History Speaks Debates Thomas Dalton

Below are my and Thomas Dalton's opening statements for this debate. It should be noted that these are "cold" openings; neither of us wrote our statements in response to the statement of the other. Two rounds of rebuttal will follow in the days and weeks to come. 

It should be noted that we were unable to agree on the inclusion of some links Dalton wanted to add to his piece. These links (unlike, for example, Holocausthandbooks.com, which contains abundant online sources) did not contain online copies of books and articles. History Speaks considered them to be nothing more than promotional material for various publishing house, and thereby outside the scope of the debate. Such links will be available at Dalton’s personal website when he reproduces the debate.

Part 2 of the debate (History Speak’s rebuttal of Dalton) follows these opening statements, and can be accessed here. Part 3 (Dalton’s rebuttal of HS) is here, and Part 4 (The second HS rebuttal of Dalton) is here. The closing statement of HS is here, and Dalton’s is here.

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Opening Statement of History Speaks:

Dear Thomas,

Thank you for agreeing to this debate and, in contrast to the craven Mike Enoch of The National Justice Party, not subsequently backing out. My introductory statement will describe the Holocaust and the devastating positive evidence for it. I will conclude by examining the three core claims of Holocaust “revisionism” that you mentioned in your Debating the Holocaust book—no policy to exterminate Jews, no extermination by gassing, far fewer than five to six million deaths—and showing they are each implausible.

The Nazi Holocaust, in which at least five million Jews were murdered, can be summarized by reference to three main stages of systematic extermination.

The first main stage of systematic extermination, which claimed the lives of nearly two million Jews from Yugoslavia, Poland, and the Soviet Union, was carried out by mass shootings, beginning in 1941; the most prolific killers was the Einsatzgruppen, but mass shootings were also carried out by the SS und Polizeiführer (SSPF), the Ordnungspolizei, the Wehrmacht, the Romanian military, local collaborators, and (in Yugoslavia) the Ustaše, among other bodies. The second main stage of extermination, the gassing of Jews at the Kulmhof camp in the Warthegau, and the Aktion Reinhardt camps of Sobibor, Belzec, and Treblinka II, was carried out between 1942 and 1943, and claimed the lives of about 1.5 million Jews. The final stage of extermination, in which about one million Jews were killed, was carried out in the gas chambers of Auschwitz-Birkenau, especially in 1943 and 1944.

The three main stages of killing already account for 4.5 million deaths, or perhaps slightly fewer. Over 700,000 Jews were also murdered by other means—for example, through overwork, starvation, and deprivation at ghettos and concentration camps; through the death marches out of the concentration camps during the end of the war; and by homicidal gassing at such locations as Majdanek, Maly Trostinets, Mauthausen, Stutthof, and Hartheim Castle.

Below, I will provide a brief glimpse into the evidence for each of the three main stages of the Holocaust described above.

Stage 1: Mass Shootings

Following the German invasion of the USSR, Jewish men, women and children were shot at a massive scale by mobile killing squads. The Einsatzgruppen—the most prolific killers in the “Holocaust by bullets”—themselves compiled copious, widely-circulated reports where they made plain that, with the exception of working Jews and their families, they were shooting substantially all Jewish civilians in Soviet regions under German occupation.

All documentary evidence shows that the Einsatzgruppen and other killing squads in the USSR targeted Jewish civilians and killed the overwhelming majority of them in the regions they occupied. Consider for example the nation of Lithuania (which had been annexed into the USSR under the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact). On 15 October 1941, just a few months after the Germans had conquered the country, Franz Stahlecker, commander of Einsatzgruppe A, reported that 71,105 Lithuanian Jews (out of a pre-war population of 160,000) had been liquidated. In November 1941, most of the surviving Lithuanian Jews—whom the Germans had concentrated in Vilna, Kovno, Siaulai, and Svencionys ghettos—were also murdered.

By 1 December 1941, the SD Einsatzkommando III Karl Jäger reported that Einsatzgruppe A had killed all Jews in Lithuania, except working Jews and their families:

I confirm today that Einsatzkommando 3 has achieved the goal of solving the Jewish problem in Lithuania: There are no more Jewish in Lithuania, apart from working Jews and their families. I wanted to eliminate the working Jews and their families as well, but the Civil Administration and the Wehrmacht attacked me most sharply and issued a prohibition against having these Jews and their families shot.

Lithuania was no anomaly. The Einsatzgruppen reports show a consistent pattern of the Germans massacring the vast majority of Jews—men, women, and children—in the German-occupied USSR.

In understanding the overall estimate of close to two million Jewish shooting victims—and why it differs from earlier estimates—it is important to reemphasize that mass shootings were not only caried out by the Einsatzgruppen, but also by the SSPF, the Ordnungspolizei, the Wehrmacht, local collaborators, and the Romanian military. Moreover, mass shootings were not confined to the USSR, but also took place in Yugoslavia (at the hands of the Germans and Ustaše) as well as in German-occupied Poland. When one accounts for all statistical reports of massacred Jews—from the Einsatzgruppen Reports, to the Kube-Lohse document, to the Stahlecker reports, among other sources—one comes to a figure of Jewish victims by shooting that is close to two million.

Stage 2: Kulmhof, Sobibor, Belzec, and Treblinka II

On the second main stage of extermination, murder via gassing at Kulmhof, Sobibor, Belzec, and Treblinka II, it should be emphasized at the outset that substantially all the Jews deported to the aforementioned camps vanished without a trace. The marginal number of survivors of these camps included several thousand Jews selected for forced labor and deported to work in camps in the west, as well as perhaps a few hundred escapees. Well over 99% of the 1.5 million deportees ‘disappeared’ in Kulmhof, Sobibor, Belzec, and Treblinka II. All eyewitnesses corroborate the claim that Kulmhof, Sobibor, Belzec, and Treblinka II were extermination camps, and these camps did not contain adequate space or infrastructure to house and feed any substantial number of internees, much less the 1.5 million persons deported there.

The documentary evidence proves these camps were extermination facilities. Regarding Sobibor, Belzec, and Treblinka II, in the well-known 27 March 1942 entry of Joseph Goebbels’s diary, the Nazi propaganda minister mentioned the process of deporting Jews there, and noted that Aktion Reinhardt director Odilo Globocnik was using a “pretty barbaric” procedure to “liquidate” Jews. At Treblinka II specifically, Nazi documents refer to Jews deported there being systematically killed. On 29 December 1942, Heinrich Himmler wrote a report to Hitler that described the execution of 363,211 Jews in various locations. As Hans Metzner notes, among these Jews listed as executed were the Jews of Bialystok, most of whom we know were sent to Treblinka II. The Stroop Report of May 1943—which contained many telegrams with information concerning the murder of the remaining Jews in the Warsaw Ghetto—also characterizations deportation to Treblinka II (“T.II”) as a method of execution. One of the telegrams cited by Stroop even states that “6,929 Jews were annihilated (vernichtet)” by transportation to Treblinka II (“T. II”).

With respect to Kulmhof, a 16 June 1943 letter from the Secret State Police of Posen to the SS-Sonderkommando Kulmhof described the Kulmhof Sonderkommando’s duty as the “fight against and annihilation of state enemies,” requiring “in particular a manly and strong mental attitude.”

Regarding material evidence, it should be noted that the Germans razed Kulmhof, Treblinka II, Sobibor, and Belzec—along with the gas chambers—long before the regions where the camps had been built were overrun by the Soviets. Nevertheless, various archaeological investigations have been undertaken which identified numerous, massive mass graves in these camps. For instance, an investigation of Belzec conducted by a team of archaeologists 1997 and 1998 discovered 33 mass graves, whose total surface area denier Carlo Mattogno calculated to be a total surface area of 5,919 square meters and a total volume of 21,310 cubic meters. In light of the very large percentage of Belzec deportees who were children, and the emaciated bodies of most adult victims, these colossal graves could readily accommodate hundreds of thousands of persons.

Finally—as usual—overwhelming testimonial evidence attests to extermination, via homicidal gassings, at these camps.

Stage 3: Auschwitz-Birkenau

Let me turn now to the third main stage of mass killing, gassing at Auschwitz-Birkenau. There is overwhelming testimonial and documentary evidence that Auschwitz was an extermination camp. The 2 September 1942 edition of SS physician Johann Kremer’s diary, for instance, describes a “special action” at Auschwitz, and remarks that in comparison, “Dante’s inferno seems almost a comedy,” concluding that Auschwitz is “justly called an extermination camp.”

Concerning evidence for gas chambers specifically at Auschwitz, consider for instance “Leichenkeller I” (“corpse cellar 1”) in Crematorium 2, a homicidal gas chamber which deniers have frequently alleged was merely a morgue. As Jean-Claude Pressac demonstrated in his Auschwitz: Technqiue and Operation of the Gas Chambers (1989) and Die Krematorium von Auschwitz : Die Technik des Massenmordes (1993), orders for a gas-tight door and hydrogen cyanide detectors were placed for Leichenkeller 1; these features are completely nonsensical for a morgue. Moreover, the room next to Leichenkeller I was described in contemporaneous German documents as an “undressing room,” something that perfectly corroborates the eyewitness testimony about undressing before gassing, but is an incoherent description of a morgue. A reference to an intended introduction of "pre-heating" equipment and processes for Leichenkeller 1 also discredits the idea that this was a morgue. The coup de grace is SS-Hauptsturmführer Bischoff’s 29 January 1943 reference to Leichenkeller 1 as a “gassing cellar.”

Despite denier rhetoric (“no holes, no Holocaust”), induction holes to accommodate the dropping of Zyklon B pellets into the gas chamber (via wire-mesh columns) have also been identified in the ruined ruins of Crema 2’s roof by independent investigators. Disturbances reflecting the existence of such holes are visible in Allied aerial photographs of Crema 2, taken by reconnaissance pilots in 1944. All categories of evidence—material, documentary, and testimonial—runs in the same direction, establishing the existence of homicidal gas chambers at Auschwitz beyond any reasonable doubt.

Nazi Jewish Policy

Naturally, the extermination operations described above were not ad hoc measures. Copious wartime statements by Nazi leaders corroborate the existence of a general policy—broadly recognized and accepted by German leaders—to murder Jewish civilians.

On 12 December 1941, Goebbels reported on a speech given by Hitler the same day,

On the Jewish question, the Führer has decided to make a clean sweep. He prophesied to the Jews that, if they yet again brought about a world war, they would experience their own annihilation. That was not just a figure of speech. The world war is here, the destruction of the Jews must be the necessary consequence.

Removing any doubt that “destruction” (Vernichtung) of the Jews might be meant metaphorically, Goebbels concludes by noting that, for the crime of allegedly starting the war, the Jews “will have to pay . . .  with their lives.”

Hans Frank, the head of the General Government (German-occupied Poland), attended Hitler’s 12 December 1941 speech and reported to his colleagues back in Poland a few days later:

In Berlin we were told, why are you making all this trouble? We don't want [the Jews] either, not in the Ostland nor in the Reichskommissariat; liquidate them yourselves! Gentlemen, I must ask you to steel yourselves against all considerations of compassion. We must destroy the Jews wherever we find them, and wherever it is at all possible.

On 3 May, 1943, the director of the German Labor Front Robert Ley proclaimed in a speech at a German armaments factory that “we swear we will not give up the struggle until the last Jew in Europe is annihilated and dead!” The aforementioned Hans Frank announced on 24 August 1942 that, apart from essential workers, Jews in the General Government would no longer be fed. Frank also declared that 1.2 million Polish Jews would be condemned to death by starvation, and commented that it was “self-evident” that if these Jews did not starve to death, that the “anti-Jewish measures” (i.e., deportation to death camps) would hopefully be accelerated.

In a meeting with the Hungarian Regent Horthy on 17 April 1943, Adolf Hitler said, of the Polish Jews under German occupation, that if they “did not want to work, they were shot” and "if they could not work, they had to perish." At the same meeting, the German Foreign Minister Joachim von Ribbentrop declared that "the Jews must be exterminated or taken to concentration camps. There was no other possibility." In his notorious Posen Speech on 6 October 1943, Heinrich Himmler spoke explicitly of a German policy to “exterminate” not only Jewish men but also women and children, and clarified that “exterminate” (ausrotten) meant “to kill them or have them killed” (“umzubringen, oder umbringen zu lassen”). In one of his final diary entries, written near the end of the war on 14 March 1945, Joseph Goebbels wrote that

When you have the power to do so, you have to kill these Jews like rats. In Germany we have, thank God, thoroughly taken care of that already. I hope the world will take this as an example.

The calls of German leaders to kill Jews were not merely personal sentiments, but formally codified in the law of the Schutzstaffel (SS). On 26 October 1942, an SS judge reported to the SS Main Legal Office Himmler’s decision that killing Jews would be legal for SS man, provided that their motive was political (i.e. ideological antisemitism) rather than personal (i.e. pecuniary, sexual, or sadistic). This principle was applied in the court-martial of SS man Max Täubner, who was court-martialled and punished for the sadism and exhibitionism he displayed while massacring Jews:

The accused shall not be punished because of the actions against the Jews as such. The Jews have to be exterminated and none of the Jews that were killed is any great loss. Although the accused should have recognized that the extermination of the Jews was the duty of Kommandos which were set up especially for this purpose, he should be excused for considering himself to have the authority to take part in the extermination of Jewry himself.

While Täubner was condemned for “apply[ing] Bolshevik methods during the necessary extermination of the worst enemy of our people” (emphasis mine), the court-martial emphasized that he was not being condemned for massacring Jews.

Thomas, how can you deny that German policy was genocidal when German (SS) law formally sanctioned the murder of Jews by SS men?

Finally, let me address a few of the eyewitnesses who have corroborated German extermination policy. It is well-known even by deniers that the testimonial evidence contradicts their case. Deniers typically respond to this by alleging—without evidence—that all or most witnesses at Nuremberg and other legal proceedings had been coerced into their confessions.

But this response fails to account for the numerous perpetrators who voluntarily confessed outside of trial, in completely non-coercive contexts. Such perpetrators include Adolf Eichmann, who confessed his knowledge of and role in German extermination policy to former Waffen-SS member Willem Sassen in Argentina, before the Israelis arrested him; former German Minister of Armaments Albert Speer, who privately wrote in a 1971 letter to the widow of a Belgian resistance leader that he had known about the extermination of the Jews and lied about this publicly; and the Palestinian-Arab Nazi collaborator Hajj Amin al-Husseini, who spent most of the war in Berlin, reported in his memoirs that, in mid-1943, Himmler told him that 3 million Jews had already been murdered.

Would you—Thomas—have our readers believe that these three men, and numerous others, voluntarily confessed to their complicity in imaginary crimes? Or do you believe that the confessions were coerced: that is to say, that Eichmann’s friend and fellow SS man Sassen, the Belgian widow to whom Speer was writing, and Al-Husseini’s Arabic publisher coerced false confessions out of them?

Debunking the Three Core Premises of Holocaust Denial

Holocaust deniers make three main claims. First, they contend that there was no German policy to exterminate the Jews. Second, they insist that gas chambers were not used to murder Jews. Finally, they argue that the Jewish death toll was much lower than the mainstream estimate of at least five million.

Not one of the three denier premises holds up in the face of the evidence I presented above. On the question of a genocide program, as I have shown, leading German statesmen explicitly and repeatedly referred to a wartime policy of exterminating Jews. I also showed that by 1942 it was lawful in Nazi Germany for SS men to kill Jews so long as their motive was political rather than personal. And I detailed how various perpetrators voluntarily, outside of trial, and without coercion confessed to their knowledge of the extermination policy.

On the question of gas chambers, I showed that a convergence of testimonial, documentary, and forensic evidence establishes the existence of homicidal gas chambers.

Finally, concerning the Jewish death toll: from sources I cited above such as the Einsatzgruppen Reports, the Kube-Lohse document, and the Stahlecker reports, we can collectively infer that close to 2 million Jews perished via mass shooting. In the Nazi camp systems, we can account for about three million more deaths simply by comparing the number of Jews deported to Nazi camps—including deaths in Kulmhof, the Aktion Reinhardt camps, the main KL system, and forced-labor camps—with the number of these Jews alive at the end of the war. Thus, the Jewish death toll in camps and through mass shootings is already close to five million.

This figure of nearly five million does not include the many hundreds of thousands of Jews starved or worked to death in ghettos established by the Germans or the Romanians, nor Jewish victims of the German-allied Ustaše regime in Yugoslavia. When these deaths are taken into account, the minimum plausible Holocaust death toll exceeds five million. (A figure of at least five million deaths is also supported by post-war demographic studies conducted by the Anglo-American Committee of Inquiry, among other organizations.)

The Holocaust is exhaustively corroborated, Thomas. What is your alternative narrative? Can you cite anything like the evidence I cited above to support it? Why did the European-Jewish population fall so disproportionately in World War II? How did millions of Jews ‘disappear’ in Nazi custody, particularly in the Nazi camp systems?

-          Matt

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Opening Statement of Thomas Dalton:

At the outset, I want to thank Matt for the invitation to a debate on this most contentious topic. The specific claims of Holocaust revisionism are almost never explicitly examined, and rational debates of almost any kind are very rare.  I intend to focus on, and defend, the primary revisionist claims in a logical, objective, and evidence-based manner; and I trust that Matt will do same for his side, while avoiding polemical or tendentious replies that bypass the substance of the issues at hand. 

Here I will outline, in condensed form, some of the main revisionist assertions. Let me start, though, with a short recap of the standard or traditional viewpoint; this will serve to highlight the opposing claims of revisionism.

On the traditional view, the Holocaust was the deliberate murder of some 6 million Jews by the Nazi regime during World War II. Traditionalists claim that Hitler’s intention, from the beginning of the war, was to kill the Jews of Europe. Jews were killed in ghettos, they were shot en masse, and they were killed in concentration camps. In the end (they say), many Jews died in specially-constructed, purpose-built gas chambers that used either carbon monoxide or cyanide gas. The corpses were burned in crematoria or on open-air pyres, and the ashes scattered. Some of the most infamous extermination camps—including Treblinka, Sobibor, and Belzec—were completely dismantled and have all but vanished, as have the remains of the victims.

According to leading Holocaust researchers, the Holocaust is defined by three central conditions: 1) intentionality on the part of Hitler and other NS leaders (i.e. they deliberately killed Jews), 2) mass gassing in homicidal gas chambers, and 3) a rough total of 6 million Jews killed overall. On their view, all three conditions are required; lacking any one of the three, we have a tragedy, perhaps, but technically no “Holocaust.”

Researchers known as Holocaust revisionists challenge this conventional view on many levels. They believe that there was never an intention to kill the Jews; rather, the Germans (including Hitler) simply wanted them out of Germany. Revisionists believe that there were no homicidal gas chambers. And they believe that the number of Jews who died during the war, from all causes, comes to far less than 6 million—and perhaps only 500,000 or so.

Traditionalists often call revisionists “Holocaust deniers,” because they say the revisionists “deny” that the Holocaust happened. But this is obviously a misleading claim. Revisionists accept that Hitler wanted a Germany free of Jews, and that he forcibly removed many of them, seized their property, and sent many others to labor camps. They also accept that Hitler knew that many Jews would die in the process. Depending on your definition, this could certainly count as a “holocaust”—but perhaps not “the” Holocaust.

Revisionists do deny, however, that 6 million Jews died, and they do deny that the Nazis constructed homicidal gas chambers. They do not deny that a tragedy happened to the Jews, nor do they deny that many thousands of them died.

Some Troubling Facts

So, how can the average person begin to check these claims, to see where the truth lies? I will start with the “6 million” figure. Let’s ask this question: How plausible, in general, is this number? The war in Europe ran for roughly 2,000 days (or 5½ years: September 1939 to April 1945). If the Germans killed 6 million Jews over this period, then they must have averaged 3,000 per day—every day, 365 days a year, for five and a half straight years. And of course, they also must have burned, buried or otherwise disposed of those same 3,000 bodies per day. This fact, in itself, is highly implausible, especially given all the other urgencies of a world war.

But isn’t the “6 million” figure documented in hundreds of history books? The number itself is, but not the details. Given all that we supposedly know about this event, one would expect that there would be a clear and concise breakdown of the number, showing roughly where, and how, 6 million died. Experts like Raul Hilberg claim that there are three main categories of deaths: death camps, shootings, and ghettos. So, the experts should be able to show us, by year, how many died in camps, how many by shooting, and how many in the ghettos—such that the numbers add up to 6 million. But they cannot do this. The reader is invited to look at any mainstream published source for this information; it does not exist. One can find numbers individually for each camp, or for certain ghettos, but virtually never any totaling 6 million. This alone strongly suggests that there are serious problems with the overall picture.

Furthermore, we should ask when, theoretically, it would have been possible to determine the “6 million” death toll. And the obvious answer is: sometime well after the end of the war.  And yet, this is not what happened. Instead, we find references to 6 million dead or dying Jews during the war, and incredibly, even before the war—in fact, decades before the war.

In reality, the “6 million” number has a history that long precedes WW2. One can find various accounts of “6 million suffering Jews” as far back as the 1880s. In major newspapers like the New York Times and the Times of London, we find about two dozen occurrences of that number in the six decades before Hitler even came to power in 1933—including during World War One! And it shows up another two dozen times before the end of WW2. All this strongly suggests that the number was more symbolic than factual. It would be a miracle if the actual death toll were 6 million.

The Context

The situation in Germany prior to 1933, back to at least the 1850s, was of a powerful Jewish minority, vastly disproportionate to their size of 1% to 2% of the population. This is very well documented, for the German media, entertainment, academia, and several sectors of business. Furthermore, German Jews were believed by many Germans, Hitler included, of playing a role in Germany's loss in WWI.  (See my book, "The Jewish Hand in the World Wars, for details).  Jews also had a prominent role in the postwar Weimar government. It was for such reasons that Hitler and others wanted to see Jews removed from Germany. And in fact, this is all they ever want-ed—ethnic cleansing. Hitler’s first letter on the topic, from 1919, speaks directly to this need to remove them. The same holds with all his speeches through the 1930s, even into the war years

Hitler, Goebbels, and others used words like Vernichtung and Ausrottung, which are flamboyant terms for removal or elimination. But they do not entail murder. The Western press always translated these terms in English as ‘extermination’ or ‘annihilation,’ in a literal or physical sense. But the press was doing that for decades before Hitler. NY Times articles dating back to the 1880s decry the “extermination,” “annihilation,” and even “holocaust” against the Jews in various countries—which never meant their physical killing. It really is striking how persistent this theme is. Again, one sees how any action against Jews is portrayed in the harshest possible terms.

The Gas Chambers

Let’s turn, now, to the infamous tale of the gas chambers. As it turns out, the standard gassing story is rife with problems. At Auschwitz, the Nazis allegedly crammed up to two thousand people into enclosed rooms—some partly underground—and dumped ordinary, lice-killing cyanide pellets (called Zyklon-B) on them from above. But this is senseless, because (a) the rooms generally had neither windows or ventilation, to later vent the poisonous gas, (b) the pellets would keep emitting poison for hours, killing anyone who went inside, and (c) there is no plausible way to remove the bodies in a timely manner. The technologically proficient Germans would never have designed such a preposterous scheme.

And for all that, cyanide gas killed only about 1 million Jews, we are told—all at Auschwitz. By contrast, more than 2 million were allegedly gassed in other camps with “exhaust gas from diesel engines.” This, unfortunately for our traditionalists, is even more ridiculous than the Auschwitz scheme. Diesel engines, it turns out, produce very little carbon-monoxide gas—far too little to kill people in any reasonable time. Even if the Nazis used regular gasoline engines, it would have been hugely impractical and inefficient to try to use exhaust gas to kill millions of people. They had far better sources of gas, and far better alternatives, than cramming people into rooms and pumping it with engine exhaust.

Body Disposal

Killing thousands per day is one major problem; even more difficult is disposing of the bodies. How do you completely eliminate a corpse? It is harder than one might think (just recall any of a myriad of murder-mysteries, in which the killer can never seem to get rid of the body). For the Holocaust, we have a standard answer: the bodies were burned in a crematorium. But the cremation furnaces were all equipped with single-body muffles (oven openings), and each took about an hour to burn one body. All of Auschwitz had a total of 46 muffles, and thus could dispose of, at best, perhaps 900 bodies per day. But at its peak, the camp was allegedly gassing 6,000 or 7,000 Jews per day. How was this possible? What happened to the bodies?

And that’s at the largest of the death camps. Smaller camps like Treblinka, Sobibor, and Belzec had no crematoria, no furnaces at all. (This is bizarre in itself: Why build a mass extermination camp and then have no good option for cremating the bodies?) Hence all the bodies, we are told, were initially buried, then later dug up and burned in the open air, over big log fires. But there are many problems here: This would have been technically impossible at the rate claimed—again, up to 7,000 or more per day. The Germans would have needed a mountain of chopped wood (seasoned and dry) for fuel each day, and would have had to dispose of another mountain of ash at the end of each day. Large bones and teeth, furthermore, cannot be burned to ash when using pyres. Hence they would have to be sifted out and crushed, somehow. Where are all these remains today?

Additionally, crematoria and (especially) open-air fires create a lot of smoke—smoke that would be visible from both ground and air. As it happens, we have ten reconnaissance air photos of Auschwitz from 1944. Of all these, not one photo shows even a single smoking crematorium chimney. Four photos show small fires burning, but only from a very small corner of the Birkenau camp—consistent with burning small amounts of trash or, perhaps, a few dozen bodies. Evidence of mass burning is strikingly and totally absent. How can we account for this?  Once again, we must ask: what happened to the bodies?

Lastly, consider the ghettos—the combined site of some 1 million Jewish deaths, on the standard view. They were in existence only from 1940 through 1943. And yet, in those ghettos, around 1 million Jews perished of…what? The main ones were in the middle of large cities, and Jews could freely come and go. So, what did they die of?  And at a rate of 250,000 per year, or about 20,000 per month, on average? That’s a lot of bodies, and there were no crematoria; so: what happened to the bodies? The same questions keep recurring, with no good answers. This suggests that far fewer than 1 million died in ghettos.

Survivors?

But what about all the Holocaust witnesses? Hundreds of people survived the camps, and lived to tell their stories. And indeed, we have hundreds of recorded statements, books, and films that “document” witness stories. Well—what, after all, did the victims witness? Enforced evacuation and confinement (true), people dying en route (true), people catching typhus and dying in the camps (true), dead bodies stacked in and around the crematoria (true), corpses being burned (true), people separated from family members and disappearing (true). And all this amidst a major war. Such true facts get mixed with rumor and wild speculation, and suddenly we get crazy stories: 2,000 Jews being gassed in a crematorium cellar, “5 million dead at Auschwitz” (NY Times), “6 million exterminated,” etc.

And this ignores the many inconsistencies, logical absurdities, and outright lies by witnesses and survivors. Virtually every witness making substantive and verifiable claims about their time at a camp has said outrageous, ridiculous, and impossible things. They do so for fame, attention, money, and glory. Many likely believe their own lies, but many are assuredly outright and bald-faced liars. This makes it doubly-hard to tease out any elements of truth in witness statements.

Given all these issues, and many more, revisionists conclude that no mass gassings ever occurred—even if small, ad hoc, ‘test’ gassings may have occurred, that are utterly irrelevant to the larger Holocaust story. Revisionists also conclude, based on existing evidence, that the total number of Jews killed comes to perhaps 500,000—a tragic figure, but far less than 6 million. Jews thus constitute about 1 percent of the 50 million people killed globally during the war. Their “holocaust” was clearly not so special after all.

Some Implications

Evidence, logic, and common sense all suggest that the revisionists are right. If so, this has huge implications for the present world. It would mean that people everywhere have, for decades, been given a false story of human suffering. It would mean an end to the primary guilt-tool deployed by Jewish groups against Germans, Swiss, and even Americans and the Allies who “didn’t try hard enough” to stop the massacre. It would fundamentally discredit the powerful Jewish interests in media and academia that promote the conventional story. And it would mean an end to the many privileges given to Jews and to Israel, based on the standard account. It might even mean a return of the hundreds of millions of dollars given to Jews and Israel as “reparations.”

One would think that honest Holocaust researchers would raise these troublesome issues, discuss them, examine them, debate them, and then strive for reasonable and consistent conclusions. And if these conclusions demand an end to the “6 million” or to the gas chamber myth, so be it; truth matters, after all.

But mainstream researchers do nothing of the sort. They refuse to consider such ideas, refuse to explore such alternative accounts, and refuse to engage with revisionist arguments. They won’t even mention their names!

Here is a simple test: Find any standard book on the Holocaust and look for the names of the major, living, and active revisionists: Germar Rudolf, Carlo Mattogno, or Juergen Graf. Look for citations or references to their (literally) dozens of books on this topic. Look for references to my own dozen or so Holocaust articles, or my two books Debating the Holocaust and Holocaust: An Introduction. You will likely find: nothing. Instead, if anything, they prefer to attack and mock the deceased Robert Faurisson, or the long-inactive Arthur Butz, or inconsequential figures like Austin App. This tells us much about the integrity of conventional historians.

And then we have these questions: Why do governmental authorities and those in positions of power take such trouble to censor, ban, cancel, or punish revisionists? Why is Holocaust revisionism illegal in some 20 countries around the world? Why did the UN, in January 2022, bother to issue a formal condemnation of “denial and distortion of the Holocaust”—and without attempting to defend the orthodox view or even define ‘denial’ and ‘distortion’? Why does Amazon rigorously censor and block publication of any books remotely related to revisionism? At whose bequest do they operate? Why do mysterious, hidden actors routinely disrupt the free speech rights, and the business activities, of those willing to research and discuss this topic? What are they worried about?

Despite all this, there are signs of hope. In recent years, thanks to the Internet and to brave, independent publishers (like Castle Hill, Clemens & Blair, and Barnes Review), the alternative, revisionist view is getting a public hearing—not a ‘fair’ one, but at least some degree of notice. We can only hope that the growing influence of academic-quality Holocaust revisionism will cause conventional Holocaust researchers to finally engage with the many, serious problems with the orthodox account, and then to make the appropriate and corresponding changes. Only then will they regain some measure of credibility and respect.

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