Author: Webb

Best Evidence

Dated:

Preserving Auschwitz: Forensic evidence of the Holocaust is the best answer to the deniers.

www.opinionjournal.com/la/?id=110005318

from the Wall Street Journal editorial page

LEISURE & ARTS

BY TIMOTHY RYBACK Wednesday, July 7, 2004 12:01 a.m. EDT

Last month, Jarek Mensfelt, spokesman for the Auschwitz memorial site, announced plans to preserve the ruins of the gas chambers and crematoria in the notorious death camp at Birkenau near the Polish town of Oswiecim. […]

[…]

Of course, the historical and circumstantial evidence of a premeditated Nazi plan to exterminate the Jewish population of Europe is overwhelming. […] The dearth of hard evidence has fueled a growth industry in Holocaust-denial.

The revisionists’ plaint is simple: They demand a proverbial “smoking gun” to prove that the Nazis deliberately and systematically designed an industrial system of extermination. […]

[…]

In the battle against Holocaust deniers, Birkenau’s extermination facilities remain important forensic evidence. […]

Between 1942, when they were first put into operation, and 1944, when they were dynamited, more than a million human beings — mostly Jewish — were fed into these extermination plants, forced into subterranean chambers and gassed, their corpses removed and transported by mechanical conveyance to the crematoria ovens. The chimneys belched smoke into the air. The remnant ash was scattered in the surrounding fields, or dumped in a nearby pond whose muddied bottom, even today, is of a sticky gray viscosity laced with matchstick-size splinters of human bone.

[…]

Mr. Ryback is author of “The Last Survivor: Legacies of Dachau.”

Webmaster note: Other than the observation that crematory buildings 1 and 2 at Birkenau were almost certainly destroyed in 1945, there is no evidence that anyone was forced into the underground (!) rooms said to have functioned as gas chambers. There is no evidence of a “mechanical conveyance” to lift the claimed millions of poison-laden corpses up to the crematory ovens. Crematory ovens are designed NOT to belch smoke (or stench). And there are no known remnants of ash or bone splinters, either in surrounding fields or in any pond: if there were, it could be shown that this ash was human in origin.

Forensic evidence needed

Dated:

Preserving Auschwitz: Forensic evidence of the Holocaust is the best answer to the deniers.

www.opinionjournal.com/la/?id=110005318

from the Wall Street Journal editorial page

LEISURE & ARTS

BY TIMOTHY RYBACK Wednesday, July 7, 2004 12:01 a.m. EDT

Last month, Jarek Mensfelt, spokesman for the Auschwitz memorial site, announced plans to preserve the ruins of the gas chambers and crematoria in the notorious death camp at Birkenau near the Polish town of Oswiecim. […]

In the coming weeks, as the Auschwitz preservationists begin their work, they should be guided by the knowledge that these heaps of dynamited concrete and twisted steel are not only historic artifacts but among the few remnants of untainted, forensic evidence of the Holocaust.

Of course, the historical and circumstantial evidence of a premeditated Nazi plan to exterminate the Jewish population of Europe is overwhelming. There are the watch-tower-girded enclosures of Nazi concentration camps and the extensive testimonials of Holocaust survivors, as well as the court protocols of Nazi war criminals, but there is little forensic evidence proving homicidal intent. The Nazis were scrupulous when it came to obscuring the “Final Solution” in bureaucratic euphemism and also dismantling or obliterating their machinery of death. The dearth of hard evidence has fueled a growth industry in Holocaust-denial.

[…]

Mr. Ryback is author of “The Last Survivor: Legacies of Dachau.”

Jewish Eugenics in the 1930s

Dated:

‘Do not have children if they won’t be healthy!’

  • A shocking new study reveals how key figures in the pre-state Zionist establishment proposed castrating the mentally ill, sterilizing the poor and doing everything possible to ensure reproduction only among the ‘best of people.’

By Tamara Traubmann

www.haaretz.com/hasen/spages/437879.html

Last update – 02:11 11/06/2004

Castrating the mentally ill, encouraging reproduction among families “numbered among the intelligentsia” and limiting the size of “families of Eastern origin” and “preventing … lives that are lacking in purpose” — these proposals are not from some program of the Third Reich but rather were brought up by key figures in the Zionist establishment of the Land of Israel during the period of the British Mandate. It turns out there was a great deal of enthusiasm here for the improvement of the hereditary characteristics of a particular race (eugenics). This support, which has been kept under wraps for many years, is revealed in a study that examines the ideological and intellectual roots at the basis of the establishment of the health system in Israel.

In the Yishuv (pre-state Jewish community) in the 1930s there were “consultation stations” operating on a Viennese model of advice centers for couples that wished to marry and become parents. In Austria, with the Nazis’ rise to power, they served for forced treatment. Here the stations were aimed at “giving advice on matters of sex and marriage, especially in the matter of preventing pregnancy in certain cases.” They distributed birth-control devices for free to the penniless and at reduced prices to those of limited means. In Tel Aviv the advice stations were opened in centers of immigrant populations: Ajami in Jaffa, the Hatikvah Quarter and Neveh Sha’anan.

These are some of the findings of a doctoral thesis written by Sachlav Stoler-Liss about the history of the health services in the 1950s, under the supervision of Prof. Shifra Shvarts, head of the department of health system management at Ben-Gurion University of the Negev. They were presented at the annual conference of the Israel Anthropological Association at Ben-Gurion College.

[…]

Teacher jailed for making revisionist film

Dated:

Teacher jailed for making revisionist Nazi film

Thu 10 Jun 2004

SUSAN BELL IN PARIS

A TEACHER [Vincent Reynouard, 33] banned from working in France for peddling revisionist views on the Holocaust has been sentenced to two years in prison by a French court after he made a film contesting a brutal Second World War massacre by Nazi SS storm-troopers.

[…]

Reynouard was first convicted in 1991 of distributing revisionist literature when he was a student in Caen, in Normandy. Six years later he was sacked from his post as a maths teacher at a technical college in nearby Honfleur, after he set homework involving counting Dachau concentration-camp victims and was discovered to have stored revisionist documents denying the Holocaust on the school computer.

Reynouard was eventually banned from teaching anywhere in France. He also wrote a revisionist book questioning the Nazi slaughter entitled The Oradour Massacre: A Half-Century of Theatre.

In 1998, some 500 French and German copies of the book were seized by police in Brussels and the Flemish port city of Antwerp at the request of French judicial authorities.

Reynouard’s sentence was handed down by the Limoges appeals court, which said that his film had insulted the memory of those who had been massacred.

The court doubled his original prison sentence, but reduced his fine of 10,000 (6,688 pounds), ordering him instead to pay 1,000 (668 pounds) in damages to each of the three civil parties in the case, including Marcel Darthout, one of the last two survivors of the massacre still alive today.

[…]

This article:

thescotsman.scotsman.com/international.cfm?id=658752004

Surviving in a Mass Grave

Dated:

MP in plea to churches to unite against racist BNP

By Lindsay Mcgarvie, Sunday Mail

May 30 2004

www.sundaymail.co.uk/news/tm_objectid=14287478&method=full &siteid=86024&headline=never-again-name_page.html

A SCOTS MP has called on church leaders to unite against the BNP in next week’s Euro elections.

Eastwood MP Jim Murphy will meet with religious leaders tomorrow, including Holocaust survivor Rabbi Ernest Levy.

[…]

As a teenager, he [Rabbi Ernest Levy] survived seven Nazi concentration camps, including Auschwitz and Belsen, where he found himself lying in a mass grave beside the dead and dying.

[…]

He Remembers the Screams

Dated:

Holocaust survivor: Don’t forget

By PAT MUIR

5/25/2004

www.kvnews.com/articles/2004/05/25/news/news04.txt

Decades after World War II when Thomas Blatt met one of his former captors from the Nazis’ Sobibor death camp, he wasn’t scared of the man himself; he was scared of how normal the man seemed.

[…]

He was spared at the camp and made a servant while his family and thousands of others — the death toll from Sobibor is believed to be more than 250,000 — were killed. Blatt remembers the cold efficiency of the camp’s gas chambers.

“I heard a terrible scream,” he said. “It lasted for about 15 minutes. It went very fast.”

[…]

Gas chambers at Terezienstadt

Dated:

Horrors of Holocaust detailed for students

By Ron Jensen, Stars and Stripes European edition, Friday, April 30, 2004

www.estripes.com/article.asp?section=104&article=21085&archive=true

Joanna Millan was a baby when the Nazis took her and her mother to a concentration camp in Czechoslovakia. Her mother died, but Joanna was adopted by a Jewish couple in England. She told her remarkable story on Wednesday to students at Lakenheath High School in England.

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She was separated from her mother soon after arriving at Thereisenstadt […]

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“I was one of less than 100 that came out alive in 1945,” she said. “I believe I was saved because I had no one to take me to the gas chambers.”

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