THE REVISIONIST

1. Introduction

It must be admitted that in the revision Professor van Pelt's book has been much improved. Gone are the "geometric progressions" of epistemology, gone too are the quotations from "Penguin Island" and "Alice and Wonderland" that gave us an Auschwitz embellished with whimsy. The most famous passages, concerning the "moral certainty" of his opinion, along with the assertion that the holes in the roof of the basement of Crematorium II had been filled in prior to being blown up, are now hard to find.

Nevertheless, while we might point to various changes in the successive drafts, it must be granted that this is an important book. First, because this book represents the first serious attempt to discuss the arguments of revisionists, and second, because the arguments, while incomplete, are thorough, handled with civility, and touch upon the writings of a number of authors, including Faurisson, Butz, Staeglich, Rudolf, and even myself. Indeed, the only significant omission is Carlo Mattogno, perhaps due to the fact that Mattogno's authoritative analyses of crematoria operation are not easily refuted.

Since van Pelt indicates that he structured his original report on the basis of my "Gas Chamber of Sherlock Holmes", (p. 138) and since that structure is largely intact, I will take the opportunity to phrase my review of van Pelt's book in terms of the issues of particular importance to me, recognizing that others will find their own points of departure.

2. Background

In fact, the main purpose "The Gas Chamber of Sherlock Holmes" was to attempt to write a brief polemic that would attempt to show that the revisionist interpretation was possible, and since possible, an unworthy candidate for censorship. Indeed, developing strategies for overcoming the taboo surrounding the Holocaust as well as the existing censorship laws has been the unspoken hallmark of all my revisionist writings.

Although "Sherlock" began as a brief polemic, I can accept the charge that it became more substantial as it grew in size, although errors still remain. Even so, while it may be a decent survey of the problem, it makes no claims to comprehensiveness and cannot be legitimately criticized on that account. Indeed, many features still indicate its primarily polemical and rhetorical origin. Its fanciful title was chosen to attract a British audience, at a time when censorship beckoned there. It was deliberately plotted to surprise the reader. And it was constructed to provide support to the two main revisionist conceptions that must be true if there were no homicidal gassings in World War Two. First, that the manifold testimonies can be shown to be interconnected and to go back to rumors and propaganda, and second, that the documentary evidence that appears to discuss mass gassings is in fact about other things.

Hence, the two main parts of van Pelt's book depends on the issues of testimony and material evidence, and I will discuss each of these in turn.

3. Testimonies

The basic rule for evaluating testimonies, and indeed any historical evidence, is that it be as near as possible to the events described; it becomes distinctly less valuable the farther from the event. There are two main reasons for this: first, because there is a natural tendency to embroider and embellish memory, and, second, the possibility of cross- pollination increases with the passage of time.

Therefore, the first thing that has to be done in order to examine eyewitness claims concerning mass gassings is to arrange them chronologically. The next step requires the identification of some elements in the claims that might constitute evidence of such cross-pollination. I identified several, of which the shower-gas-burning sequence was the most pervasive.

The shower-gas-burning sequence is the core of the narrative: if it can be shown to reflect reality by other means, then the revisionists are wrong, and the point must be given. But if the claim does not reflect reality, the story must have evolved somehow, and then the question is where and by what means. Originally, I could think of two possible sources: disinfection procedures, which involved simultaneous gassings of things and showers for people, and the general anxiety from the 1930's concerning the possibilities of gas warfare. I was surprised to find in the course of my research that the pedigree for both sources stretched back to the beginning of the 20th century if not earlier.

However, if these might be the source of the stories, that did not solve the problem of dissemination. There were undoubtedly many rumors about gassings in Europe during World War Two, but one needed to cite specific contemporary evidence. On following this train of thought, I found several hints that suggested that mass gassing stories were widely reported and discussed throughout the war. In fact, during the Irving trial, Eric A. Johnson published a book, "Nazi Terror", which indicated that he had successfully located the long lost BBC broadcast transcripts from the war years. These, along with other contemporary evidence, proved conclusively that radio broadcasts concerning gassings were beamed back to Germany, Poland, and other parts of occupied Europe throughout the war beginning in the summer of 1942, and that rumors of gassings in general were rife from the fall of 1940.

In researching these ideas I was generally following by my own route a path that had been trailed by Butz, Faurisson, and Berg years ago. I had no pre-conceived theory of delusion, nor did I take Elaine Showalter as my inspiration, as van Pelt claims. On the contrary, I sought out Showalter near the end because I was looking for some contemporary discussion of hysterical symptoms that would match the drift of my own thoughts.

In any case such attributions of influence do not discount the basic idea: The priority of propaganda and rumor to any non-anonymous account of mass gassing simply means that we cannot exclude the possibility that all eyewitnesses subsequent are simply repeating the omnipresent rumor.

Naturally, this premise can be wrong. It may be that the eyewitnesses are entirely truthful, and that the disseminated propaganda and rumor reflected that truth. But in that case, first, one would have to prove by other means the veracity of the gassing claims in order to show that the rumors and propaganda did not cause the later accounts. Second, one would have to explain how the gassing program was purportedly carried out with stealth and cunning under the full glare of Allied publicity. In short, I concluded that the priority of rumor and propaganda, while not disproving the mass gassing claim, justifies revisionist skepticism.

Since this is my basic argument for evaluating testimony, van Pelt attempts to work around it. In the earlier version of his book, he claimed that I had failed to show any evidence of media influence, and specifically, radio broadcasts. However, I did reference some, and in the intervening three years since his original report was composed more has come to light, including Johnson's discovery, and including the second volume of Viktor Klemperer's wartime diary. In any case, van Pelt's challenge is no longer there.

Instead, van Pelt falls back on two other arguments. One, which was repeated from the original report, was that the Allies had no need to engage in propaganda because there was a willingness to fight, and a "resolve" that was not present in the First World War (134). In other words, the argument is that lying about one's enemy is directly correlative to the extent to which popular support is lacking for war. However, this argument strikes us as at once far too wide-reaching -- it is the kind of argument that would require a separate study to successfully argue -- and furthermore seems to stand the relationship of the two wars on their head. If anything, the first World War was fought with greater gusto and idealism by all the combatants, while the second was characterized more by resignation and a lack of enthusiasm throughout Europe, including in Nazi Germany.

Van Pelt's other argument involves the claim, repeated whenever a new testimony is introduced, that it "independently confirms" the content of someone else's testimony. But there is no evidence for the independence of these testimonies, only the assertion. Furthermore, the thesis of independent confirmation would require that the former inmates and German prisoners were not only oblivious to the news, broadcasts, and rumors circulating around them during the war, but even after the war, when such claims were universally trumpeted as evidence of the depravity of the Nazi regime. In addition, such a thesis would require that the postwar interrogators and judges were similarly oblivious to these reports and had absolutely no expectations in the course of their questionings.

Then we have to turn to the substance of the testimonies that van Pelt considers most accurate. In general, van Pelt's approach is to leave out the elements that tend to rebut a witness, or to explain such elements away. For example, when discussing the testimony of Ada Bimko, van Pelt's explanation of her notorious assertion that the poison gas at Auschwitz came in big round tanks is that Bimko misunderstood what she was shown. (234) Similarly, while discussing the diary entries of Dr. Kremer, and after discussing Faurisson's deconstruction of these texts, van Pelt makes the surprising assertion that if Dr. Kremer were alive, he would contradict Faurisson's reading. (290)

Even if we were to grant that van Pelt's explanations are possible, it should be clear that he is allowing a high degree of interpretative intervention into these texts. As a result, he cannot legitimately claim that less invasive alternative explanations are not possible.

Of course, anti-revisionists are quick to complain about revisionist techniques of text criticism. And these critics have a point: just because a witness makes unlikely claims elsewhere, or even appears to deliberately lie, that does not by itself mean that the witness is necessarily making things up when they speak of gassings. On the other hand, if a witness says untrue things, or, perhaps better to say, is deposed as having said untrue things, then the question arises as to the motivation of such false statements. The conclusion that one must then come to is that the testimony may be doubted.

No one can read the testimonies without concluding that something terrible was going on in these camps. To be frank, some of the testimonies van Pelt cites seem more probable than others, for example, the statements attributed to Kurt Aumeier, and the brief comments of Josef Klehr and Hans Muench in recent decades. But again, the revisionist challenge is whether, when evaluating testimonies on their own, one is entitled to doubt, because of the circumstances under which they were first generated. That proposition stands.

4. Documents

However, the other aspect of the material approach concerns the documentary record of the camp, as it pertains to the operation of the crematoria as "factories of death." In this respect, van Pelt relies largely on his by now well-known analyses of a few key documents. Thus: the "Vergasungskeller" note was actually written by Kirschneck for Bischoff's signature, Bischoff caught that Kirschneck had used a forbidden word and therefore underlined the word and sent it back to Kirschneck with his name written on it. Or: "Sonderbehandlung" in a document concerning electrical consumption must have had something to do with ventilating the gas chambers after a gassing, because "Sonderbehandlung" always means killing.

At this point I found myself becoming dissatisfied with Professor van Pelt's treatment, since his interpretations seemed superficial. With respect to the "Vergasungskeller" note, I published a monograph shortly after the Irving trial ("Bomb Shelters in Birkenau", www.codoh.com/incon/inconbsinbirk.html) that reproduced several documents with Kirschneck's name scrawled on the top. According to van Pelt, this must have meant that Kirschneck was continually being upbraided by his superiors, although of course the more likely explanation was that Kirschneck's name was simply written on his copies. As for the "simultaneous cremation and special treatment" in the electrician's memo, I can only repeat my argument that the alleged 20 minute ventilation time of the gas chamber would be meaningless within the time frame of a mass burning that would have taken at least two days. My dissatisfaction turned to disappointment when I encountered van Pelt's thoroughly revised discussion of bomb shelters.

5. Bomb Shelters

However, it may surprise Professor van Pelt to know that the issue of bomb shelters had no place in the original scheme of "Sherlock" and was raised separately for a very specific purpose, namely, to force the establishment to credit a revisionist contribution to Holocaust historiography. Thus, even here, I was pursuing an anti-censorship agenda: for if the establishment was forced to concede the point, then the drive for censorship would be defeated, since the interdependence of the two positions would have been demonstrated.

Indeed, I frankly expected in 1997 that the establishment and other revisionists would concede that the gastight doors with peepholes found at Auschwitz were bomb shelter doors, but that they were instead used for other purposes, say, disinfection chambers or homicidal gas chambers. That would have been fine, and then the discussion could have continued from there. Yet even this concession has not been forthcoming. Of course, recognizing the civil defense origin of these doors opens some other metaphorical doors as well, so perhaps this explains what I can only consider a most obtuse refusal to face reality.

Van Pelt's approach to the issue of bomb shelters is to be just as constrained as my revisionist critics. Thus, since the first document concerning the construction of dedicated bomb shelters comes only from November, 1943, there could not have been any provision for civil defense, or civil defense gastight fixtures, before then. In the same way, van Pelt follows my revisionist critics in arguing that evidence for bomb shelters in 1944 is completely irrelevant, since this comes a year after the crematoriums were constructed and equipped.

Yet I must say that these lines of argument are unnaturally refined. In the first place, van Pelt ignores the sizable amount of evidence that indicates an awareness and intention to implement civil air defense in existing buildings at Auschwitz and other points further east in Occupied Poland beginning in the summer of 1942. It is true that we do not have any document proving that the gas tight doors from the spring of 1943 were put in place to fulfill civil defense requirements. But we don't have any documents indicating that these doors were put in place to gas things or gas people either.

Furthermore, by ignoring the later documentation, van Pelt and my revisionist critics are able to ignore the fact that the gastight doors described from March, 1944, are indistinguishable from the doors installed at the crematoria the previous spring. Further, that these same doors, designed for the splinter trenches for the guards, the workers, and even the prisoners, are supposed to have been used for homicidal purposes not only simultaneously, but at the time when the floodtide of Auschwitz gas exterminations was supposed to have taken place.