Förintelseförnekarnas misstag

Q. So, on page seventeen when it says that rodents can be killed with only 1.2 grams grams per cubic metre, we're talking about a concentration in excess of 833 parts per million?

A. Most likely. I haven't read this thing again and I'm nor sure whether or not we're talking about the full weight or simply the gas.

Q. Well sir, would you agree with me that Degesh, the people who manufactured the product, say that rodents can be killed with only 1.2 grams per cubic metre and that's equivalent to three times the amount that is fatal for a human. Would you agree? We're talking about around nine-hundred parts per million. And three hundred---

A. Again, over what period of time, counsellor?

Q. Well, they are talking about a time of exposure that varies greatly from 2 to 72 hours. If you read what they've written, they say "various types of pests react differently to hydrocyanic acid. Rodents can be killed with only 1.2 grams per cubic metre," and then they say "Larger Bacon Beetles require twenty times as much. Times of exposure also vary greatly," so I suggest that they're talking about to kill beetles.

A. This may well be. I've never killed beetles. I, you know, I don't know. I haven't made computations for killing beetles.

Q. Well sir, I know you haven't but you've come here and you've told the jury some conclusions.

A. That's correct.

Q. and I want to ask you about your answer to me. I said it takes a higher concentration of hydrogen cyanide to exterminate insects than it does to kill human beings. You said no. We go to the Degesh manual and it says that it requires twenty times as much to kill beetles as to kill rats and it takes three times as much to kill rats than it does to kill humans.

A. Maybe it depends upon the insects. Most of the work that I've been looking at, they've been killing lice and ticks. And their recommendation for general fumigation purposes is three thousand parts per million.

Q. What is twenty times 833 parts per million?

A. What is twenty times 833 parts per million?

Q. Right.

A. 16,600.

Q. 16,600. So what Degesh are saying, the people who make the product, is that if you want to kill beetles, you should have a concentration of -- of what sir?

A. 16,600, apparently.

Q. Right. and it takes three hundred parts per million to kill a human being in a matter of minutes?

A. Or more.

Q. In a matter of minutes.

A. Twenty minutes, fifteen minutes, yes.

Q. Right. And here they are talking about a time of exposure from 2 to 72 hours, right?

A. Right.

Utanför den lilla byn Seelow i östra Tyskland pågår fortfarande arbetet med att gräva upp kvarlevorna efter, identifiera och begrava de tyska och sovjetiska soldater som stupade i ett av Andra världskrigets största slag.

Efter Östtysklands fall började arbetet med att gräva upp gravarna, identifiera de döda och begrava dem. I tolv år har det arbetet hållit på och hittills har man identifierat och begravt 1 080 tyska och 700 sovjetiska soldater. Erwin Kowalke, som ansvarar för de tyska gravarna uppskattar att det ligger omkring
10 000 kroppar kvar i jorden kring Seelow. Ambitionen är att identifiera och begrava alla. Arbetet kommer alltså att pågå ännu i åtskilliga år.
– Andra världskriget kommer inte att vara verkligen avslutat förrän alla kroppar har återfunnits och fått en riktig begravning, säger Kowalke till nyhetsbyrån Reuters.

IHR skriver (I originalversionen):

Nej, det är omöjligt att totalt förbränna kroppar på det här sättet, eftersom elden inte blir tillräckligt varm i öppna gropar.

IHR skriver (I reviderad version):

Nej. Det är omöjligt att totalt förbränna kroppar på det här sättet, på grund av avsaknaden av syre.

Nizkor svarar:

Hur ska det vara nu då? Värme eller syre?

Oavsett vad Förintelseförnekarna helst skulle vilja, så är det så enkelt att sådan kremering skedde; det finns ett berömt foto av gropkremeringen som smugglades ut ur Auschwitz-Birkenau.

Något som stärker argumenten för att det går att bränna kroppar i öppna gropar är en rapport citerad i Hugo Erichsen's 1887 bok Cremation of the Dead som dokumenterar kremeringen av över 200 kroppar på mindre än en timme. Kropparna var inte "totalt förbrända" - en fras som bara fungerar som en fågelskrämma i förhållande till brännandet av kroppar under Förintelsen.

Rapporten från de arkeologiska undersökningarna i Belzec omfattar fruktansvärda fynd, bland dem lager av svartnat mänskligt fett som hittades i några av de 33 massgravar som upptäcktes under undersökningarna:

"Borrkärnan blottlade ruttnande människodelar, bland annat bitar av skallben med skinn och hårtestar fortfarande kvar, oidentifierbara klumpar av grå, fet människovävnad. Botten av graven var full med illaluktande svart (e.g bränt) människofett som såg ut som svart tvål."

People are very good at believing what they want to believe, while ignoring reality. “If I think about how dreadful things were, I just get unhappy.[1]” David Irving claims, with increasing stridency, that Hitler did not know.

On 20 January, 1942, a conference of Nazi officials was held in the East Berlin suburb of Grossen-Wannsee, for the purpose of planning the “final solution” (Endlösung) of the “Jewish question” (Judenfrage). On 31 July, 1941, Hermann Göring had issued orders to Reinhard Heydrich to prepare a comprehensive plan for this “final solution”. The Wannsee Conference, held six months later, was attended by 15 Nazi bureaucrats, led by Heydrich and including Adolf Eichmann, chief of Jewish affairs for the Reich Central Security Office (Reichssicherheitshauptamt).

At the time when Wetzel was writing his comments, Generalplan Ost had ceased to be merely a blueprint. Its first part, the KleinePlanung, was already being put into practice. The western areas of Poland had been incorporated into the Reich, hundreds of thousands of Poles had been expelled from them, and further deportations were in progress. Hundreds of thousands of Poles were dying in various concentration camps, while millions of Jews, herded into ghettos and still ignorant of their fate, were awaiting "the final solution of the Jewish problem." The rulers of the Third Reich were in a hurry to carry out their criminal plans while there was still a war to divert the attention of the world from what was going on in Eastern Europe.

...my first and foremost task
will be the annihilation of the Jews.
Adolf Hitler, 1922

It is one of those things that is easily said. "The Jewish people is being exterminated," every Party member will tell you, "perfectly clear, it's part of our plans, we're eliminating the Jews, exterminating them, ha!, a small matter."

What nation is credited with being the first to practice mass civilian bombing?

The IHR says:

Great Britain -- on 11 May 1940.

Nizkor replies:

The town of Guernica in Spain was bombed by the German Luftwaffe in 1937 during the Spanish Civil War. (The Luftwaffe honed its bombing skills during World War I - see the Recommended Reading note, below.)

But what does this have to do with the Holocaust?

It is true that the Allies had massively bombarded civilian population -- as had the Germans. Does the fact that atrocities were committed against the Germans mean they did not commit any themselves? Some weird logic.

The last few questions may only have hinted at it, but the IHR does openly suggest elsewhere that the imprisonment of European Jews was justified. See their Web page, The Encampment of the Jews: Might It Have Been Justified?

Recommended reading, for those who do not truly appreciate the duplicitous nature of Holocaust denial: The Luftwaffe : Creating the Operational Air War 1918-1940, by James Corum (Modern War Studies)

16. If the Jews of Europe were not exterminated by the Nazis, what happened to them?

The IHR says:

After the war Jews of Europe were still in Europe, except for perhaps 300,000 of them who had died of all causes during the war, and those who had emigrated to Israel, the United States, Argentina, Canada, etc. Most Jews who left Europe did so after, not during, the war. They are all accounted for.

Nizkor replies:

This is ridiculous. It would imply that about 5 million missing Jews have emigrated to these countries after WW2. This is not supported by reality, not by a long shot. Most Jews in these countries came before WW2. In Palestine, for instance, there were 370,000 Jews in 1936, and 590,000 in 1947. There were 5.54 million Jews in America at 1939, and about 6 million today. There are about 6 million missing European Jews, and they are not accounted for -- except by the German camps.

Interestingly, the famous "revisionist" David Irving has recently made a surprising admission in a radio interview. Totally out of the blue, he stated that he now believes that as many as four million Jews died in concentration camps during the war.

18. How many Jews emigrated prior to the war, thus being outside of German reach?

The IHR says:

Over a million (not including those absorbed by the USSR).

Nizkor replies:

Yes, but more then six million remained. There were about eleven million Jews in Europe in 1937, by the Nazis' own estimates given in the Wannsee Protocol.

19. If Auschwitz was not an extermination camp, why did the commandant, Rudolf Hoss, confess that it was?

The IHR says (original):

He was tortured by Jewish interrogators in British uniform, as one of them has subsequently admitted.

The IHR says (revised):

He was tortured by British military police, as one of his interrogators later admitted.

The Samisdat version says:

Time-honored methods were used to get him to tell his captors what they wanted to hear.

Nizkor replies:

Wait a minute! The story gets more and more vague with each revision.

What exactly did this torturer admit? The IHR's first claim was that the interrogaters were Jewish operatives wearing (phony) British uniforms. If one of these interrogators supposedly admitted this, why did the IHR change things around and make these phony Jewish operatives into real British military police?

The real answer is that this claim of "Jewish interrogators in British uniform" appears nowhere else in Holocaust-denier literature. This claim appears only in the "Q&A." There is no evidence whatsoever to support it.

In other words, someone just made it up. Later, someone else decided they'd better quietly drop the whole thing. How many of the other 65 Q&A are similar? We can't know, because they don't provide any evidence to back any of them up.

Regarding the Höss confession:

We must consider all information in context. There are numerous other testimonies which confirm the essential facts of Höss' confession. There are captured documents which speak very clearly of gassing and mass shooting. The list goes on and on; for just a few examples, see the answer to question 1.

Deniers depend very heavily upon Hoess supposedly being coerced and fed a story. But they only have two pieces of evidence:


A lurid book by one Rupert Butler called Legions of Death. Butler tells of seeing Hoess beaten when he was first found. He makes no mention of the interrogators being Jewish agents in British uniform, of course.
And most importantly, Butler's version of what happened contradicts the deniers' hypothesis that Hoess was fed a story. Butler's book nowhere mentions Hoess being given a particular story to tell, it simply says Hoess was beaten.


A piece of hearsay that is supposedly contained in a secret document which the "revisionist" Robert Faurisson is not at liberty to reveal. (And even if it were revealed, it would be the first time the deniers ever accepted hearsay as being valid...)
(See footnote 2 of Mark Weber's essay, titled "Let's Hear Both Sides" on the IHR's web site and "Different Views on the Holocaust" on Ernst Zündel's web site.)

On this pair of flimsy excuses, the deniers dismiss and ignore Hoess' confession, his testimony, his memoirs, and everything else he said and wrote about the gassings and the extermination program. Excerpts from his testimony and memoirs are available

Death camp gas chambers were the primary means of execution used against the Jews during the Holocaust. The Nazis issued a directive implementing large-scale gas chambers in the fall of 1941 but, by then, procedures facilitating mass murder, including the utilization of smaller gas chambers, were already in practice. Before their use in death camps, gas chambers were central to Hitler's "eugenics" program. Between January 1940 and August 1941, 70,273 Germans -- most of them physically handicapped or mentally ill -- were gassed, 20-30 at a time, in hermetically shut chambers disguised as shower rooms.15

Meanwhile, mass shooting of Jews had been extensively practiced on the heels of Germany's Eastern campaign. But these actions by murder squads had become an increasingly unwieldy process by October 1941. Three directors of the genocide, Erhard Wetzel, head of the Racial-Policy Office, Alfred Rosenberg, consultant on Jewish affairs for the Occupied Eastern Territories, and Victor Brack, deputy director of the Chancellery, met at the time with Adolf Eichmann to discuss the use of gas chambers in the genocide program.16 Thereafter, two technical advisors for the euthanasia gas chambers, Kriminalkommissar Christian Wirth and a Dr. Kallmeyer, were sent to the East to begin construction of mass gas chambers.17 Physicians who had implemented the euthanasia program were also transferred.

Mobile gassing vans, using the exhaust fumes of diesel engines to kill passengers, were used to kill Jews at Chelmno and Treblinka -- as well as other sites, not all of them concentration camps -- starting in November 1941.18 At least 320,000 Chelmno prisoners, most of them Jews, were killed by this method; a total of 870,000 Jews were murdered at Treblinka using gas vans and diesel-powered gas chambers.19

Gas chambers were installed and operated at Belzec, Lublin, Sobibor, Majdanek and Auschwitz-Birkenau from September 3, 1941, when the first experimental gassing of a group of Soviet prisoners-of-war took place at Auschwitz, until November 1944.20 Working with chambers measuring an average 225 square feet, the Nazis forced to their deaths 700 to 800 men, women and children at a time.21 Two-thirds of this program was completed in 1943-44, and at its height it accounted for as many as 20,000 victims per day.22 Authorities have estimated that these gas chambers accounted for the deaths of approximately 2½ to 3 million Jews.


Holocaust-denial attacks on this record of mass murder intensified following the end of the Cold War when it was reported that the memorial at Auschwitz was changed in 1991 to read that 1 million had died there, instead of 4 million as previously recorded. For Holocaust deniers, this change appeared to confirm arguments that historical estimates of Holocaust deaths had been deliberately exaggerated, and that scholars were beginning to "retreat" in the face of "revisionist" assertions. Thus, for example, Willis Carto wrote in the February 6, 1995, issue of The Spotlight, the weekly tabloid of his organization, Liberty Lobby, that "All 'experts' until 1991 claimed that 4 million Jews were killed at Auschwitz. This impossible figure was reduced in 1991. . . to I.I million. . . . The facts about deaths at Auschwitz, however. . , are still wrong. The Germans kept detailed records of Auschwitz deaths. . . These show that no more than 120,000 persons of all religions and ethnicity died at Auschwitz during the war. . . ."

In fact, Western scholars have never supported the figure of 4 million deaths at Auschwitz; the basis of this Soviet estimate — an analysis of the capacity of crematoria at Auschwitz and Birkenau — has long been discredited. As early as 1952, Gerald Reitlinger, a British historian, had convincingly challenged this method of calculation. Using statistics compiled in registers for Himmler, he asserted that approximately 1 million people had died at Auschwitz; Raul Hilberg in 1961, and Yehuda Bauer In 1989, confirmed Reitlinger's estimate of Auschwitz victims. Each of these scholars, nonetheless, has recognized that nearly 6 million Jews were killed overall during the Holocaust.23 Polish authorities were therefore responding to long-accepted Western scholarship, further confirmed subsequently by documents released in post-Soviet Russia; the cynical allegations of "Holocaust revisionism" played no part in their decision.

Yet another centerpiece of "revisionist" propaganda attacks the objectivity and legal validity of the postwar Nuremberg Trials, where much information about the Holocaust first became public, and where the general history of the genocide was first established.

The actual process of bringing Nazi war criminals to justice was a lengthy and complicated effort involving the differing legal traditions and political agendas of the United States, England, France and the Soviet Union. As the historical record shows, the allied victors, if anything, erred on the side of leniency toward the accused Nazis.

Discussions concerning allied treatment of war criminals had begun as early as October 1943.29 In the summer months following Germany's surrender in 1945, British, American and Soviet representatives met in London to create the charter for an international military tribunal to prosecute "major criminals" whose offenses extended over the entire Reich, and who therefore could be punished by joint decision of the Governments of the Allies.30

By early autumn, the Allies had resolved their debates over whom to prosecute and how to define the crimes committed during the Holocaust; the first trials began thereafter in Nuremberg, before an international military tribunal. The chief defendant was Hermann Goering, but the prosecution also selected 20 other leading officials from the Nazi party, German government ministries, central bureaucracy, armament and labor specialists, the military and territorial chiefs.31

These trials did not result in either "rubber stamp" guilty verdicts or identical sentences. In fact, of the 21 defendants, three were set free; one received a 10-year sentence; one a 15-year sentence; two, 20-year sentences; three, life sentences, and 11 received the death penalty.32

The defendants, moreover, had access to 206 attorneys, 136 of whom had been Nazi party members.33 Furthermore, as Raul Hilberg stated, "The judges in Nuremberg were established American lawyers. They had not come to exonerate or convict. They were impressed with their task, and they approached it with much experience in the law and Little anticipation of the facts."34

A second round of trials resulted in 25 death sentences, 20 life sentences, 97 sentences of 25 years or less, and 35 not-guilty verdicts.35 By 1951, following the recommendations of an American-run clemency board, 77 the 142 convicted criminals had been released from prison.36

11. Did the Jews of the world "declare war on Germany"?

The IHR says (original):

Yes. The world media carried the headlines, "Judea Declares War on Germany."

The IHR says (revised):

Yes. Newspapers around the world reported this. A front-page headline in the London Daily Express (March 24, 1933), for example, announced "Judea Declares War on Germany."

Nizkor replies:

"World media"? "Newspapers around the world"? One British newspaper is cited, talking about a planned economic boycott.

A transcript of the article is available. The next paragraphs after the headline were:

A strange and unfortunate sequel has emerged from the stories of German Jew-baiting.

The whole of Israel throughout the world is uniting to declare an economic and financial war on Germany.

Hirtherto the cry has gone up: "Germany is persecuting the Jews." If the present plans are carried out, the Hitlerite cry will be: "The Jews are persecuting Germany."

The fact that this "Hitlerite cry" has been echoed four decades later by Holocaust-deniers should surprise no one. (See question 62 for information about various deniers' views on Hitler.)

In sum, this question and answer is a cheap trick to make it seem as if "the Jews of the world" started the "war" against Germany, instead of the other way around. The word "war" means many things. In this case it meant planning to apply economic pressure.

But the IHR and Zündel want you to think it was a real declaration of war. How many divisions of troops did "Judea" have? How many tanks? How many planes? How many artillery shells?

The fact is that Germany started the real war, World War II, and started it by overrunning Poland with planes, bombs, tanks, and millions of infantrymen. To compare this to a planned economic boycott is ludicrous, but typical of "revisionist" trickery.

Besides, this is an internal contradiction. Their answer to question 54 states that "the Germans maintained cordial relations with the Zionist leadership." War is not a cordial relation. They should get their story straight.

There was a swimming pool in Auschwitz, hence it could not have been an extermination camp.
Indeed, a water reservoir in Auschwitz I (the main camp) was converted to a swimming pool which was used by the camp's staff. Other means of entertainment for the SS personnel existed - a band composed of prisoners, and a brothel (which some prisoners were permitted to use). How this "proves" that Auschwitz was not an extermination center is beyond the author of this text.