Beorn
01-11-2009, 09:44 PM
This article was first written and posted on the internet in 2005, while I was still relatively new to the subject. Some of the issues it contains are given more thorough coverage in my forthcoming publication 'From Nuremberg to Nineveh' (http://www.markturley.com/88108.html?*session*id*key*=*session*id*val*).
http://www.markturley.com/mediac/400_0/media/icon_danger_sign.jpgIf this is your first visit to my website or you don't know me, or you just haven't read this page before, this is most likely to be the time where you navigate away in disgust. I am aware that some of the views presented here are abhorrent to some people. I am also aware that by including such content on my website, I will alienate some and cause many to think I am a nutter or an extremist. But this page is on here because I happen to think it tells the truth and that's important to me.
http://www.markturley.com/mediac/400_0/media/imag10.jpgYou see, I am an obsessive person. By that I don't mean that I have a passion for shoe-shopping or pornography or that I have to wash my hands three times before leaving the house, but rather that I tend to develop an interest in a subject and then pursue it tirelessly, for months or even years until I feel satisfied that I know lots of things about it that average people don't. I've been like that since I was a kid. Trust me, it makes for fascinating conversation when I'm drunk.
Although people who have been cornered and harangued by me at parties / clubs / bars will find this hard to believe, its probably quite a good trait for a fiction writer to possess because it gives me plenty of material to develop plot-lines with. It can, however, also lead me down dark alleyways; alleyways where very few fear to tread and even fewer will admit they have trodden. Over the years I've been through doomsday scenarios (pole shift theory, the 'peak oil' energy crisis), classic conspiracy theories (the 9/11 plot, the illuminati, David Icke's belief that all world leaders are shape-shifting lizards from outer space) and political / historical wrangles (the Kennedy assasination, human origin debates) etc.
Many of these seem superficially ludicrous and very often they really are, even to someone relatively open minded such as myself. Quite often I find that after my initial enthusiasm for a subject wears off, I find it intensely silly and tedious and fail to understand why anyone is interested in it at all. Several topics listed above certainly fall into that category. Below, however are some subjects which I have investigated and which still intrigue me. They are 'taboo' subjects. In other words, subjects which virtually no-one will discuss because to do so is to break a kind of unspoken law. For someone like me, that just makes them all the more interesting. I don't believe in 'sacred cows'. So, I present these, not as part of any political doctrine or framework - I hate all that crap - as soon as people start waving banners and chanting slogans and supporting red or blue I lose interest. I present them instead simply as interesting topics for reflection. As usual, if anyone has any comments or would like to discuss anything with me further, please get in touch using the contact form on my home page.
http://www.markturley.com/mediac/400_0/media/reporter.jpgHolocaust Denial
If you weren't sure what I meant when I said that these subjects are 'taboo' you probably realise now. What could be more disgusting to any moral, right thinking person than someone who seeks to deny the terrible suffering of the Jews at the hands of Hitler? What kind of sick freak claims it never happened? Such is the outrage at this point of view that it is actually a crime to express it in many countries. That's right, Canada, Australia, France, Austria, Germany, New Zealand, all nations which otherwise uphold the right to freedom of speech, have laws which state that people who publicly deny the holocaust can be imprisoned. 'Quite right!' I hear you all cry. But who among the moral majority actually knows what Holocaust Denial is?
When I talk to people about this they usually say something like 'Holocaust deniers are those weirdos and neo-Nazis who say that nothing happened', which clearly would be a ludicrous standpoint. I mean, to fly in the face of all the evidence, all the Nazi documents that were seized at the end of the war, the photographs, the confessions, the eyewitness testimony, the intercepted, decoded messages. To say that nothing happened is just stupid. Well, I agree. So do the holocaust deniers. It is stupid.
But no-one is saying that.
Holocaust 'deniers' don't like the name the media has given them because they feel it cheapens their argument and gives people the wrong impression before they've even heard what they have to say. I happen to agree. They prefer to be called 'revisionists'. I happen to think that's actually what they are. But that's not hugely important. It wouldn't really matter if they chose to call themselves 'Norwegian fish-wrestling enthusiasts' - its what they believe and why they believe it that I find fascinating.
I began to investigate 'deniers' and their views while researching a character for a novel. My expectations were, like most people, that they were all neo-nazis and had no evidence or logic to support what they were saying. Based on snippets of information I had gained from the media I expected to read a lot of twisted, hate-filled garbage which could easily be written off and discarded. But my preconceptions were completely confounded. The first point worth making here, is that on the most part, deniers or revisionists seem pretty apolitical. Contrarily, most neo-nazis (as far as I can tell from visiting their websites) don't just believe in the Holocaust, they glory in it. They revel in the reported evils of Nazi Germany and gleefully repeat tales of how 6 million Jews were gassed to death. To deny the holocaust opposes this - it is to distance yourself from those who've based their lives around mythologising it. Now neo-nazis certainly fall into that category, but do any other groups? Religious groups perhaps? Ethnic minorities possibly? (Spielberg, I'm looking at you.)
Secondly, its important to know what deniers say and what they don't. You can view this paragraph as a kind of checklist, if you like. From the pretty extensive reading I've done around this, none of the so called deniers I've come across deny that Nazi Germany was anti-semitic. None of the so-called deniers deny that Jews were discriminated against and horribly mistreated. None of the so called deniers deny that Jewish businesses, synagogues and houses were destroyed on 'Kristallnacht' (http://www.historyplace.com/worldwar2/timeline/knacht.htm). None of the so-called deniers deny that Jews were taken from their homes, rounded up and put into ghettos, where conditions were terrible and malnutrition and typhoid caused many of them to die. None of the so-called deniers deny that Jews were also sent to concentration camps, along with others who were identified as enemies of the state, like communists, gypsies, homosexuals and untermensch, where, like the ghettoes, conditions were often appalling, particularly towards the end of war as Germany started losing and her supply lines were cut. To recap - that probably amounts to 90% of the holocaust story and nobody is denying any of it. The thing is that there is so much hard evidence to support all this that only a fool would attempt to deny it. It is unreasonable, faced with the proof of these events, to suggest that they did not take place.
So what is it actually that the deniers deny? What is it that causes such outrage? Simply put, the deniers deny that the Nazis were trying to exterminate the Jewish race. They deny that there were gas chambers at the concentration camps and that there was a state approved policy of genocide. They say that these things are wartime propaganda that has been mixed up with the truth and repeated so many times through film, fiction and journalism that people accept them unquestioningly. Deniers believe that the Nazis wanted all Jews off German soil, that they sought to exile them all to the east, but they didn't try to wipe them out. As a result, deniers deny that 6 million Jews were killed.
So, just to consolidate what I've said so far, 'deniers' aren't really denying the holocaust as such - they are actually saying that some of it is true and some of it isn't. Once we've all grasped that, we can move to the next level of the discussion, which is to ask - why do they say that?
For those who don't know, the standard version of holocaust history goes something like this. In 1942, leading Nazis met at the Wannsee conference to discuss the 'final solution' to the Jewish problem. They agreed upon a state sanctioned policy of genocide, utilising lethal gas chambers at camps which would poison prisoners with 'Zyklon B'. As a result, several camps, most notably 'Auschwitz-Birkenau' were adapted for this purpose. Prisoners were taken there on special rail services. Men who were fit for work were given jobs in camp factories, women, children, the sick and the elderly were all gassed on arrival.
This story is confirmed by the minutes of the Wannsee conference itself, eyewitness testimony of camp survivors, signed confessions of Nazis made at the Nuremburg trials in 1946, (in particular that of Rudolf Hoess, commandant of Auschwitz) and physical evidence. Although no gas chambers were found (it is believed the Nazis blew them up rather than have them discovered), piles of emaciated bodies, piles of hair, piles of shoes and clothing and piles of canisters of Zyklon B gas serve as a clear demonstration of the camps' sinister purpose. The 6 million number was originally given by the Russians at the Nuremburg trials. The subsequent total of 11 million, including non-Jews was proposed some time later by famous 'Nazi-hunter' Simon Wiesenthal (http://www.wiesenthal.com/). Both figures have been held ever since.
Now that, in abbreviated form, is what I was taught at school. That's probably what you were taught as well. Here's what the 'deniers' point out.
The minutes of the Wannsee conference (http://www.writing.upenn.edu/%7Eafilreis/Holocaust/wansee-transcript.html)don't actually mention gassings once. They don't mention attempting genocide on the Jews either. They do contain many derogatory references to Jews, as you would expect from an anti-semitic bunch like the Nazis and they do talk at length about moving Jews to work on road building schemes in Eastern Europe, but that's about as far as it goes. I found this very shocking. I mean, it hadn't occurred to me to ask 'how do we know the Nazis planned the Jewish genocide at Wannsee?' I just knew they had, because that's what I'd been told. But even a quick scan of the Wannsee documents will suggest to most readers that no such plan was made there. Bizarrely, considering how the wannsee legend is still taught as 'fact' in schools and likewise repeated in Holocaust media coverage, this view of the conference is even accepted by the foremost Holocaust historians. Jean-Claude Pressac, for example, wrote in his much-referenced and revered work 'The Technique and Operation of the Gas Chambers at Auschwitz' (considered to be the most authoritative historical study written on the genocide), that, "On the 20th January the conference called 'the Wannsee Conference' took place in Berlin. Even if an operation to remove the Jews to the east was planned which might entail the 'natural' elimination of some through labor, no one there spoke of industrial mass-liquidation. In the days and the weeks that followed, the construction office at Auschwitz received no call, telegram or letter requesting the planning of an installation intended for this purpose." Similarly, Raul Hilberg, the Jewish historian considered by many to be the 'dean' of Holocaust history, author of many books on the subject, including the seminal 'The Destruction of the European Jews' wrote that, "what began in 1941 was a process of destruction not planned in advance, not organized centrally by any agency. There was no blueprint and there was no budget for destructive measures. They [these measures] were taken step by step, one step at a time. Thus came about not so much a plan being carried out, but an incredible meeting of minds, a consensus -- mind reading by a far-flung bureaucracy. In the final analysis, the destruction of the Jews was not so much a product of laws and commands as it was a matter of spirit, of shared comprehension, of consonance and synchronization."
Think about it - if you studied history at school, did the textbook you were given actually have transcripts of the conference? Did it actually lay down, using primary, original sources what the Nazis actually said at Wannsee? Or did the author of the book just write something along the lines of 'The final solution was agreed at Wannsee where the delegates agreed to gas the Jews' and leave it there? I'll give you ten to one it was closer to the latter than the former and this is reflective of so much of Holocaust history, we are told by writers what was done and said. But if you ask, 'how do we know that?' 'where is the evidence?' You'll be surprised by what you find.
http://www.markturley.com/mediac/400_0/media/92714.jpgOK - so the main piece of evidence that has been used to prove that the Holocaust was a state-approved act of genocide doesn't really say anything of the sort, and is even rejected as such by the two leading historical authorities on the subject, but there's still all the other stuff, right? What about the signed confessions for example? Well, there now exists a great deal of available source material to suggest that many of the confessions given at Nuremburg were worthless, to the point where it is arguable that the entirities of the International and Nuremburg Military Tribunals should be disregarded as valid sources of evidence. Bernard Clarke, the Jewish interrogator who led the squad responsible for obtaining Hoess' confession (http://www.fordham.edu/halsall/mod/1946hoess.html), for example, admitted twenty years later in 'Legions of Death' (Hamlyn Paperbacks) (http://www.amazon.co.uk/Legions-Death-Enslavement-Military-Classics/dp/1844150429/ref=sr_1_1/203-9440849-8763163?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1175026413&sr=8-1) a book by British historian Rupert Butler, that Hoess' testimony stating that 2.5 million Jews had been gassed at Auschwitz and a further 500,000 had died of natural causes while under his command had taken three days of torture and death threats made against his children to obtain. For years and years Hoess' declaration was the bedrock of the extermination claim, its descriptions of the gassing process repeated ad infinitum, including the famous line 'we knew when to open the doors because the screaming stopped'. To further discredit it, it has emerged that the original document was actually written in English, a language Hoess didn't read, speak or understand. Not only was he beaten senseless and fearful for the lives of his family, he didn't even know what he was signing. The mere fact that this was done should arouse suspicion in most critical thinkers. If you have to resort to coercion, torture and death threats to prove that something happened, it surely suggests that you don't have real proof.
What is more, due to the principal of legal precedent, once Hoess and other leading Nazis had been forced to confess, it established the gas chamber story as 'fact' in the eyes of the court, meaning that subsequent defendants at Nuremburg could not dispute it. The only option available to a Nazi on trial who had any interest in avoiding the death penalty was to admit that the gas chamber / genocide story was true, but that they, personally, had nothing to do with it. It is unsurprising that in such circumstances this is what virtually all of them said.
It needs to be understood at this point that criticism of the Nuremburg process is not a new thing. There were many commentators of the time who expressed their dismay at the proceedings, but this has been forgotten as the Holocaust industry has gained momentum. US Supreme Court Chief Justice, Harlan Fiske Stone, for example, called the Nuremberg trials a fraud. "[Chief US prosecutor] Jackson is away conducting his high-grade lynching party in Nuremberg," he wrote. "I don't mind what he does to the Nazis, but I hate to see the pretense that he is running a court and proceeding according to common law. This is a little too sanctimonious a fraud to meet my old-fashioned ideas." (Pillar of the Law', Alpheus T. Mason, New York: Viking, 1956)
In the same book, Associate Supreme Court Justice William Douglas charged that the Allies were guilty of "substituting power for principle" at Nuremberg. "I thought at the time and still think that the Nuremberg trials were unprincipled.", he wrote. "Law was created ex post facto to suit the passion and clamor of the time."
It is not difficult to see how these opinions were arrived at. A quick look at the Nuremburg charter shows some bizarre justification. Article 19, for example, reads as follows: "The Tribunal shall not be bound by technical rules of evidence. It shall adopt and apply to the greatest possible extent expeditious and nontechnical procedure, and shall admit any evidence which it deems to be of probative value."
Just read that again, think about it and then tell me if you think we can trust the findings of a court that operates in such a way.
On to the physical evidence. Firstly, lets reiterate - no gas chambers were found at any of the alleged extermination camps. Many, many people are unaware of this. The only Nazi gas chamber deemed to have been found in tact is the one at Dachau (http://www.scrapbookpages.com/Dachauscrapbook/GasChamber/interior00.html). This is interesting for several reasons. Firstly, Dachau, which is just outside Munich, is not one of the alleged death camps. It was claimed to be such post war, as many labour and transit camps were, in the Allied rush to pin as much on the Nazis as possible, but current historical opinion (and even that of such ardent Holocaust propagandists as the aforementioned Simon Wiesenthal), is that that all the exterminations happened in Poland. Secondly, visitors to the camp now see a painted sign above the door which says 'brausebad' (http://darwin.ediacara.org/gallery/Dachau/100_1154)(shower room). Inside the chamber is a placard which says 'Gas chamber - disguised as a shower room - never used as a gas chamber.' Ponder that for a moment, does it not strike you as odd? Here we have what is supposedly the only remaining gas chamber, mysteriously undestroyed unlike all the others, located at a camp where nobody alleges any gassing took place and therefore nobody alleges it was ever used? Eh? This sense of mystery deepens, when we see that when US soldiers liberated the camp in 1945, there was another sign on the door. As this picture (http://www.holocaust-history.org/dachau-gas-chambers/photo.cgi?34)clearly shows, the 'homicidal gas chamber' was apparently labelled with a skull and crossbones and the words 'Gaszeit! Vorsicht, Lebensgefahr! Nicht Offnen!' which means 'Gas room! Warning! Danger to life! Don't open!' (roughly). Clearly, certain questions present themselves. Why have the labels on the door changed since 1945? And who changed them? These are clearly important things to ask and have answered, as nobody would believe that they were being taken for a shower in a room labelled with a skull and crossbones. As we already know that the Allies built fake gas chambers at other camps after the war (I will expand on this point later) there is clearly scope for rational suspicion with Dachau. Whether the room was a shower room which was tampered with to make it look like a gas chamber, or a delousing chamber which was tampered with to make it look like a shower room, or genuinely was, as we are told, a real homicidal gas chamber which no-one ever used, is a matter of considerable controversy, which I encourage readers to investigate for themselves, if interested. I would urge such readers to seek out statements made by American soldiers (not commanding officers) who liberated the camp.
The point is, that if one of the original, huge, homicidal gas chambers had been found at any of the alleged extermination camps (or at least part of one) there would be no debate. If there was a photograph of one, there would be no debate. But there isn't. If you've ever done any philosophy at school, you'll probably be familiar with Ockam's razor, deemed to be the clearest way to establish truth, namely, 'the simplest explanation is usually correct' and 'if an event is explainable without using an idea, discard the idea.' Now, lets apply those principles to why no gas chambers or photographs of them were found. Is it, a) because there weren't any, or b) because there were enormous, industrial gas chambers, the scale of which have never been seen before or since, which were used to murder up to 11 million people in three years but which were destroyed leaving no trace of their existence at all before the camps were liberated? Before you answer that, let me add that no blueprints for the gas chambers have ever been found, despite blueprints for all other parts of the camps, including the crematoria being available. Furthermore, not one Nazi document relating to the construction, use or demolition of the gas chambers was ever found, despite tons of Nazi documents being seized at the end of the war. About 65,000 documents were recovered from the construction office at Auschwitz alone, giving a detailed record of every stage of the building of the crematoria, the delousing rooms, the barrack blocks etc yet gas chambers or extermination facilities are mentioned on none.
In addition to the lack of physical or documentary evidence for the existence of the huge homicidal gas chambers, there is the simple fact that the construction and operation of such facilities would pose enormous technical difficulties, which it is doubtful even technicians of today would be able to solve.
http://www.markturley.com/mediac/400_0/media/gas%7Echamber.jpgBy means of illustration, lets focus briefly on the American gas chambers used until recently to end the lives of death row inmates at Parchmont, Mississippi, San Quentin, California and several other prisons. These working gas chambers were not rooms like the alleged Nazi installations, but specially constructed, purpose-designed, octagonal steel boxes, roughly 6 feet across and 8 feet high. Both had 30 foot high chimneys outside to vent the hydrocyanic gas after use, as the levels of toxicity even for gassing just one inmate at a time would be deadly if the air of the prison or surrounding rooms became in any way contaminated.
When operational, the interiors of the chambers were sealed in rubber, (not shown in the picture)to prevent leakage and had thick steel doors closed by large, locking wheels and an elaborate latching system. Air pressure had to be carefully monitored and regulated, using various pieces of equipment, in order that any leaks that did occur, (as some molecules would always escape, even in a sealed steel chamber), flowed inward, into the chamber, rather than outward where they would kill the guards and onlookers. The chambers at both prisons had windows of bullet-proof glass, set in gas-resistant resin, within riveted steel frames, for the witnesses to view the execution.
To try to ensure speedy executions, the chambers were equipped with metal chairs upon which guards would strap the prisoner. Beneath the chair would be a bowl filled with sulphuric acid, mixed with distilled water, with a pound of sodium cyanide pellets suspended in a gauze bag just above. After the door was sealed and checked and when the warden gave the signal, the executioner would operate a lever that released the cyanide pellets into the liquid. This would cause a chemical reaction that produced hydrogen cyanide gas, which would rise through holes in the chair. Prisoners were told to inhale deeply, to hasten death and minimise suffering. However some prisoners clung to life for a very long time, like Walter LeGrand, who took eighteen minutes to die, despite all the measures described above.
After gassing, the body of the inmate would be highly poisonous, to anyone who came into contact with it, due to hydrocyanic compounds being released through the pores. The corpse could only be handled by qualified technicians wearing airtight safety suits. Because of the extent of these technical problems, (bear in mind this is only when occasionally using the chambers to kill one person at a time), the United States has now abandoned this method as a means of execution. It was simply perceived to be too awkward, unreliable and dangerous.
http://www.markturley.com/mediac/400_0/media/auschwitzgaschamber.jpgThe problem, in relation to our subject, is that apparently the Nazis gassed millions of people during the course of three years, in rooms like this one, which were previously used as air raid shelters and morgues. At the peak of the final solution, it is alleged that the gassing and cremating was a constant, 24-hour-a-day, 7-day-a-week operation. Imagine the logistics. Yet none of the measures or precautions listed above are in evidence and none are mentioned in the eyewitness accounts and confessions. We are told that simple buildings, made of ordinary brick and stone, concrete and plaster served this purpose. In fact many witness statements seem to completely contradict all normal handling procedures for hydrocyanic gas, like Hoess saying that after fifteen minutes the SS would clear the bodies while 'eating and smoking'. The question deniers ask and its clearly a valid one, is whether we are really to believe that the Nazis herded people into rooms like this, dropped in some Zyklon B pellets through a hole in the wall or roof, waited for them all to die and then simply walked in and dragged out and cremated their bodies, with no concern for their own safety or any resultant problems. How exactly did the Nazis manage to avoid all the issues that the US government faced (and had to invent inticate systems to try to combat) while using inferior technology and equipment and engaging in this process on an absolutely vast scale? Is it really feasible?
http://www.markturley.com/mediac/400_0/media/pressac%7EP.15.jpgI'd like to return you now to Ockam's razor, as we progress to looking at the other physical evidence, namely the piles of bodies, the piles of hair, the piles of shoes and clothing and the the piles of Zyklon B canisters. I can see, as I'm sure can you, how these things point people in a certain direction, particularly if they've already been primed by the Wannsee document and Hoess' confession, but lets go through them one by one and discuss what they actually show. The piles of bodies show that people died at the camps. Once again, nobody is denying that. Conditions weren't great and as the war wore on, it became harder and harder to get supplies in. Prisoners were starving, susceptible to disease and many of them died. (We'll discuss numbers later.) It is worth noting that the pictures of piles of emaciated bodies (http://www.remember.org/image/003.gif)which are so synonymous in the public consciousness with the holocaust, were taken during the Allied liberation of Belsen, which, like Dachau, is not alleged to be one of the death camps. Autopsies were conducted on these bodies and none of them showed gas poisoning as a cause of death. According to the chief pathologist, a Dr. Larson (http://www.astm.org/cgi-bin/SoftCart.exe/DIGITAL_LIBRARY/JOURNALS/FORENSIC/PAGES/5775.htm?E+mystore), the majority died from pectoral typhus, some from gunshot wounds, some from other ailments and diseases. Yet through repeated exposure, alongside the genocide claim, these images have become iconic. The fact is that they are truly horrific to see and may be moving, shocking and disturbing, but it needs to be accepted that they are not evidence for gas chambers or an extermination plan. They are evidence for starvation and typhoid epidemics. The piles of hair are also a dramatic sight, displayed as they are, in glass cases at several camp museums, but what do they actually prove? The fact is, all they prove is that inmates had their heads shaved on admission in an attempt to prevent the spread of lice - a standard practice. Similarly, the piles of shoes and clothing demonstrate that the prisoners were issued with a camp uniform, nothing more. Finally, then, to the big piece of the jigsaw, the canisters of Zyklon B. Anyone who has been taught the holocaust story knows that Zyklon B was a deadly gas formulated by the Nazis for the express purpose of genocide, right? Wrong. One of the biggest shocks for me on discovering this subject was finding out that Zyklon B was a fumigant and delousing agent in common use in Europe at that time. Prison camps, hospitals and army barracks all over the continent were using it to prevent the spread of lice and bacteria. Again, it was standard practice and it stands to reason that in a camp as big as Auschwitz you'd need a lot of it, hence the big pile of canisters. Once you are armed with that information, you quickly realise that the gas cans prove nothing either
http://www.markturley.com/mediac/400_0/media/pressacP.54.jpgWhat's left then? If we turn the discussion around and are attempting to prove that there was a Nazi state policy of extermination using Zyklon B, where is the proof? There are no gas chambers or blueprints and no photographs of them. I repeat - if any of those existed it would end the argument. Did you know (and I bet you didn't) that allied spotter planes flew over the camps several times during the time the final solution was supposedly at its peak and saw nothing untoward happening? They even took photographs (http://www.vho.org/tr/2000/4/birkaug25.jpg), such as this one. Although the CIA added incriminating labels to the photographs, before releasing them in 1991, it is clear to the clear-eyed observer that the pictures seem to show no queues waiting to be gassed, no columns of smoke from the crematoria chimneys and no burning piles of bodies. This was during the period when the combined camps were supposedly liquidating 20,000 people a day in a constant 24-hour process. The photographs should show something. How about if I told you that Nazi codes were broken in 1943 and for the last two years of the war pretty much all German messages were intercepted, even those coming from Auschwitz? Would it be reasonable to assume that some of those messages would pertain to the genocide? After all, the Germans didn't know the Allies had cracked their code. But none of them do, none of them mentioned wiping out the Jews or homicidal gassings. So what evidence have we actually got? Very little. In fact all that remains is eyewitness testimony.
Now, two points need to be made here. The first is that although there is reams and reams of eyewitness testimony from holocaust survivors, hardly any of it describes the gas chambers. There's eyewitness accounts of train journeys, of life in the camps, of the ghettos and persecution but only a mere handful of individuals who claim to have seen the gas chambers. Obviously, you could say that's because for the victims, the gas chambers would be the last thing they ever saw. Fair enough, but what about the 'sonderkommando'? (the Jews who worked in the gas chambers). What about other inmates at the camp who would have known what was going on? Why do we have so few who have claimed to have seen them? And what about the credibility of these few eyewitnesses, can we trust their version of events? Now, I don't wish to personally offend anyone, if your grandfather claims to have seen a gas chamber, I'm not going to call him a liar, but what I will say is that eyewitness testimony on its own proves nothing. If eyewitness testimony is proof, then the loch ness monster exists, because thousands of people claim to have seen it. If eyewitness testimony is proof, then UFOs exist, because thousands of people claim to have seen them. Many people even claim to have been on them and been anally probed, does that mean that's true as well? If I say that I saw you assaulting a schoolgirl on Greek Street last Thursday, does that make it true? Of course not, we'd want some hard evidence too - your DNA on her uniform, for example, or signs of a scuffle at the crime scene. If it then turned out that you really hated me and had been making my life a misery for the last few years, how reliable would you think my eyewitness testimony was then? Could it be that the few eyewitnesses who claim to have seen gas chambers were corroborating the Nuremburg story to exact revenge on their Nazi tormentors?
To review this whole thing so far. We have in the first instance an accusation - that the Nazis attempted to kill all Jews in Europe using poison gas. We then basically have no worthwhile evidence to support that accusation. Nothing that is given as 'proof' of the genocide actually is. This brings us to an important point in the discussion. A criticism that deniers often face is that their's is a negative thesis, all they do is debunk the views of exterminationists without offering their own theory. The response to this is obvious - their 'theory' is that which is shown by the available evidence. If anything else is to be alleged, then the burden of proof clearly lies with those making the accusation. If I can't produce one piece of decent evidence to show that you raped that schoolgirl, then you probably didn't. How could the Nazis have moved 11 million people around Europe to be killed, then disposed of their bodies, in the biggest, most industrial piece of mass murder in history, with all the organisation and administration that would involve, without leaving a paper trail or at least one piece of hard evidence? Its an impossibility. Why is there hard evidence and genuine Nazi documentation about all the rest of it - the ghettos, kristallnacht, the anti Jewish laws, but none for this? It really doesn't make sense.
In a further attempt to answer this criticism, Holocaust denier Ernst Zuendel (http://www.zundelsite.org/)sent Fred Leuchter, an execution expert who had designed gas chambers for American states where they are used to carry out the death penalty, to Auschwitz and several other camps in 1989 to examine the facilities there. Leuchter viewed the remains of all the alleged gas chamber sites and took rock and brick samples to test for Zyklon B residues in the ruined buildings. The result was a 192 page report (http://www.revisionists.com/leuchter/reports/index.html)in which Leuchter concluded that none of the sites had been or ever could have been used as execution gas chambers. It was unequivocal. This resulted in Leuchter being disparaged by those on the other side of the debate (http://www.nizkor.org/faqs/leuchter/), such as Deborah Lipstadt, who questioned his expertise. Unfortunately for them, the Polish governnment then conducted its own, independent enquiry, which broadly corrobrated (http://www.ihr.org/jhr/v11/v11p207_Staff.html) Leuchter's findings. Seriously - its not something you'd know about unless you've spent a bit of time investigating the subject, like I have, because no-one discusses it. The BBC will give airtime and coverage to Lipstadt and other 'standard' holocaust historians, whereas those who say what I'm saying tend to end up in prison. If you don't believe me, go and research it yourself. Its all out there.
I'm going to round this part of the discussion off by briefly mentioning the fact that several of the camps, including Auschwitz, are now open as museums and have guided tours. At some of these camps they show visitors a 'gas chamber'. Not one of these is genuine, except, allegedly for the previously mentioned controversial and confusing one at Dachau. The authorities running the camps will admit, if pressed, that the rest are reconstructions, built after the war by the Russians and Poles to approximate what they thought a Nazi gas chamber looked like. Interestingly, tourists to Auschwitz were told that the gas chamber they were shown was in its 'original state' until a young revisionist reporter, David Cole (who also happened to be Jewish) got the museum curator to admit on camera (http://video.google.co.uk/videoplay?docid=-2968377116621277074%20) that this wasn't the case in 1992. Auschwitz then began telling its guests that the chamber actually was a reconstruction. This clearly begs the question of why the museum authorities felt the need to lie about it for 45 years.
http://www.markturley.com/mediac/400_0/media/ausplaq1948.gifFinally, we get to the Maths. Standard holocaust history holds that 6 million Jews were killed. But if the Germans weren't using industrial methods of mass murder, this figure is clearly impossible. (Even if they were, its pretty high.) Originally we were told that 4 million of those were killed at Auschwitz (see plaque above), yet for some reason, even as that figure has been officially revised by the Auschwitz museum to 1.1 million, (see plaque below) that total of 6 million has remained the same. This is the world of holocaust history - figures don't add up, evidence shows very little, most of the 'facts' are hotly disputed, yet still we are supposed to suspend suspicion and just believe. I'm afraid I can't do that.
http://www.markturley.com/mediac/400_0/media/ausplaq1990.gifRevisonists point out that the Germans were meticulous record keepers - we have logs of inmates at Auschwitz, detailing their name, height, weight, build, profession, marital status and a variety of other details, even in some cases, the number of lice counted on their heads. If these camp records are taken as a basis, it seems that the total populations of all German camps during World War 2 was about 500,000. Himmler gave a statement in which he estimated the number at 700,000. It therefore seems reasonable to deal in these sorts of numbers.
http://www.markturley.com/mediac/400_0/media/red%7Ecross%7Ereport.jpgThese figures are broadly supported by numbers from the recently opened Bad Arolsen archive, provided by the International Red Cross (see left), who can hardly be claimed to be Nazi apologists or 'deniers'. Now even if these 5-700,000 were all Jewish (which they weren't) and all died (which they didn't), it would only amount to about 1% of the total deaths of the war. This clearly doesn't deserve the enormous emphasis it receives from the media and the Hollywood film industry. (You still reading, Spielberg?) Furthermore, if homicidal gassings were not taking place and the concentration camps were simply prison compounds in which poor conditions led to death for many inmates, then what the Germans were doing, although disgusting, was little different to what the Americans were doing to Japanese-Americans during the same period or the British did to Afrikaaners during the Boer War or many other nations have done at many, many points in history. This would mean that the demonisation of the Nazi regime and the portrayal of Germans from that time as two-dimensionsal, evil fiends is unjustified.
There is much more that could be said on this subject and there are whole websites dedicated to it - I was fascinated to discover that there are debates on aspects of the holocaust dating back to the earliest days of the internet. Within academic circles it seems it has been a briskly debated (and often revised) subject for much longer than that, going back to the 50s and 60s, yet the public is largely unaware of this. Most of us like to lead simple lives and believe that which we are told. Especially in matters of war, particularly fairly recent war in which relatives may have been involved (I am unusual in that I have family members who fought on both sides in WW2), even intelligent people like to indulge in what I call 'cowboy film' morality. In other words we like to feel that good and evil is clearly defined, that the heroes wear white hats and the villains black ones, that you are either on one side or the other. Of course, real life is not like this and there are shades of good and evil, of truth and lies, bravery and cowardice in all communities, events and actions. We need to calm down and start thinking about the holocaust rationally.
By means of conclusion, I'd like to encapsulate the viewpoint of holocaust 'deniers,' if we must use that name, by saying that the enormous flaw in the centre of the holocaust story (which is surrounded by many other only slightly less significant flaws) is this...We are told that a major European nation engaged in a massive extermination programme, utlilising innovative, technological, yet energy-hungry killing apparatus while embroiled in World War 2, the biggest war in history. This alone is frankly unfeasible, (would Germany really have diverted so much scarce energy and resources away from their troops fighting a massive war on two fronts?) Yet not only did they apparently do this, but they did it in secret. A programme of extermination, which ultimately accounted for 11 million lives, of continental scope, was conducted in the middle of an international war, with spotter planes flying around Europe taking photographs and entire espionage units placed within the enemy chain of command to gather information and nobody knew it was happening. Such was the extent of this secrecy and the complete dearth of any real evidence of the event that it required court proceedings to prove its reality. This enormous, pan-European death programme required teams of lawyers, coerced defendants and specially primed witnesses in what even moderate historians refer to as 'show trials' to demonstrate its truth. Let me ask you this, did we need legal process to prove that Pearl Harbour happened, or the Allied carpet bombing of Dresden? Did we need lawyers and testimony and arguments to show that the Blitz or the Battle of Britain occurred? No. Because when huge historical events like this actually happen, they are self-evident. There is piles of hard proof lying around. Yet this one, apparently, is a special case. Surely any thoughtful person must be sceptical?
Hopefully, if nothing else, I've demonstrated that this subject is at least worth considering. How can we imprison people for saying this? That's the sort of thing we're told that Hitler did, isn't it? If people such as Lipstadt don't like what the revisionists say, all they need to do is engage them in open and honest debate and prove them wrong. That's the way academic study, such as history, is supposed to work. My opinion is that if people are too emotionally involved in a subject to discuss it rationally with those who have opposing views, then they shouldn't be discussing it publicly at all. In case you're not clear - I support it (revisionism / denial), as a thesis. I never would have said that three years ago, but my mind has been opened. We need to remember that Germany lost the war and as we all know, 'history is written by the victors'. As time goes by and the desire to separate fact from propaganda becomes stronger, I believe that the 'deniers' version will become the accepted one and people will look back on the time when David Irving and others like him were jailed with curiosity and fear, the way we regard the Spanish Inquisition today. That's not to say I'm closed-minded about it. If someone came to me tomorrow and said 'look, here's the piece of evidence that proves it all!' I would be happy to look at it and reform my opinion if necessary. But with the evidence we have at present and have had for the last sixty years, I suggest that to anybody with at least one eye and half a brain, it really is an open-and-shut case. Go and look for yourself - that's all I did, but be prepared for the fact that you will enter a field of study where looking objectively at the facts and drawing logical conclusions is frowned upon, even reviled. You are only supposed to say what they tell you. It isn't academia as it normally exists, its legend, religion and moral rectitude, all rolled up into one. Criticise it and its as if you are criticising God himself.
"Freedom is being able to say 2 + 2 = 4. Everything else comes from that." (George Orwell)
http://www.markturley.com/mediac/400_0/media/auschwitz%7Erelease%7Eform.jpg
http://www.markturley.com/mediac/400_0/media/auschwizschein.jpg
Update 24/03/07 - Since writing this Holocaust article, I have continued to investigate the subject and other, connected topics. The more I do so, the more I am convinced that the Holocaust story, as it has been told and taught for decades, does not hold water. Directly above, for example, are two release forms from Auschwitz. Yes, that's right, release forms. It seems that some prisoners were allowed to leave the 'factory of death' upon completion of their sentences. There are actually quite a few of these documents around. These two particular ones come from June and July 1944 - the very time when the alleged 'Final Solution' was at its peak. When, we are told, 20,000 people were being exterminated a day, in a continous, 24 hour conveyor belt of death, when the Auschwitz crematories no longer sufficed to meet demand and bodies had to be burned on huge, open pyres. To anyone with a rational bone in their body, the fact that inmates were being released from the camp during this time is surely very telling, especially as the two documents I have provided are from Auschwitz-Birkenau, the section of the camp where, we are told, the vast majority of the exterminations occurred. Whether or not the people released were Jews (they may have been Poles or Communists, or Gypsies etc) it makes the mass-extermination story even harder to believe. I mean, if the Nazis were conducting a top-secret, three year programme of genocide at Birkenau, would they really allow prisoners to walk free in the middle of it, back to the world, knowing that they would be in possession of knowledge which would blow the whole thing wide open? Is it reasonable to claim that the Nazis were that stupid? And why is it that none of the holocaust historians discuss the matter of released inmates from Auschwitz? I've not read anything about it in books by Hilberg, Pressac, Gilbert or any of the rest of them. I certainly wasn't taught it at school. Are they aware of the existence of these documents? Or do they simply ignore them? If anyone can offer a rational explanation, I'd be interested to hear it.
http://www.markturley.com/mediac/400_0/media/ah1919.gif
Continued@ Source (http://www.markturley.com/96244.html)
http://www.markturley.com/mediac/400_0/media/icon_danger_sign.jpgIf this is your first visit to my website or you don't know me, or you just haven't read this page before, this is most likely to be the time where you navigate away in disgust. I am aware that some of the views presented here are abhorrent to some people. I am also aware that by including such content on my website, I will alienate some and cause many to think I am a nutter or an extremist. But this page is on here because I happen to think it tells the truth and that's important to me.
http://www.markturley.com/mediac/400_0/media/imag10.jpgYou see, I am an obsessive person. By that I don't mean that I have a passion for shoe-shopping or pornography or that I have to wash my hands three times before leaving the house, but rather that I tend to develop an interest in a subject and then pursue it tirelessly, for months or even years until I feel satisfied that I know lots of things about it that average people don't. I've been like that since I was a kid. Trust me, it makes for fascinating conversation when I'm drunk.
Although people who have been cornered and harangued by me at parties / clubs / bars will find this hard to believe, its probably quite a good trait for a fiction writer to possess because it gives me plenty of material to develop plot-lines with. It can, however, also lead me down dark alleyways; alleyways where very few fear to tread and even fewer will admit they have trodden. Over the years I've been through doomsday scenarios (pole shift theory, the 'peak oil' energy crisis), classic conspiracy theories (the 9/11 plot, the illuminati, David Icke's belief that all world leaders are shape-shifting lizards from outer space) and political / historical wrangles (the Kennedy assasination, human origin debates) etc.
Many of these seem superficially ludicrous and very often they really are, even to someone relatively open minded such as myself. Quite often I find that after my initial enthusiasm for a subject wears off, I find it intensely silly and tedious and fail to understand why anyone is interested in it at all. Several topics listed above certainly fall into that category. Below, however are some subjects which I have investigated and which still intrigue me. They are 'taboo' subjects. In other words, subjects which virtually no-one will discuss because to do so is to break a kind of unspoken law. For someone like me, that just makes them all the more interesting. I don't believe in 'sacred cows'. So, I present these, not as part of any political doctrine or framework - I hate all that crap - as soon as people start waving banners and chanting slogans and supporting red or blue I lose interest. I present them instead simply as interesting topics for reflection. As usual, if anyone has any comments or would like to discuss anything with me further, please get in touch using the contact form on my home page.
http://www.markturley.com/mediac/400_0/media/reporter.jpgHolocaust Denial
If you weren't sure what I meant when I said that these subjects are 'taboo' you probably realise now. What could be more disgusting to any moral, right thinking person than someone who seeks to deny the terrible suffering of the Jews at the hands of Hitler? What kind of sick freak claims it never happened? Such is the outrage at this point of view that it is actually a crime to express it in many countries. That's right, Canada, Australia, France, Austria, Germany, New Zealand, all nations which otherwise uphold the right to freedom of speech, have laws which state that people who publicly deny the holocaust can be imprisoned. 'Quite right!' I hear you all cry. But who among the moral majority actually knows what Holocaust Denial is?
When I talk to people about this they usually say something like 'Holocaust deniers are those weirdos and neo-Nazis who say that nothing happened', which clearly would be a ludicrous standpoint. I mean, to fly in the face of all the evidence, all the Nazi documents that were seized at the end of the war, the photographs, the confessions, the eyewitness testimony, the intercepted, decoded messages. To say that nothing happened is just stupid. Well, I agree. So do the holocaust deniers. It is stupid.
But no-one is saying that.
Holocaust 'deniers' don't like the name the media has given them because they feel it cheapens their argument and gives people the wrong impression before they've even heard what they have to say. I happen to agree. They prefer to be called 'revisionists'. I happen to think that's actually what they are. But that's not hugely important. It wouldn't really matter if they chose to call themselves 'Norwegian fish-wrestling enthusiasts' - its what they believe and why they believe it that I find fascinating.
I began to investigate 'deniers' and their views while researching a character for a novel. My expectations were, like most people, that they were all neo-nazis and had no evidence or logic to support what they were saying. Based on snippets of information I had gained from the media I expected to read a lot of twisted, hate-filled garbage which could easily be written off and discarded. But my preconceptions were completely confounded. The first point worth making here, is that on the most part, deniers or revisionists seem pretty apolitical. Contrarily, most neo-nazis (as far as I can tell from visiting their websites) don't just believe in the Holocaust, they glory in it. They revel in the reported evils of Nazi Germany and gleefully repeat tales of how 6 million Jews were gassed to death. To deny the holocaust opposes this - it is to distance yourself from those who've based their lives around mythologising it. Now neo-nazis certainly fall into that category, but do any other groups? Religious groups perhaps? Ethnic minorities possibly? (Spielberg, I'm looking at you.)
Secondly, its important to know what deniers say and what they don't. You can view this paragraph as a kind of checklist, if you like. From the pretty extensive reading I've done around this, none of the so called deniers I've come across deny that Nazi Germany was anti-semitic. None of the so-called deniers deny that Jews were discriminated against and horribly mistreated. None of the so called deniers deny that Jewish businesses, synagogues and houses were destroyed on 'Kristallnacht' (http://www.historyplace.com/worldwar2/timeline/knacht.htm). None of the so-called deniers deny that Jews were taken from their homes, rounded up and put into ghettos, where conditions were terrible and malnutrition and typhoid caused many of them to die. None of the so-called deniers deny that Jews were also sent to concentration camps, along with others who were identified as enemies of the state, like communists, gypsies, homosexuals and untermensch, where, like the ghettoes, conditions were often appalling, particularly towards the end of war as Germany started losing and her supply lines were cut. To recap - that probably amounts to 90% of the holocaust story and nobody is denying any of it. The thing is that there is so much hard evidence to support all this that only a fool would attempt to deny it. It is unreasonable, faced with the proof of these events, to suggest that they did not take place.
So what is it actually that the deniers deny? What is it that causes such outrage? Simply put, the deniers deny that the Nazis were trying to exterminate the Jewish race. They deny that there were gas chambers at the concentration camps and that there was a state approved policy of genocide. They say that these things are wartime propaganda that has been mixed up with the truth and repeated so many times through film, fiction and journalism that people accept them unquestioningly. Deniers believe that the Nazis wanted all Jews off German soil, that they sought to exile them all to the east, but they didn't try to wipe them out. As a result, deniers deny that 6 million Jews were killed.
So, just to consolidate what I've said so far, 'deniers' aren't really denying the holocaust as such - they are actually saying that some of it is true and some of it isn't. Once we've all grasped that, we can move to the next level of the discussion, which is to ask - why do they say that?
For those who don't know, the standard version of holocaust history goes something like this. In 1942, leading Nazis met at the Wannsee conference to discuss the 'final solution' to the Jewish problem. They agreed upon a state sanctioned policy of genocide, utilising lethal gas chambers at camps which would poison prisoners with 'Zyklon B'. As a result, several camps, most notably 'Auschwitz-Birkenau' were adapted for this purpose. Prisoners were taken there on special rail services. Men who were fit for work were given jobs in camp factories, women, children, the sick and the elderly were all gassed on arrival.
This story is confirmed by the minutes of the Wannsee conference itself, eyewitness testimony of camp survivors, signed confessions of Nazis made at the Nuremburg trials in 1946, (in particular that of Rudolf Hoess, commandant of Auschwitz) and physical evidence. Although no gas chambers were found (it is believed the Nazis blew them up rather than have them discovered), piles of emaciated bodies, piles of hair, piles of shoes and clothing and piles of canisters of Zyklon B gas serve as a clear demonstration of the camps' sinister purpose. The 6 million number was originally given by the Russians at the Nuremburg trials. The subsequent total of 11 million, including non-Jews was proposed some time later by famous 'Nazi-hunter' Simon Wiesenthal (http://www.wiesenthal.com/). Both figures have been held ever since.
Now that, in abbreviated form, is what I was taught at school. That's probably what you were taught as well. Here's what the 'deniers' point out.
The minutes of the Wannsee conference (http://www.writing.upenn.edu/%7Eafilreis/Holocaust/wansee-transcript.html)don't actually mention gassings once. They don't mention attempting genocide on the Jews either. They do contain many derogatory references to Jews, as you would expect from an anti-semitic bunch like the Nazis and they do talk at length about moving Jews to work on road building schemes in Eastern Europe, but that's about as far as it goes. I found this very shocking. I mean, it hadn't occurred to me to ask 'how do we know the Nazis planned the Jewish genocide at Wannsee?' I just knew they had, because that's what I'd been told. But even a quick scan of the Wannsee documents will suggest to most readers that no such plan was made there. Bizarrely, considering how the wannsee legend is still taught as 'fact' in schools and likewise repeated in Holocaust media coverage, this view of the conference is even accepted by the foremost Holocaust historians. Jean-Claude Pressac, for example, wrote in his much-referenced and revered work 'The Technique and Operation of the Gas Chambers at Auschwitz' (considered to be the most authoritative historical study written on the genocide), that, "On the 20th January the conference called 'the Wannsee Conference' took place in Berlin. Even if an operation to remove the Jews to the east was planned which might entail the 'natural' elimination of some through labor, no one there spoke of industrial mass-liquidation. In the days and the weeks that followed, the construction office at Auschwitz received no call, telegram or letter requesting the planning of an installation intended for this purpose." Similarly, Raul Hilberg, the Jewish historian considered by many to be the 'dean' of Holocaust history, author of many books on the subject, including the seminal 'The Destruction of the European Jews' wrote that, "what began in 1941 was a process of destruction not planned in advance, not organized centrally by any agency. There was no blueprint and there was no budget for destructive measures. They [these measures] were taken step by step, one step at a time. Thus came about not so much a plan being carried out, but an incredible meeting of minds, a consensus -- mind reading by a far-flung bureaucracy. In the final analysis, the destruction of the Jews was not so much a product of laws and commands as it was a matter of spirit, of shared comprehension, of consonance and synchronization."
Think about it - if you studied history at school, did the textbook you were given actually have transcripts of the conference? Did it actually lay down, using primary, original sources what the Nazis actually said at Wannsee? Or did the author of the book just write something along the lines of 'The final solution was agreed at Wannsee where the delegates agreed to gas the Jews' and leave it there? I'll give you ten to one it was closer to the latter than the former and this is reflective of so much of Holocaust history, we are told by writers what was done and said. But if you ask, 'how do we know that?' 'where is the evidence?' You'll be surprised by what you find.
http://www.markturley.com/mediac/400_0/media/92714.jpgOK - so the main piece of evidence that has been used to prove that the Holocaust was a state-approved act of genocide doesn't really say anything of the sort, and is even rejected as such by the two leading historical authorities on the subject, but there's still all the other stuff, right? What about the signed confessions for example? Well, there now exists a great deal of available source material to suggest that many of the confessions given at Nuremburg were worthless, to the point where it is arguable that the entirities of the International and Nuremburg Military Tribunals should be disregarded as valid sources of evidence. Bernard Clarke, the Jewish interrogator who led the squad responsible for obtaining Hoess' confession (http://www.fordham.edu/halsall/mod/1946hoess.html), for example, admitted twenty years later in 'Legions of Death' (Hamlyn Paperbacks) (http://www.amazon.co.uk/Legions-Death-Enslavement-Military-Classics/dp/1844150429/ref=sr_1_1/203-9440849-8763163?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1175026413&sr=8-1) a book by British historian Rupert Butler, that Hoess' testimony stating that 2.5 million Jews had been gassed at Auschwitz and a further 500,000 had died of natural causes while under his command had taken three days of torture and death threats made against his children to obtain. For years and years Hoess' declaration was the bedrock of the extermination claim, its descriptions of the gassing process repeated ad infinitum, including the famous line 'we knew when to open the doors because the screaming stopped'. To further discredit it, it has emerged that the original document was actually written in English, a language Hoess didn't read, speak or understand. Not only was he beaten senseless and fearful for the lives of his family, he didn't even know what he was signing. The mere fact that this was done should arouse suspicion in most critical thinkers. If you have to resort to coercion, torture and death threats to prove that something happened, it surely suggests that you don't have real proof.
What is more, due to the principal of legal precedent, once Hoess and other leading Nazis had been forced to confess, it established the gas chamber story as 'fact' in the eyes of the court, meaning that subsequent defendants at Nuremburg could not dispute it. The only option available to a Nazi on trial who had any interest in avoiding the death penalty was to admit that the gas chamber / genocide story was true, but that they, personally, had nothing to do with it. It is unsurprising that in such circumstances this is what virtually all of them said.
It needs to be understood at this point that criticism of the Nuremburg process is not a new thing. There were many commentators of the time who expressed their dismay at the proceedings, but this has been forgotten as the Holocaust industry has gained momentum. US Supreme Court Chief Justice, Harlan Fiske Stone, for example, called the Nuremberg trials a fraud. "[Chief US prosecutor] Jackson is away conducting his high-grade lynching party in Nuremberg," he wrote. "I don't mind what he does to the Nazis, but I hate to see the pretense that he is running a court and proceeding according to common law. This is a little too sanctimonious a fraud to meet my old-fashioned ideas." (Pillar of the Law', Alpheus T. Mason, New York: Viking, 1956)
In the same book, Associate Supreme Court Justice William Douglas charged that the Allies were guilty of "substituting power for principle" at Nuremberg. "I thought at the time and still think that the Nuremberg trials were unprincipled.", he wrote. "Law was created ex post facto to suit the passion and clamor of the time."
It is not difficult to see how these opinions were arrived at. A quick look at the Nuremburg charter shows some bizarre justification. Article 19, for example, reads as follows: "The Tribunal shall not be bound by technical rules of evidence. It shall adopt and apply to the greatest possible extent expeditious and nontechnical procedure, and shall admit any evidence which it deems to be of probative value."
Just read that again, think about it and then tell me if you think we can trust the findings of a court that operates in such a way.
On to the physical evidence. Firstly, lets reiterate - no gas chambers were found at any of the alleged extermination camps. Many, many people are unaware of this. The only Nazi gas chamber deemed to have been found in tact is the one at Dachau (http://www.scrapbookpages.com/Dachauscrapbook/GasChamber/interior00.html). This is interesting for several reasons. Firstly, Dachau, which is just outside Munich, is not one of the alleged death camps. It was claimed to be such post war, as many labour and transit camps were, in the Allied rush to pin as much on the Nazis as possible, but current historical opinion (and even that of such ardent Holocaust propagandists as the aforementioned Simon Wiesenthal), is that that all the exterminations happened in Poland. Secondly, visitors to the camp now see a painted sign above the door which says 'brausebad' (http://darwin.ediacara.org/gallery/Dachau/100_1154)(shower room). Inside the chamber is a placard which says 'Gas chamber - disguised as a shower room - never used as a gas chamber.' Ponder that for a moment, does it not strike you as odd? Here we have what is supposedly the only remaining gas chamber, mysteriously undestroyed unlike all the others, located at a camp where nobody alleges any gassing took place and therefore nobody alleges it was ever used? Eh? This sense of mystery deepens, when we see that when US soldiers liberated the camp in 1945, there was another sign on the door. As this picture (http://www.holocaust-history.org/dachau-gas-chambers/photo.cgi?34)clearly shows, the 'homicidal gas chamber' was apparently labelled with a skull and crossbones and the words 'Gaszeit! Vorsicht, Lebensgefahr! Nicht Offnen!' which means 'Gas room! Warning! Danger to life! Don't open!' (roughly). Clearly, certain questions present themselves. Why have the labels on the door changed since 1945? And who changed them? These are clearly important things to ask and have answered, as nobody would believe that they were being taken for a shower in a room labelled with a skull and crossbones. As we already know that the Allies built fake gas chambers at other camps after the war (I will expand on this point later) there is clearly scope for rational suspicion with Dachau. Whether the room was a shower room which was tampered with to make it look like a gas chamber, or a delousing chamber which was tampered with to make it look like a shower room, or genuinely was, as we are told, a real homicidal gas chamber which no-one ever used, is a matter of considerable controversy, which I encourage readers to investigate for themselves, if interested. I would urge such readers to seek out statements made by American soldiers (not commanding officers) who liberated the camp.
The point is, that if one of the original, huge, homicidal gas chambers had been found at any of the alleged extermination camps (or at least part of one) there would be no debate. If there was a photograph of one, there would be no debate. But there isn't. If you've ever done any philosophy at school, you'll probably be familiar with Ockam's razor, deemed to be the clearest way to establish truth, namely, 'the simplest explanation is usually correct' and 'if an event is explainable without using an idea, discard the idea.' Now, lets apply those principles to why no gas chambers or photographs of them were found. Is it, a) because there weren't any, or b) because there were enormous, industrial gas chambers, the scale of which have never been seen before or since, which were used to murder up to 11 million people in three years but which were destroyed leaving no trace of their existence at all before the camps were liberated? Before you answer that, let me add that no blueprints for the gas chambers have ever been found, despite blueprints for all other parts of the camps, including the crematoria being available. Furthermore, not one Nazi document relating to the construction, use or demolition of the gas chambers was ever found, despite tons of Nazi documents being seized at the end of the war. About 65,000 documents were recovered from the construction office at Auschwitz alone, giving a detailed record of every stage of the building of the crematoria, the delousing rooms, the barrack blocks etc yet gas chambers or extermination facilities are mentioned on none.
In addition to the lack of physical or documentary evidence for the existence of the huge homicidal gas chambers, there is the simple fact that the construction and operation of such facilities would pose enormous technical difficulties, which it is doubtful even technicians of today would be able to solve.
http://www.markturley.com/mediac/400_0/media/gas%7Echamber.jpgBy means of illustration, lets focus briefly on the American gas chambers used until recently to end the lives of death row inmates at Parchmont, Mississippi, San Quentin, California and several other prisons. These working gas chambers were not rooms like the alleged Nazi installations, but specially constructed, purpose-designed, octagonal steel boxes, roughly 6 feet across and 8 feet high. Both had 30 foot high chimneys outside to vent the hydrocyanic gas after use, as the levels of toxicity even for gassing just one inmate at a time would be deadly if the air of the prison or surrounding rooms became in any way contaminated.
When operational, the interiors of the chambers were sealed in rubber, (not shown in the picture)to prevent leakage and had thick steel doors closed by large, locking wheels and an elaborate latching system. Air pressure had to be carefully monitored and regulated, using various pieces of equipment, in order that any leaks that did occur, (as some molecules would always escape, even in a sealed steel chamber), flowed inward, into the chamber, rather than outward where they would kill the guards and onlookers. The chambers at both prisons had windows of bullet-proof glass, set in gas-resistant resin, within riveted steel frames, for the witnesses to view the execution.
To try to ensure speedy executions, the chambers were equipped with metal chairs upon which guards would strap the prisoner. Beneath the chair would be a bowl filled with sulphuric acid, mixed with distilled water, with a pound of sodium cyanide pellets suspended in a gauze bag just above. After the door was sealed and checked and when the warden gave the signal, the executioner would operate a lever that released the cyanide pellets into the liquid. This would cause a chemical reaction that produced hydrogen cyanide gas, which would rise through holes in the chair. Prisoners were told to inhale deeply, to hasten death and minimise suffering. However some prisoners clung to life for a very long time, like Walter LeGrand, who took eighteen minutes to die, despite all the measures described above.
After gassing, the body of the inmate would be highly poisonous, to anyone who came into contact with it, due to hydrocyanic compounds being released through the pores. The corpse could only be handled by qualified technicians wearing airtight safety suits. Because of the extent of these technical problems, (bear in mind this is only when occasionally using the chambers to kill one person at a time), the United States has now abandoned this method as a means of execution. It was simply perceived to be too awkward, unreliable and dangerous.
http://www.markturley.com/mediac/400_0/media/auschwitzgaschamber.jpgThe problem, in relation to our subject, is that apparently the Nazis gassed millions of people during the course of three years, in rooms like this one, which were previously used as air raid shelters and morgues. At the peak of the final solution, it is alleged that the gassing and cremating was a constant, 24-hour-a-day, 7-day-a-week operation. Imagine the logistics. Yet none of the measures or precautions listed above are in evidence and none are mentioned in the eyewitness accounts and confessions. We are told that simple buildings, made of ordinary brick and stone, concrete and plaster served this purpose. In fact many witness statements seem to completely contradict all normal handling procedures for hydrocyanic gas, like Hoess saying that after fifteen minutes the SS would clear the bodies while 'eating and smoking'. The question deniers ask and its clearly a valid one, is whether we are really to believe that the Nazis herded people into rooms like this, dropped in some Zyklon B pellets through a hole in the wall or roof, waited for them all to die and then simply walked in and dragged out and cremated their bodies, with no concern for their own safety or any resultant problems. How exactly did the Nazis manage to avoid all the issues that the US government faced (and had to invent inticate systems to try to combat) while using inferior technology and equipment and engaging in this process on an absolutely vast scale? Is it really feasible?
http://www.markturley.com/mediac/400_0/media/pressac%7EP.15.jpgI'd like to return you now to Ockam's razor, as we progress to looking at the other physical evidence, namely the piles of bodies, the piles of hair, the piles of shoes and clothing and the the piles of Zyklon B canisters. I can see, as I'm sure can you, how these things point people in a certain direction, particularly if they've already been primed by the Wannsee document and Hoess' confession, but lets go through them one by one and discuss what they actually show. The piles of bodies show that people died at the camps. Once again, nobody is denying that. Conditions weren't great and as the war wore on, it became harder and harder to get supplies in. Prisoners were starving, susceptible to disease and many of them died. (We'll discuss numbers later.) It is worth noting that the pictures of piles of emaciated bodies (http://www.remember.org/image/003.gif)which are so synonymous in the public consciousness with the holocaust, were taken during the Allied liberation of Belsen, which, like Dachau, is not alleged to be one of the death camps. Autopsies were conducted on these bodies and none of them showed gas poisoning as a cause of death. According to the chief pathologist, a Dr. Larson (http://www.astm.org/cgi-bin/SoftCart.exe/DIGITAL_LIBRARY/JOURNALS/FORENSIC/PAGES/5775.htm?E+mystore), the majority died from pectoral typhus, some from gunshot wounds, some from other ailments and diseases. Yet through repeated exposure, alongside the genocide claim, these images have become iconic. The fact is that they are truly horrific to see and may be moving, shocking and disturbing, but it needs to be accepted that they are not evidence for gas chambers or an extermination plan. They are evidence for starvation and typhoid epidemics. The piles of hair are also a dramatic sight, displayed as they are, in glass cases at several camp museums, but what do they actually prove? The fact is, all they prove is that inmates had their heads shaved on admission in an attempt to prevent the spread of lice - a standard practice. Similarly, the piles of shoes and clothing demonstrate that the prisoners were issued with a camp uniform, nothing more. Finally, then, to the big piece of the jigsaw, the canisters of Zyklon B. Anyone who has been taught the holocaust story knows that Zyklon B was a deadly gas formulated by the Nazis for the express purpose of genocide, right? Wrong. One of the biggest shocks for me on discovering this subject was finding out that Zyklon B was a fumigant and delousing agent in common use in Europe at that time. Prison camps, hospitals and army barracks all over the continent were using it to prevent the spread of lice and bacteria. Again, it was standard practice and it stands to reason that in a camp as big as Auschwitz you'd need a lot of it, hence the big pile of canisters. Once you are armed with that information, you quickly realise that the gas cans prove nothing either
http://www.markturley.com/mediac/400_0/media/pressacP.54.jpgWhat's left then? If we turn the discussion around and are attempting to prove that there was a Nazi state policy of extermination using Zyklon B, where is the proof? There are no gas chambers or blueprints and no photographs of them. I repeat - if any of those existed it would end the argument. Did you know (and I bet you didn't) that allied spotter planes flew over the camps several times during the time the final solution was supposedly at its peak and saw nothing untoward happening? They even took photographs (http://www.vho.org/tr/2000/4/birkaug25.jpg), such as this one. Although the CIA added incriminating labels to the photographs, before releasing them in 1991, it is clear to the clear-eyed observer that the pictures seem to show no queues waiting to be gassed, no columns of smoke from the crematoria chimneys and no burning piles of bodies. This was during the period when the combined camps were supposedly liquidating 20,000 people a day in a constant 24-hour process. The photographs should show something. How about if I told you that Nazi codes were broken in 1943 and for the last two years of the war pretty much all German messages were intercepted, even those coming from Auschwitz? Would it be reasonable to assume that some of those messages would pertain to the genocide? After all, the Germans didn't know the Allies had cracked their code. But none of them do, none of them mentioned wiping out the Jews or homicidal gassings. So what evidence have we actually got? Very little. In fact all that remains is eyewitness testimony.
Now, two points need to be made here. The first is that although there is reams and reams of eyewitness testimony from holocaust survivors, hardly any of it describes the gas chambers. There's eyewitness accounts of train journeys, of life in the camps, of the ghettos and persecution but only a mere handful of individuals who claim to have seen the gas chambers. Obviously, you could say that's because for the victims, the gas chambers would be the last thing they ever saw. Fair enough, but what about the 'sonderkommando'? (the Jews who worked in the gas chambers). What about other inmates at the camp who would have known what was going on? Why do we have so few who have claimed to have seen them? And what about the credibility of these few eyewitnesses, can we trust their version of events? Now, I don't wish to personally offend anyone, if your grandfather claims to have seen a gas chamber, I'm not going to call him a liar, but what I will say is that eyewitness testimony on its own proves nothing. If eyewitness testimony is proof, then the loch ness monster exists, because thousands of people claim to have seen it. If eyewitness testimony is proof, then UFOs exist, because thousands of people claim to have seen them. Many people even claim to have been on them and been anally probed, does that mean that's true as well? If I say that I saw you assaulting a schoolgirl on Greek Street last Thursday, does that make it true? Of course not, we'd want some hard evidence too - your DNA on her uniform, for example, or signs of a scuffle at the crime scene. If it then turned out that you really hated me and had been making my life a misery for the last few years, how reliable would you think my eyewitness testimony was then? Could it be that the few eyewitnesses who claim to have seen gas chambers were corroborating the Nuremburg story to exact revenge on their Nazi tormentors?
To review this whole thing so far. We have in the first instance an accusation - that the Nazis attempted to kill all Jews in Europe using poison gas. We then basically have no worthwhile evidence to support that accusation. Nothing that is given as 'proof' of the genocide actually is. This brings us to an important point in the discussion. A criticism that deniers often face is that their's is a negative thesis, all they do is debunk the views of exterminationists without offering their own theory. The response to this is obvious - their 'theory' is that which is shown by the available evidence. If anything else is to be alleged, then the burden of proof clearly lies with those making the accusation. If I can't produce one piece of decent evidence to show that you raped that schoolgirl, then you probably didn't. How could the Nazis have moved 11 million people around Europe to be killed, then disposed of their bodies, in the biggest, most industrial piece of mass murder in history, with all the organisation and administration that would involve, without leaving a paper trail or at least one piece of hard evidence? Its an impossibility. Why is there hard evidence and genuine Nazi documentation about all the rest of it - the ghettos, kristallnacht, the anti Jewish laws, but none for this? It really doesn't make sense.
In a further attempt to answer this criticism, Holocaust denier Ernst Zuendel (http://www.zundelsite.org/)sent Fred Leuchter, an execution expert who had designed gas chambers for American states where they are used to carry out the death penalty, to Auschwitz and several other camps in 1989 to examine the facilities there. Leuchter viewed the remains of all the alleged gas chamber sites and took rock and brick samples to test for Zyklon B residues in the ruined buildings. The result was a 192 page report (http://www.revisionists.com/leuchter/reports/index.html)in which Leuchter concluded that none of the sites had been or ever could have been used as execution gas chambers. It was unequivocal. This resulted in Leuchter being disparaged by those on the other side of the debate (http://www.nizkor.org/faqs/leuchter/), such as Deborah Lipstadt, who questioned his expertise. Unfortunately for them, the Polish governnment then conducted its own, independent enquiry, which broadly corrobrated (http://www.ihr.org/jhr/v11/v11p207_Staff.html) Leuchter's findings. Seriously - its not something you'd know about unless you've spent a bit of time investigating the subject, like I have, because no-one discusses it. The BBC will give airtime and coverage to Lipstadt and other 'standard' holocaust historians, whereas those who say what I'm saying tend to end up in prison. If you don't believe me, go and research it yourself. Its all out there.
I'm going to round this part of the discussion off by briefly mentioning the fact that several of the camps, including Auschwitz, are now open as museums and have guided tours. At some of these camps they show visitors a 'gas chamber'. Not one of these is genuine, except, allegedly for the previously mentioned controversial and confusing one at Dachau. The authorities running the camps will admit, if pressed, that the rest are reconstructions, built after the war by the Russians and Poles to approximate what they thought a Nazi gas chamber looked like. Interestingly, tourists to Auschwitz were told that the gas chamber they were shown was in its 'original state' until a young revisionist reporter, David Cole (who also happened to be Jewish) got the museum curator to admit on camera (http://video.google.co.uk/videoplay?docid=-2968377116621277074%20) that this wasn't the case in 1992. Auschwitz then began telling its guests that the chamber actually was a reconstruction. This clearly begs the question of why the museum authorities felt the need to lie about it for 45 years.
http://www.markturley.com/mediac/400_0/media/ausplaq1948.gifFinally, we get to the Maths. Standard holocaust history holds that 6 million Jews were killed. But if the Germans weren't using industrial methods of mass murder, this figure is clearly impossible. (Even if they were, its pretty high.) Originally we were told that 4 million of those were killed at Auschwitz (see plaque above), yet for some reason, even as that figure has been officially revised by the Auschwitz museum to 1.1 million, (see plaque below) that total of 6 million has remained the same. This is the world of holocaust history - figures don't add up, evidence shows very little, most of the 'facts' are hotly disputed, yet still we are supposed to suspend suspicion and just believe. I'm afraid I can't do that.
http://www.markturley.com/mediac/400_0/media/ausplaq1990.gifRevisonists point out that the Germans were meticulous record keepers - we have logs of inmates at Auschwitz, detailing their name, height, weight, build, profession, marital status and a variety of other details, even in some cases, the number of lice counted on their heads. If these camp records are taken as a basis, it seems that the total populations of all German camps during World War 2 was about 500,000. Himmler gave a statement in which he estimated the number at 700,000. It therefore seems reasonable to deal in these sorts of numbers.
http://www.markturley.com/mediac/400_0/media/red%7Ecross%7Ereport.jpgThese figures are broadly supported by numbers from the recently opened Bad Arolsen archive, provided by the International Red Cross (see left), who can hardly be claimed to be Nazi apologists or 'deniers'. Now even if these 5-700,000 were all Jewish (which they weren't) and all died (which they didn't), it would only amount to about 1% of the total deaths of the war. This clearly doesn't deserve the enormous emphasis it receives from the media and the Hollywood film industry. (You still reading, Spielberg?) Furthermore, if homicidal gassings were not taking place and the concentration camps were simply prison compounds in which poor conditions led to death for many inmates, then what the Germans were doing, although disgusting, was little different to what the Americans were doing to Japanese-Americans during the same period or the British did to Afrikaaners during the Boer War or many other nations have done at many, many points in history. This would mean that the demonisation of the Nazi regime and the portrayal of Germans from that time as two-dimensionsal, evil fiends is unjustified.
There is much more that could be said on this subject and there are whole websites dedicated to it - I was fascinated to discover that there are debates on aspects of the holocaust dating back to the earliest days of the internet. Within academic circles it seems it has been a briskly debated (and often revised) subject for much longer than that, going back to the 50s and 60s, yet the public is largely unaware of this. Most of us like to lead simple lives and believe that which we are told. Especially in matters of war, particularly fairly recent war in which relatives may have been involved (I am unusual in that I have family members who fought on both sides in WW2), even intelligent people like to indulge in what I call 'cowboy film' morality. In other words we like to feel that good and evil is clearly defined, that the heroes wear white hats and the villains black ones, that you are either on one side or the other. Of course, real life is not like this and there are shades of good and evil, of truth and lies, bravery and cowardice in all communities, events and actions. We need to calm down and start thinking about the holocaust rationally.
By means of conclusion, I'd like to encapsulate the viewpoint of holocaust 'deniers,' if we must use that name, by saying that the enormous flaw in the centre of the holocaust story (which is surrounded by many other only slightly less significant flaws) is this...We are told that a major European nation engaged in a massive extermination programme, utlilising innovative, technological, yet energy-hungry killing apparatus while embroiled in World War 2, the biggest war in history. This alone is frankly unfeasible, (would Germany really have diverted so much scarce energy and resources away from their troops fighting a massive war on two fronts?) Yet not only did they apparently do this, but they did it in secret. A programme of extermination, which ultimately accounted for 11 million lives, of continental scope, was conducted in the middle of an international war, with spotter planes flying around Europe taking photographs and entire espionage units placed within the enemy chain of command to gather information and nobody knew it was happening. Such was the extent of this secrecy and the complete dearth of any real evidence of the event that it required court proceedings to prove its reality. This enormous, pan-European death programme required teams of lawyers, coerced defendants and specially primed witnesses in what even moderate historians refer to as 'show trials' to demonstrate its truth. Let me ask you this, did we need legal process to prove that Pearl Harbour happened, or the Allied carpet bombing of Dresden? Did we need lawyers and testimony and arguments to show that the Blitz or the Battle of Britain occurred? No. Because when huge historical events like this actually happen, they are self-evident. There is piles of hard proof lying around. Yet this one, apparently, is a special case. Surely any thoughtful person must be sceptical?
Hopefully, if nothing else, I've demonstrated that this subject is at least worth considering. How can we imprison people for saying this? That's the sort of thing we're told that Hitler did, isn't it? If people such as Lipstadt don't like what the revisionists say, all they need to do is engage them in open and honest debate and prove them wrong. That's the way academic study, such as history, is supposed to work. My opinion is that if people are too emotionally involved in a subject to discuss it rationally with those who have opposing views, then they shouldn't be discussing it publicly at all. In case you're not clear - I support it (revisionism / denial), as a thesis. I never would have said that three years ago, but my mind has been opened. We need to remember that Germany lost the war and as we all know, 'history is written by the victors'. As time goes by and the desire to separate fact from propaganda becomes stronger, I believe that the 'deniers' version will become the accepted one and people will look back on the time when David Irving and others like him were jailed with curiosity and fear, the way we regard the Spanish Inquisition today. That's not to say I'm closed-minded about it. If someone came to me tomorrow and said 'look, here's the piece of evidence that proves it all!' I would be happy to look at it and reform my opinion if necessary. But with the evidence we have at present and have had for the last sixty years, I suggest that to anybody with at least one eye and half a brain, it really is an open-and-shut case. Go and look for yourself - that's all I did, but be prepared for the fact that you will enter a field of study where looking objectively at the facts and drawing logical conclusions is frowned upon, even reviled. You are only supposed to say what they tell you. It isn't academia as it normally exists, its legend, religion and moral rectitude, all rolled up into one. Criticise it and its as if you are criticising God himself.
"Freedom is being able to say 2 + 2 = 4. Everything else comes from that." (George Orwell)
http://www.markturley.com/mediac/400_0/media/auschwitz%7Erelease%7Eform.jpg
http://www.markturley.com/mediac/400_0/media/auschwizschein.jpg
Update 24/03/07 - Since writing this Holocaust article, I have continued to investigate the subject and other, connected topics. The more I do so, the more I am convinced that the Holocaust story, as it has been told and taught for decades, does not hold water. Directly above, for example, are two release forms from Auschwitz. Yes, that's right, release forms. It seems that some prisoners were allowed to leave the 'factory of death' upon completion of their sentences. There are actually quite a few of these documents around. These two particular ones come from June and July 1944 - the very time when the alleged 'Final Solution' was at its peak. When, we are told, 20,000 people were being exterminated a day, in a continous, 24 hour conveyor belt of death, when the Auschwitz crematories no longer sufficed to meet demand and bodies had to be burned on huge, open pyres. To anyone with a rational bone in their body, the fact that inmates were being released from the camp during this time is surely very telling, especially as the two documents I have provided are from Auschwitz-Birkenau, the section of the camp where, we are told, the vast majority of the exterminations occurred. Whether or not the people released were Jews (they may have been Poles or Communists, or Gypsies etc) it makes the mass-extermination story even harder to believe. I mean, if the Nazis were conducting a top-secret, three year programme of genocide at Birkenau, would they really allow prisoners to walk free in the middle of it, back to the world, knowing that they would be in possession of knowledge which would blow the whole thing wide open? Is it reasonable to claim that the Nazis were that stupid? And why is it that none of the holocaust historians discuss the matter of released inmates from Auschwitz? I've not read anything about it in books by Hilberg, Pressac, Gilbert or any of the rest of them. I certainly wasn't taught it at school. Are they aware of the existence of these documents? Or do they simply ignore them? If anyone can offer a rational explanation, I'd be interested to hear it.
http://www.markturley.com/mediac/400_0/media/ah1919.gif
Continued@ Source (http://www.markturley.com/96244.html)