Thomas Dalton Replies to History Speaks:

Round III of the Debate

We have reached round III of the debate, Thomas Dalton’s rebuttal to Matt (History Speaks). This was preceded by the opening statements of both parties (Part I) as well as History Speaks’ rebuttal of Dalton (Part II).

Per our agreement, this will be Dalton’s only rebuttal. (Given the choice between two 3,750-max word rebuttals and one 7,500-max word rebuttal, he opted for the latter.) Thus, this statement serves as a rebuttal both to (1) History Speaks’s opening statement, and also to (2) History Speak’s rebuttal of Dalton.

Without further delay, here is Dalton’s rebuttal:

Reply to Opening Statement and First Rebuttal

Thomas Dalton

NOTE:  Matt and I were unable to reach agreement on embedded links to my books; he says, at the top of his opening statement, that such links are “nothing more than promotional material” and hence are “outside the scope of the debate.”  But links to the books allow readers to find the books and pursue their own, independent investigation.  As Matt well knows, Internet censorship, Amazon censorship, and so on, make it hard to find such books.  Evidently he prefers that it stay this way.  In any case, active links to books will be included in the text when I post this full debate on my personal website, www.thomasdaltonphd.com.

In his opening statement, Matt gave a good summary of some of the main points of the traditional Holocaust story; unfortunately, it doesn’t hold up under scrutiny.  In his first rebuttal, he responded to my opening statement; but his points are deficient in many ways.  I will respond to both of these essays here, distinguishing Matt (O) from Matt (R), as needed.

Matt (O) structures his statement around what he calls the “three main stages” of “systematic extermination”: (1) mass shootings, (2) the Reinhardt camps (Belzec, Sobibor, Treblinka) + Chelmno/Kulmhof,¹ and (3) Auschwitz-Birkenau.  To my knowledge, this is a new structure, not used by conventional Holocaust researchers.  I’m not sure of its purpose.  Be that as it may, I will respond to the points he raises.

Stage 1: 

Matt claims that “nearly two million Jews” were shot beginning in 1941, most by the Einsatzgruppen.  It is unclear from where he draws this figure.  Most conventional sources estimate far fewer shooting deaths: 1.5 million (Debois, Holocaust by Bullets), 1.4 million (Raul Hilberg, 2003), 1.3 million (Ron Headland, 1992).  The “official” Israeli source, Yad Vashem, claims that only 1.25 million died by shooting.  So we have some serious inconsistencies here.²

Perhaps, says Matt, I am focusing only on the Einsatzgruppen and ignoring the “hundreds of thousands of Jews” shot by other groups.  I am unaware of any conventional source that has documented these many thousands of other shooting deaths.  Matt owes us a list, by group and by year, of how many Jews were shot; and he needs to identify the source.  Then I can evaluate this claim.

To justify his claim about the shootings, Matt focuses on a single small country—Lithuania—which had only 160,000 Jews, prewar.  He cites the Stahlecker report, claiming 71,000 Jews shot.  (I would point out that, even if totally true, this represents only about 3% of his claimed 2 million deaths; he has a long way to go.)  He then cites the Jaeger report of December 1941, claiming that “all” (160,000?) Jews had been killed.  But his link to a U Oregon site is unclear—where, exactly, is this passage?

Furthermore, Matt neglects to explain that many Soviet Jews, including men, women, and teens (“children”), were active partisans in the war, actively fighting against German troops.  As partisans, they were liable to be shot under international rules of warfare.

Furthermore, Matt’s link to the “Einsatzgruppen Reports” directs to Itzhak Arad’s 1989 book, which is marginal in the current literature and rarely cited.  Much more important is Headland’s 1992 book, Messages of Murder.  And there, we find a (semi-) honest appraisal of the many problems with the so-called Einsatzgruppen shootings.  Headland argues for a death toll of just 1.1 million.  But there are immediate problems, as he recognizes. First, these are, allegedly, all victims—Jews and non-Jews alike. Traditionalists assume that Jews were the large majority, perhaps 90%, though this could be drastically in error.

But there are more fundamental problems, as Carlo Mattogno observes:

This analysis shows that the Einsatzgruppen reports contain chaotic and disordered numerical data which almost never coincide with the declared totals, the general reliability of which is therefore dubious, to say the least.³

Even the orthodox researchers concede this point. “It is not easy,” admits Headland (p. 92), “to obtain a clear picture of any distinct features” of the Einsatzgruppen reports; “the irregularity of the reporting frustrates us at every turn.” He continues:

There is also evidence to suggest that some Einsatzkommando and Einsatzgruppen leaders deliberately exaggerated the numbers of persons shot for their own self-aggrandizement… If these exaggerations existed, there is no way to determine by how much and where the numbers were embellished. (pp. 97-102)

It gets worse:

The impossibility of determining an exact total becomes even more obvious when one examines closely the numbers given in the tables… Any­thing approaching a final total for the entire period of the war cannot be realized.

But wait—this is a big part of the Holocaust, the “most well-documented event in history.” Why is this huge portion such a mystery?

The final dagger in the heart of the “mass shootings” story is the absence of bodies.  If “nearly two million” Jews were shot, where are their bodies?  Buried?  Then they are still in the ground, waiting to be discovered.  Burned?  But when?  And how, under the horrible conditions of a violent land war?  And where are the ashes, which, if buried, remain as ash for centuries?  And what about all the teeth and bones, which cannot be “burned to ash”?  Where are those?⁴  Lots of unanswered questions.

Stage 2: 

I will focus on the three Reinhardt camps (Treblinka, Belzec, Sobibor), and pass over Chelmno/Kulmhof here; this latter camp is allegedly the site of some 250,000 Jewish deaths, but the evidence is so painfully lacking that it is scarcely worth the time here.  Suffice to say that revisionists suggest only a few thousand Jews died there, at most.

But to Matt’s point: the reason that some 1.5 million Jews “disappeared” via the three Reinhardt camps is precisely because they were—transit camps.  The entire purpose of the camps was to collect and concentrate Jews temporarily, disinfest them of disease-carrying lice, and then ship them on to points further East, into newly-captured Russian territory—many to forced-labor camps.  That’s why all 3 camps were located in the far eastern portions of Poland, which made it easier to transfer Jews onto Russian-gauge railways and then to ship them out.  Once they left those camps, the Jews were considered “exterminated” (from the Latin “ex-terminus”, “beyond the borders”—look it up), and hence no longer had to be tracked.  They were now “gone.”

We know this because there is no evidence, even indirect, of (for example) 900,000 Jewish corpses at Treblinka.  If they were buried, they are still there—but no one has found them.  If they were buried and dug up, then there should be a huge volume of disturbed earth—which does not exist.  If they were burned, there should be a mountain of ash, teeth, and bones—which does not exist.  In recent years, a British archeologist, Caroline Sturdy Colls, was hired to find evidence at Treblinka using high-tech ground-penetrating radar; she found precisely nothing.⁵ 

Matt (R) does make one valid point, namely, that we have no good documentation for the 1.5 million Jews who were ‘ex-terminated’ through the Reinhardt camps, into captured Soviet territory (on the revisionist view).  But as I stated above, the Germans had no need to continue to track all these Jews; they had more important matters on their hands, after all.  Matt falsely suggests that the Germans shipped them all to one location, making a “new nation” of Jews, for which we have no evidence.  But that’s not what happened (Madagascar was such a plan, but it was never implemented).  The transferred Jews were dispersed over a very large area, some to labor camps, many abandoned, all soon to be swallowed up by a resurgent Soviet army—and thus lost to the Western world, for decades.  This, in fact, explains the mysterious “disappearance”: the Jews went behind the Iron Curtain, losing touch with everyone in the West.⁶  It’s not that hard to explain.

The Diesel Question

What about Belzec?  That camp allegedly experienced some 550,000 gassing deaths—all by “carbon monoxide from diesel engines,” a story that is laughably incoherent.  (Engine exhaust cannot be pumped into a “hermetically sealed” room without the engine stalling; and diesels produce only a small fraction of the carbon monoxide needed to kill masses of people in any reasonable time.) 

Matt (R) insists that all the witnesses—and consequently all the orthodox experts who believe them—are simply “mistaken” when they say that the Germans used diesel engines to gas Jews at the Reinhardt camps.  Really, he says, it was gasoline engines.  And we know this thanks to one man, Erich Fuchs, who testified that one camp—Sobibor—used gasoline.

In his testimony (in 1963!) Fuchs describes his visit to Sobibor to set up the chambers:

We unloaded the motor. It was a heavy Russian gasoline engine (presumably a tank or tractor motor) at least 200 horsepower (V-motor, 8 cylinder, water cooled). We installed the engine on a concrete foundation and set up the connection between the exhaust and the tube.⁷

He goes on to describe an experimental gassing of 30 or 40 Jewish women: “I fixed the motor on a definite speed… About ten minutes later, the thirty to forty women were dead.”

Some problems with Fuchs’s statement: First, it is counterintuitive that the Germans would use a Russian tank or tractor engine when they had their own high-quality engines. A foreign machine would have been difficult to operate and hard to repair—bad qualities for the key element in your mass-extermination scheme. Second, many Russian tanks of that era were in fact powered by diesel engines, not gasoline. Third, ten minutes is an extremely short time to cause death, given a lightly packed chamber with lots of fresh air to be displaced. But we must keep in mind that Fuchs gave his statement while on trial in 1963 for Nazi-era crimes; perhaps uncoincidentally, he got off with a very light sentence (4 years for complicity in 79,000 murders).

But overall, the consensus is clearly toward diesel at all three camps. Mattogno and Graf⁸ cite the German edition of the Encyclopedia of the Holocaust: “Belzec, Sobibor, and Treblinka were built within the framework of the Operation Reinhardt… These extermination camps used carbon monoxide gas, which was produced by diesel engines.” Noted traditionalist Léon Poliakov cited the Gerstein diesel statement in his book Harvest of Hate; immediately following which he wrote:

There is little to add to this description, which holds good for Treblinka and Sobibor [as well as Bełżec]. The latter installations were constructed in almost the very same way, and also used the exhaust carbon monoxide gases from Diesel motors as the death agent. (p. 196)

The current editions of the online encyclopedias at both Yad Vashem and USHMM explicitly refer to diesels.  And in an authoritative 2010 Oxford University Press book, Karen Orth is equally insistent: “Chelmno and the Reinhard camps killed with carbon monoxide gas generated by diesel truck motors”.⁹  Other sources simply do not specify the engine type, as if it were irrelevant; more likely they do not want to raise this troublesome issue.

And yes, as Matt (R) admits, the Germans had a much better alternative than gasoline engines: namely, “producer gas” (or “wood gas”) engines that explicitly produce carbon monoxide as fuel, rather than as a waste product.  He wants to laugh this off, but it didn’t take a genius to know that producer-gas engines, which were built by the thousands at that time, would have worked much better (had the Germans insisted on the idiotic scheme of gassing people with engine exhaust).  Every schoolboy knew that producer vehicles were poisonous and dangerous if maltreated.  It would have taken any SS man about a minute to decide to use producer gas over diesels or gas engines.  But our experts are insistent: “oh no, they were diesel engines.”  Right.

Back to Belzec

The conventional story is that the 550,000 Belzec corpses were first buried, and then most were later exhumed and burned to ash, and then the ash was deposited back into the corpse pits.¹⁰  If true, then contemporary excavations should confirm all this.  And in fact, a detailed sample study was done in the late 1990s by Andrzej Kola (Matt refers to this study, but fails to cite Kola by name [why?], or to cite Kola’s [now obscure] report).  As Matt says, citing Mattogno’s important revisionist book Belzec, there were some three dozen grave sites with a total volume over 20,000 cubic meters.  The problem, though, is that this doesn’t begin to hold the required 500,000+ bodies.¹¹  Based on the excavation data, Mattogno (p. 91) concludes that “it is possible to infer, from what has been discussed above, an order of magnitude of several thousands, perhaps even some tens of thousands” of deaths.¹² But certainly not hundreds of thousands.  This is surely why Kola’s work is never mentioned in conventional circles.

While we are addressing Reinhardt, let me respond to Matt’s (R) comments on body disposal.  On the wood needed for open-air burnings—all three Reinhardt camps burned all their corpses on open-air fires—Matt claims that the mountain of dry wood was supplied, apparently, by a large network of workers and wood-cutters operating across Poland.  And in any case, since the bodies were buried first and then exhumed, that they lost a lot of water and thus were easy to burn.

Again, if Matt had read my Debating the Holocaust (chapter 8), he would have a better understanding of the problems involved here.  There are many variables at work, but in general, we can say that an average body requires about 160 kg of dry wood to burn it to ash—not ‘cooked,’ not ‘charred,’ but burned to ash.  Thus, Sobibor would have required a total of 36 million kg (41,000 tons) of wood; Belzec, 88 million kg; and Treblinka, 144 million kg.  For the latter camp, it comes to 1,400 tons of wood per day, every day, for four solid months in a row.  This is an absurd amount; there would have been a convoy of wood-haulers entering the camp every day.

But what about the ‘desiccated corpses’ claim?  Matt forgets (or doesn’t realize) that they were only buried for a few months, on average; some only for a few weeks—when exhumation and burning commenced.  They were not neat, dried, jerky-like corpses; they were rotting, moldy messes. 

What about those bones and teeth?  Matt (R) is unimpressed; he says, with a wave of the hand, “the manner…varied from camp to camp,” some using a “ball mill,” some using “crude logs” (!).  But it’s not so easy to dismiss.  We are talking femurs, pelvic bones, and skulls of 1.5 million Jews (at the Reinhardt camps)—which could never have been burned in open-air pyres.  We are talking 48 million enamel-coated teeth.  These things would have been a nightmare to dispose of; or else, they are still there, in the ground, just waiting to be dug up.

And where is that ash?  Oh, right, it was “buried in the ditches from which the corpses had been removed” (Arad, 1987, p. 171).  Well then!  We have an easy task: just dig up, or probe, the soil at the three camps and confirm the ash content, consistent with 1.5 million bodies.  Wait—they tried that, at all three camps, and found almost nothing.  (Best not to talk about that, either…)

Lastly in this Stage 2, I want to mention the cited Himmler report of late 1942 in which over 360,000 Jews are claimed to have been executed “in various locations”.  But I would remind Matt, and the reader of this debate, that, on the revisionist view, some 500,000 Jews died or were killed during the war.  Reports like the one alleged to be from Himmler may, in fact, have been correct, but they are entirely consistent with the revisionist death toll.¹³

Stage 3: 

Matt’s third stage is “Auschwitz-Birkenau”. But this requires a bit of clarification.  The alleged “extermination” facility at Auschwitz covers two physical locations: 1) the Auschwitz Main Camp (or “Stammlager”) located in the village of Oswiecim; and 2) Birkenau, located about 3 km away, just outside of town.¹⁴  By focusing on Birkenau—which was indeed the alleged site of most mass-gassings—Matt overlooks or ignores the gas chamber Krematorium #1 at the Main Camp, and the alleged 20,000 Jews gassed there.¹⁵

But let me also focus on Birkenau, which had four crematoria (K2 – K5) built as two matching pairs (K2/K3 and K4/K5).  Oddly, on this most-important aspect of the Holocaust, the site of some 1 million Jewish gassings, and the only gassings using cyanide gas (Zyklon-B), Matt (O) allots all of three paragraphs; perhaps it is best for him not to call too much attention to this.  In his (R) he adds three more paragraphs, but these do little to aid his case.

Also, Matt (O) neglects to mention the two small converted farmhouses (“Bunkers”) at Birkenau, the alleged site of some 250,000 gassing deaths.¹⁶  But the whole story of the Bunkers is ludicrous—old, wooden farmhouses, with old windows and old (non “gas-tight”) doors, and no ventilation, converted by the super-efficient Nazis into high-tech, high-volume killing machines.  Right.  Best to ignore that story too.

Kremas 2 and 3 were built, and operated, very differently than Kremas 4 and 5.  K2/K3 allegedly had the “wire-mesh columns” to introduce the Zyklon, whereas K4/K5 had only holes in a sidewall in which to sprinkle the deadly pellets (a farce).  As Matt rightly says, the semi-underground K2/K3 rooms had ventilation (as did K1), whereas K4/K5, and the two bunkers, had none.  But ventilation-less rooms make no sense, even at “ground level.”  This is not like opening a couple windows on a spring day; you’ve got a room jammed with hundreds of dead bodies, intermixed with Zyklon pellets that continue to emit deadly fumes for at least two hours.  In K4/K5, the three gassing rooms had a total of two exterior doors, and hence would have taken hours, perhaps a day, to “air out”—which is entirely opposed to the streamlined, rapid-fire assembly-line of death that orthodoxy depicts.

The “wire-mesh columns” that Matt alludes to are attested only by two marginal witnesses.  Further, there is no physical evidence today, in the Krema ruins, of any such devices (or attachment points, or related fixtures, etc).  Nor have the ceiling holes been found in the ruins.  Matt’s link is to the well-known 2004 Keren study, which is a joke; I invite any reader to track down this study, read it, and then say, “yep, they found those wire-mesh holes!”.  The study is an embarrassment to serious researchers.

Additionally, it was only the pair K2/K3 that are alleged to have had such devices; the other pair, K4/K5, simply had “vents in a side wall” into which Zyklon pellets were sprinkled—an entirely amateurish and frankly idiotic scheme that never would have been used.

We should note here that crematoria, in themselves, are nothing suspicious, especially in a prison-like facility during wartime.  On the standard view, something like 1.4 million people in total were sent to Auschwitz (main camp + Birkenau), and, they say, about 400,000 were officially registered (for forced-labor purposes) while the remaining 1 million were “gassed upon arrival.”  Of the registered, half were Jews; of the gassed, 90%. 

Since the Germans anticipated many hundreds of thousands of inmates, they also knew that many thousands would be dying of various causes—from old age and suicide to illness and disease, if nothing else.  A high groundwater table in the area precluded mass burials, and therefore incineration would have been the preferred option for body disposal.  Hence, one crematorium at the Main Camp and four at the much-larger Birkenau.  The newly-deceased would be placed in a cool, partially underground corpse-cellar, their clothes removed (“undressed”), and the bodies would await their turn at incineration—a slow process, requiring about one hour per body. 

But Matt (R) does not like my estimate of a maximum of 900 bodies per day, total, for all five Auschwitz crematoria.  He prefers the Bischoff estimate of 4,756 per day—a number that entails 4.8 bodies per muffle per hour, which is ridiculously high.  If we want ridiculous figures, why not go with Höss’ estimate of 7,800 per day?  Or the Soviet Special Commission report of 1945, that claimed 9,300 per day?  If we are in fantasyland, all problems vanish.  Better to listen, not to Bischoff but to Kurt Prüfer, lead designer of the furnaces; he said

In Auschwitz in my presence, two corpses were inserted into each muffle instead of just one, and that the furnaces of the crematory could subsequently not stand the strain…¹⁷

If even two corpses were not sustainable, what makes us think that figures of 4 or 5 bodies per hour are possible, over the long term? 

Also, Matt’s (R) statement that the Birkenau crematoria were “running continuously” is patently false, or at least highly misleading.  He is apparently unaware that K4 burned out after just three months of use, likely because they attempted to burn more than one body per hour. 

Matt (O) cites details from a French pharmacist, J-C Pressac, who is now an obscure figure, rarely cited by mainstream Holocaust researchers; this could be because, in 1994, he stated that only some 710,000 people (Jews and others) were gassed at Auschwitz.  Hence, the number of Jews gassed would have been in the 600,000s—something unacceptable to our orthodoxy.  (Latest figures are even lower than this.  Meyer [2002] estimates only 356,000 gassed Jews.¹⁸)

The whole gassing story collapses into a pile of absurdities.

Ghettos?

In my opening statement, I offered a rough number of 1 million ghetto deaths, on the conventional view.  My figure was based on Hilberg (2003, Appendix B), who claimed, under “German-controlled ghettos” and “Theresienstadt”, “over 700,000” Jewish deaths.  But this supported his low overall figure of 5.1 million.  To scale up to the “6 million”, the ghetto deaths would have to be correspondingly scaled up by 20%, arriving at “over 840,000.”  I used 1 million because it fit best with other estimates to reach a total of 6 million.¹⁹

But Matt (R) is unhappy about this.  He prefers “probably about 450,000” ghetto deaths but can cite no source for this figure, which is a large portion of the overall Holocaust. 

Matt also castigates me for holding an “epistemic double standard”, claiming that I place “a unique burden of proof” on conventional Holocaust claims.  But it is his side, not mine, that claims that the Holocaust “is the most well-documented event in history.”  This “documentation” surely includes the locations of the majority of victims, and concrete analysis showing their rough number.  If so, it is surely not too much to ask for forensic evidence of, say, 50% of claimed fatalities in all major categories.  But we don’t have this; not even close.

Matt tosses out a few random statistics for three ghettos, but ignores the single largest one: Warsaw.  That allegedly had over 400,000 Jews in it.  How many died there?  And where are the bodies?  Mainstream literature has no answers to these questions.

Confessions, Documents, Policies

In his next section, Matt (O) examines the documentary record, looking for evidence of a mass Holocaust of Jews.  He begins with a quotation from Goebbels’ diary.  I know something about that diary, having published the most extensive study ever of his diary references to Jews: Goebbels on the Jews.²⁰  I highly recommend to Matt, and the reader, to track down a copy and read it; it is extremely revealing—mostly for the utter lack of homicidal references to Jews.

The complete diary consists of near-daily entries for over 20 years, and, in hard copy, is larger than most any encyclopedia.  It is massive (believe me, I know!).  One would thus expect, on the standard view, to find countless references to the mass murder of Jews, to their gassing, to Auschwitz, and so on.  This was a private diary, after all.  Instead, virtually every entry on Jews talks of their confiscation, quarantining, transfer, and deportation.  There is not even one entry, out of thousands, that mentions gassing Jews.

To the point, Matt partially cites the Goebbels entry from 13 Dec 1941.  Here is the full passage:

As concerns the Jewish Question, the Führer is determined to make a clean sweep (reinen Tisch—lit. ‘clean table’). He had prophesied to the Jews that if they once again brought about a World War, they would experience their own destruction (Vernichtung). This was not just an empty phrase. The World War is here, and the destruction of Jewry must be the necessary consequence. This question must be seen without sentimentality. We are not here in order to have sympathy with the Jews, rather we sympathize with our own German people. If the German people have now once again sacrificed as many as 160,000 dead in the Eastern campaign, then the authors of this bloody conflict must pay with their lives (mit ihrem Leben bezahlen müssen).

This, indeed, is the first diary reference to Jewish fatalities.  But, does “a clean sweep” sound like mass murder?  Why be so coy—in your own diary?  Hitler’s prophecy of the Vernichtung of the Jews, we recall, was from January 1939—well before the war.  It was spoken at a major live event, to a global audience.  At that time, Vernichtung clearly did not mean mass murder.  What makes us think anything changed?  And even Matt (R) admits that such terms can have both “exterminatory as well as metaphorical usage.”

Further, Goebbels is not saying that “all the Jews” must pay with their lives, or even “most of the Jews”; only “the authors of this [war]”.  That can only refer to the Jewish leadership and top influence-peddlers.  And for them, yes, Goebbels says that they must pay.

More insight comes from the next daily entry:

The early curfew in Paris has been abolished, but a plethora of Jews remain to be pushed out (abgeschoben) of occupied France to the eastern region. In many cases, this is equivalent to a death sentence. The remaining Jews will think hard before stirring up trouble or sabotage against the German troops.

Hence the Jews are to be “pushed out” to the East.  If deportation is sometimes the “equivalent of a death sentence,” and many will “pay with their lives,” we are left wondering how, exactly, and in what numbers, they will die.  I trust that there is a clear difference between (a) many dying from disease, exposure, lack of medical care, periodic shootings, etc, and (b) all dying in a complex and systematic gassing operation.  There is no doubt that concentrating and deporting thousands or millions of people in wartime would lead to many deaths.  But this is not genocide.  The next entry (Dec 18) is telling:

I speak with the Führer regarding the Jewish Question.  He is determined to take consistent action and not be deterred by bourgeois sentimentality.  Above all, the Jews must leave the Reich (aus…heraus).  We discuss the possibilities for especially clearing out (räumen) Berlin as quickly as possible. … German intellectuals and elite have no anti-Jewish instinct at all.  Their vigilance is not sharp.  It is therefore necessary that we solve this problem, since it is likely that, if it remains unsolved, it will lead to the most devastating consequences after we are gone.  The Jews should all be pushed off (abgeschoben) to the East.  We are not very interested in what becomes of them after that.  They have wished this fate upon themselves, they have started the war, and they must now pay the price.

Once again, Jews are to be “pushed off to the East.”  And, “We are not very interested in what becomes of them after that.” Harsh and brutal, perhaps, but clearly far less than genocide.

Matt then quotes Hans Frank.  First, “liquidate” (liquidieren) does not imply murder.  To ‘liquidate’ is to ‘make fluid,’ and to dissolve, in some sense.  In reference to masses or organizations, it means to dissolve the social unit or organization so that it no longer exists as a unit.  For example, Germans often “liquidated” a given camp or prisoner facility by dismantling it and shipping people out.  In no such case was everyone killed.  To “liquidate” Jewry is to dissolve their social organization (“destroy” it), and then ship the people out (Ausrotten, ‘root them out’), so that they no longer exist in society as a social unit.

But let’s look at more of what Frank said.  This is from his memo of December 16:

What is to happen to the Jews [after evacuation]? … We have in the General Government an estimated 2.5 million Jews—perhaps with those closely related to Jews and what goes with it, now 3.5 million Jews.  We can’t shoot these 3.5 million Jews, we can’t poison them…

Obviously he and Goebbels, at least, were unaware of any program of genocide.  They were thinking strictly in terms of mass evacuation and deportation.²¹

In both his pieces, Matt cites Himmler at Posen, using his language to make a point about mass murder.  But as usual, Matt gives us an incomplete picture.  Here are the full, relevant passages from both the Oct 4 and Oct 6 Posen speeches, including the key German words:

Oct 4:  I am thinking now of the evacuation [Evakuierung] of the Jews, the extermination [Ausrottung] of the Jewish people. It is one of those things that is easy to say: ‘The Jewish people will be exterminated [ausgerottet],’ says every Party comrade, ‘that is quite clear, it is in our program: deactivation [Ausschaltung] of the Jews, extermination [Ausrottung]; that is what we are doing.’

Oct 6:  We were faced with the question: what about the women and children? – I decided to find a clear solution to this problem too. I did not consider myself justified to [only] exterminate [auszurotten] the men – in other words, to kill them or have them killed and allow the avengers of our sons and grandsons in the form of their children to grow up. The difficult decision had to be made to have this people disappear [verschwinden] from the earth.

From October 4, Himmler is clearly equating Ausrottung (‘extermination’) with evacuation.  It is, furthermore, a kind of ‘deactivation.’  If “every Party comrade” knows this, it obviously cannot be a Reich secret about mass murder.  October 6 is different; here, Ausrottung means killed.  But Himmler seems to be referring to the partisan (fighter) Jews and their families; such people must “disappear from the earth.”  He never says “all Jews” or “millions of Jews,” in either speech.  And no mention of gassing, Treblinka, Auschwitz, and so on. 

But let me grant Matt the point for a moment.  Even if Himmler called for the killing of all Jews—even then, that doesn’t mean it was possible, or that it happened.  Leaders proclaim, assert, and demand all kinds of things, many of which never materialize.  If they want or demand impossible things, or insist upon something that, after the fact, never happened, we should hardly be surprised.

Matt’s (O) next link, to something “Hitler said,” goes again to a Tweet; Twitter is not an authoritative source for anything.  It shows a book page—but what is the book?  Once we know, then we can evaluate.

Matt then quotes Ribbentrop, but this one hurts his cause more than helps it.  If the Jews are to be either “exterminated” or “sent to concentration camps”, then the evident meaning is:  Jews are either shipped out (‘ex-terminated’) or confined (and not killed).  Ribbentrop obviously did not mean “either killed or killed”!

But then he cites Goebbels’ diary again, from very late in the war (14 Mar 1945).  At this point, the outcome was clear.  The chief instigators—on the Germans’ view, Jewish capitalists (to the west) and Jewish Bolsheviks (to the east)—were responsible for the deaths of 4.5 or 5 million German soldiers and perhaps 2 million civilians. Finally (and for the only time in his diary!), Goebbels called for Jews to be killed en masse.  Where was such talk in 1940 or 1941 or 1942??

But What About those “Six Million”?

In his rebuttal, Matt (R) admits, helpfully, that the 6M is “not an academically rigorous estimate,” and indeed, that it is merely “a symbolic representation.”  This agrees with the revisionist view.  But then he moves on to excuses:  All mass-killings do this, he says; and after all, some traditionalists, like Hilberg, have argued for less (5.1 million); and that the decades of “6 million” dead or suffering Jews, prior to WW2, tell us nothing (pay no attention to that man behind the curtain!). 

First, it is elementary morality to point out that just because “everyone does it” doesn’t make something right.  Yes, every aggrieved party has incentive to exaggerate their dead—precisely my point.  Hilberg argued for 5.1 million his whole life, and yet never could justify even this reduced total—which no one else ever really endorsed—with a breakdown by cause and by year (even a rough one).  Matt could have mentioned Gerald Reitlinger, who defended a total of 4.2 million.  But today, 4.2 million would get you branded as an evil revisionist!  Maybe even, God forbid, a “denier”! 

But Matt once again misses the point.  When Yad Vashem says “nearly six million Jews had been murdered,” and the US Holocaust Museum says “The Holocaust was the systematic, state-sponsored persecution and murder of six million European Jews,” and when the Holocaust Encyclopedia (2001, p. 139) says “The round figure of 6 million admits of no serious doubt”—what do you think they mean?  They are not accepting Hilberg, or Reitlinger, or any such estimate.  Of course, they never really tell you what they would accept—this is part of the strategy—but based on common sense, they should accept 5.9 million, 5.8 million, maybe 5.5 million.  But not fewer, surely.  (Or are they “mistaken” on this issue too?)

And then what about all those NYT stories, dating back to the late 1800s, of “6 million” dead or dying Jews?  Obviously it is not a “decades long conspiracy”.  What it is, is a fixation on a symbolic number—“6” has special meaning in the orthodox Jewish community—that came to represent “all the Jews” or “all suffering Jews.”  It was like a shorthand for Jewish suffering: “6 million” dead, dying, or suffering. 

Matt would do well to read my Chapter 3 in Debating the Holocaust, or my recent article “The Holocaust of Six Million Jews—in World War I.”  There he would find a detailed and specific list of such citations, including the fact that there was (1) a Jewish “holocaust” in Russia between 1903 and 1911 in which “6 million” died or were persecuted, (2) a Jewish “holocaust” during World War One, in which another “6 million” died or were threatened, and then, incredibly, (3) a third Jewish “holocaust” during WW2 in which yet another “6 million” died.  It beggars belief, to say the least. 

In a further attempt at defense, he refers to Mathis’ silly article, claiming, in all of two short paragraphs (and one table), that between 1857 and 1939, there were NYT references to “1 million Jews,” “2 million Jews,” etc up to “10 million”, such that “6 million” had no special preponderance.  But (a) Mathis gives us no actual quotations at all (unlike what I do), and (b) there is no claim that there were “1 million dead/suffering Jews,” “2 million dead/suffering”, etc.  Nor is there any connection with those other figures and a “holocaust.”  Mathis has a lot more documentation to do before he convinces anyone.²²

Bottom line: Matt still owes us a plausible breakdown, of rough figures, by year and by major cause, that adds up to (or close to) 6 million.  From his (O), he seems to want to defend the following:

            Mass shootings:                       “nearly 2 million”

            Reinhardt + Chelmno:  “about 1.5 million”

            Auschwitz-Birkenau:    “1 million”

            Ghettos, marches, other:           “over 700,000”

            TOTAL:                       about 5.2 million

Is this correct?  If so, he risks being branded as a “revisionist”, since virtually all major sources insist on something close to 6 million (Hilberg is the lone exception, but no one else is willing to go there.)  Furthermore, is it too much to ask to break those numbers down by year: 1940, 1941, 1942, 1943, 1944, and 1945?  I presume that is possible, since this is, after all, “the most well-documented event in history”.  I await these figures; they would tell us much.

And not just him: Matt needs to show us that other major players in the Holocaust fiasco can do this.  Otherwise, a mere list of numbers from some random blogger like Matt holds no water.  (If Matt can document his particular expertise, such as with a list of publications, he owes us that too.)

Coerced Testimony

In order to wrap up this rebuttal, I’ll say little here about testimony by captured Germans, other than to point out the obvious:  a “judicial” system run by victorious allies, out for revenge, and hell-bent on “proving” German crimes, had plenty of incentive—and no inhibition—to use the most vicious means of obtaining testimony.  See, for example, the testimony by Julius Streicher,²³ or the book Cruel Britannia by Ian Cobain. 

Then there is the fact that high-profile testifiers like Rudolf Höss and Adolf Eichmann have included such transparent absurdities in their statements that they can only have come from coercion or torture.  Obviously, when there is a gun to your head, you will say anything.

To close here: My “alternate narrative” is of some 9 million European Jews who were first encouraged, then compelled to leave Europe, by a National Socialist government that came to power in 1933 and which was then thrust into a war in 1939, on two fronts.  In their eyes, Jews both within and outside of Germany were belligerent and destructive people, and who therefore had to leave the Reich.²⁴  Over the course of the war, some 500,000 perished in a variety of ways, none in gas chambers.  Many thousands of others were sent far away (many behind the Iron Curtain), separated from family members, losing touch, and often changing names along the way, “never to be seen again.”  This was the tragedy of the Jews during the war.  But it was not “the Holocaust.”

---

1. Early on, Matt mentions “Hartheim Castle” as a further “gassing site”, though apparently without realizing that this “castle” (also called a “schloss” or “palace” or “mansion”, depending on the source) is actually part of the Chelmno/Kulmhof camp facility, not something in addition to it.

2. Source details are in my book Debating the Holocaust (4^th ed), 2020, Castle Hill, pp. 89-98.

3. Mattogno, C. 2018. The Einsatzgruppen in the Occupied Eastern Territories. Castle Hill, p. 271.

4. And not merely “hundreds” or even “thousands”, but “hundreds of thousands”.  There should be so many bodies, or so much ash, out there that we should be inundated by evidence.  But we have virtually nothing.

5. The reader is invited to search on Sturdy Colls and review any of her small handful of articles or books.

6. Matt’s (R) link under “zero evidence” (of resettlement) goes to—his own YouTube video.  Is this legit?

7. Details in my book Debating the Holocaust (pp. 149-150).

8. In their book Treblinka (2016), Castle Hill, p. 43.

9. “Camps” in Oxford Handbook of Holocaust Studies (2010), p. 370.

10. Another idiotic alleged process, one that would never have been implemented by the efficient Germans.

11. Sometimes basic math is all we need to expose the absurdity: 500,000 bodies packed into 20,000 cubic meters means (500k/20k=) 25 bodies per cubic meter!  Recall that a cubic meter is roughly a box that is 3 ft x 3 ft x 3 ft.  Picture such a box, and then imagine fitting 25 dead bodies into that box—impossible.

12. “Tens of thousands”—say, 30,000 or 40,000—at Belzec is fully compatible with the revisionist thesis.

13.  If, say, another 100,000 Jews died or were killed in 1943, and another 100,000 in 1944, that would virtually match the revisionist estimate. 

14.  I know it well, having visited on two separate occasions.

15. Notably, this is “the” gas chamber for 90% of Auschwitz tourists, most of whom never see the far more consequential ruins at Birkenau. Also notably, K1 has been significantly altered and modified since the war in order to conform to expectations of a “gas chamber”; this is why French anti-revisionist Eric Conan wrote that “Everything there is false.” Hence, good strategy on Matt’s part to bypass this one.  (In his (R) he includes a quick, passing notice to K1 that contains no details at all; fewer questions that way.)

16. In his (R) he adds a quick, passing, parenthetical mention to the bunkers, which, as he knows, will go unnoticed by virtually every reader.

17. Cited from G. Rudolf, Lectures on the Holocaust (2011), p. 385.

18. F. Meyer, Die Zahl der Opfer von Auschwitz. Osteuropa 52(5).

19. See my Debating the Holocaust, pp. 76-77.

20. Thomas Dalton, Goebbels on the Jews (2019), Castle Hill.

21. Matt needs to sharpen up his citations.  His link to “Frank declared…” directs to a Tweet; the actual source is Nazi Conspiracy and Aggression, vol 12, chap 16—for those interested in following up.

22. And who the hell is “Andrew Mathis” anyway?  Does he have any proven expertise in this field, or any field?  When you click on his profile, you find out that he “enjoys skinny-skiing and going to bullfights on acid.”  Now there’s a reliable source!

23.  In Streicher, Rosenberg, and the Jews (T. Dalton, 2020, Castle Hill).

24. There is a long history of commentary, by the Germans and others, of opposition to belligerent and troublesome Jews; see Thomas Dalton, Eternal Strangers (2020, Castle Hill), esp. pp. 60-65.