The Expert Report by Mark Weber on the Heretical Press publication Tales of the Holohoax. In 2008 Simon Sheppard was prosecuted for its publication, even though the comic had been sold in Britain for around two decades. The following report was not allowed to be submitted into evidence because “the truth is no defence.” Later, prosecution barrister Jonathan Sandiford told the jury, “You need not concern yourselves with the truth. You only need consider whether these matters are abusive or insulting.”
My name is Mark Weber. I was born on October 9, 1951, in Portland, Oregon, USA. I studied history at Portland State University, the University of Illinois (Chicago), the University of Munich (in Germany), and Indiana University (in Bloomington).
In 1976 I graduated from Portland State University with a Bachelor’s degree (high honors). In 1978 I received a Master’s degree in modern European history from Indiana University, where I also served as an instructor.
On March 22, 1988, I was accepted by a court in Toronto, Canada as qualified to give opinion evidence testimony on the Holocaust and Germany’s wartime Jewish policy. After being qualified by Judge Ron Thomas of the District Court of Ontario, I testified for five days in the high-profile case.
During the past 20 years I have carried out extensive independent study on history, particularly 19th and 20th century European and US history. This included considerable research in the National Archives and the Library of Congress (both in Washington, DC ) during the late 1970s and early 1980s into the ordeal of Europe’s Jews during the Second World War.
That research included study of the aerial photographs of Auschwitz taken by the Allies in 1944, the complete, original records of the German wartime Einsatzgruppen units, the German Foreign Office files on the “final solution of the Jewish question in Europe,” the SS concentration camp administration records, the Wannsee Conference protocol and memoranda, and many US Army records, as well as virtually all documents and testimony relating to Germany’s wartime Jewish policy in the 42 volumes of the Nuremberg Tribunal and in the other volumes of testimony and documents of postwar Allied trials. In addition, I have carefully studied the works of prominent historians of the Holocaust, including Raul Hilberg, Gerald Reitlinger, Leon Poliakov and Lucy Dawidowicz.
I am the author of many scholarly published articles and reviews on a range of historical issues, including many on Germany’s wartime Jewish policy and the Holocaust, and on the implications and consequences of this chapter of history. These include “Buchenwald: Legend and Reality” (with the first-ever publication of a secret post-war US Army report on conditions in that notorious camp), “Treblinka,” “Stutthof,” “Bergen-Belsen: The Suppressed Story,” “High Frequency Delousing Facilities at Auschwitz,” “Pages from the Auschwitz Death Registry Volumes,” “Wilhelm Höttl and the Elusive ‘Six Million,’” “New ‘Official’ Changes in the Auschwitz Story,” and “Tell-Tale Documents and Photos from Auschwitz.”
My detailed study, “The Nuremberg Trials and the Holocaust,” was published as a book in 1998 in French translation under the title La face cachée de Nuremberg.
Since January 1991 I have been living in southern California, where I have been employed full time as a writer, editor and/ or director of the Institute for Historical Review (IHR), an independent “think tank” and research and publishing center. For nine years I served as editor of the IHR’s Journal of Historical Review. The IHR is recognized by the US Internal Revenue Service as a public interest educational enterprise, which means that donors may deduct the amount of their donations to the IHR from their incomes for tax purposes.
I have been asked to provide an analysis of the 16-page booklet “Tales of the Holohoax,” based on my specialized study and training as a historian. Here is my assessment:
The obvious main purpose of this booklet is to discredit the generally accepted Holocaust story of the systematic killing of some six million European Jews during World War II, or at least on some aspects of it. A notice at the top of the booklet’s front cover, “A Journal of Satire,” serves as a disclaimer, warning the reader that this is not to be regarded as a scholarly publication. Adding to its obviously polemical and satirical character is the booklet’s “comic book” format and irreverent title.
All the same, the reader is encouraged to believe that the booklet’s assertions are true and based on fact. To lend credibility to assertions made in the booklet’s text, sources or references are sometimes provided. A few of these are given in the text itself, but most are in the form of numbered sources or references through the booklet text, and which are all listed in the “Endnotes” section on page 15. Although I have not been able to check all of the sources or references in the “Endnotes” listing, most of those I was able to check are accurate, or at least essentially so.
Front Cover / Page 1
On the front cover is a cartoonish drawing captioned “Alice in Lampshade Land.” Because this same drawing appears inside, along with some text, my comments on this are given further below, at the place where the content of page 10 is treated.
Page 2
On this page, under the headline “Genuine Miracles of the Holy Hoax,” are two drawings, along with some text.
The drawing at the top, identified “Palestine 1988” shows Israeli soldiers wantonly killing a stone-throwing Palestinian boy. This image is contrasted with references, noted in the accompanying text, to Jews as “God’s Holy people” who are “serving as a beacon of morality unto all nations.”
The drawing at the lower part of this page recalls and reinforces ancient perceptions of Jews as avaricious and materialistic. Jews are depicted here with unattractive, stereotypical features. Jewish men are shown carrying bags of money or other valuables, and a Jewish woman is shown hauling a load of expensive fur coats.
On this page the booklet bluntly contrasts Jewish/Israeli pretensions of moral rectitude with the reality of the Jewish state’s sometimes brutal and oppressive policies, notably in its treatment of non-Jews in the occupied territories. Although presented here in a heavy-handed way, this is a valid point, and one that many others, including quite a few Jewish and Israeli writers, have made over the years.
The image of Jews as an exalted and morally superior people is rooted in the ancient Hebrew scriptures. In the book of Deuteronomy (Deut. 7:6 and 14:2), for example, God (Yahweh) supposedly tells the Jews: “For you are a people holy to the Lord your God; The Lord your God has chosen you to be a people for his own possession, out of all the peoples that are on the face of the earth.”
Elsewhere in the Hebrew scriptures, God promises the Jews that, on the basis of a special “covenant,” they will have great wealth and power over non-Jews. (See, for example: Deut 6: 10-11; Deut 11: 22-25; Psalms 2:8-9; Isaiah 60:10-14; Isaiah 61: 5-6.)
Page 3
The drawing at the top of this page depicts ancient Hebrews sacrificing babies to the flames of a man-made deity, the “Moloch.”
The source provided for this claim – Endnote or footnote Number 1, given on page 15 in the “Endnotes” section – is to the Biblical verse, Jeremiah 7:31:
“For the sons of Judah have done evil in my sight, says the Lord; they have set their abominations in the house which is called by my name, to defile it. And they have built the high place of Topheth, which is the valley of the son of Hinnom, to burn their sons and their daughters in the fire; which I did not command, nor did it come into my mind.”
Reputable historians agree that, as suggested here, the ancient Hebrews apparently did sometimes sacrifice children to the flames of a man-made deity. This is confirmed, for example, in the “Moloch” entry in the 1957 edition of the Encyclopaedia Britannica (Vol. 15, pages 678-679). However, this practice was apparently not as widespread among the Hebrews as it was among other Semitic peoples in the region.
The drawing on the lower portion of this page refers to gross exaggerations of Jewish deaths at the hands of their ancient enemies, in this case, claims in the Jewish Talmud that in suppressing the Bar Kokhba revolt in Judea in 135 A.D. Roman forces slaughtered 40 million Jews.
I was not able to check the relevant Talmud sections. However, this specific Talmudic claim is noted by Dr. Arthur Butz in his book, The Hoax of the Twentieth Century (2003 edition, p. 296).
Of course, no modern scholar accepts such outlandish claims as historically valid or accurate. Even Jewish scholars readily acknowledge that such Talmudic figures are extravagantly inflated. Similar exaggerations, it should be noted, appear in ancient non-Jewish writings.
Page 4
The drawing on the upper left of this page shows a rabbi being burned inside a scroll. The accompanying text refers to an ancient Jewish claim whereby “... the nefarious Romans rolled a rabbi up inside a Torah scroll and set it on fire... While he was being cooked the rabbi saw letters from the scroll hop into the air miraculously.”
The source provided for this assertion – Endnote 2 – is a statement by a rabbi that supposedly appeared in an item in The New York Times of Sept. 19, 1988. I was not able to check this source or reference.
The reader is then told that “Our modern era has not been lacking in Jewish miracles either... In fact, the Holohoax is filled with miracle after miracle that defy the principles of science.” In the pages that follow, the reader is presented with a number of such “miracles,” based on statements by Jewish “Holocaust survivors.”
The first of these is given at the lower part of this page, in a section titled “The Miracle of the Jumping Buckets of Flesh.” The macabre drawing and text here is based on a claim by former Auschwitz prisoner Filip Müller (Mueller) as related in his memoir. I checked a US edition, entitled Eyewitness Auschwitz: Three Years in the Gas Chambers (Stein & Day, 1984), pages 46-47.
Here is the relevant passage:
“After their execution the chosen bodies were laid on a table. The doctors proceeded to cut pieces of still warm flesh from thighs and calves and threw them into waiting receptacles. The muscles of those who had been shot were still working and contracting, making the bucket jump about. At first we thought the Nazis planned to use human flesh for plastic operations on wounded soldiers. Only later we learned that those buckets of living flesh were taken to the Institute of Hygiene at Rajsko where it was used in the laboratories for the growing of bacterial cultures.”
This unbelievable claim, and other similarly incredible Holocaust claims presented elsewhere in this booklet, are based on statements by Jewish Holocaust survivors. Responsible historians understand, of course, that “eyewitness” accounts are often not reliable, and that such testimony should be evaluated critically and accepted only when it can be verified by other evidence.
Among the scholars who have warned about the dubious worth of such testimony is Jewish historian Samuel Gringauz, himself a Holocaust “survivor.” In an article published in the January 1950 issue of Jewish Social Studies (the original of which I have consulted), Gringauz wrote:
“The hyperhistorical complex [of survivors] may be described as judeocentric, lococentric and egocentric... This is the reason why most of the memoirs and reports are full of preposterous verbosity, graphomanic exaggeration, dramatic effects, overestimated self-inflation, dilettante philosophizing, would-be lyricism, unchecked rumors, bias, partisan attacks and apologies.”
Over the years I have evaluated many testimonies by Jewish Holocaust survivors, including first-person verbal testimony. In my experience, testimony of Holocaust survivors is usually credible when the witness is describing what he or she has personally observed, but not when relating what he or she has heard from others, second- or third-hand.
Page 5
At the top of this page is a drawing and text, under the heading “Miracle of the Smoke-Belching Cremation Chimneys.”
According to the text, “survivor” testimony about smoke-belching chimneys is not credible because “it’s impossible for crematoria to do that because that’s exactly what cremation technology was invented to do... to suppress emissions...” In support of this assertion, “the builder’s patent for Auschwitz crematoria” is mentioned, with a footnote reference – Endnote 4 – to “Manufacturer’s patent, Topf & Son.” Of course, the source cited here is hardly one that any reader of this booklet is in a position to check for himself. I was not able to do so. All the same, this point is essentially a valid one.
Over the years, a number of Holocaust “eyewitnesses” have indeed testified that in 1944 crematories in the Auschwitz-Birkenau camp spewed smoke or even flame. On the basis of information provided to me by American crematory staff members, as well as a study of relevant technical literature and other research, I can confirm that claims about crematories at Auschwitz-Birkenau spewing smoke or flame are not true.
Ivan Legacé, a manager and experienced operator of a crematorium in Calgary, Canada, spoke about this in sworn testimony given in April 1988 during the second “Holocaust trial” in Toronto. He testified that crematories, including the wartime crematories in the Auschwitz-Birkenau camp, do not, and cannot, emit smoke or flame.
Legacé’s courtroom testimony is described in Robert Lenski’s book, The Holocaust on Trial (published in 1990). A more detailed report on Legacé’s testimony is provided in ‘Did Six Million Really Die?’: Report of the Evidence in the Canadian ‘False News’ Trial of Ernst Zündel (pages 267-271). This 560-page work, compiled and edited by attorney Barbara Kulaszka, and published in 1992, is faithfully based on the court transcript of the 1988 “Holocaust trial” in Toronto.
The drawing and text in the middle of this page, headed “The Miracle of the Colour-Coded Flames,” is based on courtroom testimony of Arnold Friedman, a Jew who had been a prisoner during the war in the Auschwitz-Birkenau camp.
The source or reference provided for this – Endnote 5 – is testimony of Friedman in January 1985, as given in the transcript of the 1985 trial of Ernst Zundel, and a report in the Toronto Globe and Mail newspaper of January 12, 1985, pages 1, 2.
I was not able to check the transcript of that 1985 trial, but I did check and confirm the Globe and Mail item, as reproduced in facsimile in the book The Great Holocaust Trial, by Michael A. Hoffman II (Third edition, 1995, p. 49). On this particular point, the Globe and Mail item reports: “Mr. Friedman said the young internees even thought they could tell whether fat or skinny people, Ukrainians or Poles, were being cremated by looking at the color of the smoke.”
The drawing and text at the bottom of this page is headed “Pope Elie’s Miraculous Escape.” According to the text, Elie Wiesel – the well-known Nobel prize laureate who was a prisoner in several wartime German camps – “survived the Nazi killing machine at Auschwitz, only to be imprisoned in Buchenwald where according to Elie, ‘They sent ten thousand to their deaths every day!’ But despite the methodical nature of the Nazi killing machine, Pope Elie miraculously escaped being killed. ‘I was always in the last hundred (to be killed) near the gate.’ (6)... Yet the Nazis never got him...”
The source cited here – Endnote 6 – is Time magazine, March 18, 1985, p. 79. I checked the original of this item, and can confirm that the source is valid, and that Wiesel is more or less accurately quoted here. In the Time article, headlined “Author, Teacher, Witness,” the relevant quote is: “In Buchenwald they sent 10,000 to their deaths each day. I was always in the last hundred near the gate. They stopped. Why?”
As quoted here, Wiesel greatly exaggerated the character and scope of deaths in the Buchenwald camp. According to the Encyclopaedia Judaica (1971), the total number deaths, of all causes, in the Buchenwald camp was 56,549. A U.S. Army intelligence report of April 24, 1945, noted that the total number of certified deaths in the camp was 32,705. A detailed June 1945 U.S. government report about Buchenwald put the total number of deaths in the camp at 33,462, of whom more than 20,000 died in the chaotic final months of the war.
(For more on all this, see my article, “Buchenwald: Legend and Reality,” published in the Winter 1986-87 issue of The Journal of Historical Review. Posted at http://www.ihr.org/jhr/v07/v07p405_Weber.html
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Page 6
Along with a drawing of Anne Frank at the top of this page, there is text, headed “The Miracle of Anne Frank’s Diary,” which reads:
“St. Anne is the girl that wrote a ‘diary’ which has been a bestseller around the world. She had a magic pen that changed dates and rewrote the ‘diary’ two years later. When Anne died of typhus the pen was inherited by her daddy, who rewrote the ‘diary’ over and over again. (7) And the magic pen never ran out of ink!”
I was not able to check the reference or source given here – Endnote 7 – “Simon Sheppard, Anna Frank’s Novel: The Diary is a Fraud, Heretical Press, 2001.”
Given that no one, to my knowledge, has ever made any claim about a “magic pen” that changed dates in the Anne Frank diary, or which never ran out of ink, the text here is extravagant and rather silly.
Although many people are under the impression that Anne Frank was put to death in a gas chamber, or was otherwise killed, historians universally accept that she died of typhus in the Bergen-Belsen camp, apparently in March 1945, just weeks before the end of the war in Europe.
The book that for decades has been issued and widely accepted as “the diary” of Anne Frank is, in fact, a work assembled by Anne Frank’s father and others from the teenage girl’s diverse writings, and then extensively edited. The “assembled” and heavily edited character of the well-known “diary” was confirmed by the Netherlands State Institute for War Documentation in its “critical edition,” published in English and 1989, with a revised edition in 2003.
The drawing at the bottom of this page, with accompanying text, headed “The Miracle of the Gas Chamber Barber Shop,” is based on testimony of Abraham Bomba, as given in the Claude Lanzmann film, Shoah.
Here is the booklet text:
“In the holy movie ‘Shoah’ we meet St. Abraham Bomba who ran a barber shop in the gas chamber at Treblinka, which according to him, featured 16 barbers plus 140 inmates, plus some benches in a space that was only 16 square meters big! This may well have been the most crowded barber shop in the world. It was a miracle the barbers could get the inmates hair cut in time for the next scheduled gassing, which according to St. Bomba was every five minutes... But it would have taken hours to vent the poison Zyklon gas... So if this weren’t a magic barber shop everybody would have been killed... including the barbers. (8).”
The source cited for this – Endnote 8 – is the transcript of the Shoah film that was published as a book in 1985. I have checked the book. The testimony of Bomba is given there on pages 111-117.
Contrary to what the booklet text suggests, neither Bomba nor any reputable historian ever claimed that Zyklon was used at Treblinka to kill prisoners. Instead, it is generally claimed that Jews were killed there in chambers with exhaust from one or more engines.
The booklet more or less accurately quotes what Bomba said, as related in the Shoah film and book.
Bomba did indeed say that he and the other workers – “about sixteen or seventeen barbers” – carried out their hair cutting “inside the gas chamber,” which he said was “not a big room, around twelve feet by twelve feet” – that is, about 16 meters square. Bomba also claimed that there were benches in the room, as well as “about 140, 150 women,” with children, or “between sixty and seventy women in the same room at one time.”
Contrary to what the booklet text asserts, Bomba did not say that the gassings took place every five minutes. Instead, he indicated that each gassing was about five minutes in duration. Bomba also claimed that the dead bodies were removed from the room (chamber) in one or two minutes. He is quoted as saying that “in two minutes – in one minute – everything was clear. It was clean to take in the other party of women and do the same thing they did to the first one.”
On its face, the story that Bomba tells is not credible. It is difficult to avoid the conclusion that at least some of his testimony is exaggerated.
Page 7
The text and accompanying drawing, under the heading “The Miracle of the 23 Million Jews...,” is based on a sentence from Auschwitz and the Allies, a book by British Jewish historian Martin Gilbert.
Gilbert is quoted here as saying that “In the spring and summer of 1942 ... hundreds of thousands of Jews were being gassed every day.” The booklet text goes on to conclude that “If 200,000 Jews were indeed gassed daily by the Nazis for the 17 weeks of spring and early summer, that would be 23,800,000 Jews gassed in just those 4 months alone!”
I have checked the source cited here – Endnote 9. The relevant sentence in this book is indeed on page 26. It reads as follows:
“The deliberate attempt to destroy systematically all of Europe’s Jews was unsuspected in the spring and early summer of 1942: the very period during which it was at its most intense, and during which hundreds of thousands of Jews were being gassed every day at Belzec, Chelmno, Sobibor and Treblinka.”
If instead of “hundreds of thousands,” Gilbert had written “tens of thousands” or “many thousands,” or if he had left out the words “every day,” this sentence would have been consistent with the “standard” or generally accepted Holocaust claims about the scope of killings at the four camps mentioned here.
Of course, neither Gilbert nor any other historian has ever asserted that anything like 23 million Jews were put to death in the camps of Belzec, Chelmno, Sobibor and Treblinka. However valid the point that the booklet’s author is making here, it’s stretching things to base it on a single sentence from a single book by a single historian, even one as prominent as Martin Gilbert.
At the lower part of this page there is a drawing of a ramshackle building, identified with a sign reading “Auschwitz Gas Chamber.” In the accompanying text, which is headed “The Miracle of the Magic Gas Chambers,” the booklet reader is told:
“According to scientists and engineers who have inspected the ‘gas chambers’ on display in Auschwitz, Poland (10) it was impossible for any of these to have ever operated as gas chambers due to a total lack of properly sealed doors, fans or vents.”
The source cited here – Endnote 10 (on page 15) is “The Leutcher report.”
This is a reference to the detailed 1988 report by American gas chamber specialist Fred A. Leuchter, Jr. (correct spelling) about the Majdanek, Auschwitz and Auschwitz-Birkenau camps. He had been commissioned by the defense case in the Toronto “Holocaust Trial” to carry out a forensic investigation of the alleged wartime gassing facilities at those camp sites. In sworn testimony in April 1988 in the second Zundel trial, and in his report about his on-site investigation, Fred Leuchter explained in detail that the supposed gas chambers at Auschwitz, Birkenau and Majdanek could not possibly have been used to gas people as alleged.
In spite of fervent efforts over the years to discredit Leuchter and his findings, the key conclusions of his 1988 report have been independently confirmed by other specialists, including German chemist Germar Rudolf and Austrian engineer Walter Lüftl.
Page 8
The two drawings at the upper portion of this page, and the accompanying text, headed “The Miracle of the Burning Pits,” are meant to discredit the often-repeated claim that in the Auschwitz-Birkenau camp during the spring and summer of 1944 many thousands of corpses of gassed Jews were cremated every day in open pits.
The cited source – Endnote 11 – are wartime Allied aerial reconnaissance photos taken on a range of dates in 1944.
In 1979 at the National Archives in Washington, DC, I examined all of the large, original film rolls of these aerial reconnaissance photos. I also carefully examined enlargements of the most relevant individual frames of this collection, that is, the photos of Auschwitz and Auschwitz-Birkenau. I also studied relevant available literature, and I discussed these photos with a photo interpreter who had played a role in make public these photographs through the CIA.
As the booklet text suggests here, the claims of mass burnings of bodies in open-air pits are indeed incompatible with the evidence of these 1944 aerial reconnaissance photos.
Claims of mass cremation in pits at Birkenau are also not credible because it is extraordinarily difficult to burn corpses in the open air, and even more so in pits. This point was made by Ivan Legacé, a crematory manager and operator, in court testimony given in April 1988. (See: B. Kulaszka, ed., ‘Did Six Million Really Die?’ [1992], p. 270.)
When he was asked about the often-made allegation that some 4,400 bodies were cremated each day at Auschwitz-Birkenau in the spring or summer of 1944, Legacé responded by saying that such claims are “preposterous,” “beyond the realm of reality” and “ludicrous.”
The drawings in the middle and bottom of this page, and the accompanying texts, under the heading “Those Who Miraculously Survived,” are about false or exaggerated claims of “miraculous” Holocaust survivors.
Although I was not able to check this particular reference – Endnote 11 – (The Washington Times, April 12, 1983, p. B-1), I can confirm that many Holocaust survivor claims are indeed exaggerated or not true.
For example, Jewish “Holocaust survivor,” Moshe Peer recounted in a memoir and to a Canadian journalist his wartime ordeal as an eleven-year-old in the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp. He claimed that he “was sent to the [Bergen-Belsen camp] gas chamber at least six times.” The journalist’s newspaper account went on to relate: “Each time he survived, watching with horror as many of the women and children gassed with him collapsed and died. To this day, Peer doesn’t know how he was able to survive.”
(Source: K. Seidman, “Surviving the Horror,” The Gazette [Montreal, Canada ], August 5, 1993. A facsimile of this item was published in The Journal of Historical Review, Nov.-Dec. 1993, p. 24.)
Peer’s story is not true. In fact, and as every reputable historian of the subject now acknowledges, not a single person was ever “gassed” at the Bergen-Belsen camp.
Page 9
Under a heading, “Mr. Weasel’s Miraculous Geysers of Blood,” there is a drawing of a man, presumably Elie Wiesel, who claims to see “geysers of Jewish blood which have been spurting out of the piles of Jewish bodies in this field for the last two months.”
The text at the top of this page tells the reader: “Elie Wiesel is not only a miraculous gassing survivor, he’s also an eyewitness to a wonderful miracle! ... Wiesel, who won a Nobel ‘Oscar’ in Stockholm for best tall tale of the Holohoax, has written that after the Nazis killed some Jews in eastern Europe, the blood of the Jews began to spurt out of the ground in geysers! These geysers of Jewish blood... according to Mr. Weasel...continued to flow for months! (13)”
The source cited here for this – Endnote 13 – is a book by Wiesel, The Jews of Silence, p. 48. Although I was not able to check this source directly, I did confirm that what is written here about Wiesel is not quite accurate.
Prof. Robert Faurisson, in his essay, “A Prominent False Witness: Elie Wiesel,” relates that Wiesel did not himself claim to have seen such “geysers,” but only that he heard this story from someone else. Citing the French edition of Wiesel’s book, Paroles d’étranger, Faurisson quotes Wiesel as writing that: “Later, I learn from a witness that, for month after month, the ground never stopped trembling; and that, from time to time, geysers of blood spurted from it.”
Page 10
The drawing on this page also appears on the front cover of this booklet.
The drawing and text on this page, under the heading “Alice in Lampshade Land,” deals with two lurid Holocaust stories. The first is the widely repeated story that bars of soap were manufactured from the corpses of murdered Jews. (The “Alice in Wonderland” character in the drawing is holding one of the legendary soap bars.) The second story is that lampshades were made from the skin of murdered Jews. In that regard, the face shown on the “lampshade” in the drawing here is a stereotypical Jewish face, with fleshy lips and a large, “Jewish” nose.
As the text at the lower part of this page indicates, historians now generally acknowledge that these two legendary stories are not true.
I am familiar with the sources or references cited here – Endnote 14. For example, I am familiar with press reports confirming that Deborah Lipstadt and Yehuda Bauer – two prominent Holocaust historians – now acknowledge that the “soap story” is not true.
According to Endnote 14, on page 15, “similar anti-German atrocity propaganda about soap was invented during World War I (see Arthur Ponsonby, Falsehood in Wartime).” This is not quite accurate. A chapter of the book Falsehood in Wartime deals with similar World War I stories about German manufacturing of lubricating oil, fertilizer and fats – but not soap – from the bodies of dead soldiers in “corpse factories.” (For more on this, see my “Jewish Soap” article, published in the Summer 1991 issue of The Journal of Historical Review. Posted at http://www.ihr.org/jhr/v11/v11p217_Weber.html
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With regard to the “lampshade story,” I can confirm that the source cited in Endnote 14 (page 15) is valid, although the citation is not very precise.
As far as I know, I am the first person to cite or quote from the remarks mentioned here by Lucius D. Clay about the lampshade story. That was in my article on the Buchenwald camp, published in the Winter 1986-87 issue of The Journal of Historical Review (posted at http://www.ihr.org/jhr/v07/v07p405_Weber.html
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I wrote that General Lucius D. Clay, Commander in Chief of U.S. Forces in Europe and Military Governor of the U.S. Occupation Zone of Germany, 1947-49, carefully reviewed the Ilse Koch case in 1948 and found that, whatever her other misdeeds, the lampshade charge was baseless. He commuted her sentence from life imprisonment to four years, and informed the Army Department in Washington “There is no convincing evidence that she [Ilse Koch] selected inmates for extermination in order to secure tatooed skins or that she possessed any articles made of human skin.”
I also quoted from a 1976 interview with Clay, in which he recalled:
“We tried Ilse Koch... She was sentenced to life imprisonment, and I commuted it to three [four] years. And our press really didn’t like that. She had been destroyed by the fact that an enterprising reporter who first went into her house had given her the beautiful name, the “Bitch of Buchenwald,” and he had found some white lampshades in there which he wrote up as being made out of human flesh... Well, it turned out actually that it was goat flesh. But at the trial it was still human flesh. It was almost impossible for her to have gotten a fair trial.
Page 11
This page, headed “The Miraculous ‘Proof’ That the Holocaust Did Happen,” deals with the significance of the well-known photos of masses of dead bodies found in German concentration camps at the end of the war.
Everyone is familiar with the horrific photographs of dead and dying inmates found in concentration camps such as Bergen-Belsen and Nordhausen when they were liberated by British and American forces in the final weeks of the war in Europe. As suggested in the booklet text, many people accept these photos as proof of “the Holocaust.”
The booklet goes on to tell the reader that these dead inmates had died of “hunger or disease... like victims of any war in history... not from ‘gassings!.’” This is a valid point. The much-photographed dead and dying inmates found in camps liberated by American and British forces in 1945 were, in fact, victims of disease and malnutrition brought on by the complete collapse of Germany in the final months of the war. (For more on this, see my essay, “Bergen-Belsen: The Suppressed Story,” published in the May-June 1995 issue of The Journal of Historical Review. Posted at http://www.ihr.org/jhr/v15/v15n3p23_Weber.html
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As the booklet text relates here:
“If these people were killed by being ‘gassed to death’ where are the autopsy reports stating this? There aren’t any such autopsy reports... All the autopsy reports show these corpses died from hunger or disease... like victims of any war in history... not from ‘gassings.’ Dr. Raul Hilberg, a leading Jewish Holohoax historian and author of the book, ‘The Destruction of European Jewry’ admitted under oath at the 1985 Zundel trial that there is not a single scientific report showing that any Jew died by gassing! (14) ‘I’m at a loss’ Hilberg told the court when asked to cite a single report! Dr. William Eckert, chief pathologist for the International Reference organization in forensic medicine and sciences has also confirmed that there are not autopsies showing any Jew in the camps was gassed. (15).”
There are some mistakes or inaccuracies here. For one thing, Hilberg’s book is actually entitled The Destruction of the European Jews. It is true, as the booklet text relates, that in his testimony in the 1985 Zundel trial, Hilberg said that there are no autopsy reports showing that even a single person died from exposure to poisonous gas in chambers. However, Hilberg’s testimony is not inconsistent with the “standard” Holocaust story, because he and other Holocaust historians contend that the bodies of all Jews who were killed in gas chambers were cremated.
The footnote 14 given in the text here on this page is not valid. This note 14 should instead refer to Endnote 15 on page 15, which cites a Canadian Press (CP) report published in The Sault Star, a Canadian newspaper, about Hilberg’s testimony in 1985. This item is reproduced in full, apparently in facsimile, in The Great Holocaust Trial, a book by Michael A. Hoffman II (Third edition, 1995, p. 88). The date given on the facsimile is January 18, not January 16, 1985.
The footnote 15 given in the text here on this page is an apparent mistake. As already mentioned, endnote 15 on page 15 refers to a newspaper report about Hilberg’s testimony, and makes no mention of a William Eckert. I am not familiar with the claim made here attributed to “Dr. William Eckert,” nor was I able to find any independent confirmation of this finding by him.
Near the bottom of this page, the booklet’s author writes:
“But what we historical detectives and investigators do deny is the irrational, hysterical and plainly mendacious claims that Jews were gassed to death by Nazis. There is no scientific evidence for such nonsense and thinking people have the right to doubt it.”
Evidence for wartime killings of Jews in gas chambers is less substantial or abundant than many assume. This point was made by Arno J. Mayer, a professor of history at Princeton University. In his book, Why Did the Heavens Not Darken? (Pantheon, 1989; pp. 362-363), this Jewish scholar wrote: “Sources for the study of the gas chambers are at once rare and unreliable... there is no denying the many contradictions, ambiguities and errors in the existing sources.”
In this regard, it is also worth recalling that for years it was authoritatively claimed, and even “proven” in courts, that prisoners were killed in gas chambers at Dachau, Buchenwald and other concentration camps in Germany proper. Claims of homicidal gassings in those camps ultimately proved to be groundless, and are now rejected by all reputable historians.
All the same, to dismiss evidence for wartime killings of Jews in gas chambers as mere “nonsense” and “plainly mendacious” is unjustified.
It is true that some skeptics of the standard Holocaust story – who are routinely castigated as “deniers,” but referred to here in the booklet as “we historical detectives and investigators” – contend that there were no homicidal gassings of Jews during World War II. However, other skeptics, such as David Irving, accept that homicidal gassings of Jews did take place, or may have taken place.
Page 12
On this page, under the heading “Crimes by Jews Not Reported in the News,” is text and three drawings that depict Jews with unattractive, exaggerated features. Jewish pretensions of love for all humanity are contrasted with vicious remarks by some Jews about non-Jews (gentiles).
In the middle of this page, in a portion headed “The Reality,” Rabbi Simon ben Yohai (Shimon bar Yohai) is quoted from the Talmud as telling his fellow Jews that “... Even the best of the Gentiles should all be killed.”
The authenticity of this Talmudic quote has been confirmed by reputable specialists, including British scholar and explorer Sir Richard F. Burton, in his book The Jew, The Gypsy and El Islam (1898 edition, p. 119); Rabbi Mordechai Friedfertig, in his essay “Divrei Moredchai – Our Sacred Texts”; Jewish American scholar David Klinghoffer, in a 1994 item, “Among Strangers”; and, Jewish scholar Israel Shahak, a Holocaust survivor and, for years, a professor in Israel, in his book, Jewish History, Jewish Religion: The Weight of Three Thousand Years (London: Pluto, 1994), pp. 78-80.
A more complete and accurate rendering of this quote is: “The best of the non-Jews should be killed. The best of the snakes, their skulls should be crushed.”
Some Jewish commentators express embarrassment over the ferocity of this statement, and try to play down its importance. All the same, the basic Jewish attitude toward non-Jews, as expressed in the Talmud, is hardly a loving one. In his book Jewish History, Jewish Religion (page 80), Israel Shahak writes: “As for gentiles, the basic Talmudic principle is that their lives must not be saved, although it is forbidden to murder them outright.”
At the bottom of this booklet page is a hateful injunction attributed to Israeli Army Chief Chaplain Shmuel Derlich. Although I was not able to confirm the accuracy of this specific injunction, or to check the reference given here for it (The Nation, August 16, 1986), I can confirm that comparable remarks have been made by similarly prominent Israelis.
In Jewish History, Jewish Religion, (pp. 76, 113, n. 7), Israel Shahak cites an exhortation to Israeli soldiers by the Chief Chaplain of the Israeli Army’s Central Region Command, Colonel Rabbi A. Avidan (Zemel). In a booklet published in 1973 for Israeli troops, the rabbi declared:
“When our forces come across civilians during a war or in hot pursuit or in a raid, so long as there is no certainty that those civilians are incapable of harming our forces, then according to the Halakha [Jewish religious law] they may and even should be killed ... Under no circumstances should an Arab be trusted, even if he makes an impression of being civilized... In war, when our forces storm an enemy, they are allowed and even enjoined by the Halakha to kill even good civilians, that is, civilians who are ostensibly good.”
Shahak also relates (page 91):
“In fact, it is not uncommon for reserve soldiers called up for to do a tour of duty in the Gaza Strip to be given an ‘educational lecture’ in which they are told that the Palestinians of Gaza are ‘like the Amalekites.’ ... There are many similar examples of bloodthirsty rabbinical pronouncements against the Palestinians, based on these laws.”
Shahak goes on to explain to readers of his book (pages 96-97) that:
“Anyone who lives in Israel knows how deep and widespread these attitudes of hatred and cruelty to towards all Gentiles are among the majority of Israeli Jews... Judaism is imbued with a very deep hatred towards Christianity, combined with ignorance about it.”
Endnote 16 (on page 15) cites the book Jewish History, Jewish Religion, by Israel Shahak, and another book co-authored by Shahak. I am familiar with the first of these two works. I was not able to check The Nation item mentioned here in the text.
Page 13
On this page, and on page 14, television reports (exaggerated or untrue) of German Holocaust crimes against Jews are sharply contrasted with atrocities and crimes reportedly committed by Jews, especially Israelis, against non-Jews. The reality of Israel’s often brutal and criminal treatment of non-Jews in the occupied territories is, of course, well known and abundantly documented. The author of this booklet is by no means the first or only person to write indignantly about “western taxpayers” support for Israel, in spite of the Zionist state’s harsh and illegal policies.
I was not able to check The Nation item mentioned here in the text.
Page 14
The reader is told here:
“The media-induced fixation with only one war, one war crime and one nation of supposed war criminals has served as a handy focus for attention away from Israeli murders not only of the present but also of the past.”
This same point has been made by many others, including a number of Jewish writers.
Amira Hass, an award-winning Israeli journalist and author, for example, says that Israel has turned “the Holocaust” into a “political asset.” In an April 2007 column in the influential Israeli daily Haaretz, she wrote:
“Turning the Holocaust into a political asset serves Israel primarily in its fight against the Palestinians. When the Holocaust is on one side of the scale, along with the guilty (and rightly so) conscience of the West, the dispossession of the Palestinian people from their homeland in 1948 is minimized and blurred.
“The phrase ‘security for the Jews’ has been consecrated as an exclusive synonym for ‘the lessons of the Holocaust.’ It is what allows Israel to systematically discriminate against its Arab citizens... Turning the Holocaust into an asset allows Israel to present all the methods of the Palestinian struggle (even the unarmed ones) as another link in the anti-Semitic chain whose culmination is Auschwitz ...
“Separating the genocide of the Jewish people from the historical context of Nazism and from its aims of murder and subjugation, and its separation from the series of genocides perpetrated by the white man outside of Europe, has created a hierarchy of victims, at whose head we stand... Whoever criticizes Israel’s policies toward the Palestinians is denounced as an anti-Semite, if not a Holocaust denier... The transformation of the Holocaust into a political asset for use in the struggle against the Palestinians feed on those same stores of official cynicism, but it is part of the consensus.”
Norman Finkelstein, a Jewish scholar who teaches at DePaul University in Chicago, wrote in his bestselling book, The Holocaust Industry, that “invoking The Holocaust” is “a ploy to delegitimize all criticism of Jews.” He added: “By conferring total blamelessness on Jews, the Holocaust dogma immunizes Israel and American Jewry from legitimate censure... Organized American Jewry has exploited the Nazi holocaust to deflect criticism of Israel ‘s and its own morally indefensible policies.”
This view is echoed by another Jewish scholar, Tony Judt, who is director of the Remarque Institute at New York University. In a piece published in early 2005 in The Nation, he wrote
“The Shoah [Hebrew term for Holocaust] is frequently exploited in America and Israel to deflect and forbid any criticism of Israel. Indeed, the Holocaust of Europe’s Jews is nowadays exploited thrice over: It gives American Jews in particular a unique, retrospective ‘victim identity’; it allows Israel to trump any other nation’s sufferings (and justify its own excesses) with the claim that the Jewish catastrophe was unique and incomparable; and (in contradiction to the first two) it is adduced as an all-purpose metaphor for evil – anywhere, everywhere and always – and taught to schoolchildren all over America and Europe without any reference to context or cause. This modern instrumentalization of the Holocaust for political advantage is ethically disreputable and politically imprudent.”
(For more on all this, see my essay, “Holocaust Remembrance: What’s Behind the Campaign?” Posted at http://www.ihr.org/leaflets/holocaust_remembrance.shtml
)
In the middle of this booklet page (p. 14) is a drawing and some text about the Jewish role in the early Soviet regime, and crimes committed by Jews who served the Soviet state.
It is indeed true, as the booklet relates here, that such misdeeds are not well known. This point was made recently by Sever Plocker, chief economics editor of Israel’s largest circulation daily newspaper, Yedioth Ahronoth. In an essay, “Stalin’s Jews,” posted on the Ynet News website (Dec. 21. 2006), he wrote:
“An Israeli student finishes high school without ever hearing the name Genrikh Yagoda, the greatest Jewish murderer of the 20th Century, the GPU’s deputy commander and the founder and commander of the NKVD. Yagoda diligently implemented Stalin’s collectivization orders and is responsible for the deaths of at least ten million people. His Jewish deputies established and managed the Gulag system....
“Many Jews sold their soul to the devil of the Communist revolution and have blood on their hands for eternity. We’ll mention just one more: Leonid Reichman, head of the NKVD’s special department and the organization’s chief interrogator, who was a particularly cruel sadist.
“In 1934, according to published statistics, 38.5 percent of those holding the most senior posts in the Soviet security apparatuses were of Jewish origin... Turns out that Jews too, when they become captivated by messianic ideology, can become great murderers, among the greatest known by modern history... I find it unacceptable that a person will be considered a member of the Jewish people when he does great things, but not considered part of our people when he does amazingly despicable things.”
(For more on the Jewish role in the Bolshevik seizure of power and in Russia’s early Soviet regime, see my essay on this, posted at http://www.ihr.org/jhr/v14/v14n1p-4_Weber.html
)
As significant as the Jewish role was in the Bolshevik takeover of Russia and the early Soviet regime, this role is sometimes exaggerated. For example, it is not true, as claimed here in this booklet, that Lenin was “half-Jewish.” His ancestry was one-quarter Jewish. The booklet reader is also told that “The very first law ever promulgated in the official Communist newspaper ‘Izvestia’ (July 27, 1918) made opposition to Jews a crime punishable by death.” In fact, numerous laws and decrees were promulgated by the young Soviet regime and publicly issued in the seven or so months following the Bolshevik seizure of power on November 6-7, 1917.
A valid point is made in the text at the bottom of this page, in noting the “authentic Holocaust” of Allied bombing during World War II. This campaign took the lives of some 500,000 or 600,000 Germans, overwhelmingly civilians, including tens of thousands in the infamous fire-bombing of Dresden on February 13-14, 1945.
Page 15
In the text at the top of this page, the reader is told that “most of those who call themselves ‘Jews’ today have no blood relation or ancestral link to the Israelites but are in fact imposters,” and that “many of the ‘Jews’ today are Khazars posing as Jews...” Over the years some plausible evidence has been presented to support the view that most Ashkenazi Jews are not of Hebraic ancestry, but instead are descendants of the Khazars, a central Asiatic people. However, the balance of modern scholarship on this question does not support this view.
In the text at the bottom of the page, mention is made of the savage beating of French professor Robert Faurisson on September 16, 1989, and of some of the arrests, prison ordeals and acts of terror against Ernst Zundel. These points are valid, and have been abundantly verified. For more about the persecution of and terror against Faurisson and other Holocaust skeptics, see, for example, my 1993 publication, “The Zionist Terror Network,” the text of which is posted at http://www.ihr.org/books/ztn.html
).
As a kind of conclusion, the reader of this booklet is told:
“The wild fables about homicidal gas chambers have become the parables of an informal state religion of the West. Government, schools and media inflict this morbid, funereal mindset on young people, to instill guilt and as a form of group-libel/hate propaganda against White people, especially Germans. There is a synagogue masquerading as a museum in Washington, D.C. supported by public funds (the U.S. Holocaust Museum), which is the first cathedral to the first state-established religion in American history, and a similar shrine has been installed in London ‘s Imperial War Museum. People who question the central assumptions of the gas chamber cult are denounced as heretics; belief is supposed to be automatic. Everyone has the right to ask questions and to read books which given an alternative view – there are always two sides to a story. The gas chamber dogma can only maintain credibility through censorship, lies and suppression of debate. You have the right to doubt, to scepticism and to scientific proof. However, there is no scientific proof of homicidal gassings, as was admitted by Jewish historian Dr.Raul Hilberg (transcript of the trial of Ernst Zundel, Ontario, Canada, Jan. 17, 1985, pp. 968-969.)”
The language here is polemical and overstated. For example, the US Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, DC, is not a “synagogue masquerading as a museum.” All the same, the writer makes some valid points here. I have made similar points myself in my essay “Holocaust Remembrance: What’s Behind the Campaign?” (posted at http://www.ihr.org/leaflets/holocaust_remembrance.shtml
).
It is not an exaggeration to assert, for example, that “the Holocaust” now has a semi-religious status in western society. Rabbi Michael Goldberg, a Jewish author and religious leader, says that for many Jews the “veneration” of the Holocaust has become a new religion. In his 1995 book, Why Should Jews Survive?, he goes on to write: “And as with any organized church, this Holocaust cult has its own tenets of faith, rites, and shrines.”
Back Cover / Page 16
On the back cover, under the heading “Ye Olde Gas Bag,” are drawings of a “Jewish Holocaust survivor” with an unattractive, stereotypical “Jewish face,” and accompanying text in which the “survivor” character makes obviously absurd and mendacious statements. Even though (and as already mentioned) many claims by Holocaust survivors have proven to be false or overwrought, I am not aware of any Jewish survivor making claims as outlandish as those presented here.
Because this page’s text is so hyperbolical and unspecific, I am unfortunately not able to evaluate it as a historian.
Summary
While it is true that many claims by Jewish Holocaust survivors are indeed groundless or extravagant, the main focus of this frankly satirical and polemical booklet on such claims may be misleading or unfair, given the undeniable reality that large numbers of Jews were mercilessly put to death during World War II. For example, and as I have testified, many tens of thousands of Jews were killed by German units in mass shootings in the occupied Soviet territories, notably in 1941 by the notorious “Einsatzgruppen.”
At the outbreak of World War II in 1939, there were hundreds of Jewish communities scattered across eastern and central Europe, especially in eastern Poland, Lithuania and Ukraine. But these communities, with their many hundreds of thousands of Jewish inhabitants, were eradicated during the war years. Given this grim reality, the survival of at least some of the Jews who were alive at the end of the war in Europe was indeed fortuitous, if not “miraculous.”
This booklet is on more solid ground in its treatment of what Jewish scholar Norman Finkelstein calls “the Holocaust industry,” and in highlighting the double standard of western society that sanctions a kind of “hate propaganda” against Germans and other Europeans in the context of “Holocaust remembrance,” while prohibiting a comparable emphasis on Jewish or Zionist misdeeds.
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