200,000, and he notes that this has finally been accepted as valid by the World Centre of Contemporary Jewish Documentation at Paris. However, he regards such a figure as a maximum limit, and refers to the lower estimate of 896,892 casualties in a study of the same problem by the Jewish statistician Raul Hilberg. Rassinier points out that the State of Israel nevertheless continues to claim compensation for six million dead, each one representing an indemnity of 5,000 marks. Hilberg testified that "the only correct statement in the paragraph" was that his name was Raul Hilberg. Hilberg said he was "actually not" a statistician. He never gave an estimate of 896,892: "not in my book, not in any of my published work, not in any of my unpublished statements that I ever made, not of any kind." Hilberg believed the figure came from "a calculation, if we may call it a calculation, made by [Rassinier] in which he took two columns. Before and after columns, Jewish population in 1939, Jewish population in 1945, adjusted for anything such as migrations or war casualties. He did not subtract the last column from the first. He subtracted one column from the other, which gave him a number such as 5.4 million... And then he decided that he would have to proceed in this number in order to render it into something proper, so he deducted from it various figments of his imagination, numbers that he concocted, and came up with a bottom line, his, not my bottom line, of 896,892. Here the figure is attributed to me." (4-748, 749)
Hilberg indicated that his calculation of the Jewish death toll in the Holocaust was in fact over 5 million. "I have broken it down, particularly in the second edition. I can break it down by cause. I can break it down by locality, and now I could even break it down by time, by year... I would say that of this 5.1 million rounded figure in which the term 'Jew' is taken as the one adopted by the Germans, roughly up to 3 million were deaths in camps. The vast majority of them, of course, were gassed, but several hundred thousands in these camps were shot or dying of privation, starvation, disease and so forth; that a 1.3 million or a 1.4 million were shot in systematic operations... such as those of the Einsatzgruppen, but not limited to Einsatzgruppen operations, shot in primarily the occupied USSR, Galicia, but also Serbia and other localities, and that the remainder, deaths from conditions in the ghettos, which can also be calculated because the Korherr reports has numbers about such deaths, and because individual ghettos, Jewish councils in these ghettos sent reports to German agencies. We have these reports indicating the monthly death tolls in such places as Warsaw, which was the largest ghetto, and Lodz, which was the second largest ghetto. We also have data about Lvov, which was the third largest ghetto. Thus we do have a pretty good idea of the death rate in the ghettos which, at the peak, in 1941, was one percent of the population per month." (4-749 to 751)
Most of the Hilberg testimony deals with numbers shifting in the quicksand under cross-examination. So what are the numbers? Let's look at Auschwitz alone. Here is a very abbreviated rundown:
a. The Allies accused the Germans of killing 4 million people at Auschwitz right after the war.
b. The Krakow Auschwitz Guards and Officials Trial talked about 300,000 dead in Allied-released newsreels in 1948.
c. In the spring of 1989 Ernst Zündel led an organized "write-in campaign" to Gorbachev. In September of 1989 the Soviet Union released the death registries at Auschwitz, revealing a death figure of 74,000 (New list of Holocaust victims reignites controversy over figures" Washington Jewish Week, March 8, 1990)
d. In 1990, the plaques at Auschwitz were removed and the toll of dead reduced to 1.1 million ("Poland reduces Auschwitz death toll estimate to 1 million", The Washington Times, July 17, 1990)
e. Now the number has been increased to 1.6 million to meet vociferous Jewish demands for more Jewish Auschwitz victims.
At this point, most numbers are highly suspect. Furthermore, Hilberg has admitted there was no plan, no blueprint and no budget for the alleged extermination ("The Holocaust in Perspective", Newsday, February 23, 1983) Yet he was so full of prejudice against Germans that he still testified in the preliminaries and trial of 1985 - even though he knew better!
===========
19. Guttenplan: Other historians dispute Hilberg's arithmetic, arguing for a figure closer to six million. Scholars also remain divided on exactly when and why the Nazis shifted from a policy of encouraging Jewish emigration (which saved half of Germany's Jews) to a policy of extermination (which murdered perhaps 90 percent of Greece's Jews). And they argue about the role of the camps in the German economy. David Irving uses these divisions - just as he uses ambiguities about the Auschwitz complex, where factories run by Siemens and Krupp, an IG Farben plant for making synthetic rubber, and several coal mines all co-existed with Birkenau, a highly specialized killing center where nearly a million people were gassed to death. But his argument is something different.
ANSWER TO 19. Guttenplan is engaging in a bit of mental calisthenics and typical Holocaust Syndrome arithmetic - and arrives at "nearly a million people were gassed to death" in Birkenau.
Well, the plaques there state (falsely again!) 1.6 million victims. Who is lying - the Poles or Guttenplan? What sources does he base his "revisionist" figures on? Irving can't revise his figures, but Guttenplan can? Why? Because he is Jewish?
===========
20. Guttenplan: What David Irving actually believes about the Holocaust remains mysterious. He can appear the soul of reason, eager to concede common ground to his adversaries. "I'm not going to dispute most of what they say about the Holocaust," he told me recently, "most of which - or ninety percent of which - I agree with wholeheartedly." But he has also referred to "the absurd legends" of the Holocaust, especially the "myth" of the gas chambers, as a "blood libel on the German people." Irving claims that Hilberg's arithmetic is not just mistaken but off by an order of magnitude, and that Jewish victims of the Nazis number in the hundreds of thousands, not millions. He is, as he told a BBC interviewer, "a gas-chamber denier." Finally, he dismisses evidence refuting his claims as postwar fabrication.
ANSWER TO 20. Although waffling, Irving is basically right. One can agree with 90% of the documents shown. The invoices are invoices for a fumigation and delousing compound. One can agree with that! One hundred percent! What Irving and Revisionists totally disagree on is the fraudulent interpretation that these invoices for a delousing compound are proof of a mass murder, much less of a genocidal policy.
Revisionists and Irving agree that there were tens, even hundreds of thousands of casualties in those concentration camps due to overcrowding, epidemics and malnutrition. 100% agreement on that! What revisionists dispute is the false allegation and accusation that there was a deliberate German policy, a plan, or even a budget to exterminate the Jews, the Gypsies, homosexuals or anybody else.
Irving is right when he calls himself a "Gas Chamber Denier." He is on solid ground there, for quite apart from the much maligned Fred Leuchter , who found that these facilities in Auschwitz could not have served as mass execution gas chambers , others with impeccable credentials, like the Austrian engineer, Lüftl, the Austrian fumigation chamber engineer Fröhlich, the German chemist Germar Rudolf all have corroborated in independent studies and texts that no homicidal gas chambers or a policy for the killing of Jews or anybody else existed in the German Reich of Adolf Hitler.
Irving is right! To call the German people and nation "a nation of genocidal killers" is a blood libel against the Germans. The Jews of the world ought to know how such a blood libel rankles - for have they not been loudly whining and complaining about being called "Christ Killers" by religious zealots? Did they not work for 2000 years to lift that curse from themselves? Why should Germans meekly accept the Sign of Cain - of being Jew Killers - just to serve the nefarious political agenda of an expansionist, colonial power, Israel, and its Zionist Fifth Column in the world?
===========
21. Guttenplan: Irving's arguments have a quicksilver quality, and over time he has occupied a number of contradictory positions. But his aim is consistent: "Cutting the Holocaust down to its true size," he said on Australian television in 1996, "makes it comparable with the other crimes of World War Two."
ANSWER TO 21. Anybody who has ever had the misfortune to have to debate or cross-examine so-called "Holocaust survivors" or Holocaust promoters like Hilberg will attest that Irving is not alone with "quicksilver"-like arguments. Read the testimony of the Jewish witnesses and their Communist fellow travelers in the postwar, de-Nazification or Nuremberg trials, or the disgusting war crimes trials which have been instigated by the ilk of Simon Wiesenthal and the character assassins of the US Justice Department's Office of Special Investigations - down to the Frank Walus case and culminating in the Demjanjuk case. "Quicksilver arguments" is a mild description when dealing with these pathological liars and serial perjurers.
Irving is absolutely right, except that he is more cautious than others who say: "Strip the Holocaust of all spin-doctoring and outright lies and forgeries, the false claims and mistranslations of German documents, and what you will end up with are no greater crimes than were routinely committed by the Allies during that terrible conflagration called the Second World War."
===========
22. Guttenplan: To Deborah Lipstadt, David Irving is "an ardent admirer" of Adolf Hitler who skews documents and misrepresents data "to reach historically untenable conclusions." The sum of his arguments, she says, equals Holocaust denial - a position that in her view has no more credibility than the claim that the earth is flat. To Irving the label "Holocaust denier" is itself libelous, a tool to silence his inconvenient truths. The two sides have agreed that the issues involved are too complex, the questions of evidence and interpretation too subtle, to be argued in front of a jury. Instead it will be up to Judge Charles Gray to decide who is telling the truth. But the whole world will be watching.
ANSWER TO 22. Those of us who have actually heard David Irving lecture on World War II have heard him say very few endearing things about Adolf Hitler. He has usually referred to Hitler as a "war criminal" in the same mold as Winston Churchill, Franklin D. Roosevelt and Josef Stalin - a comparison which is an insult to Hitler! This supposed "admirer of Adolf Hitler" has lived comfortably off the Hitler era - that is, his version of what he thought Hitler Germany was like.
It is just one more version, an Englishman's quicksilvery argument - which is not necessarily the truth either, as many Germans who lived during the Hitler era told me, over and over again. Significantly, a large portrait of Franklin D. Roosevelt, whom Irving calls a "war criminal," adorns the room in Irving's apartment where Guttenplan conducted the Interview. What does that say about Irving's "heroes"?
===========
Tomorrow: Part IV