History Speaks Rests His Case

A Closing Statement in the Holocaust-Denial Debate

The reader is highly encouraged to examine the earlier portions of our debate—the opening statements, as well as Rebuttal I, Rebuttal II, and Rebuttal III—before proceeding.

Please also note that Thomas Dalton’s closing statement will be published within the next week.

Without further delay, here is the closing statement of History Speaks.

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Thomas,

My closing statement will proceed by summarizing the main points we have covered in our debate—across two opening statements, three rebuttals,¹ and over 20,000 words—before I draw some conclusions and implications from all this. 

Summarizing a ‘Dodgy’ Debate

In my opening statement I presented a diverse range of evidence for the conventional “Holocaust” narrative of at least five million Jews systematically murdered by the Nazis. I divided the Holocaust into three main stages: (1) mass shootings of nearly two million Jews; (2) homicidal gassing of 1.5 million Jews at Kulmhof and in the Aktion Reinhardt camps; and (3) homicidal gassing of about 1 million Jews at Auschwitz-Birknenau.² After providing evidence for each of the three main stages, I corroborated at a more general level a broad German policy to exterminate Jews.

Regarding the first main stage of the Holocaust: You accepted in your opening statement and rebuttal that large numbers of Jews were killed in mass shootings; your denialism in this regard is confined to the number of Jews shot, which you estimate at far lower than my figure of nearly 2,000,000. Thus, I will not dwell much here on mass shootings, but I will link to and strongly recommend to our readers the detailed appendix I wrote in my final rebuttal, corroborating my estimate of nearly two million Jews killed by bullets.

On the second main stage: You engaged in what proved a common Dalton debate tactic: skipping entirely over my evidentiary submission on Kulmhof. (You specifically said “the evidence is so painfully lacking that it is scarcely worth the time here.”). On the Aktion Reinhardt camps, you also dodged documentary evidence, including Himmler’s 29 December 1942 report to Hitler, which listed Jews deported to Treblinka II as having been executed;³ as well as the May 1943 Stroop Report, which described deportation to Treblinka II as a form of execution.

While largely ignoring my documentary evidence on the Reinhardt camps, you denied exterminations there based on an argument from incredulity that you developed in your opening and reiterated in your rebuttal. You passed this logical fallacy off as some kind of technical demonstration that disposing of so many bodies, bones, and teeth at the Reinhardt camps was impossible, and that the Nazis did not have enough wood to burn the corpses. I debunked your claims in great detail.⁴

Both in your opening statement and in your rebuttal, you devoted considerable space to emphasizing that diesel gas would have been an implausible means of mass execution at the Reinhardt camps. In view of the fact that some witnesses alleged the use of diesel gas engines at the camps, you argued that the technical implausibility of mass gassing by diesel casts doubt on the entire extermination narrative. I exposed your argument as a complete non-sequitur. Far stronger testimonial evidence exists that the Nazis used gasoline engines, and the witnesses referring to diesel engines were simply mistaken about this ultimately trivial detail.

On the third main stage, Auschwitz-Birkenau, my opening statement and rebuttals focused on building documents related to Leichenkeller I, the homicidal gas chamber in Krematoria Two and Three.⁵ You simply dodged this abundant evidence, dogmatically insisting LK1—referred to in the documents I cited as a “gassing cellar” in need of “gas-tight doors,” “hydrogen-cyanide detectors,” and a “pre-heating system”—was a mere morgue.

As with the Reinhardt camps, your only attempt to cast doubt on extermination at Auschwitz amounted to arguments from incredulity. Specifically, you contended that it would have been impossible to burn more than 900 corpses daily in the Auschwitz crematoria. As I noted in my rebuttal, your argument in this regard is based on an erroneous extrapolation to Auschwitz of conditions in civilian cremation.⁶ Another argument from incredulity you made—both in your opening and your rebuttal—is that it would have been impossible for the Sonderkommando to safely ventilate the gas chambers. In response, I provided evidence about the technical process for removing Zyklon-B pellets from Krematoria Two and Three, and described the natural aeration process for the bunkers and Krematoria Four and Five.⁷

After describing the three main steps of extermination, I provided in my opening statement general evidence of Nazi extermination policy and the genocidal intentions of Nazi leaders towards the Jews. You predictably dodged what I consider to be the most damning of these documents: the 26 October 1942 report by an SS judge, noting that Himmler had legalized the ad hoc killing of Jews by SS men; and the Täubner judgment in which an SS court upheld this principle.⁸ But the dodging did not stop with these legal documents: you ignored Frank’s 24 August 1942 statement announcing that the Polish Jews would no longer be fed, Hitler’s 17 April 1943 remark to Horthy that Polish Jews who could not work had to perish, and Ley’s 3 May 1943 speech proclaiming that the Nazis would not give up their struggle until the last Jew in Europe was dead.

When you did address my quotations from Nazi leaders in your rebuttal, you attempted to whitewash them through a series of disreputable tactics. First,  in attempting to spaghettify Goebbels’s 27 March 1942 reference to “liquidation” by “a pretty barbaric procedure” of Jews deported to the Reinhardt camps, you argued that “liquidating” a person or group of people does not imply killing. Second, you selectively quoted Hans Frank’s 12 December 1941 speech to make it imply that he was saying Jews could not be systematically killed. Third, you claimed that both Himmler’s 6 October 1943 Posen Speech and Goebbels’ 14 March 1945 diary entry—both of which you conceded called for the killing of Jews⁹—were merely advocating such killings rather than attesting to German policy.¹⁰

Dalton’s Epistemic Nihilism

The attentive reader will by now have noticed a peculiar quality of your argumentation style: virtually every argument you made in this debate has been negative in character. You nitpick at each category of evidence I present for the Holocaust—using crank epistemology, for example, the desire for a comprehensive physical record of all victims—that nobody uses in the context of any other war or genocide.

Yet you are unable or unwilling to provide positive evidence for a narrative—an alternative explanation—of what happened to the Jews during World War II, and how millions disappeared in Nazi custody. This is not history in the usual sense. And I suspect that your argumentative style is unlikely to satisfy even a reader temperamentally inclined to scepticism about mainstream narratives of World War Two.¹¹

A Recurring Issue: The Problem of the ‘Disappeared’ Jews

A foundational problem for Holocaust deniers is their lack of an explanation for how millions of Jews disappeared in the German camp systems. The problem of the ‘disappeared’ millions is one that anti-deniers have brought up for decades, and it repeatedly came up in our debate.

To be sure, Mattogno, Graf, Rudolf, and other more sophisticated deniers,¹² who presumably know the basics about how history is written, have recognized their epistemic obligation¹³ to offer an explanation for the disappeared Jews. They have hypothesized that the Jews were channelled out of the camps and resettled. You embraced this theory in this debate, contending that a proportion of the disappeared Jews—the 1.4 million Jews sent to the Reinhardt camps—were resettled in the Russian East.

But resettlement theory is a joke, Thomas! As I have repeatedly written in this debate, there is no evidence for resettlements of Reinhardt-camp Jews. And this lack of evidence is an absurdity, given that a 1.4 million Jews would have amounted to a country larger than contemporary Estonia.¹⁴

To quote myself at greater length:

Common sense [ ] requires us to assume there would be physical evidence (infrastructure, homes, etc), as well as testimonial, infrastructural, economic, and communicative traces of these [resettlements], not to mention train records of the actual deportations from the Reinhardt camps to the East. But you have exactly (precisely) nothing.

Conclusion

In the course of this debate, I have focused on debunking the specific claims of Holocaust deniers: that there was no German policy to murder Jews; that gas chambers were not used to murder Jews; and that the Jewish death toll was far below five to six million. Now, I want to focus on another question. Does denial—in addition to being wrong—even amount to historical discourse? I conclude it does not.  

To understand why, I will need to say a few words about the practice of history.

History is not simply about marshalling negative evidence to discredit historical narratives you dislike or disbelieve. The practice of history involves constructing, corroborating, and refining positive narratives which explain historical phenomena. In the context of the Holocaust, a genuine revisionist (as opposed to denialist) account would develop an alternative narrative to extermination that explained what happened to the Jews during World War II. More specifically, a genuinely “revisionist” theory would explain (1) how so many eyewitnesses and investigators across various eras, cultures, and languages, came to believe in the extermination of the Jews. A revisionist theory would also (2) offer an alternative explanation for how millions of Jews disappeared in Nazi custody during World War II.

But you have failed to provide a credible positive narrative to explain these two striking historical phenomena. On the first point, you offered no explanation whatever for how so many eyewitnesses and investigations came to believe (or pretend to believe) that the Germans exterminated Jews systematically, including by gassing. In Debating the Holocaust, you dismiss the idea of a conspiracy to frame the Germans—“Holohoax”—sensibly noting that there is zero evidence for such a conspiracy. But how then, on your account, could so many “false” confessions to gassing have been extracted if the Allies were not trying to frame the Germans?

On the second point, or the question of how millions of Jews disappeared in Nazi custody, you embrace the “resettlement theory” of Mattogno, Graf, Rudolf, and Kues. But this narrative is embarrassed by its lack of evidence. As I have noted repeatedly, there is no evidence of resettlements of millions or—if we are limiting the discussion to Jews who disappeared in the Reinhardt camps—1.4 million Jews.

The lack of an alternative explanation for how the Germans were framed (you apparently believe they were framed without intent?), and how millions disappeared in Nazi custody, puts Holocaust denial outside the scope of serious historical discourse. Denial will continue to be dismissed as an absurd conspiracy theory until you find evidence for either the existence of a conspiracy to frame the Germans or the existence of resettlements for the millions who ‘disappeared’ in Nazi custody.

1. The reader may wonder why Thomas only wrote one rebuttal whileI wrote two. The answer is that Thomas chose to write one rebuttal—with a word limit twice as long as each of my two rebuttals—rather than two.

2. This figure adds up to nearly 4.5 million, but does not include deaths from other concentration camps such as Majdanek, Mauthausen, and Dachau; deaths in forced-labour camps; deaths in ghettos; or victims of “death marches” at the end of the war. As I explained previously, when all these deaths are accounted for, one arrives at a figure of total Jewish deaths greater than five million. 

3. This document does not mention Treblinka. However, it indicates that Jews from Bialystok—whom we know were deported to Treblinka II—had been executed.

4. To your questions about the allegedly inadequate fuel for cremations at the Reinhardt camps, I pointed out that the bodies required much less fuel (wood) to cremate than you assumed, because of the large percentage of bodies that were children and/or decomposed (and thus dehydrated). I also noted that Poland was a lumbering country, and thus the large quantities of wood needed to cremate the bodies could have been easily delivered to the Reinhardt camps.
As to bones, I pointed to the Nazis use of ball mill machines to crush bones more efficiently at the camps.
As to ashes, they were frequently buried in the mass graves from which the bodies had been exhumed and burned; for example the colossal 33 mass graves Kola found in his archaeological study of Belzec were loaded with ash.[1]

5. It is common ground among the leading Holocaust deniers and mainstream historians that LK1 in Krematoria Two and Three were twins: that is, they were identical rooms, and served the same purpose. The disagreement between deniers and the mainstream is whether LK1 was a homicidal gas chamber

6. At Auschwitz, multiple bodies could be legally burned at once in a single muffle; most cadavers were of children or emaciated adults; the Krematoria ran continuously; and the goal was to burn bodies as quickly as possible. None of those conditions apply to civilian cremation.

7. My claim that the latter—which, critically, were on ground level—could be naturally ventilated through opening its windows and doors is supported by Graham’s Law of Diffusion. I also emphasized that the Sonderkommando wore gas masks.

8. The court condemned Täubner, who had murdered Jews in a particularly sadistic and exhibitionist fashion, for “apply[ing] Bolshevik methods during the necessary extermination of the worst enemy of our people” (emphasis mine). However, the court emphasized that he was not being condemned for the act of killing 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.

9. On the Second Posen speech, you half-heartedly suggest that Himmler may have only calling for the killing of partisan Jews. But you accept that Goebbels was calling for the killing of Jews en masse.

10. This interpretation is discredited by the fact that both speeches clearly described the killing of Jews as a policy that had already been carried out.

11. Of course, the incorrigible neo-Nazi—who constitutes the normative denier, although not every denier is a stock characters of this variety—will happily be “persuaded” by bad arguments for denial.

12. This is a category to which I’d assign you, Thomas, for what it’s worth.

13. If a reader does not understand why such an epistemic obligation exists on the part of deniers, I would point him or her to the conclusion section of this essay, where this is explained in more detail.

14. You pointed out in your rebuttal that there need not have been only one resettlement; I rejoined that postulating more settlements, say 24 settlements of 57,000 (“twenty four Greenlands”), would hardly address the problem of absurdity.