| Topic: |
Sociology > Education |
| User: |
"" |
| Date: |
04 Apr 2005 10:43:19 AM |
| Object: |
A Small Fraud that Betrays a Bigger Hoax |
A Small Fraud that Betrays a Bigger Hoax
By Francis Dixon
Jürgen Graf, Carlo Mattogno, Concentration Camp Stutthof and Its
Function in the National Socialist Jewish Policy, Theses and
Dissertations Press, Chicago 2003, 122 pp., $15.-
Among the concentration camps of National Socialist Germany, Stutthof
has remained something of a stepchild. Established near Danzig at the
start of the Second World War (and under Polish control since the end
of that war), the Stutthof camp is smaller and more remote than Dachau
or Buchenwald, and far less notorious than Auschwitz or Majdanek.
Partisans of the Holocaust extermination thesis concede that fewer
Jews died there than at the major alleged extermination camps,
although none of them has contested the anomalous claim that Stutthof
had a gas chamber, which allegedly dispatched Jews and other inmates
during a few months in 1944. Thus, Stutthof has to date been little
studied by either orthodox historians of the Holocaust or by their
revisionist challengers.
Revisionist historians Jürgen Graf and Carlo Mattogno have remedied
this with their concise but substantive study Concentration Camp
Stutthof and Its Function in the National Socialist Jewish Policy. The
two are patient researchers and careful scholars, noted for their
diligence in seeking out records and for their ability, as gifted
linguists, to read documents in a variety of languages foreign to most
Western historians, including Russian, Hungarian, and Polish. The last
of these, of course, is the key to postwar scholarship (such as it is)
on Stutthof, because official Polish historians have long been the
custodians of what records survive from the camp, and have generated
nearly all the literature on its history.
Concentration Camp Stutthof is a short book, but admirably organized
in terms of the key questions on Holocaust extermination claims as
they relate to the camp. After briefly surveying the state of existing
research on Stutthof at the outset of their study, Graf and Mattogno
clearly define their main purposes: to investigate the alleged
gassings; to attempt to determine how many died from all causes at the
camp; and to examine the import of deportations of Jews to Stutthof in
1944.
Prefatory to investigating those Holocaust-related questions, the
authors provide a brief overview, based on surviving documents, of the
camp’s history, which, they show, was pretty much in line with that of
most other German camps. In very broad lines, Stutthof first housed
Polish political prisoners, later received a large influx of Soviet
prisoners of war; finally, though not to the prejudice of its security
role, the chief purpose of Stutthof became the employment of its
prisoners, including a growing number of Jews, on work crucial to the
war economy.
More emphatically than most revisionists, the authors concede – and
deplore – the high death rates and sometimes brutal treatment that was
the lot of camp inmates. They credit the accusation that some unwell
inmates, at least, were killed by lethal injection. As the authors
write in their conclusion, their "research in no way trivializes the
actual sufferings of Stutthof inmates" or denigrates the memory of
those who actually died in the camp.
Order now! Call toll free (877) 789-0229
Reasonable persons might think that such sentiments could provide
common ground for revisionists and ‘exterminationists,’ and in a
reasonable age Graf and Mattogno might have concluded their study a
third of the way through. Given the miasma of unreason that cloaks the
history of the Second World War, the authors are compelled to present
and examine at some length the official history of the camp as
presented in the writings of officials of the postwar Stutthof museum
and other functionaries.
The authors have little difficulty in showing that the official
version of Stutthof’s history is based not on careful examination and
dispassionate evaluation of the best evidence available, but rather on
those rumors and inventions of the inmates that serve best to impute
malicious intent and murderous deeds to the German authorities. That
many of Stutthof’s historians were themselves detained there and that
most of the place’s historians spent decades as exponents and
guardians of a historical orthodoxy that formed part of the state
communist ideology would lead any observer to suspect their
objectivity; reading the substantial swatches of their version of
Stutthof’s history reproduced in Concentration Camp Stutthof is enough
to confirm the strongest suspicions.
For example, a brief passage quoted from one of Stutthof’s prime
official histories, Krzystof Dunin-Wasowicz’s Stutthof, informs of an
SS sergeant Foth who "arbitrarily handed down" hundreds of death
sentences (at a time when simple corporal punishment had to be
authorized from Berlin). Among the deeds of this Foth, we learn, was
beating to death a contingent of women condemned to death by gassing
when the gas chamber failed. Dunin-Wasowicz somehow knows (without
revealing his source) that Foth “felt sick if he had not killed at
least one inmate during the course of a day’s work." (p. 39 of the
work under review) The rest of the official historiography on display
here is of a piece, and Graf and Mattogno have wisely refrained from
attempting to refute it lie by lie: for anyone who can read and think,
the official version of Stutthof’s history is its own best refutation.
The authors take more pains refuting the various claims of homicidal
gassings at Stutthof, although they are scarcely forced to extend
themselves. The gassings are supposed to have taken place mainly in a
delousing chamber, while some are said to have occurred in one or more
narrow-gauge railway cars that were either stationary or circled
through the camp as they did their grim work. The inmates often
suspected that they were to be gassed and had to rounded up and forced
in, or else deceived into entering either the chamber or the railway
cars. Unsuspecting inmates are said to have sometimes been selected
for gassing by means of foot races. Graf and Mattogno are easily able
to show that, beyond these ludicrous stories from inmates, there is no
documentary evidence that either the delousing chamber or the railway
cars were designed or used for anything but their official purpose.
They handily refute the thesis of the late Jean-Claude Pressac, the
only partisan of gassing at Stutthof to offer technical rationales,
that the presence of a hole in the ceiling of the delousing chamber
indicates a homicidal purpose: much more likely it served to ventilate
the chamber (which lacked the circulatory apparatus in more modern
German facilities).
If Graf and Mattogno’s study of Stutthof went no further, it would be
a valuable, if less than scintillating, addition to scholarship on the
concentration camps. Their findings on the camp’s role in the wartime
German Jewish policy, however, make this book a revisionist tour de
force that simultaneously adds to our knowledge of what actually
befell many of the Jews who came to the camp and establishes a
convincing rationale for the gas chamber hoax.
The authors are able to estimate, based on partial records of deaths
and on analysis and extrapolation from those figures, that around
26,000 persons perished at Stutthof, rather lower than official
estimates but still a high toll. More important, they are able to
demonstrate that the Jewish mortality rate was comparatively low, and
that Jews died at a lower rate while the ‘final solution’ was in
operation than in the latter months of the war, when gassing and other
means of mass killing are supposed (by official historians) to have
ceased.
The great majority of the ca. 50,000 Jews who came to
Stutthof, as the authors show, were Hungarians shipped either directly
from Auschwitz or from Auschwitz by way of another camp from June to
October, 1944, at a time when the alleged annihilation of the
Hungarian Jews at Auschwitz was in full swing. Moreover, as the
authors also indicate, a large number of the Jews who came to Stutthof
from Auschwitz were never registered as inmates at the latter camp: a
fact that official historians long interpreted as virtual proof that
such persons had been gassed at Auschwitz.
Graf and Mattogno do a great service by demonstrating that the safe
arrival from Auschwitz of so many Jews at so obscure a camp as
Stutthof at the height of the alleged exterminations has been a major
embarrassment for official historians including Raul Hilberg and
Danuta Czech, as well as the Polish authorities on Stutthof. The
authors plausibly speculate that ambient rumors of a gas chamber were
imported by the Jews transported from Auschwitz; quite likely the
Stutthof gas chamber claim owes its continued existence to those very
inapposite arrivals (although the authors establish that only about
two thousand persons, not all of them Jews, are said to have been
gassed at Stutthof).
Concentration Camp Stutthof thus serves as more than a necessary
extension of the revisionist method to a little-studied camp. It is of
course – indeed, by virtue of the comparative isolation of the camp
and its relative freedom from previous associations – that the book is
a model study of the gas chamber allegation. And the authors, too,
have made a contribution to the humanitarian history of the camps,
fulfilling their stated purpose of rescuing Stutthof’s history from
the obscenity of lurid inventions and propaganda distortions. Yet what
makes the book valuable above all else, is the payoff on its carefully
defined objectives – investigating the camp’s gas chamber, mortality,
and role in the NS Jewish policy – by way of carefully researched
conclusions that provide a springboard to further investigation as
well as add another nail to the coffin of the Holocaust myth.
Carlos Porter’s fluid English translation from the German original is
of high quality, and contributes significantly to the book’s value. As
with many small press revisionist books, copy editing and
proofreading, though adequate, have room for improvement. Nearly
twenty pages of photographs of camp installations, plans, and
contemporary documents enhance Concentration Camp Stutthof’s value to
casual and serious readers.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Source: The Revisionist 2(1) (2004), pp. 95-97.
--
"Can we alter the course? It is too late.
A general correction is factually and humanely impossible ...
New documents will unavoidably turn up and will overthrow
the official certainties more and more. The current view of
the world of the [National Socialist] camps,though triumphant, is doomed.
What of it can be salvaged? Only little."
J.C. Pressac
[Valérie Igounet, Histoire du négationnisme en France, Editions du Seuil, Paris 2000, p. 652.]
.
|
|
| User: "Ron Jacobson" |
|
| Title: Re: A Small Fraud that Betrays a Bigger Hoax |
04 Apr 2005 10:57:38 AM |
|
|
Chris Carpenter <scott@free.info> wrote:
(snip)
Chris, a few weeks ago I asked you about the September
2, 1942 entry from the diary of Johann Paul Kremer, a
German professor who was recruited to the SS and stationed
in Auschwitz:
"For the first time, at 3:00 A.M. outside, attended
a special action. Dante's Inferno seems to me almost a
comedy compared to this. They don't call Auschwitz the
annihilation camp for nothing!"
Your reply was that Kremer wrote this "because he saw a
pile of clothes being burned".
Are you sure about that, Chris, or do you want to try
again?
RJ.
-- "I'm stupid about a lot of things" -- Chris Carpenter,
Message-ID: <8s5g0190pu4juju5qfmg4ia7rrn6c8gn3s@4ax.com>
.
|
|
|
|
|
Related Articles |
|
|
