Author: Webb

Michael Shermer: Liar or idiot — you decide!

Dated:

Please forward to Germar Rudolf.

Dear Germar:

I am Michael Shermer, Publisher of Skeptic magazine. I would like to ask you a few questions about your research. In Errol Morris’ film “Mr. Death,” he shows the fatal mistakes made by Fred Leuchter in his chemical analysis of the concrete and brick from numerous locations at Auschwitz and Auschwitz-Birkenau. I would like to inquire if you made the same errors in your research and if not, how did your research take these problems into account:

  1. Since the gas chamber at Auschwitz 1 is a reconstruction, what would make him (or you) think that the particular section from which he chipped concrete was part of the original?
  2. The bricks at Kremas 2, 3, 4, 5 at Birkenau have been moved about the camp over the decades, some used by the locals to rebuild their homes. How can you be sure that the bricks you tested are from the actual gas chambers?
  3. Even if the bricks and concrete at Kremas 2, 3, 4, 5 at Birkenau were original, they have been exposed to half a century of brutal weathering. How did you adjust your findings accordingly?
  4. Leuchter chipped off huge chunks of concrete and brick and ground up the entire chunks into powder when they were analyzed (or, more to the point, the chemist whom he gave the samples to did because Leuchter didn’t tell him what they were), thereby diluting the Zyklon-B traces by hundreds of thousands of times. As you must know, Zyklon-B gas only penetrates about 10 microns into concrete (a human hair, by comparison, is 100 microns thick). What was your procedure for controlling for this problem?

Thank you for your attention.

Michael Shermer

[email protected]

Note: Others have responded to these questions from Shermer elsewhere, although one scarcely knows where to begin. Even after being exposed to the answers to these questions for years prior to the sending of this message, Shermer cannot or will not forsake his anti-revisionist bias in favor of skepticism. If as publisher of Skeptic magazine, Shermer is at the forefront of skeptics in the United States — if not the world — then skepticism is dead, as is independent thought.

Trucks to Camouflage the Noise of Gassing

Dated:

I visited the Auschwitz-Birkenau camp during Winter 1997 (…) Near the Auschwitz-Birkenau gas chambers one may still see an old truck, the engine of which was activated by the Nazis in order to prevent the inmates from hearing the shrieks of their fellow comrades …

From the February 29, 2000, Journée nationale des Justes de France:

Commercialization of the Holocaust

Dated:

Holocaust on the block

A new exhibit of artifacts is part of a growing debate over what some say is the commercialization of the tragedy

Vancouver — […]

This exhibition [Fragments, at the Vancouver Holocaust Education Centre] is occurring at a particularly febrile time in the history of the Holocaust, and not just because of the presence of Joerg Haider’s Freedom Party in the new Austrian government, the libel trial in Britain of Holocaust denier David Irving, or the debate over the merits of the films Life is Beautiful, Mr. Death and Train of Life. The Holocaust — an event which some have deemed to be all but inexpressible in its horror — has been undergoing a kind of commercialization, particularly in the last 15 years. Recently, for example, a postcard written by Anne Frank before the Second World War and her death in a Nazi camp was sold at an auction for hundreds of thousands of dollars to a museum in Los Angeles.

Fifty-five years after the liberation of the death camps, the relative scarcity of these Holocaust objets and the creation of Holocaust memorial centres in cities like Washington, Berlin and Jerusalem have created tremendous pressure for authentication. The Vancouver education centre, for instance, includes a counterfeit Star of David armband in its current exhibition. Roberta Kremer, director of the VHEC, says the armband, found in an antique store in Bellingham, Wash., with other seeming Holocaust “memorabilia,” has been artificially aged, probably with shoe polish. Moreover, authentic Holocaust artifacts are rare and those not in institutions are usually in the possession of survivors or their families.

[…]

Elliot Dlin, a director of The Valley of the Communities, one of the sites at Yad Vashem, who is currently writing a doctoral dissertation at the University of British Columbia, admitted that the quest to acquire Holocaust objets is “on the edge of bad taste…”

[…]

Besides the notebook of Rebecca Teitelbaum, there’s one written by Shia Moser who taught Yiddish in a Polish orphanage in Peterswaldau after the war. “The children had experienced so much tragedy,” he explained. “I thought that their memories should be preserved.” He talked to the children after his classes and recorded what they told him about their families and all that had happened to them.

In December, 1999, Jack Kuper, a Toronto filmmaker, came to the VHEC to research a documentary. There, he found a photograph of the Polish war orphans from Peterswaldau and recognized the place. Then he asked how they had come by the picture. He was told that Shia Moser, who had taught at the orphanage had donated it. Staff at the VHEC were also able to tell him that Moser was alive and living in Vancouver and, though 93-years-old, in good health. Kuper remembered his teacher vividly but had never known what happened to him. A meeting was quickly arranged. It was highly emotional. Moser was astonished by the turn of events. He had never known what happened to any of his orphans either.

Source:

CLAUDIA CORNWALL
Special to The Globe and Mail
February 22, 2000
www.globeandmail.ca/gam/
TopGlobeReview/20000222/TAHOLO.html

Too old to be gassed

Dated:

Private hell of a charming rabbi

Chasing Shadows

Hugo Gryn with Naomi Gryn

Viking, £16.99

Reviewed by Hyam Maccoby

Rabbi Hugo Gryn was well known as the genial contributor of Jewish wisdom to the radio programme The Moral Maze. […]

Yet, despite his bonhomie, no one had a deeper experience of human misery and human evil. As a youth, brought up in a wealthy, loving and pious family, he was plunged into the hell of the Nazi death camp at Auschwitz. Most of his family perished, but he survived by good luck and at times good judgment. He was one of the very few who actually entered a gas chamber at Auschwitz and lived to tell the tale (he had somehow wandered into a crowd of children marked down for gassing and was sent out by a meticulous guard at the last moment as over-age).

[…]

[…] They were eventually gassed in Auschwitz. Hugo himself, having escaped the gas chambers by pretending to be a carpenter, was one of the few survivors of the subsequent death march and came within an inch of death from typhus. His father, however, was too ill to survive more than a few days after the liberation. Hugo made his way back to Berehovo and was overjoyed to find his mother alive, the only other survivor of his immediate family.

[…]

Israel gets tremendous sympathy for the Holocaust

Dated:

Israel Expresses Concern for Talks

By Dina Kraft

Associated Press Writer

Sunday, Feb. 20, 2000; 1:13 p.m. EST

JERUSALEM —- A recent surge of anti–Israel rhetoric in the Arab world prompted Israeli leaders to express concern Sunday for the future of the peace process.

Following a breakdown in peace talks, Arab media has compared Israelis to Nazis and attacked them with imagery conventionally associated with the worst anti-Semitic excesses.

“We have to be concerned about the question of how the Arab world perceives Israel,” Foreign Minister David Levy told Israeli radio. “Is the wave which has arisen today an expression of that hidden thought in the hearts of many people there?”

Prime Minister Ehud Barak referred to the phenomenon in the weekly Cabinet meeting, saying that such “incitement” does not contribute to the peace process.

Peace talks with Syria broke down last month, and talks with the Palestinians foundered this month — in both cases over Israeli territorial concessions.

The breakdown in Syrian talks was followed by an escalation of clashes between Israeli troops and guerrillas in Lebanon, where Syria is the main power.

As the violence escalated, official Syrian media accused Israel of carrying out Nazi-like strikes, and of grossly exaggerating the Holocaust to win international support.

Echoing his Syrian patrons, Lebanese President Emile Lahoud condemned Israeli policies as “crimes inherited from the Nazi school.”

In a country where as much as a third of the Jewish population comprises Holocaust survivors or their descendants, such language cuts deeply into the national psyche — and could hamper Barak’s efforts to garner public support for eventual peace deals.

“From a historic point of view it is horrific, a deception,” Shevah Weiss, a Holocaust survivor and a former speaker of parliament who backs the peace process, said of the comparisons with the Nazis.

“Waves of Hatred,” read the front page headline in Sunday’s Maariv daily over an article that said Barak was “embarrassed” by the outbursts.

The rhetoric could stem, in part, from frustration with the sympathy Israel enjoys in the West because of the Holocaust, when Nazis and their allies in German-occupied Europe murdered 6 million Jews.

The Arabs “have no idea what to do with the fact of the Holocaust and that it gets tremendous sympathy, and have no effective way to deal with it,” said Barry Rubin, a Syria expert at Bar Ilan University.

Israeli anger is exacerbated when such images appear in countries with which it has already signed peace treaties.

A cartoon in the pro-government Egyptian newspaper, Al-Ahram, depicted Barak standing on an Arab boy to reach an Austrian ballot box, which he is defacing with a swastika.

The suggestion is that Barak’s condemnation of the inclusion of Joerg Haider’s anti-immigrants party in the Austrian coalition is hypocritical, given Israel’s treatment of the Lebanese.

Such images “among those with whom we are at peace, who compare us to Hitler and cheer Haider, suggests that there is something very deeply (wrong) here,” Levy said.

Levy said Israel was also stung by the support Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak expressed for the Lebanese in a high-profile weekend visit, in which he said guerrilla attacks that have killed seven Israeli troops in recent weeks are “a result, not a cause,” of Israel’s presence in Lebanon.

Barak dispatched two of his top advisers to Egypt on Sunday, apparently seeking answers about the Mubarak visit.

The heated rhetoric also traditionally precedes peace moves, said Gerald Steinberg, another Syria expert at Bar Ilan, as a way for Arab leaders to preserve credibility.

“It is a way of … maintaining the Arab honor,” he said.

The Arabs, too, read a lot into Israeli rhetoric. On Sunday, state-run Damascus Radio called on Levy to apologize for saying “the soil of Lebanon will burn” if attacks on Israeli soldiers persist.

‘There are worse things than denying the Holocaust’

Dated:

Inspector Clouseau of the Yad Vashem Gendarmerie: The Case of the Wily Dictator

By Sam Schulman ([email protected])

Jewish World Review ([email protected])

February 15, 2000

www.jewishworldreview.com/0200/clouseau.html

JUST WHEN YOU THOUGHT that the Holocaust Establishment had done its worst to trivialize the shoah, put it in competition with other massacres in the victimization marketplace, and make the world loathe the very word, something comes along to make you sit up and take notice.

In last Wednesday’s New York Times, 25 of our great and good, including Elie Wiesel, Emile Fackenheim, Abraham Foxman, and Franklin Littell, put their signatures to a bold appeal to the President of Syria, Hafez al-Assad.

Suppose you were invited to take your place on the list of signatories (which you won’t be. You’re not good enough!). Now, let’s say that writing a check to the Sulzbergers for upwards of 40 grand were to attract the undivided attention of Assad-which it wouldn’t. What would you say to him, if you knew he would read the 300 words you might write?

[…]

But the chance to ask Assad these questions would not be interesting to you if you are a Holocaust professional, like Saul Friedman, Zsusanna Ozsvath, or Michael Berenbaum. What rouses such men and women to take hold of the ends of the earth that the wicked might be shaken out of it? It’s not murder, not terror, not war, but holocaust-denial. President Assad has allowed Tishrun, the official Syrian government newspaper to call the Holocaust “a myth.” And — what’s more — this isn’t the first time! The signatories of the letter are awfully sore at President Assad-so angry that they don’t hesitate to denounce this outrage “in the strongest possible terms.”

Like Peter Sellers as Inspector Clouseau, these worthies appear on the crime scene-so concerned with showing off their competence that they fail to notice another dead body in the closet. Has our obsession with the Holocaust obliterated every other consideration? […]

[…]

I think it’s time to say it aloud: There are things in the world that are worse than denying the Holocaust.

JWR contributor Sam Schulman is deputy editor of Taki’s Top Drawer, appearing in New York Press, and was formerly publisher of Wigwag and a professor of English at Boston University.

No gas today!

Dated:

“I am here for my wife,” said Dutch veteran John Franken, 77, who was captured and forced into slave labour in a Japanese coal mine three months before the atomic bomb was dropped Hiroshima. “She was at Auschwitz and got sent to the gas chamber three times. She survived because they kept running out of gas.”

Montreal Gazette, February 10 (?), 2000, discussing a demonstration outside the Austrian embassy by Holocaust “survivors” and other Jews.

Gas chambers and target practice at Mauthausen

Dated:

Nazi war criminal, expelled from US, is living in UK

Vikram Dodd

Thursday January 20, 2000

The Guardian

www.guardian.co.uk/uk_news/story/0,3604,237326,00.html

An SS guard at a concentration camp where more than 80,000 people were gassed, worked to death or died after being subjected to experiments is living in Britain and receiving a state pension, the Guardian has learned.

[…]

For three years he was a member of the SS “death’s head” unit at the Mauthausen concentration camp in Austria.

It is rare to get documentary evidence of alleged war crimes. But in a document seen by the Guardian, which Mr Schweidler signed during the war, he details how he gunned down two prisoners. He wrote that they were trying to escape in broad daylight in the report he submitted to the SS.

But testimony from another guard, seen by the Guardian, reveals that SS troops would chase prisoners so that guards could use them as target practice.

Yesterday he denied murdering prisoners. […]

[…]

Guardian Unlimited © Guardian Newspapers Limited 2004

‘You could smell the bodies burning …’

Dated:

Interview by Eve-Ann Prentice

The tattoo has faded with the passing of the years, but memories of the hell that was Auschwitz are as sharp as ever for Anne Frank’s stepsister. The smudged, blue numbers — A/5272 — were indelibly etched on Eva Geiringer’s lower left arm soon after she and the rest of her family arrived at the notorious Nazi twin concentration camp of Auschwitz-Birkenau in May 1944 after being deported in cattlewagons from The Netherlands…

Now, as one of the few concentration camp survivors, Eva hopes that discussing her experiences will ensure that the evils of race will never rise again. She is promoting a play featuring her own story. She is also helping to launch a series of exhibitions about Anne Frank, the teenage Jewish diarist who chronicled her family’s life in hiding in Amsterdam before being captured and deported to Bergen-Belsen, where she died of typhoid…

Life in the camp was brutal and precarious. Eva caught the typhoid that killed Anne Frank, was forced to break stones and plait ropes for 14 hours a day in the bitter cold of the East European winter, and lived under the constant threat of being “selected” — or sent to the gas chambers if she became too weak to work. “You could smell the incinerators and see the flames shooting out of the top when they had a particularly heavy day burning bodies,” she says.

Eva’s feet became infected with open sores caused by frostbite and she and her mother almost starved to death on the meagre rations of black bread and vegetable water that passed as soup. “It was more than 50 years ago, but I can see everything in front of me today. I remember very, very clearly.”…

The Times, January 18, 2000

Denial Denial

Dated:

“Senior editors at … publishing houses still welcome me warmly as a friend, invite me to lunch in expensive New York restaurants and then lament that if they were to sign a contract with me on a new book, there would always be somebody in their publishing house who would object.” Thus the English historian David Irving, famous for his histories of Nazi Germany. He made these remarks last week in the opening statement to the lawsuit that he has brought against Penguin Books and Prof. Deborah Lipstadt of Emory University.

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