Historical revisionism has always been an indispensable tool of the cultural-Marxists which they developed into an entire ideology with Critical Theory in the humanities. The goal was to destroy objective truths and objective value judgments, especially the latter. If values cannot be ascertained, all morality is nothing but a subjective delusion in the human mind.
Academia deployed revisionism and CT so successfully in our postmodern era that now overt anti-Semitism has exploded again in our faces and Holocaust deniers are having a field day. To comment that this is a disturbing phenomenon would be a gross understatement, for it happens to be blood-chilling.
Historical revisionism in this regard is properly termed historical negationism: a pure denial, or negating of the historical record, known facts and collective memories from experience.
There are many sources for this negation of the Holocaust, but some stand-out ones whose admirers keep them surfacing on social media are the British-born David Irving, the German-Canadian Ernst Zündel (now deceased), the American Fred Leuchter (author of the Leuchter Report) and the nonagenarian German Ursula Haverbeck.
All of these people deny in general that the intentional mass extermination of Jewry happened in Europe at the hands of the Nazis, and in particular that they were “not gassed” en masse. Auschwitz-Birkenhau was a work camp not a death camp, they claim, and the huge quantities of Zyklon B in the collected records was used for delousing, not as a weapon of mass homicide.
I will say here, for the record, that people such as the aforementioned have a right to hold their views without being criminally charged for hate-speech or sent to prison for the so-called crime of holding a falsehood as a truth. The fact that the elderly Frau Haverbeck has been imprisoned twice for such non-crimes is itself a crime. She once claimed to camera, “I would say that National Socialism is a better way than communism or capitalism, that is quite clear,” but it should not be lost on anyone that National Socialists were hardly proponents of freedom of expression as a principle given that they exterminated all opposition. That Frau Haverbeck couldn’t get away with espousing her vile views in modern Germany without being legally molested only furthers the view that modern Germany ought still to be treated with suspicion when it comes to human rights. Similarly with Canada and its treatment of Ernst Zündel, Neo-Nazi scoundrel that he undoubtably was.
Regarding Zündel, it was his 1988 trial in Canada on a charge of “reporting false news” that brought the engineer and electric-chair execution expert, Fred Leuchter, to his side with his Leuchter Report. Leuchter traveled to Poland to chisel out brick and floor samples out of the Auschwitz prison camp memorial masonry with nothing but a hammer (an act of vandalism actually) in order to have them tested by a chemist for traces of hydrogen cyanide (HCN). Leuchter went to enormous lengths, while his new wife sat in their car reading a book (this was their honeymoon), to obtain the samples without getting caught.
The Leuchter Report claimed that only “insignificant traces” of HCN could be found in his samples, but the one sample he took from the delousing chamber at Birkenau had a much higher trace than the gas chamber sample. Moreover, it reported that the gas chambers were nothing but concrete morgues with no sealed doors, no ventilation (needed to not kill the SS operators) and no deliverable ability to use Zyklon B for mass murder in the way that the Holocaust survivors had claimed it had been used. The report also states that the chambers were too close to the crematoria ovens to not cause dangerous explosions. In other words, the report concluded that the mass gassing of Jews at Auschwitz never happened, as Zündel had asserted.
There was one very large problem. When Leuchter handed over his many unlabelled samples to the chemist, one James Roth, he failed to tell him what they were, where they were from and for what purpose they were to be analysed.
The judge of the Zündel trial demanded Roth’s testimony and when Roth understood what had been asked of him said that it required a whole different type of test as the samples had been pulverised to dust to examine the contents. Hydrogen cyanide could not have penetrated into the bricks or concrete, but would’ve been only around 100 microns into a painted surface (half a human hair’s breadth), and none of the samples were labeled. As samples, Roth said they were meaningless for the tests he carried out.
The judge rejected the Leuchter Report as evidence.
Although his cameraman was also his translator because Leuchter himself did not speak or read German, while in Poland he failed to find the Auschwitz archives where blueprints, plans and additions to the various buildings used in the gassings were recorded and available, showing the ventilation systems, rubber sealed steel doors and rooftop shafts.
This whole shonky business was made into an excellent, though very understated, documentary film made by director Errol Morris in 1999, titled Mr. Death: the Rise and Fall of Fred A Leuchter, Jr. It’s almost sad in its palpable sense of pathos. In the film, in an effort to imply the impartial nature of Leuchter’s participation, David Irving states in ridiculously admiring tones that he was a man of “criminal simplicity.” Indeed, I couldn’t have said it any better, though I don’t intend that to be a point of respect.
Other chemistry forensics have been done on Auschwitz-Birkenau, both before Leuchter and after, showing that HCN residues are present in both the gas chambers and the delousing rooms, the latter showing higher readings because insects need a significantly higher and longer concentration of Zyklon B to cause death compared to humans who die quickly after exposure to small amounts of the gas once inhaled. Thus Leuchter’s junk-science report only confirmed the very thing he was so adamant that he’d disproved.
That aside, the problematic fact remains that as the Soviet Army swept through to liberate the camps, the SS, upon orders from Himmler, blew up the gas chambers and crematoriums of Auschwitz in an attempt to hide their inhumane mass murders and as the local Polish populations were plunged into abject poverty after the war, the bricks, masonry, tin, steel and piping from the abandoned prison camps were much cannibalised, as well as exposed to weathering.
Adolf Eichmann participated in the Wannsee Conference in Berlin in January of 1942 where the plans for the Final Solution to the Jewish Question were hatched and formalised in 90 minutes of Prussian efficiency, headed by SS-Obergruppenführer Reinhard Heydrich. Eichmann, a second-tier bureaucratic functionary, recorded the minutes of the meeting while all dined on French champagne and canapés. Lists of Jewry in every occupied country were itemised in the protocol equating to 11,000,000 Jews targeted for “evacuation.” That enormous number did not even factor in the populations of Roma, Slavs, political dissidents, blacks, homosexuals or disabled. The only country to be listed at the conference as already “Jew free” (Judenfrei) was Estonia because their previously thriving Jewish communities had already fled to the Soviet Union and those who remained were mercilessly wiped out by the roving death squads of the Einsatzgruppen (special action groups), which followed behind the German army wherever it went.
Numerous euphemisms the Nazi Party used, not only to shield the populations under occupation from their malevolent intentions, but also to shield themselves from the horrible reality of their own crimes by using language in a way that disguised the true meaning of their words, so as not to regard themselves and each other as the monsters they were. Despite the euphemisms their genocide is the most documented genocide in all of history.
Erledigt (finished, done with): murdered,
umsiedlung (resettlement): murdered,
aussiedlung (evacuation): murdered,
sonderbehandelt (specially treated): murdered,
entsprechend behandelt (appropriately treated): murdered,
sauberung (cleansing): murdered,
de sondermassnahme zugefuhrt (conveyed to special measure): murdered,
bereinigung der Judenfrage (cleaning up the Jewish question): all Jews murdered, Endlosung (the Final Solution): decision to murder all Jews,
Judenfrei gemacht (made free of Jews): all Jews in area murdered,
badeanstalten (bath houses): gas chambers,
schutzhaft (protective detention): arrest without charge or trial.
The mass shootings and mass graves, the gassings, the tortures, the slave labour, the cruel and unusual medical experiments, the sterilisations, the total dehumanisation of people into cattle became known to all the world. There are still people alive today who survived it and some who perpetrated it. Numerous Nazi officers, including Rudolf Hoess Commandant of Auschwitz before his 1947 execution in Poland, and many prison guards confessed to the mass gassings, even some much later in life when the truth of what they did caught up with them.
To deny the Holocaust today is a fool’s errand that amounts to a complete blanking out of the enormous amount of evidence available over the last 80 years. The crimes themselves only happened because the average German civilian, in real time during those dark years, did the very same blank out, allowing it to come to pass. They bought the delusions, along with all the horrors encased within the evil euphemisms, as do Holocaust deniers today, fuelled by the historical negationists who create them.
I’m not entirely sure what motivates the Holocaust deniers to keep doubling down on militantly ignorant denialism of this kind, but my suspicion would be something in the vicinity of the need to negate Jewish exceptionalism throughout the ages of history, including our own age.
Eichmann offers a clue to this when interviewed in 1957 by Willem Sassen, a Dutch-German Nazi living in Argentina along with Eichmann, before Eichmann was kidnapped by Mossad to stand trial and be executed in Israel for war crimes.
According to the Sassen Papers, Eichmann said:
I will not humble myself or repent in any way. I could do it too cheaply in today’s climate of opinion. It would be too easy to pretend that I had turned suddenly from a Saul to a Paul. No, I must say truthfully that if we had killed all the 10 million Jews that Himmler’s statisticians originally listed in 1933, I would say, “Good, we have destroyed an enemy.” But here I do not mean wiping them out entirely. That would not be proper—and we carried on a proper war.
Now, however, when through the malice of fate a large part of these Jews whom we fought against are alive, I must concede that fate must have wanted it so. I always claimed that we were fighting against a foe who through thousands of years of learning and development had become superior to us.
I no longer remember exactly when, but it was even before Rome itself had been founded that the Jews could already write. It is very depressing for me to think of that people writing laws over 6,000 years of written history. But it tells me that they must be a people of the first magnitude, for law-givers have always been great.
That admission from a true-blue fascist, who could clearly observe Jewish exceptionalism despite being one of the worst anti-Semites who ever lived, tells a tale on today’s Holocaust deniers armed with their historical negationists, infected by Critical Theory in a post-modern culture.
This article originally appeared here.
