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Video Interview of Williamson

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The Holodays

Leibowitz was born out this December when six new “holocaust movies” were released in time for the Christimas Season. According to the New York Post, Harvey Weinstein, whose studio produced one of the films, “believes that no number of Holocaust movies is too many.” The Post quoted Weinstein as saying, “What a wonderful subject to explore in as many ways as possible.” What is actually going on is an attempt to infuse social consciousness with the going contemplation of an event that becomes more “symbolical” the more it is “explored”

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As if on cue, authorities in Germany announced that they were studying whether to bring charges against Williamson. They might well also consider whether to bring charges against Justice Gray.

The underlying issue in the Lipstadt Case was whether David Irving had acted with professional competence in advancing various criticisms of the “official” Jewish-Zionist account of Nazi genocide. This issue, turned on whether there was such overwhelming evidence against Irving’s interpretation and in favor of “holocaust orthodoxy” that Irving could be said to have acted “irresponsibly”.

In the end, Justice Gray all but conceded that the facts in favor of orthodoxy were underwhelming, and that evidence of mass gassings at Auschwitz relied on a theory of circumstantial “convergence” -- i.e. that the sum of zeros added up to at least a one. Increasingly even Zionist historians have abandoned the trite linearity of docu-dramas and holo-soaps in favour of circumstantial convergence theories. A few excerpts from a very lengthy opinion will convey the gist of the matter;

Re: Documentary Evidence of Gas Chambers

7.59 None of these drawings refers overtly to any part of the buildings being designed or intended to serve as gas chambers whether for fumigation or extermination purposes. In particular the drawings for Leichenkeller (morgue) 1 in crematorium 2 make no provision for ducts or chimneys by means of which Zyklon-B pellets might be inserted through the roof. However, van Pelt sought to illustrate by means of detailed analyses of certain features of the drawings that it reasonable to infer that certain chambers were designed to function as gas chambers.

7.60 The principal feature identified by van Pelt is the redesign of the doubledoor to [the alleged gas chamber]...

7.65 [and the existence of planned] incinerators near the "Badenanstalten fur Sonderaktionen" [Bath stations for Special Actions]

But

7.75 It is also accepted by the Defendants that in certain respects the documentary evidence, including the photographic evidence, is capable of more than one interpretation. Nevertheless the Defendants argue that the different strands of evidence "converge". [i.e. their interpretation trumps Irving’s]

Re: Numbers Killed

8.21 A formidable obstacle in the way of arriving at an accurate number for those killed by gas is that no records were kept by the Nazis of the numbers put to death in the gas chambers or, if they were, none have survived. Records were kept, as I have mentioned earlier, of the number of deaths amongst those who were registered as inmates of the camp. But, for reasons which are perhaps obvious, none of those deaths is recorded as having been due to gassing.

[But perhaps less “obviously” they weren’t attributed to gassing because ...]

8.22 The difficulty of arriving at an accurate estimate is compounded by the undoubted fact that many inmates died from disease and above all in the typhus epidemics which from time to time ravaged the camp. Whilst the Defendants do assert that these deaths are the result of deliberate genocidal policy on the part of the Nazis, they must of course be discounted in order to reach a correct estimate of the number of deaths in the gas chambers. Initial estimates, largely based on the capacity of the crematoria, ran as high as 4 million. As has been see the camp commandant, Hoss, gave varying estimates, ranging from 3 million to 1.1 million.

However, analysis of the numbers of Jews transported to Auschwitz produced a lower estimate of around 1 million. Research carried out more recently, notably by Raul Hilberg and by Dr Piper of the Auschwitz Museum, has concluded that the true figure for the number of deaths at Auschwitz is in the region of 1.1 million of which the vast majority perished in the gas chambers. This figure has, according to the evidence of van Pelt and Longerich, been endorsed by the majority of serious, professional historians concerned in this field. The only significant exception is Jean-Claude Pressac, a French chemist and amateur historian, whose study concluded that the overall number of deaths was 630-710,000, of which 470-550,000 were gassed on arrival at the camp.

Summation

13.71 I have to confess that, in common I suspect with most other people, I had supposed that the evidence of mass extermination of Jews in the gas chambers at Auschwitz was compelling. I have, however, set aside this preconception when assessing the evidence adduced by the parties in these proceedings.

The "convergence" of evidence:

13.72 The case for the Defendants, summarised above, is that there exists what van Pelt described as a "convergence" of evidence which is to the ordinary, dispassionate mind overwhelming that hundreds of thousands of Jews were systematically gassed to death at Auschwitz,

13.73 I recognise the force of many of Irving's comments upon some of those categories. He is right to point out that the contemporaneous documents, such as drawings, plans, correspondence with contractors and the like, yield little clear evidence of the existence of gas chambers designed to kill humans.

13.74 Similarly Irving had some valid comments to make about the various accounts given by survivors of the camp and by camp officials. Some of those accounts were given in evidence at the post-war trials. The possibility exists that some of these witnesses invented some or even all of the experiences which they describe

[The court effectively gave very little weight to the few allegedly actual eye-witness accounts ]

13.75 Vulnerable though the individual categories of evidence may be to criticisms of the kind mentioned in the preceding paragraphs, it appears to me that the cumulative effect of the documentary evidence for the genocidal operation of gas chambers at Auschwitz is considerable.

13.78 My conclusion is that the various categories of evidence do "converge" in the manner suggested by the Defendants. I accept their contention which I have summarised in paragraph 7.75 above. My overall assessment of the totality of the evidence that Jews were killed in large numbers in the gas chambers at Auschwitz is that it would require exceedingly powerful reasons to reject it.

A Note of Caution: Lipstadt and her backers have gone about trumpetting Gray's decision a legal determination that mass gassings took place. Not so. Because this was a civil libel trial the burden was on Irving to prove that Lipstadt had impugned his integrity. To distill it simply, the ruling from the bench was simply that Irving had failed to prove that Lipstadt's criticism of him was unreasonable. That was a far far cry from ruling, in a war crimes case, that the prosecutor had proved the existence of killing gas chambers beyond a reasonable doubt. Justice Gray's opinion is noteworthy less for its "legal precedent" than as a sober illustration that there are many inferences but few hard facts.

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These estimates -- bandied about in the press and on the web as indisputable "fact" -- have their source in Judge Parker's summation of War Crimes and Crimes Against Humanity at the Nuremberg Trials, viz

Hoess “estimated that in the camp of Auschwitz alone in that time (1940-1943) 2,500.000 were exterminated and that a frutehr 500,000 died from disease and starvation” ....Eichman estimated that the policy pursued resulted in the killing of 6,000.000 Jews of which 4,000.000 were killed in extermination institutions.”

Neither of these estimates is at all reliable for a variety of reasons. As Raul Hilberg the premier Jewish historian on the subject, states “the raw data are seldom self-explanatory, and their interpretation requires the use of voluminous background materials that have to be analyzed in turn.” (See http://www.counterpunch.org.finklestein/80222009.html)

In addition, it is now generally acknowledged albeit discretely that Hoess and other witness were tortured -- or at least that there "accounts" are unreliable. See John Toland’s account in his biography “Adolf Hitler” of Kurt Gerstein, the SS lawyer who prosecuted camp personnel for homicide and who was later beaten by allied interrogators in an attempt to get him to attest to lamp shades of human skin and the like.
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Rather than attempt an "illustrative" list, more salient to note that the reason for the revisions lies in the elemental fact that no two eye-witnesses see the same event the same way. Psychological studies in the criminal forensic field, have repeatedly demonstrated the utter unreliability of eye witness accounts due to the psychological fact that memory is malleable and always changing. In addition, few of the investigators can themselves be deemed "impartial". The documentary records that historians rely upon were themselves written by participants who had a variety of less than objective motives. For years, the Soviet blamed the Katyn Massacre on the Germans, who themselves printed up posters accusing the Russians of the barbarous murders of Polish officers, while the Nazi's themselves were liquidating the Polish intelligentsia. This is the stuff of detective work, but not of "indisputable" fact.
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1. To say even this much is something of an interpretation, based on accepting the Jewish lawyer, Rafael Lemkin’s sociological definition of genocide as a cluser of policies operating in stages at economic, linguistic, political, cultural, and biological levels. In his schema, economic discriminations, political exclusions, linguistic prohibitions, and the rationing of food, medicine, and shelter --- when calculated to efface a given group -- constitute genocide. International law defines genocide more restrictively as the killing of a “substantial” number of a target group members with the intent to eradicate them as a group. (I.e. killing substantial numbers on a battle field would not be “genocide”) International law adopts a more restrictive definition because there are obvious problems of demarcation with Lemkin’s categories. For example, does an English-only ballot measure constitute a form of “genocide” ? Does swamping the world with Disney cartoons constitute a form of homogenization that is culturally genocidal? Relevant portions of Lemkin's studies can be found at http://www.preventgenocide.org

In addition to these definitional issues, there are developmental issues which focus on whether whatever took place happened haphazardly and more or less ad hoc or pursuant to a long standing and pre-existing intent and objective (if not “plan”). The Wansee on line museum contains discussions of these issues.

The purpose of this brief Note and Comment is not even to attempt a “summary” of the historical issues but to point out in a quick and illustrative way that, beyond negating that some form of genocide was committed against Jews, the concept of “holocaust denial” results in absurdities
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click on foto to enlarge

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