This is in response to the article linked in this topic.
The article is titled “Proving the Gas Chambers & Crematoria” by Michael Shermer of SKEPTIC Magazine.
The article attempts to answer of how we know the Nazis killed large numbers of Jews in gas chambers. The answer “a convergence of evidence from various sources.”
What is meant by a convergence of evidence by Dr. Shermer is the careful selection of data needed to reach a predetermined conclusion. What Shermer does, like all of the Holocaust authors I have read who believe in the Nazi genocide, is start with the conclusion and work backward gathering evidence to support it. Like the Looking Glass cake, which is first served and cut afterward, Dr. Shermer gets the order reversed. [BTW, Dr. Shermer has a PhD in the history of science from Claremont Graduate University.]
Dr. Shermer lists five categories of evidence, though these can be boiled down to three: postwar testimony, contemporaneous documents, and physical evidence.
For postwar testimony, the article offers that of four people, though I am sure many more could be used. The author states there are thousands of postwar testimonies. So there are. Nevertheless, testimony concerning gassing of Jews is rare.
Judith Berg, and Edith Gleick claim to have spent time at Auschwitz as prisoners during the war. The testimony offered from them was gathered on the Phil Donahue television show. Neither of the witnesses, at least as related in the article, claim to have witnessed a gassing take place. Berg claims to have witnessed the mass burning of bodies. Gleick witnessed and was subjected to the “selection” process upon arrival at the camp.
Auschwitz and Birkenau camps had a high mortality rate in 1942 and 1943. In 1944 this was reduced, but prisoners and staff died there throughout its operation primarily from disease. That is why the crematories were built at Birkenau. There were a total of 46 single-body retorts or ovens at the camp. Fuel deliveries for them were recorded during 1943 and these records were published in the Pressac book cited by Dr. Shermer. They indicate there was enough fuel being delivered to cremate around 100 people per day during that time.
If Judith Berg and Edith Gleick were at Auschwitz, it was probably in 1944. No new crematory facilities were build at the camp that year. And coke fuel deliveries stopped. In order to dispose of those that died of disease at the camp, the Nazis turned to wood. Sometimes the bodies were burned in the crematories using wood. Sometimes they were burned out of doors on wood pyres.
The phrase “mass burning of bodies” can describe the cremation of 50 corpses or 5000. What Berg witnessed didn’t have anything to do with the gassing of Jews. People died at the camp of diseases. The bodies were cremated.
The process of “selection” upon arrival at Auschwitz had nothing to do with gassing either. The Nazis would sort people based on how the camp was organized and labor needs. The camp was segregated by sex. Women and children lived in one area of the camp while men were housed in another. Auschwitz was a complex of camps and satellite camps. Prisoners were sorted out based on job skills. If there was a need for a particular skill, a prisoner with that skill was selected and sent to where that skill was in demand. Prisoners with no employable skills were housed and remained unemployed. Prisoners who were ill when they arrived were selected out and sent to the main camp where the hospital blocks were.
How these two women’s testimony contribute to “a convergence of evidence” for the use of gas chambers to kill Jews en masse escapes me. They don’t even claim to have seen one.
The other two witnesses cited by Dr. Schermer are Rudolf Hoess and Pery Broad who were both Nazis who worked at Auschwitz. Hoess was a camp commander and Broad was a SS-Unterscharfuehrer which is equivalent to a corporal or sergeant. He was not a high-ranking member of the SS.
The testimony of Hoess has been treated extensively by Arthur Butz and others. Hoess went into hiding at the end of the war and was captured by the British. He was beaten upon his arrest. He was put in an unheated prison cell and deprived of sleep. He claims to have been beaten in British custody with his own riding crop. His testimony was extracted using torture and contradicts itself and in other cases information in it has proven incorrect. Butz rightly calls it a pack of lies.
Supposedly corroborating Hoess’ confessions is the report Pery Broad wrote while also in the custody of the British. Broad’s testimony is dissected by Dr. Wilhelm Staeglich in THE AUSCHWITZ MYTH. I have not seen Broad’s report. For some reason I cannot find it. All I have seen are references to it and selected quotes.
Dr. Shermer writes in the article that “Broad was never tortured and he had absolutely nothing to gain and everything to lose by confessing.” It may be he was not tortured. I don’t know. The problem is he wasn’t confessing to anything other than being a witness. He did have something to gain by writing his report. He gained early release. When his report was used against him at trial some 15 years later Broad said he could not stand by everything in his report because some of what he wrote was based on hearsay.
Both Hoess and Broad had a general understanding of the gas chamber story after the war because the American WRB report, published in November of 1944, outlined it. This and the fact that the British interrogated both of these men makes the claim that they gave independent accounts that corroborate one another incredible. Laughable, really.
Testimony is very poor evidence. That there is a lot of it just makes for a large pile of poor evidence. Testimony should be a starting point. It is the accusation for which evidence for and against has to be gathered.
The article cites documents as another part of the convergence of evidence allowing the credulous to know there were Jews gassed en masse. It divides these into photographs, and written documents. I assume this refers to contemporaneous documents.
Receipts for Zyklon B are not evidence of gas chambers because Zyklon B was a fumigant that was used in the camps for ridding barracks of lice and to clean scrap material being processed at Auschwitz. Pressac’s book contains lots of blueprints of delousing facilities at Auschwitz and Birkenau. Lice were a big problem and the typhus they spread killed ten of thousands of people at the camp. I invite you to look at Pressac’s book. Pressac, for all the documentation he presents, has no proof there were any gas chambers for killing Jews at Auschwitz. What he claims to have found are “criminal traces.” A word in a document here, or there. The book claims to document the gas chambers. It doesn’t. Everything in it having to do with the gassing of Jews is postwar testimony.
The photo of the bodies being burned out of doors at Auschwitz referred to shows a few dozen bodies being burned on pyres. I have read it is a fake, but I am not able to judge. It may be a real image that is misrepresented. That would make it a fake. The misrepresentation would be it was the burning of gas chamber victims rather than the cremation of prisoners who died from disease.
Mattogno examines this photo in detail. I will list the reference works below.
There is no physical evidence of gassings or gas chambers. Van Pelt has recently said so. So did Arno Mayer in WHY DID HEAVENS NOT DARKEN? The difference between me and these two is they believe in the gas chambers despite the lack of evidence and I don’t because of the lack of evidence.
Shermer writes of negative evidence: “documentation of the numbers of prisoners shipped to the various camps, the numbers that were transferred, and the number liberated. The difference between the latter with the former two figures gives an approximation of the numbers who died or were killed.” The problem with this approach is it assumes Jews were mostly put into camps. That is not the case. During 1942 and 1943 around 1.8 to 2.5 million Jews were deported east to live in ghettos and towns set up for them there. These people were not among the “liberated.” This is what is called creative accounting.
Reference works.
Butz
http://www.vho.org/GB/Books/thottc/Faurisson
http://www.ihr.org/jhr/v02/v02p103_Faurisson.htmlMattogno
http://vho.org/aaargh/fran/livres8/aoai.pdfMayer
http://www.amazon.com/Why-Did-Heavens-Not-Darken/dp/0394571541Pressac
http://veritas3.holocaust-history.org/auschwitz/pressac/technique-and-operationShermer
http://www.nizkor.org/hweb/orgs/american/skeptic-magazine/skeptic-12.htmlStaeglich
http://vho.org/aaargh/fran/livres6/WSeng.pdf
I think for me now at least it's obvious gas chambers didn't exist. No one denies that Hitler wanted to deport Jews at the beginning of the war, so why would he change his mind so abruptly? I can't believe all this important information is being kept away from mainstream media, especially everything that was revealed in the holocaust trial! How is it that Jews and holocaust historians can keep lying to everyone and ignoring revisionists? 
