Templeton Times: Frequently Asked Questions About The Holocaust From The West and rense.com


Frequently Asked Questions About The Holocaust From The_West 9-9-7
1) What is historical revisionism?

As more facts about past events come to light, it becomes necessary to re-evaluate them taking the new information into account. All history is constantly being reviewed. It is a natural process. It is an important process. The only way to judge the future is to accurately compare current trends and events to those of earlier times. It has been said that the good thing about experience is that one can recognize a mistake when it is made again. So it is with history, the sum of recorded human experience. Historical revisionism is the process of changing the human record so that it more accurately represents events as they actually occurred. Often there is resistance to the process of bringing history in accord with the facts. The reason for this is history is not simply a record of events, but is also a resource from which a world view is drawn. A re- examination or re-evaluation of important historical events can be viewed as a threat to the political status quo and to interests upon whose power partially rests the established view of these events. It has also been said that historians have the power to upset everything. Vested interests take a dim view of having everything upset.

2) What is the Holocaust?

The Holocaust, or Shoah, is the term used to label the fate of the Jews of Europe at the hands of the Nazis during World War Two. It is a broad term used to cover all events involving Europe's Jews usually between 1933 and 1945, and especially during the six year period between November 1938 (Kristallnacht) and November 1944 (alleged Himmler order to stop the Final Solution program) . Six extermination centers are said to have been established between 1941 and 1943 by the Nazis in Poland for the purpose of killing Jews and "other minorities." The number of Jews killed by the Nazis during this period is generally estimated to have been six million.

A) "The Holocaust" : An all-encompassing neologism used in reference to the (alleged) extermination of European Jews by the Nazis during World War Two. Use of the term in this context presumes the following:

(1) The Nazis implemented and succeeded in a premeditated plan to destroy (not resettle) European Jewry,

(2) Approximately six million or more Jews perished as a result, and

(3) A majority of these were killed by use of poison gas (Zyklon B) [and internal combustion engine exhaust] in gas chambers built for the purpose of taking human life. [...]

3) Do revisionists 'deny the Holocaust'?

The phrase "Holocaust denial" was invented by a Holoscribe named Deborah Lipstadt who occupies the Dorot Chair in Modern Jewish and Holocaust Studies at Emory University. Its purpose is to imply Holocaust revisionists are not rational in their opinions. Dr. Lipstadt believes the current view of the Holocaust cannot be questioned and debate on the topic cannot be tolerated. To this end she created the epithet "Holocaust denier."

Revisionists are skeptical of postwar testimony of gas chambers at the Nazi concentration camps and are of the opinion the six million figure is a baseless exaggeration. It is not a matter of denying anything. The issue is whether this emotionally charged and politically important event can be examined critically. Researchers--some professional, some amateur--have been questioning aspects of the Nazi extermination story since the war ended fifty years ago. The evidence has been difficult to obtain, but in the last twenty-five years enough has been gathered to conclude the gas chamber story is definitely false and the Nazi program to kill the Jews is a myth. The problem that has arisen is established political interests have done their best to suppress this research and prevent the evidence to support these startling conclusions from being presented to the general public.

4) What aspects of the Holocaust do revisionists believe to be supported by evidence?

Here is a summary of what happened to the Jews:

Before the war, the Nazis encouraged emigration of German Jewry. Laws were instituted and governmental pressures were brought to bear to make life more difficult for Jews in many professions which Jews came to dominate in the Weimar Republic. The 'Ha'avara' or transfer agreement was reached with Zionist leaders to facilitate the emigration of German Jews to Palestine. Emigrating Jews very often were forced to abandon much of their wealth when they left Germany. After the defeat of France, a plan was discussed by the Nazis to remove the Jews from Europe to the French colony on Madagascar. This plan was soon dropped in favor of a resettlement plan which transferred Jews into ghettos and work camps inside Soviet territory following the invasion of the Soviet Union in 1941. This was to be the first stage toward the ultimate creation of a Jewish homeland after the war.

As the Germans invaded and the Russians retreated, large shifts in population occurred in eastern Europe. This shift went from west to east. Tens of millions of people were involved. Many were forcibly deported into the Russian interior. Others willingly accompanied the Communists as the Red Army retreated eastward. General Gehlen estimated in his memoirs that a third of the population in the areas the German army was to occupy was evacuated eastward ahead of the German invasion.

Since Jews were viewed by many eastern Europeans as willing accomplices of the Communists who had occupied the area in the years and months preceding the German assault, pogroms occurred after the retreat of the Red Army and prior to arrival of the German army. Many of these assaults on local Jews were in reaction to the murdering of political prisoners by the Soviet police as they prepared to retreat. These events left areas of eastern Europe, now occupied by the German Wehrmacht and under Nazi administration depopulated. The Nazis took the situation as an opportunity to remove Jews eastward into the areas abandoned during the Soviet retreat. Jews were assembled at train terminals and deported to ghettos and concentration camps established for them in the east. Some Jews were not deported, however, due to the fact their work was considered too important to the German war effort.

A result of the tremendous movement of people is many families and communities were scattered and people lost contact with one another. Many of these contacts were not reestablished after the war due to a multitude of reasons the greatest of which were the splitting of Europe in two after the war and the establishment of the state of Israel. Guerrilla groups were formed to fight the Nazi occupation. A campaign of sabotage and assassination by these groups was countered by repression on the part of the occupiers in the form of the Einsatz groups. The Einsatzgruppe fought the partisans in ways which included reprisal shooting of civilians. Jews were believed to make up the majority of partisans. They were also the people targeted for reprisals. These reprisals took several forms which included the shooting of hostages or their deportation to ghettos and concentration camps.

During the summer of 1942 a major typhus epidemic swept the Nazi concentration camp system. The most severely affected camp was Auschwitz camp in Poland. The epidemic continued for many months. Crematories were built in some of the concentration camps as part of hygienic measures established to fight the epidemics. The fumigant Zyklon B was used to exterminate the typhus-bearing body louse which spread the disease. The total number of Jews and others who died in the camps is not known, but the total is probably in the hundreds of thousands. As the Germans suffered military reversals in 1944 and 1945, the Nazis took many who were in labor camps with them as they retreated westward. Others were left behind. As this happened, tens of millions of people were again uprooted as civilians abandoned almost everything in an effort to escape the approaching Red Army. The migration in 1941-42 was eastward. In 1944-45 it was westward.

In the beginning, Europe's Jewish communities were concentrated in eastern Europe. By the end of the war, Europe's Jews were still in eastern Europe, but the communities were shattered. Tens of millions of people, particularly Germans and Jews were left homeless by the war. As a result, millions of Jews emigrated. Many settled in Palestine. Many more moved to North America. Others settled in Australia, South America, and South Africa. The war was a boon for the Zionist movement.

The Holocaust become the founding myth of modern day Israel. As such it became an excuse for behavior of the Israelis which would have been inexcusable. It also became the excuse for billions of dollars in aid and 'reparations' being sent to Israel from Germany and the United States even though Israel did not exist during the war and its citizens were not subject to Nazi repression. Much of the aid the new Zionist state was to receive was for the purpose of resettling European refugees who did not want to go there, but had little alternative at the time.

5) What aspects of the Holocaust do revisionists believe to be unsupported by evidence?

While there is no universal agreement on many aspects of WWII and the Holocaust, but one might be classified as a Holocaust revisionist if one is skeptical of the following:

* Hitler ordered the extermination of the Jews in writing , orally, or through mental telepathy.

* The Nazis cremated 1,500,000 to 4,000,000 bodies at Auschwitz/Birkenau in less than two years using between 30 and 52 single-body crematory ovens and were able to keep it all a secret until late 1944 despite the fact Auschwitz was a major bombing target photographed by American planes throughout that year.

* The Nazis were able to destroy all documentation of the extermination program before the total German surrender in mid 1945. This despite the fact all German secret codes had been broken by the British and many SS communications had been intercepted by them.

6) Wasn't the Holocaust proven at the war crimes trials?

No. The NMT and IMT set out to prove nothing. The crimes themselves were never an issue. The courts took judicial notice of the crimes.. This means the crimes were assumed to be true based purely on the allegations. No proof was needed. The war crimes tribunals also suspended the normal rules of evidence. They accepted into evidence documents, hearsay testimony, and other material which would never be accepted in anything other than a sham court. The point of the tribunals was to demonstrate the moral authority of the new world powers. In demonizing the Nazi regime through these trials England, France, The United States, and the U.S.S.R secured their positions as the occupiers of Germany and justified the annexation of German territory along with the expulsions of millions of Germans into the dismembered rump Germany. Allied plans for the future of Germany at that time included the de- industrialization of Germany. The standard of living was to be the lowest in Europe. The economy was to be agrarian despite the fact it being the most densely populated nation on the continent. In this context, it had to be shown to the world and the Germans themselves that they were evil and deserved the horrendous treatment they were to receive. The country was to be "de-Nazified" and reduced to the point where Germany could "never threaten world peace again." Since the nature of the war crimes trials was purely political, nothing that went into them or came out of them should be taken at face value.

7) Didn't the Nazis themselves admit there was a program to exterminate the Jews?

a) Since the war crimes courts took judicial notice of the crimes, pleading innocent on the basis the crime did not occur was not an option. The strategy of many defendants was demonstrate non-involvement or distance themselves from the alleged crime. Backbiting and finger- pointing were also common. In order to save their lives, the accused placed blame on others- particularly people who were either dead, or had evaded capture by the Allies. The jailers of the Nazis used torture and threats of torture to obtain many confessions. Sometimes threats against the prisoners' families were made. For some, like Rudolf Hoess, sleep deprivation was used to get them to sign confessions. The contents of confessions such as those by Hoess and Kurt Gerstein are enough to simply throw them out as evidence. They contain internal contradictions, absurdities, and facts that are verifiably false. Nevertheless most high Nazi officials who survived to be tried disputed the charge that the final solution to the Jewish question involved their elimination though mass murder . Julius Streicher stated he believed it was technically impossible to kill that many people and simply did not believe it was true or even attempted.

8) Do the photographs taken at the Nazi concentration camps at the end of the war prove the Nazis were exterminating people?

a) How often have we heard the phrase "bodies stacked like cordwood"? Certainly, the photos of the sickening conditions in some of the Nazi concentration camps in the spring of 1945 were not faked, but they were taken out of context. Many concentration camp prisoners survived the war in very good physical condition. Others died for a variety of reasons.

As World War Two approached its conclusion in Europe, Germany was a chaotic mess. The Allies controlled the sky all over Germany. One of the missions of the Allied pilots was to disrupt German communications as much as possible. This meant they shot at just about anything that moved. Trains with supplies bound to concentration camps were attacked just like any other train. Rail lines, roads, bridges, and airstrips were bombed and destroyed to prevent the supply and movement of the German army.

As Germany collapsed upon itself, it suffered from many shortages. This included medicine, food and fuel. Not being the highest priority, concentration camps were affected as well. Some camps had not received supplies for days before the British or American troops arrived. Add to this the Germans retreat. Prisoners were evacuated from labor camps near the fronts and moved to other camps. As a result, the remaining camps became extremely overcrowded. Combine the overcrowding with the lack of food and medicine. Conditions became perfect for the outbreak of epidemics. This is what happened.

Bergen Belsen which had been designed by the SS as a sick camp in the waning days of the war became the destination of many prisoners who were already sick from other camps. A typhus epidemic was raging there when the British captured the camp where an uncounted number-usually estimated to be between 10,000 and 30,000- of prisoners died primarily from disease. Similar circumstances contributed to the awful conditions discovered at Dachau, Buchenwald, and several other concentration camps. Germany's enemies used the scenes of dead and dying prisoners as documentary evidence of German malevolence.

While the pictures are authentic, the films of bodies being bulldozed into trench graves do not tell the whole story. There was a war going on. It is in this context that these pictures need to be viewed. There are several reasons the Germans didn't simply release those in the camps. Many of the inmates were common criminals. Many were politically anti-German or anti-Nazi. Those infected with disease posed the threat of spreading the epidemics into the countryside if allowed to roam Germany. The healthy prisoners had nowhere to go. There was a war raging all around. Their homes were on the other side of the battle lines. Additionally, the likelihood that freed prisoners would form criminal gangs was too high for them to be released. Many were imprisoned because they were considered risks to security to begin with. Releasing them to roam the countryside was out of the question.

9) Do captured German documents prove the Nazi regime was exterminating people

No. Quite the opposite is true. Documents such as Wannsee Protocol state quite clearly that the final solution to the Jewish question was a program of evacuation and resettlement in the East. The conditions under which this population transfer took place were not ideal and were in some cases inhumane or even cruel. Executions took place. Many families and communities were shattered in the process. It is shameful, but something very different from an intentional mass murder of the Jews.

Other documents which are erroneously presented to support the thesis extermination was the intent of the resettlement program generally depend on postwar interpretation of supposed "code words" the SS used. The interpretation of these code words as indicating there was a policy to murder the Jews depend on postwar testimony. This means the proof is not in the documents but in the testimony. In addition to the resettlement program documents, Einsatzgruppe records are also offered as proof of an extermination program which targeted Jews. The aim of the Einsatzgruppe was to fight communist guerrillas inside captured Soviet territory. Some partisan groups were largely ethnically Jewish. The Einsatzgruppe targeted Jewish civilians for reprisals when partisans committed acts of sabotage or murder. The Einsatzgruppe documents indicate hundreds of thousands of Jews were killed.

Some historians, however, question the accuracy and even the authenticity of many of these records since the source of these is Stalin's Soviet Union. There is definitely a subset of documents offered as proof of an extermination program that are forgeries produced for the war crimes trials. These exist in the form of "certified copies" of documents the originals of which are nowhere to be found. One of the most notable examples of this type of document is the Franke-Gricksch "Resettlement-Action Report". A final category of suspicious documents are those which appear damning but for some odd reason the signer of the documents was not prosecuted even though he was in Allied custody. Dr. Butz discusses a case concerning documents relating to the deportation of Hungary's Jews where the signer was simply let go. The implication here is the Allies agreed to let the Nazi official go in exchange for him signing some bogus documents. The documents could then be used as evidence against a "bigger" Nazi.

10) What was 'the Jewish question?'

The Jewish question was 'What was to be done with an ethnic minority with no homeland of its own which refuses to assimilate into the dominant German culture?'.

11) What was 'the final solution to the Jewish question' if it was not extermination?

A) The Wannsee Protocol states the following:

II[...] The primary responsibility for the administrative handling of the Final Solution of the Jewish Problem will rest with the Reich Leader SS and the Chief of the German Police [...] -regardless of geographic boundaries.[...] The most important aspects are-

a. Forcing the Jews out of the various fields of the community life of the German people.

b. Forcing the Jews out of the living space of the German people. In execution of these efforts there was undertaken - as the only possible provisional solution - the acceleration of the emigration of the Jews from Reich territory on an intensified and methodical scale.[...]

III The emigration program has now been replaced by the evacuation of the Jews to the East as a further solution possibility, in accordance with previous authorization by the Fuehrer. [...] ======

Because the retreating Soviets had depopulated areas later captured by the advancing Nazis in 1941 by as much as a third, or twenty-two million people, the Nazis leadership decided to expel the Jews under their control to ghettos and labor camps in the east as a step toward a final expulsion to a Jewish homeland/reservation/ghetto-nation which was to be set up outside Europe after the war. The final solution was the expulsion of all Jews from Europe, not their murder. Even so, it did not matter to the Nazis if people died in the process. The Nazis believed such a move was needed because Jews were viewed as a threat to national morale and security during the war.

12) What is the origin of the six million figure?

The six million figure is not based on any body count, records, or census. The number came into use during the war in Zionist propaganda and appears to have symbolic numerological significance. When the digits in six million are summed they add up to six. Six million is six times ten raised to the sixth power. In numerology the number six is considered 'perfect'. Six is the number of days God used to create the earth in the story of creation in the book of Genesis. It holds a special significance for the Jews who use the hexagram as their symbol. In the Holocaust itself, the six million figure was used in propaganda emanating from Zionist and Jewish organizations as early as 1941. Before the Russian Bolshevic revolution, anti-Czarist propaganda generated by Jews used the six million figure in describing the magnitude of the plight of Russian Jews under the Czar. The chief rabbi of Britain recently called for the re-examination of the six million figure which he considered totally arbitrary in nature.

13) Where did the six million Jews go if they were not killed?

Since the six million number is not based on a census or survey or any other type of documentation, this question cannot be answered in an accounting 'balance sheet' type manner. However, a general explanation is possible. There are several circumstances one has to keep in mind when considering what happened to the Jews of Europe between 1939 and 1948.

Before the outbreak of the war, the Jews of Europe were concentrated in the east. Poland, The Soviet Union, Hungary, and other countries that fell into the Soviet sphere of influence after the war contained the bulk of the population in question. Since the very definition of Jew changed with the governments, no accounting of how many Jews remained in these areas after the defeat of Nazi Germany is possible, but everything indicates a large Jewish population remained after the end of the war. During the war, populations in eastern Europe shifted several times. In 1939, Nazi Germany invaded Poland and occupied the western half. Stalin's U.S.S.R. occupied the eastern half. During the period that followed, many Jews shifted to the Soviet half. The Russians deported millions of people into the Russian interior ahead of the German invasion.

When Nazi Germany attacked The U.S.S.R. in 1941, the German army found that the areas they were to occupied had been depopulated by the Soviets of a third of its people. The Germans estimate 22 million people were moved eastward into the Soviet interior from Poland, Ukraine, White Russia, the Baltic States and other regions the Germans were to temporarily take from the Soviets. As the Communists retreated, the Soviet secret police, known under the acronyms NKVD and OGPU, murdered thousands of political prisoners in Poland, the Baltic states, and Ukraine. In reaction to these murders the local populations killed many Jews because the Jews were viewed as collaborators in the Communist occupation and the suppression of nationalist organizations. In late 1941, the Nazis began deporting Jews from central and eastern Europe into the areas captured from the Soviets. These were generally concentrated into Ghettos and labor camps. The conditions under which these expulsions took place were far from ideal and many thousands died in the process. In addition, over one million Jews are believed to be serving in the Red Army during the time with over one hundred thousand dying while in uniform.

As the Germans retreated in 1944 and 1945, millions of people from the east came with them. Some came willingly in order to avoid the Red Army. Others, mostly conscripted for labor, were forcibly evacuated. Millions of people, mostly ethnic Germans, died during this collapse of Nazi Germany through expulsions that came during and after the defeat as part of the brutal occupation of the Allies. Germany lost a fourth of its territory. Poland was shifted westward. The Baltic countries would not regain their independence for decades. After Germany's surrender, Europe was a chaotic mess with millions of refugees from scattered communities wandering in all directions. There was no way to determine how many Jews had died at that point despite the fact that the six million figure had been part of the anti-German propaganda long before the war was over.

During the war years and the first years after the war, millions of people--Jews included--left Europe for other parts of the world including the U.S., the Middle East, Australia, Canada, South America, and South Africa. In the case of the Jews, there were organizations assisting their relocation, particularly to British- controlled Palestine. It is very easy to claim a European Jewish population on eleven million in 1939 and a Jewish population of five million in 1945, but there is no way to verify either number. Nevertheless, simply due the fact that there were massive shifts in population in the areas where Jews were most concentrated and much of the most ruthless and destructive warfare was practiced in eastern Europe, it is very likely Jewish casualties were heavy and may have exceeded one million dead. The remainder of the 'missing' were absorbed into the U.S.S.R. or moved to The U.S., Palestine/Israel, Argentina, South Africa and other countries.

14) Why would concentration camp survivors lie about their treatment?

There are a variety of reasons former prisoners of the Nazis would lie about their treatment.

A. Many concentration camp inmates were imprisoned not simply for ethnic reasons. They were there because they were common criminals. Some of these people were not honest to begin with and used this opportunity to turn the tables on their former captors. It is a way to take revenge and to distract attention away from their own crimes.

B. Many concentration camp inmates were there for political reasons-- particularly communists. They might lie for ideological reasons. Alleging atrocities and abuse would help to discredit the Nazi regime and system that imprisoned them.. On a more personal level, communists and Jews who spent the war in a camp working for the Nazis need to justify their actions while in custody. This usually entailed working in German shops and factories for the Germans. Claiming heavy abuse, or involvement in sabotage are ways of satisfying questions of personal political hygiene.

C. Some former prisoners testified to abuse after their liberation from the Nazis simply because that was what was expected of them from their liberators. In the postwar trials some people became paid professional prosecution witnesses who were willing to testify to just about anything. Perjury by prosecution witnesses was not something that was punished-instead it was often encouraged.

15) Why do revisionists not find the eyewitness testimony credible?

Eyewitness testimony, even when it is not politically motivated, is the lowest quality of evidence. Memory is a very malleable thing even under normal circumstances. In the highly charged atmosphere of the ideological conflict that destroyed a major part of Europe, the testimony of people who have good reason to hold a grudge should be highly suspect and examined carefully. When inspected critically, many of the cornerstone testimonies regarding the Holocaust contain many factual errors and absurdities. Another important point to consider is the circumstances under which the testimonies--particularly those of the Nazis-were obtained. Torture was used in some cases to obtain "confessions." In others, threats were made against the lives and health of members of the "war criminal's" family. Under the conditions that prevailed at the end of the war, the Allied governments could obtain any sort of testimony they wanted to get. And they did. It is not just the revisionists who view the supposed eyewitness testimony with caution; Authors like Arno Mayer, J.C. Pressac, and Tom Segev also are aware of just how unreliable "survivor" and other postwar testimony is. Despite this, these authors regard this testimony to be, in a general sense, true even though they are exaggerated, or contain hearsay information.

16) Why does the U.S. government endorse the Holocaust story?

World War Two was the event which drew the United States back onto the global political scene after following a politically neutral foreign policy since the end of World War I. It defined the United States as the world's economic and military superpower, with only the Stalinist U.S.S.R. as a major competitor. The U.S. began to follow an ideologically messianic foreign policy under Roosevelt which sought to internationalize the New Deal. This political messianism solidified and became more sharply defined under Truman and the development of the Cold War. Part of the justification for the international role the U.S. has played has been its new obligation to fight 'evil' regimes and protect 'democratic' ones. The paradigm for the U.S. role in international politics is its involvement in W.W.II and the paradigm for the 'evil' it is fighting is Hitler and Nazi Germany--particularly as it has become defined in its attempt to exterminate the Jews.

Since Stalin, our ally, could be argued to be every bit as evil as Hitler, a reason had to found to define what made Nazi Germany so much more evil than Soviet Russia. The idea that we fought Germany because Hitler declared war after extensive U.S. provocation does not serve an active interventionist policy. The Holocaust serves the purpose of justifying U.S. political messianism which insisted on the unconditional surrender of Germany, bombed German cities into ruins, suppressed German economic recovery for three years after the surrender, and put the country under U.S. military occupation for nearly fifty more.

Questioning the Holocaust therefore would also be a round-about threat to messianic myth which drives U.S. interventionist foreign policy. There are other factors involved in the U.S. endorsement of the Holocaust which involve its prosecution of 'Nazi war criminals' at the show trials that followed the war; Except for the alleged attempt to exterminate the Jews, the U.S., British, and the Soviets committed all of the same crimes they accused and hanged the Nazis for. Of course, not least of all, the political power wielded by the 'AIPAC' and other branches of the 'Jewish lobby' work to ride herd on the U.S. government when it feels its interests are threatened. The Holocaust is Zionism's most important political tool and weapon.

17) Why does the current German government endorse the Holocaust story?

The postwar German government of West Germany, based in Bonn, which has become the government of a reunified Germany has endorsed and protects the Holocaust story by law because West Germany wished to rejoin the community of nations that had rejected it during the war years. In order to do that West Germany had to demonstrate its rejection of its Nazi past. Part of this act of contrition is its recognition and support of the Zionist state of Israel which states in its declaration of independence that the reason for its foundation was the Holocaust.

Any rejection of the Holocaust story by the German government would be regarded as a sign of backsliding by the United States, Israel, the international Jewish lobby organizations, such as the World Jewish Congress, and other interested parties. In exchange Germany has again been allowed to become a major political and economic force in Europe. The myth that the Nazi regime was composed of a few thugs who intimidated the German nation and that therefore Germans are not collectively guilty for the sins of Nazi Germany has been promulgated as part of the new German political order. A re-examination of the twelve years of Nazi rule is viewed by the German establishment as potentially having only negative results. It prefers the status quo where it pretends to be a new Germany which has rejected its past rather than a creature of the Allied occupying powers.

18) What was the purpose of Nazi concentration camps like Auschwitz, Treblinka, Belzec, Sobibor, and so forth?

The Nazi concentration camp system served as a source of labor and income for the SS which rented prison labor to private industry. It was a prison system for common criminals and political enemies. Auschwitz and Birkenau held many unemployed prisoners, many of them with no job skills or too sick to work. These included inmates with chronic illnesses such as tuberculosis. Some camps were designated transit camps where Jews being resettled in ghettos in the East were deloused before being sent on to their final destinations. In some cases Jews were placed in quarantine before being sent to their final destinations to prevent the introduction of diseases like typhus into the Eastern ghettos. This is not to say many Poles, Gypsies, and others did not die in the Nazi concentration camps. They did, but the context of their deaths is quite different than the one usually portrayed.

19) Why was the Wannsee conference held?

Because of the rapid acquisition of huge amounts of territory which had been depopulated by the retreating communists, the Nazi leadership saw this as an opportunity to expel the Jews. Germany now had control of an area into which to put them until the end of the war. Because of the war, an international boycott of German goods and limits on immigration in Palestine and other areas, Germany had difficulty getting the Jews to emigrate. In addition, the defeat of Poland in 1939, and the annexation of Austria, and parts of Czechoslovakia before that brought millions of additional Jews under German control. The Wannsee conference was where Germany's new policy toward the Jews was outlined.

The Nazis believed the Jews constituted a security risk due to the 'stab in the back' of World War One in which they blamed the Jews for Germany's defeat. By expelling and isolating the Jews the Nazis hoped, among other things, to keep the Jews from agitating inside Germany and detrimentally affecting the morale of the country. They also believed Jews could not be assimilated and were a negative cultural influence. In the process of expulsion, many of the Jews being relocated would also be put to work on various projects related to the war effort in the east and according to the Wannsee protocol many were expected die in the process. After the war, it was planned that a homeland for the Jews would be created outside of Europe through an international agreement. The Jews resettled in Russia, would be relocated once again to this new, remote homeland once this expected agreement was reached.

20) What did Himmler refer to in his Posnan speech if not a policy of killing the Jews?

The quote from the October 4,1943 Himmler Posnan speech usually cited as evidence that the Nazis were attempting to exterminate the Jews is this:

'I am referring to the evacuation of the Jew, the annihilation of the Jewish people. This is one of these things that are easily said. "The Jewish people is going to be annihilated," says every party member. "Sure, it is our program, elimination of the Jews, annihilation-we'll take care of it." And then they all come trudging, 80 million worthy Germans, and every one has one decent Jew. Sure, the others are swine, but this one is an A-1 Jew. Of all those who talk this way, not one has been through it. Most of you must know what it means to see a hundred corpses lie side by side, or five hundred, or a thousand. To have stuck this out and - excepting cases of human weakness-to have kept our integrity, that is what has made us hard. In our history, this is an unwritten and never-to- be-written page of glory, for we know how difficult we would have made ourselves if today-amid the bombing raids, the hardships and the deprivations of war-we still had the Jews in every city as secret saboteurs, agitators, and demagogues. If the Jews still ensconced in the body of the German nation, we probably would have reached the 1916-17 stage by now.'

Some revisionists question the authenticity of the Posnan speech, while others believe it to be authentic. In any case, the meaning of this one paragraph taken from a long, rambling speech by Himmler to SS officials is ambiguous. Himmler does not mention gas chambers, or death camps, or specifically to mass killings. The meaning of this passage is unclear. Himmler speaks of large numbers of corpses and the "annihilation" of the Jews, but he also makes reference to "bombing raids, the hardships and the deprivations of war" which would also produce large numbers of corpses. Himmler does not say whose corpses are lying side by side. In 1943 Nazi Germany had suffered a major reversal of fortune on the Russian front. The SS was involved in fighting the Red Army and partisan guerrillas behind the front. To say Himmler is talking about killing large numbers of Jews in gas chambers is reading a lot into the text of this one paragraph. The point Himmler appears to be making in this quote is though expelling the Jews is a difficult, thankless task, but if it had not been done German morale would be low and Germany would have be suing for peace with the Russians because of internal disorder caused by the Jews. This quote should be taken in the context of the Nazi myth of the Jews stabbing Germany in the back and causing its defeat in World War I.

21) Weren't gas chambers for killing people found at some of the Nazi concentration camps when they were captured by the Allied armies?

No. The 'gas chambers' on display at Dachau and Auschwitz were originally crematory morgues. The Dachau crematory morgue was altered by the U.S. Army and Soviet Army into mock-up 'gas chambers disguised as a shower' for 'educational' purposes. The one at Majdanek was actually a delousing chamber for the fumigation of mattresses and other material. Several forensic examinations of these rooms and others which are now in ruins conclude none of these facilities could have been used as execution chambers for the killing of large numbers of people. Their designs are all wrong. Despite the fact that these 'reconstructions' are displayed to hundreds of thousands of tourists every year, Holocaust historians such as Arno Mayer and Hugh Trevor-Roper admit nobody knows what the gas chambers looked like or how they operated. This is no reason not to believe the gas chambers are a myth according to these two authors, but others take a more skeptical view.

22) How many Jews died during the war if the 6 million is not the correct number?

This is not known, but several demographic studies indicate the number of Jews who lost their lives in the war from all causes is somewhere around one million persons. There are several difficulties in determining what the Jewish population is at any point in time. First, a definition has to be agreed upon. If the definition is religious, then a population decrease might be attributable to conversions to other faiths. Are those who no longer practice any religion to be counted? Once a definition is determined, how does one go about counting the population? Between 1939 when the Germans invaded Poland and the German surrender in 1945 uncounted millions of people were displaced by the war. People who lived in Poland in 1939 were in the U.S.S.R in 1945 and they didn't have to move at all. National borders were redrawn all over eastern Europe. In any case, taking a Jewish census was not a top priority in 1945 and none was taken. Most estimates of Jewish losses in Europe are baseless, or at least flawed in that they do not include Jewish population increases due to immigration in areas outside Europe during the 1930's through the 1950's. Even today in a world without the restrictions in communication that existed in the preceding five decades estimates in world Jewish population vary by several million persons depending on who is doing the estimating and how and why the guesses are being made.

23) What did the term 'selection' refer to?

Holocaust literature often uses 'selection' as meaning a process in which prisoners were segregated into a group that would be put to work and a group that would be put to death. Of course, the process of sorting prisoners by sex and age before the delousing procedure was a standard and implied nothing sinister since the prisoners had to strip in order to take a shower. The Nazi concentration camps generally segregated prisoners by sex with children under 14 staying with their mothers if an entire family was put into the camp. Prisoners were also selected and organized by the type of work that was assigned to them. Selections also took place when prisoners were to be reassigned to other camps, or were to be released. Many who spent time in Auschwitz served sentences of less than a year and went home after completing their sentence. In addition sick prisoners were triaged and sent to hospital blocks. Many of these procedures required a quick visual examination by an SS doctor who to part in the camp selections. The 'selection' process was part of routine camp procedures and has since been given an evil meaning in survivor testimony and Holocaust literature.

24) What did the term 'special treatment' refer to?

Several German words with the 'Sonder' or 'special' prefix have been designated as code words in the Holocaust lexicon. 'Sonderbehandlung' can mean many different things in German depending on the context. In many documents in the Auschwitz files, the 'Sonder' prefix designated something that had to do with the hygienic regimen that was instituted in the camps after the epidemics of the summer of 1942. There was 'special action', 'special treatment', 'baths for special purpose' and other terms which referred specifically to procedures put in place to control body lice and the spread of typhus.

25) What did the term 'special action' refer to?

The diary of SS doctor Josef Kremer makes repeated references to his taking part in 'special actions' while he was assigned to duty at Auschwitz during the Fall of 1942. This was during the worst time of the typhus epidemic at that camp. While his diary does not make clear what he was doing during one of these special actions, it appears his duty was one of giving clinical (i.e. visual) examinations to groups of prisoners being transferred from other camps and sub-camps of Auschwitz (e.g. Birkenau.) Because of the typhus epidemic many of prisoners were in very bad shape and prompted Kremer to record the horrible conditions that prevailed in the camp at the time. In his private diary he referred to Auschwitz as the butt hole of the world and compared it to Dante's Inferno. A 'special action' could refer to any number of activities at the camp. The use of this term in German refers to any unscheduled activities or duties performed that were outside the norm.

26) What is Zyklon-B used for?

Zykon-B is a commercially made fumigant designed to rid man-made structures, such as buildings, ships, silos, etc. of destructive pests including moths, rodents, termites, and--most importantly during World War II--the typhus-bearing body louse. Many of the Nazi concentration camps suffered from typhus epidemics which killed hundreds of thousands of prisoners. Camp staff members also became sick and died from typhus. To control the epidemics, a hygienic regimen was instituted which included the periodic fumigation of camp buildings with Zyklon-B. Decontamination facilities were also built to delouse clothing, luggage, etc. Some of these facilities used steam, others used Zyklon-B. The hygienic practices also included shaving the hair of incoming prisoners and forcing them to take a shower as part of a delousing procedure. Large shipments of the fumigant was sent to many of the Nazi concentration camps and not just to the alleged 'death camps.' So the presence of Zyklon-B in a camp is not an indication that it was there to be used to gas prisoners. Zyklon-B is a fumigant. There was a hygienic need for a fumigant in the camps. It's use in the camps is not evidence of a genocide program. In fact, it is just the opposite. Zykon-B was used in an effort to save the lives and health of camp inmates and staff.

27) Why would German documents designate Zyklon-B as material for Jewish resettlement?

The resettlement of Jews by the Nazis meant they would have to be moved to housing in the east. This housing in some cases needed to be fumigated before it was turned over the resettled Jews. Transit camps were also set up where Jews, and their luggage, being transported eastward, would be deloused before being sent to their final destinations. Since the delousing of Jews and their belongings and the fumigation of buildings was part of the resettlement process, there is nothing unusual in the fact in some documents the fumigant Zyklon-B would be labeled 'material for Jewish resettlement.'

28) Why did the Nazis equip some of their camps with crematories?

From 1942 until the end of the War in 1945, the SS fought epidemics of typhus and other diseases in the concentration camps. One of the largest camps and the one hardest hit by the epidemic was Auschwitz and its satellite camps. An average of about one hundred prisoners out of population of around fifty thousand died there every day. The crematories were built as a sanitary measure to dispose of the bodies of the dead. Auschwitz/Birkenau's crematories were completed during the first half of 1943 after it was decided to expand the camp to hold two hundred thousand prisoners. This decision and the already high death rate at the camp is why the four crematory facilities were built there. Many of the concentration camps had crematories and many did not. Included in those that did not is Treblinka which is alleged to have been an extermination camp. The conclusion that has to be drawn is the presence of crematories is not an indication of the existence of gas chambers or an extermination program. Several studies of the crematories conclude these facilities were designed to handle the camp disease mortality rate and little more.

29) Why were Jews required to wear a yellow hexagram on their clothing in Nazi Germany?

a)From the time the Hitler became Chancellor, the policy of the Nazi regime was to institute laws which would politically, socially, and economically isolate the Jews of Germany and encourage their emigration. The yellow Star of David was only one of many harassing laws applied to the Jews to get them to leave Germany.

30) What role did the Einsatzgruppen play in the German war effort?

a)Because the fight between the Soviet Union and Nazi Germany was a largely ideological one, and the Soviet Union was not a signatory of Geneva Convention agreements on the conduct of war, it was rightly assumed by Hitler that the Soviets would not fight by the rules. The Einsatzgruppen were police units assigned to the pacification of occupied territories in the east. Their duties included fighting anti-German partisan guerrillas, shooting captured communist 'commissars' and executing civilians in reprisal for acts of murder and sabotage committed by the guerrillas.

31) Why were so many dead bodies found in the Nazi camps when they were captured by Allied troops?

a) By the early spring of 1945, when the British and American troops began occupying German territory containing Nazi prison and labor camps, Germany was in a state of economic chaos. Allied bombers and fighter planes made the communication of goods very difficult and many of the concentration camps had not received enough supplies for weeks or months to feed the camps, or to provide the sick in the camps with medicine. In addition, as German military forces retreated from the advancing Red army in 1944 and 1945 many prisoners retreated with them; most did so voluntarily. More and more people were crowded into fewer and fewer camps. The overcrowding and lack of supplies combined to contribute to the spread of disease in the camps in the final months of the war. The death rate in the camps outstripped the capacity of the crematoria in the camps to dispose of them. In some cases there was no fuel to run the crematoria even if death rates were at 'normal' levels. This increase in camp population, and breakdown in support services to the camps led to an increased death rate. The bodies piled up in the days and weeks before the surrender of the camps to the advancing Allied armies in the spring of 1945.

32) Why is the Holocaust story important to Israel?

a) Israel's 1948 declaration of independence states the reason that state was being founded was the Holocaust had shown there was a need for a Jewish state as a place of refuge for Jews suffering persecution. Without the Holocaust, there is no demonstrated need for a Jewish state. The Israeli government therefore considers any questioning of the Holocaust to be a questioning of Israel's right to exist. It passed a law in the early 1980's making questioning, or minimizing the Holocaust a crime punishable by a sentence of five years in prison-a sentence more severe than the one in Israeli law for questioning God's existence.

33) What was Babi Yar?

a) Babi Ravine [ = Yar] is a ravine in Ukraine where over 100, 000 Jews are said to have been shot by the Nazis and buried in a mass grave. The bodies were later exhumed and the evidence destroyed.

34) What evidence exists for the massacre at Babi Yar?

a)The basis of the Babi Yar allegation is Soviet wartime propaganda, some documents purporting to be Nazi reports of the massacre, and post war testimony. According to these claims the bodies of the victims were exhumed and destroyed by the Nazis before the Soviets recaptured the territory. There is no physical evidence of the massacre. Air photographs taken of the area soon after the mass exhumation is supposed to have occurred show no evidence of it.

35) Why were Jews put into concentration camps by the Nazis?

a) Jews were put into concentration and labor camps for a wide variety of reasons. Some were imprisoned because of criminal activities or anti-Nazi political activities. Others, particularly after 1943 and the reversal of Germany's fortunes on the eastern front, were taken from ghettos for the purpose of working in factories and on farms and housed in concentration camps to keep them socially isolated from the surrounding community. The war produced a shortage of labor and Jews were exploited to fill that need. This situation put Jews in the position of working for the Nazis and the German war effort which was socially and politically embarrassing for them once Germany surrendered and Nazism defeated. Since Jewish inmates could therefore be seen as collaborating with the German war effort, there was pressure upon them to explain why they had worked for the Nazis. The explanation, like that used by Germans who were accused of participating in the extermination of the Jews, was the only alternative was death. If the inmate did not work, he or she was murdered The excuse then was they had to cooperate to save their lives. Some have added to this reason the self-inflated "in order to bear witness" reason for their working for the Nazis, if saving their own skins was not reason enough. If the need to bear witness overrides any reason not to cooperate with the Nazis, then what was witnessed needs to be extraordinary. In this may be a core reason for the wild tales told by some former concentration camp inmates because after the war they were viewed with scorn by other Jews and wished to rehabilitate their standing in the community. The Zionists living outside Europe referred to the Jews who survived Nazi occupation as "soap" because of their lack of resistance to the Nazi occupation and the extermination program.

36) What was the function of Treblinka camp?

a)Records indicate there were two Treblinkas. Treblinka I was a labor camp that included a gravel quarry. Treblinka II was a smaller camp and was probably a delousing station for Jews being resettled in the east. Train loads of Jews would arrive at T-II to be deloused. Their luggage would also be deloused. Once the procedure was completed, the Jews would board a new train that would take them to their final destination which was either a labor camp or ghetto somewhere in occupied Soviet territory. German documents indicate Jews were being funneled through Treblinka which was designated a transit camp. T-II played a major role in the deportation of Jews from the Warsaw ghetto to labor camps and ghettos farther east.

37) What evidence is used to support the Treblinka death camp story?

a) There are wartime news reports that Jews were being killed in large numbers at Treblinka and there are also the postwar recollections of about 70 people who claim to have worked as prisoners at the camp. There are also the 'confessions' of Nazis who were either assigned to the camp or claim to have visited it during the year or so that it was operational. The content of the testimonies is largely contradictory and in some cases very funny. Read about Treblinka from three or more sources and compare what they say about the method used to kill Jews there and you will understand why I say that. There is no physical evidence that hundreds of thousands of people were killed at Treblinka. The camp was totally dismantled by the Nazis and the site today contains an elaborate memorial that was built long after the war was over.

38) Why were Gypsies put into concentration camps?

a)Some groups of Gypsies were put into Nazi concentration camps for several reasons. The German government considered them a security risk, but more importantly the Romany led a wandering lifestyle and did not occupy themselves in what the Nazis considered productive employment. Because they refused to abandon their traditional lifestyle, they were put to work in labor camps.

39) Why is the question of the gas chambers important?

a)The gas chambers are supposed to be the end result of a long chain of events that evolved into a genocide program. They then constitute the physical application of Nazi policy toward the Jews. Whether the policy the exterminate the Jews was the intention from the start, or whether it evolved into it over time because of circumstance, the gas chambers are unambiguous signs the extermination program existed. So, if the silly gas chamber allegation is abandoned in favor of shootings, or starvation, or clubbings the whole fabric of the Holocaust story begins to unravel. If the gas chamber story is false, why has it been pushed for half a century by those who insist it is true? If the extermination of the Jews is true, why falsely allege gas chambers were used when another method of murder was applied? The gas chamber story and the extermination story are twins joined at the heart. If one dies, so does the other. On another level, men were hanged because of the gas chambers. The German nation has spent half a century apologizing over the gas chambers. The orientation of European and Middle Eastern politics revolves around the gas chamber story as justification for many actions taken by various governments. The question of the gas chambers is important because outcome of W.W.II is the basis on which the world has rested for the last half century and how that war is viewed has a lot to do with how many countries view their current role in the political world.

40) How did the Holocaust story originate?

a)The Holocaust story of German extermination of the Jews originated during the war. The charge of gassings of Jews in concentration camps was leveled by the Zionist and Jewish organizations appear around 1942 and were picked up and given lip service by the American and British governments at about the same time. Some Zionists were looking to leverage the British into opening Palestine up to more Jewish immigrants. By pleading a refuge in Palestine was needed due to the crisis of Nazi Germany's mass murder of the Jews, these groups hoped to embarrass the British to life immigration restrictions and to pressure the U.S. government to use its influence to get Great Britain to make the changes to its policies regarding the Jews and Palestine they desired. Other Jewish organizations wished to stop the Germans who were deporting entire Jewish communities east. Many of these deportations were taking place under inhumane circumstances. Various plans were floated to purchase groups of Jews from the Nazi regime to get them out of Europe or to terminate the deportations and though the Nazis appear to have been willing to negotiate, none of them were implemented. The Soviets also began accusing the Germans of murdering civilians soon after the mass graves containing the bodies of executed Polish Army officers were discovered in the forests near Katyn by the German Army. Stalin accused the Germans of the Katyn forest massacre as well. Katyn was one of the crimes for which Germans were prosecuted after the war. The Russians finally admitted responsibility for that crime only a few years ago. As a propaganda story among many meant to discredit the Axis war effort and overshadow Soviet atrocities, the genocide charge took on a similar role during the IMT and NMT war crimes trials and the post war de- Nazification programs. The point to it was and is to discredit the NS regime and place it beyond the political pale. The Holocaust became the paradigm which demonstrated the evil of the Nazi regime and therefore justified the amount of destruction inflicted on Europe to defeat it. The evil of Germany revealed in the Holocaust became the reason Germany and Europe remained divided for so long and why the United States needed to become western Europe's guardian. Since Europe could not be trusted to protect itself after the defeat of Nazism from the new menace of Russian Communism which had recently swallowed eastern Europe, the United States had an excuse to remain engaged in European politics and retard Germany's political and economic recovery. As an indication the status quo established by World War Two is still in place, recent commemorations of the Nuremberg trials have lionized them as a dispensation of justice rather than repudiating them for the show-trials they were.

41) Are there precedents to what happened to the Jews?

a) The forced transfer of populations is something that has happened as long as history has been recorded. In more recent times, the Turks and the Greeks exchanged populations when borders were redrawn at the end of W.W.I. At the end of W.W.II millions of Germans were relocated under horrible conditions. In the United States, Indian tribes were resettled multiple times as the country expanded westward. Stalin uprooted millions of various ethnic minorities in Russia and forcibly resettled them in Siberia. The forcible expulsion of ethnic groups is not a unique occurrence and definitely not rare even in the last one hundred years. SR)

42) What escape routes were available to Jews during the war?

a) Many Jews were able to leave Europe during the war through a variety of paths. Over 100,000 are claimed by Yad Vashem to have crossed Soviet territory to Shanghai, China which had liberal immigration policies. >From there almost all of them proceeded to other destinations which included the United States, Canada, and Australia. Fashion designer John Weitz is said to have taken this emigration route through China. Others traveled south from the Soviet Union into Iran and then west to Palestine. Menachem Begin supposedly left his native Poland during the war using this route. Another pathway out of Europe used by Jews during and after the war was a southerly course through the Balkans and Greece to Turkey and then on to Palestine.

43) Did resistance to German occupation affect Nazi treatment of Jews in territory under their control?

a)Soviet propaganda agitated for civilians to fight the Germans in occupied Soviet territory. Many partisan guerrilla groups remained active in these areas committing acts of sabotage and murder throughout the time the Nazis occupied them. The Nazis viewed communism as a creature of the Jews and in reprisal for the war being waged by the partisans, many Jews were shot. Jews were viewed by many in the Baltic states, occupied by the Communists in 1940, as collaborators in that occupation. As the Red army retreated in 1941, the Soviet secret police known as the NKVD murdered as many of the political prisoners as they could before abandoning their prisons to the advancing Germans. Many Jews who did not retreat with the Russians were rounded up and murdered by local anti-Communist militias and German units in reaction to the NKVD murders of members of nationalist groups they held in their prisons.

44) How were Jewish ghettos in Nazi territory administered?

a)Ghettos set up by the Nazis were administered by a Jewish council called the Judenratt. The Judenratt was the point of contact between the Nazis and the Jews of the ghetto. It acted as the official ghetto government.

45) What role did the Judenratt play in providing labor for the concentration camps?

a)The Judenratt would provide lists of names of people in the ghetto that could be conscripted for work in the concentration camps. This was a compromise the Judenratt made with the Nazi SS which was known to send press gangs into the ghetto and kidnap Jews off the street.

46) Why did Otto Frank, father of diarist Anne Frank, leave Germany?

a) Otto Frank was wanted in Germany on charges of embezzlement of money from his employer.

47) What was the 'transfer agreement?'

a)An international boycott of German goods organized by some American Jews cut Germany's foreign exchange. It also cut the value of German currency outside the country. The Nazis wanted Germany's Jews to emigrate, but it was difficult for them to do so for several reasons. One of the most prominent reasons was they did not want to leave all their assets behind when they left the country. The transfer agreement was made between Nazi Germany and the Zionist leadership in British-controlled Palestine by which German goods would be purchased in Germany using the assets of the Jews wishing to emigrate to Palestine. The German goods would be shipped to Palestine with the emigrating Jews. The goods would then be sold in Palestine and the proceeds would go to the émigré's. About 50,000 Jews are said to have taken advantage of the program which was implemented by the German government, the Zionist leadership and several Jewish financial institutions inside and outside of Germany. One of the most notable of these was the Warburg bank in Hamburg.

48) Why did the Nazis initiate a boycott of Jewish shops in Germany?

a) The Nazis proclaimed a boycott of German shops owned by Jews in response to an international boycott of German goods declared by international Jewish groups on March 24th, 1933 that was to last more than twelve years.

49) How long did the Nazi boycott last?

a) The Nazi boycott of German Jewish shops lasted one day: April 1st, 1933. It was a Saturday--when religious Jews would not be doing business because of religious obligations.

50) What events led up to the Kristallnacht pogrom?

a) Poland passed a law which required Polish Jews living outside the country return to Poland to have their passports stamped. If these stamps were not obtained by a particular date, the passports would become invalid and the bearer would no longer be recognized by Poland as a citizen of that country. Nazi Germany, fearing that it would suddenly have a large population of 'stateless' Jews, forced thousands of Polish Jews living in Nazi Germany back to Poland to obtain the required stamp. After the stamp was obtained, the Jews were free to return to Germany, which is what most of them did. Among those deported were the parents of Hershel Grynspan, a young Polish Jew living in Paris. While several stories exist about his motivation, including anger over what he considered the mistreatment of his family, it is not certain why he went to the German embassy to kill the German ambassador. Because he was not allowed to see the ambassador, the assassin shot another German diplomat instead who died a few days later from his wound. Goebbels is generally blamed for instigating the pogrom against German Jews that took place thereafter.

51) Why was German Jewry fined to pay for the damage done during the Kristallnacht pogrom?

a)The Nazis fined the German Jewish community for the damage from the pogrom because much of the material needed for repairs had to be imported. Because of the Jewish boycott of German goods, Germany lacked foreign exchange. The fine was a direct punishment for the Jewish boycott of Germany.

52) What was Hitler's reaction to news of the pogrom?

a) He was shocked and angry. He ordered that it be stopped immediately.

53) How many gas chambers were there at Treblinka?

a) One, three, five or six, seven, eight, ten, or thirteen depending on which source you use. In some accounts of Treblinka there were no gas chambers, but steam chambers that boiled Jews to death like lobsters. Other stories allege Jews were crowded into sealed buildings and large pumps were used to evacuate the air causing the victims to suffocate. The gas chambers of Treblinka are a mystery both in their number and their design. There is no real evidence the gas chambers at Treblinka numbered any more than zero.

Hannah Arendt quotes Eichmann as recalling seeing one large hall and being told the killing agent was cyanide. Steiner states there were originally three gas chambers and ten more larger structures were added later and that the gas used was engine exhaust. An ex-SS member remembers there being five or six large gas chambers and an unspecified number of smaller ones while another states he believes there were eight. Hoess, the Auschwitz commandant, says in his confession that there were ten gas chambers at Treblinka, but claims to have visited the camp on a date before it existed. The IMT trials accepted an official Polish government report into evidence that claims ten chambers were built at Treblinka and the killing agent was steam. Most books on the death camps contain very little about Treblinka and the other four lesser-known "death camps" because evidence about them is so scarce and confused. Even simple questions like 'how many gas chambers?' cannot be answered authoritatively because the evidence is contradictory and of similar quality.

54) What agent was used to kill people in the gas chambers at Treblinka?

a) It might have been cyanide, or steam, or diesel engine exhaust, or gasoline engine exhaust, or some delayed-action mystery gas. It depends on the source consulted. Since the camp was dismantled long before the war ended, it is entirely speculation that gas chambers existed at Treblinka at all. The official version of events appears based on the reports of Gerstein and confessions of others who were either stationed at the camp, or survived it as inmates. This version centers around the use of engine exhaust. Diesel engine exhaust is most frequently alleged.

55) What evidence is there that Jews were being resettled in the east by the Nazis?

a)First, there are Nazi documents that mention ghettos of resettled Jews in White Russia and other areas of occupied Soviet territory. Second, thousands of Jews survived their relocation by the Nazis and either returned to their former homes after the war or emigrated from Europe after the defeat of Germany testifying to the fact they had been relocated. Third, during the war, many resettled Jews continued to correspond with people back in their home countries.

56) What consequences have revisionists suffered for their conclusions?

a) Since at least the 1970's revisionist authors and researchers have met with not only with derision from other historians and authors, but also with court fines, imprisonment, assault, arson attacks against their homes and offices, loss of employment, of pensions, revocation of academic degrees, exclusion from entering some countries, expulsion from other countries.

A popular magazine in Japan was shut down after printing a revisionist article.

A revisionist book published in Germany was ordered destroyed by a German court-every copy was to be burned!

Revisionist WWWeb sites have been shut down without warning for their content.

Discussions of revisionist findings on various online services have been cut off by the services.

57) What evidence exists for mass murder at Belzec?

a)Like the evidence of it at the other camps, it consists of testimony. Belzec is supposed have been similar to Treblinka according to some stories, but a fantastic report about the camp filed with the IMT alleges Belzec had a subterranean facility where Jews were marched into a pool of water where they were electrocuted. Once they were dead, a grillwork on the bottom of the pool lifted the mass of corpses up and out of the water. Then current sent through the grillwork caused it to heat up and incinerate the bodies. It's laughable, but certainly as true as any of the stories about Belzec.

58) What evidence exists for mass murder at Chelmno?

a)Testimony.

SR)Butz; Mayer; Klee; Lanzmann

59) Where did the bodies of the dead at Treblinka go?

a) It is alleged by those who claim to be survivors of Treblinka camp that some 800,000 bodies were first buried in mass graves and that these were later exhumed and burned on iron rails set over wood fires. Treblinka was not equipped with crematories. Aerial photography of the site taken in 1944 shows no indication of mass graves or locations where continuous burning of bodies had taken place.

60) How many are claimed to have been killed at Treblinka?

a) The figure most often given for Treblinka is 800,000 or more Jews gassed or otherwise killed in less than a year. The bodies are said to have been buried in mass graves and later exhumed and burned. There is no evidence to support these allegation or that for the other five so-called death camps.

One of several versions of the Treblinka gas chamber story alleges Diesel engines were used to pump exhaust into some rooms and everyone inside died within 32 minutes. Animal tests performed in England forty years ago indicate animals can survive three and one half hours on up to 14 or more hours breathing exhaust from Diesel engines.

John Ball has demonstrated the area in which the bodies were buried was not large enough to hold even one tenth the number that are claimed to have been buried there prior to exhumation and cremation.

61) What evidence exists for mass murder at Sobibor?

a) Testimony.

62) How good is testimony as a form of evidence?

a)Testimony is the poorest form of evidence. The human mind is very malleable, and memory can be affected by a wide variety of factors. Very normal people can sincerely remember things that never happened. Add to this the interest of many of the witnesses in getting attention, influencing how they are themselves perceived by those around them, ameliorating their punishment, or exacting vengeance on their enemies. Testimony alone should be used only with extreme caution.

63) What was the War Refugee Board?

a)The WRB was set up in 1944 by the Roosevelt administration and was head by Secretary of the Treasury Henry Morgenthau who was the one who proposed the destruction of Germany's industrial base at the end of the war. This plan was the basis of U.S. occupation policy for over two years after the German surrender. The WRB was involved in projects to get Jews out of Europe and served as a tool of the World Jewish Congress and other Zionist organizations.

64) What was the WRB Report?

a)The WRB report is supposed to be based on the testimonies of three escaped prisoners from Auschwitz who claimed Jews were being gassed at Auschwitz on a large scale. It has now been largely forgotten, even though it is one of the founding sources for the Auschwitz legend. The reason it has been forgotten is that it is so obviously inaccurate in its descriptions of the gas chambers and the numbers of Jews being killed. In effect, it was inaccurate about everything that had to do with the extermination of Jews at the camp.

65) How accurate was the information contained in the WRB Report?

a)There is very little in the report which can verified as accurate. The bulk of the information in the report is verifiably untrue or inaccurate by a wide margin. Though the report is supposed to be the first detailed account of the extermination of Jews at Auschwitz to reach the West, it is wrong in almost all of its details.

66) What did the Auschwitz camp commander Rudolf Hoess confess about the Auschwitz camp?

a)Auschwitz camp commander Rudolf Hoess signed two confessions. The first confession was while a captive of the British. This confession was read to him at one of the Nuremberg trials at which time he testified the content of the confession to be true. A thorough examination of the confession shows it is filled with lies and contradictions.

Hoess signed another confession while in Polish custody. The contents of the second confession are much like that of the first, but in his second confession he accuses the British of beating him and forcing him to sign the first confession though he had no idea what was in it. Hoess also wrote a memoir while in Polish custody. This memoir is considered by many to be a fraud which Hoess transcribed from a prepared text given to him by the Polish communists. Even so, this fake is still in print and widely available. The former camp commander also testified at other trials before he was ultimately hanged at the Auschwitz camp that he used to run by the Polish Communists. In his oral and written accounts of his time as commander at Auschwitz, Hoess describes being ordered to established facilities for the killing of large numbers of people and the disposal of their bodies. To fulfill this task assigned to him, Hoess built one or more gas chambers at Auschwitz and Birkenau concentration camps. The fumigant Zyklon-B was used as the killing agent in these gas chambers. The bodies of the victims were burned in the crematories and in open pits. The ashes were then collected. Bones were pounded into a powder. All of the remains were then dumped into the river. Hoess provided several estimates as to the number of people killed at his camp which range from 1.2 million to 2.5 million.

67) How was Hoess' confession obtained?

a) Among the techniques used by the British to get Hoess to sign his confession included sleep deprivation, threats against his family, beatings, and forced consumption of alcohol.

68) Is torture a way to get a reliable confession?

a) No. The torture victim will usually agree to do anything in order to get the pain or torture stopped. It is however, a good way to get the kind of confession that is desired by the torturers. SR)Butz; Faurisson; Porter; Pressac; Mayer; Sack; Preissinger

69) What did a U.S. Senate commission find about the use of torture to obtain confessions for the Malmedy Massacre case?

a) The commission investigated nearly 140 former members of the Waffen SS who were involved as defendants in the Malmedy case. All except two of these men had had their testicles crushed while in the custody of the U.S. military.

70) Was the use of torture and threats only used in isolated cases?

a) There appears to be a wide range in how Nazi's in Allied custody were treated. It is pretty clear from various sources that threats against prisoners were common. The use of torture was not rare either. Torture was used to break a prisoner's spirit to gain cooperation, as in the case of Hoess. It was also administered out of what appears to be pure sadism.

71) Why is it nobody protested the use of torture on German prisoners?

a)There were some protests, and there was a U.S. Senate investigation, but these have been largely ignored or forgotten. The attitude of the time, much of which continues to this day in certain circles, saw the Germans as deserving of any abuse they received. The press and many public officials were still under the influence of war propaganda. Voicing concern over the torture of an enemy would be regarded as disloyal.

72) Where did concentrations of Jews exist in Europe before 1939?

a) The bulk of Europe's Ashkenazi Jews was located in Poland and parts of the Soviet Union. Hungary also was the home of a large population of Jews. The areas where most of the Jewish losses during the war occurred were areas which underwent massive shifts in population and borders between 1939 and 1945. Though a large percentage of Jews in the Netherlands, Germany, Austria and Czechoslovakia were deported eastward by the Nazis, the Jewish population of these countries were relatively small to begin with.

73) What is the origin of the Einsatzgruppe gas van charge?

a)Soon after the mass graves in which the NKVD buried thousands murdered Polish officers at Katyn were opened to international inspection by the Germans, the Russians, hurting from the bad publicity, put several Germans on trial for murdering prisoners with the exhaust from truck engines. These charges were later carried over to the postwar war crimes trials.

74) Why haven't Germans and others in a position to know come forward to repudiate the extermination story?

a) Besides the danger of social ostracism for questioning the extermination story, anyone in a position of authority during the war in a position to know, in detail, what the final solution program involved is in danger of being prosecuted for war crimes. There is no statute of limitations on Nazi war crimes. Since the early 1980's laws have been passed in several European countries which make it a crime to question the Holocaust or to offer an opinion which is not in line with the official dogma on the topic. There is no interest in what would be viewed as an attempt to rehabilitate the Nazi regime since postwar German politics is based on the repudiation of Hitler and the Nazi years.

75) Why were Jews in Nazi Germany forced to wear a star of David on their clothes?

a)This Nazi edict, which copied laws from the Middle Ages was one of many harassing measures instituted to isolate Jews in Germany and exclude them from German culture and society. The objective of this and other laws was to get Jews to leave Germany.

76) What sources of information did the Western Allies have during the war that failed to verify the extermination story or provide warnings about it?

a) The Catholic church, The Polish government in exile, aerial photography of Auschwitz, The Polish underground resistance movement, The International Red Cross, Spies in the German government, Intercepted German government cipher communications coming from and going to concentration camp administration personnel. There was a process in place in which governments at war could register complaints and war crimes charges against their enemies. Each combatant country had a neutral country which would pass these complaints on to their enemy to investigate and explain. The Allies did not even ask the Germans to investigate the extermination story in a formal complaint even though the channel to do so was in place. This is an indication that the Allies did not take the charge of Jewish exterminations seriously enough even to as for an investigation or explanation.

77) What evidence is there that Zionist leaders did not believe their own propaganda?

a) There was no effort on the part of the Jewish leaders outside of Nazi occupied Europe to warn the Jews threatened with extermination about the danger. In fact, the Jewish council at a ghetto near Budapest turned British paratroopers from Palestine over to the Germans for fear harboring them would result in punishment. Arendt and Segev relate that testimony at the Eichmann trial indicate Jews in occupied Europe were unaware of the extermination at the time.

In 1944 Zionist leaders requested the British government stop running news stories concerning Jewish scientific contributions to the war effort for fear of reprisals being inflicted upon Jews in occupied Europe. That indicates they did not believe Jews were being exterminated since a reprisal against a population that was being killed in any case is meaningless particularly in 1944 when nearly all of the Jews were supposed to be already dead.

Additionally, Allied leaders, while giving lip service to Zionist complaints about the exterminations, did nothing because they did not believe and could not confirm them despite the fact they had excellent sources for information in Germany and Eastern Europe.

78) Do Dr. Robert Faurisson and Fred Leuchter claim Zyklon-B was used as a germicidal antiseptic at Auschwitz?

a) J. C. Pressac, the author of AUSCHWITZ: THE TECHNIQUE AND OPERATION OF THE GAS CHAMBERS accused Leuchter and Faurisson of this because Faurisson used the verb 'disinfect' in describing what the fumigant did when it was used to fumigate a building. This interpretation of Dr. Faurisson's loose use of the word when referring to delousing is a false one. Deborah Lipstadt also picked up Pressac's straw man in her attack on Leuchter and Faurisson in her book DENYING THE HOLOCAUST. Fred Leuchter explained that the morgues of the crematories at Auschwitz were probably deloused with Zyklon-B and that this is why minute traces of a byproduct of the gas were detected in the samples of brick and plaster taken from the ruins at the former Nazi concentration camp. In interpreting the term 'disinfect' as meaning a process in which germs are killed rather than meaning a delousing or fumigation process, Pressac countered an explanation Faurisson and Leuchter never made by derisively pointing out washing surfaces with chlorinated water would be a much safer way to disinfect a building. Deborah Lipstadt, who probably never read the Leuchter Report, picked up Pressac's transparent argument and incorporated it into her book as well.

79) Are accounts of cremation pits at Auschwitz-Birkenau credible?

a)No. Various accounts from former prisoners who spent time detained at Birkenau and staff who worked there include claims that a large number of corpses was burned in open pits up to three meters deep because the crematories there, despite a fabulous cremation capacity of 10,000 bodies per day, were not fast enough to dispose of all of the gas chamber victims. There are several problems with this allegation. Birkenau was built in a marsh. The camp was crisscrossed with drainage ditches to help deal with the high water table. Any pit dug into the ground there would fill with water making the burning of bodies impossible. Even in a case where striking water is not a problem, burning anything in a deep pit is difficult since the fire consumes all of the oxygen available for combustion and puts itself out. There is no point in digging a pit for cremating bodies and is entirely counterproductive to the effort. Open air cremation is done on pyres, not in pits. After Dresden was bombed, the Germans needed to dispose of a large number of bodies in a small amount of time. In this case, besides digging mass graves, bodies were burned on pyres, not in pits. If burning bodies in pits was such an effective means for their disposal, pits would have been dug in this case as well. They were not despite the fact pre-dug bomb craters in Dresden would have suited this requirement. This fact alone indicates the story of large scale pit cremation is pure whimsy.

80) How does the crematory capacity of Auschwitz-Birkenau compare to other Nazi concentration camps where exterminations were not taking place?

a) In comparing the number of retorts, or cremation chambers, installed at Auschwitz-Birkenau where large numbers of people are said to have been gassed to death and other camps, like Dachau and Buchenwald, that had crematory facilities, but in which gassing are not claimed, and the prison registered death rates for each camp, it can be concluded Auschwitz- Birkenau was not suspiciously over-equipped with crematory ovens.

81) Why did Jews not return to their homes at the end of the war if they were not killed?

a) Some did, but most could not return home because it either no longer existed or someone else had moved in after they were deported and would not be willing to relinquish their homes to former owners and occupants. The war set tens of millions of refugees on the move. Housing, much of it destroyed during the war, was in short supply; There was no home to which to return. Others, still living in Soviet occupied areas, had entered a new era of their lives. National borders had been redrawn. Their prewar communities no longer existed and many did the best they could to get on with their lives in whatever area they found themselves. It should also be remember that the bulk of Europe's Jews lived in the eastern part of the continent before the war and continued to live there after the war behind the Iron Curtain.

82) What evidence exists for the charge the Nazis used the bodies of Jews to make, among other things, soap, fertilizer, lampshades, gloves, book covers, etc., ad nauseum?

a) During the war, many rumors circulated about the Nazis exploiting dead bodies for industrial, commercial and other uses. Some of these stories were merely reworked versions of stories spread by the British about the Germans during World War I. For instance, an article in a German newspaper during the First World War dealing with the rendering of horse corpses to make soap was changed by the British into a report that the bodies of dead German soldiers were being used by the Germans to make soap. The British also spread the story that German soldiers were cutting off the hands of Belgian children. All sorts of these horrible stories were spread as part of the war effort. Similarly, during the Second World War, atrocity stories were spread about the activities of the enemy by both sides. The soap from dead bodies story came to life once more in the form of German-manufactured RIF soap. A rumor was spread that RIF stood for 'pure Jewish fat' and the bodies of dead Jews were used in its manufacture. Though this and many stories like it are now considered to be 'rumor' by Holocaust historians, Germans were tried at war crimes trials on charges they had participated in the manufacture of soap from human bodies and the Soviets produced photographs of what they claimed was a laboratory near Danzig where it was made. Several men were tried and went to jail for taking part in activities Deborah Lipstadt, Tom Segev, and other Jewish Holocaust writers now claim was only a wartime rumor. Nevertheless many Jews still take the story seriously. 'Soap' became a derogatory term for survivors of the Holocaust used by Israelis after the war. The American television comedy 'Soap' was renamed 'Bubbles' when it aired in Israel for that reason. The Yad Vashem museum in Israel still displays RIF soap in one of its exhibits. There are several graves in which German soap is buried on the belief that it was made from human bodies. The 'human skin' lamps were the property of Ilse Koch who was the wife of a concentration camp commander. Her husband had been executed by the Nazis over financial irregularities at the camp under his command. When brought to trial, Frau Koch was accused of, among other things, picking prisoners with tattoos she liked to be killed so she could make use of the art. As it turns out the lamps were made of leather from goat hide and not human skin. Frau Koch committed suicide while serving a prison sentence. These and the other stories about the Nazis extracting material from dead bodies for the manufacture of products are untrue and indicative of people's willingness to accept any story concerning an enemy as fact. During wartime, dehumanizing an enemy bolsters morale at home and justifies any vicious act of war committed against it.. This is not to say all atrocity stories are false, but great care should be taken before giving credence to such horror stories. Even so, five decades after the war ended, many people are willing to swallow any charge of evildoing leveled at Nazi Germany as true.

83) What is the explanation for all the hair, shoes, eyeglasses, and other personal items found at Auschwitz?

a) As prisoners were processed into the concentration camp, their hair was shaved to prevent the introduction of more typhus-bearing lice into the camp. Their personal belongings were taken away and put into storage. Uniforms and shoes were issued to the prisoners after they were deloused. Hundreds of thousand of people passed through Auschwitz camp and survived. The best evidence available points to a total of around 130,000 deaths that took place during the time the Nazis operated the camp. Nearly all of these were due to epidemics of typhus and other diseases. The separation of a person from their belongings in and of itself does not cause death, however, those that not survive their time at Auschwitz did not claim their belongings, so these remained in storage. In addition much of this prisoner private property was left behind when the camp was evacuated and abandoned to the advancing Red Army in January of 1945. There was very real possibility of having one's belongings stolen while in the camp by other prisoners. Storing the goods prevented that. Leather goods are a haven for lice. Many items like shoes and suitcases were stored as part of camp hygienic measures. Other items, such as shaving razors, were potential weapons and were confiscated and stored for that reason.

84) What have forensic examinations of the alleged extermination sites revealed?

a)Several examinations have been made by scientists and amateurs of the crematoria, and alleged gas chamber sites at several of the former Nazi camps. While they generally agree on what the buildings look like, the conclusions as to their nature diverge in some cases. Fred Leuchter, an execution equipment engineer; Walter Lueftl, an Austrian engineer; Germar Rudolf, a German chemist; and two revisionist researchers - David Cole of the United States and Ditlieb Felderer of Sweden, among others, have all concluded the gas chambers and ruins of gas chambers on display at the various concentration camp sites were not and could not be used as gas chambers as described by eyewitness. A French pharmacist, J.C. Pressac, and the Polish government authority that administers the Auschwitz museum draw the opposite conclusion based on the same evidence. What they discovered were extremely small traces of prussian blue, a byproduct of the use of the fumigant Zyklon-B, (i.e. the chemical HCN), in the mortar at the some of the sites, particularly at Auschwitz and Birkenau. Revisionists point out that the by product should be found in much higher quantity. The traces were found at levels consistent with the building being fumigated at some point. A gas chamber would contain a much larger amount of the prussian blue because of the repeated exposure to HCN as in the camp fumigation facilities where prussian blue has permeated deeply into the walls and can be found in high concentrations. Pressac and others on the opposite side of the issue argue finding any trace at all supports their position of gassings in the buildings.

85) Why have there not been extensive forensic examinations of the killing centers up to now by the Allied governments?

a)There are probably several reasons for it and since these governments don't even address the issue any reply to this question would be speculative. The most obvious reason is the Soviets and her allies saw no need for them. The war crimes tribunals simply took judicial notice of the crimes themselves and therefore it was not required that proof be produced. The question addressed by the IMT and NMT was not what happened, but who was to be punished. A thorough examination of the death camps would more likely than not produce evidence which would damage their case since they knew many of the charges were untrue. Therefore such an action by them would be counterproductive to the larger goal of discrediting the Nazi regime.

86) Doesn't the verdict in the Max Taeubner trial indicate the Nazi Einsatzgruppen were killing Jews?

a) Max Taeubner was a member of an SS Einsatzgruppen who was convicted by an SS court for his part in the massacre of Jews in the occupied territories in the East. The court was particularly disturbed by his photographing the bodies and sharing the pictures with family and friends. It appears from the verdict the reason he was punished for his activities in the case was for his acting in this regard without orders, the cruelty with which the executions were carried out, and for taking photographs which he shared with others. Certainly the Einsatzgruppen killed people, particularly Jews. These executions were part of security measures instituted in the eastern territories occupied by the Nazis. The point to them was to suppress anti- Nazi guerrilla activities in these areas. Taeubner was a loose cannon acting out of his own personal hatred for Jews. He was sentenced to several years in prison for his crimes, but was pardoned in January 1945-- when the situation for Germany was beyond desperate--and put back on duty at the front. Taeubner apparently survived the war and there were several unsuccessful attempts to prosecute him in the 1960s and 1970s in Germany for his crimes, but the courts cited his prior conviction by an SS court and dismissed the case.

87) What is the Leuchter Report?

a) During the mid-1980's a German-Canadian publisher named Ernst Zuendel commissioned an American execution equipment engineer and consultant named Fred Leuchter to examine the sites of alleged Nazi gas chambers at Auschwitz and Majdanek and render his opinion as to whether these buildings were used to kill millions of people. The report then, is Leuchter's opinion based on the evidence he gathered and analyzed.

88) Is the Leuchter Report flawed? If so, how?

a)The Leuchter Report is adequate for the purpose for which it was intended, which was to fulfill the commission of Ernst Zuendel to examine the sites of alleged German gas chambers, report on what he found, and draw conclusions from his findings.

The samples of plaster and mortar Leuchter had tested left a question as to how much prussian blue residue from Zyklon-B would be found in a room that had been fumigated one or more times, but not used as a gas chamber. The answer to this question was left open because plaster samples from the so-called undressing rooms at crematory II and III were not analyzed for comparison to those taken from the alleged gas chambers.

89) Have others corroborated Leuchter's findings?

a)German chemist, Germar Rudolf has analyzed samples of plaster taken from prisoner sleeping barracks and found that the amount of residue left behind from fumigation with Zyklon-B is comparable with that found in the alleged gas chambers. Rudolf also concludes the gas chamber story is false. The Austrian engineer Walter Lueftl has also examined the allegations and came to the same conclusion; As did DuPont chemist William L. Lindsey when he examined the problem of the gas chambers.

90) Why would the Allies have been interested in Auschwitz long before the charges of extermination there were leveled?

a) Auschwitz was located next to a Buna rubber factory that the Nazis were building to convert coal to gasoline. 'Operation Frantic' targeted German fuel production facilities for bombing missions. As early as 1943 Auschwitz and Monowitz, the Buna plant, were flown over by Allied photo reconnaissance airplanes in preparation for it being targeted by American bomber planes. The entire area had been photographed over a dozen times by the American army by the end of 1944. Yet, despite this interest in the area, the U.S. government was unable to confirm an extermination of the Jews was taking place.

91) What do Himmler's diaries reveal about the final solution to the Jewish problem?

a) That is unknown, since these have never been published and are not available to researchers though they are known to exist in Israel.

92) What do the Auschwitz-Birkenau coke shipment records reveal?

a) Receipts for shipments of coke to fuel the crematories for some of 1942 and ten months of 1943 are in the Auschwitz archives in Poland. They indicate an amount of fuel available to cremate corpses compatible with the registered deaths in the camp for that period. The death rate was about 100 per day and the amount of coke available for each cremation works out to a little more than 21 kilograms (46 lb.) of fuel per registered death. This amount of fuel is compatible with the requirements of the crematory machinery.

93) How long does it take to cremate a human body?

a) It varies with the equipment used, but the cremation time for the equipment installed at Birkenau appears to have required an incineration time of about an hour per body. The entire cremation cycle took longer and each oven, or retort, could reduce three or four bodies per day under normal operating circumstances. Birkenau had a total of 46 ovens so the capacity would have been 184 bodies per day if all of the facilities were operating at once.

This, however, was not the case. Crematories IV and V had 8 ovens each and operated for only a few months before they broke down and were mothballed in 1943. The other two at Birkenau, numbered II and III, contained a total of 30 retorts which would have put the normal daily capacity at 90 to 120 bodies per day which is the rate indicted for the camp by the death registries.

In 1942, when the crematory facilities for Birkenau were planned by the SS, it was also planned that the camp be greatly expanded and the inmate population increased to two hundred thousand. The camp population never reached that number and the typhus epidemic was partially brought under control, so the two smaller facilities were not repaired and put back into operation since they were not needed.

94) Where are the original Allied Auschwitz air photo negatives?

a) In the CIA archives and unavailable to researchers. Copies of the films can be studied by researchers at the National Archives in Washington, D.C. but it is believed these films have been altered and contain imagery different from the originals.

95) What was the 'Madagascar Plan'?

a) After France was defeated by Germany in 1940, the Nazi leadership researched the practicality of resettling Europe's Jewry on the remote French colony of Madagascar. It was decided Germany did not have the resources to transport them there while the war was still being fought, so Madagascar was abandoned in favor of occupied Soviet territory in late 1941. It was hoped at the time by the Nazis the final expulsion of the Jews from the continent of Europe would then be addressed once the war was won.

96) Who was Kurt Gerstein?

a) Kurt Gerstein was a low-ranking SS officer with a degree in mining engineering who served as a sanitation officer for the SS during the war. Near the end of the war, he deserted his assignment and surrendered to the French. While a captive of the French, he wrote several reports or confessions having to do with what he claimed to have witnessed with regard to the gassing of Jews at various Nazi concentration camps. He was found hanged in his cell soon thereafter.

97) How reliable are Gerstein's confessions?

a)The reports left by Gerstein are full of exaggerations and absurdities, but since the source is an SS officer, they are frequently used by Holoscribes as source material in their writings. A reading of the entire text of these confessions can only make one wonder how anyone can seriously quote from them.

98) How much ash remains after a body is cremated?

a) The Cremation Association of North America says that adult remains weigh between three and nine pounds. Others have found they average 7.4 pounds for men and 5.8 pounds for women.

99) What does Dr. Kremer's diary reveal about his time at Auschwitz?

a)Dr. Kremer's diary does not mention the gas chambers at all and only refers to the use of Zyklon-B once in relation to the fumigation of a barracks infested with lice. Dr. Kremer discusses the epidemic of typhus raging through Auschwitz during the second half of 1942 and the quarantine the camp was under to get control of the spread of the disease.

There are several references to having witnessed horrible scenes while assigned to special actions, but these references are so vague, only a very loose interpretation would allow the reader to conclude he is referring to gassings in these entries. More than likely the references are related to examining prisoners with typhus.

Other gruesome entries deal with the pathologist's work in collecting human organs from dying patients for his studies; attending trials and executions of prisoners. These were all duties he performed while assigned to the camp.

The key reason Kremer's diary is cited by the Holoscribes as proof of mass murder of Jews at Auschwitz is his use of an ambiguous phrase in one of the entries. The phrase in question refers to Auschwitz camp as "das Lager der Vernichtung" which they translate as "an extermination camp." As Faurisson points out, however, the Nazis did not refer to any of their camps as such and placing this postwar interpretation on this 1942 diary entry is erroneous. Moreover when the diary of SS-Dr. Kremer is used as evidence of gassings at Auschwitz, it is required that his more explicit post-war testimony be used in conjunction with the diary to make it support the Auschwitz gas chamber legend. Kremer testified to being assign duty at gassings. He claimed his function was to stand by in case an SS member accidentally succumbed to the gas and render assistance in such cases. The problem with interpreting the diary based on Kremer's postwar testimony is the diary is no longer the evidence. The evidence is the postwar testimony which was subject to all of the postwar pressures of the other testimony given by former Nazis.

100) Are the stories of strange Nazi medical experiments true?

a)Medical experiments were performed on some concentration camp prisoners, but those experiments which were life-threatening were performed on inmates who had been sentenced to death by the German government for crimes they had committed. However, many stories concerning medical experiments, like those of Dr. Mengele at Auschwitz, are more likely exaggerations and fabrications because they appear to be scientifically pointless and even silly. The evidence for most of these stories too is post-war testimony. The Nazis do not have a monopoly on performing medical experiments on prison inmates, however. In fact, some of the experimental research started by SS doctors was continued and completed by American military doctors after the German defeat.

101) Did Hitler order the Jews be exterminated?

a) Though that is alleged by those wishing to discredit Hitler and others who wished to shift blame to a dead man. No extermination order has ever been located, and there is no evidence Hitler even knew such a program existed.

102) Did Himmler order the gas chambers be destroyed?

a) It is claimed Himmler, the head of the SS, ordered the destruction of the gas chambers in October or November of 1944 and the extermination of the Jews ended. No proof of this has ever been produced. The story of the Himmler order, like the story of the Hitler order to kill the Jews is based largely on postwar testimony, particularly that of Eichmann and Hoess. The gas chamber facilities at Auschwitz were supposed to have been destroyed soon after this order was issued, but aerial photographs taken as late as January 1945 show at least one of the crematory buildings still intact several months after they were allegedly destroyed.

103) How many people survived being imprisoned at Auschwitz?

a) Recent (1996) press articles estimate the number of people to have survived imprisonment at Auschwitz to be 200,000. The real number is unknown, but many people were imprisoned at Auschwitz and its satellite camps for very short times and were then released after they had served their sentences. The real number, depending on the definition of 'survived', therefore may be higher. This huge number of survivors is interesting in that the extermination program was supposed to have been a state secret. Witnesses to it were supposedly killed as part of the effort to destroy the evidence of the crime. Yet the crematories were built in plain sight of everyone arriving at camp and most of the barracks buildings. An athletic field was situated next to Crematory III. There was no effort to hide the facilities, and the people imprisoned at Auschwitz could see everything.

104) What is the Mueller document?

a) The Mueller document, published in 1980's, is purported to be an Austrian police memorandum from the postwar 1940's which lists Nazi concentration camps where gassing claims had been investigated and proved to be false. An Austrian, Emil Lauchout, claims the document to be genuine, but it is most likely a forgery. It appears the gassing claims were never investigated, but simply accepted by the Allied governments as fact.

105) Do Holocaust revisionists incite racial hatred?

a)No. As far as I know, there is no evidence of that. What the revisionists want to incite is skepticism and an objective examination of major contemporary historical issues that affect us all. Or to quote the revisionist researcher and writer Carlo Mattogno :

"If official historiography reached the clear conclusion that their 'Holocaust' version was historically flawed, would it be necessary to hush it up out of fear of providing justification for neo-Nazi resurgency?" In other words, if it is true, it is unintentional and beside the point.

Posted by The_West on http://newsfromthewest.blogspot.com/2007/09

/frequently-asked-questions-about.html

9/07/2007

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