CW Porter's Website

[fireofice]

You guys still haven't found a single example of an eyewitness who was at the AR camps, wrote or testified about his experience (in a recorded statement), and did not say they were extermination facilities. (I recognized in my first post on the thread that a couple such witnesses exist for Auschwitz

Gustav Wagner.

Not that your argument is historiographically sound.

(I can already picture your little hands Googling away to "debunk" Wagner )

He'll probably bring this up:

https://www.washingtonpost.com/archive/ ... d8d8708eb/

Of course, this is just as much hearsay as the Himmler interview, which he dismissed for that reason. Anyone can claim years later that they "interviewed" him and that he "confessed everything". There is great incentive to make up lies like this.

Apparently the article is based on a BBC television program, although I can't find the original program.

Assuming these are his words (which I don't accept until I see video or audio) it's clear he has accepted that everyone already thinks he is guilty, and wants to downplay his role within that context.

From the article:

Wagner insists that it was not possible to resign. "They would have shot us. We were under oath, involved in top secret Reich work." In fact, many investigations have shown that the few SS men who did refuse to continue were merely transferred to other work.

So if HS wants to dismiss Christophersen "because he admitted he lied" (even though he didn't) then he will have no choice but to dismiss this "retraction" because of the lies it contains.

On top of that, whatever "retractions" existed at a later time because of pressure and the like are completely irrelevant to the argument HS is making. He is saying "we should expect a witness to deny it if it didn't happen". A silly argument to begin with. But taking it seriously, well here is one. Whatever false retractions they made at a later date is not relevant to that argument on what we "should" expect.

[HistorySpeaks]

You guys still haven't found a single example of an eyewitness who was at the AR camps, wrote or testified about his experience (in a recorded statement), and did not say they were extermination facilities. (I recognized in my first post on the thread that a couple such witnesses exist for Auschwitz

Gustav Wagner.

(I can already picture your little hands Googling away to "debunk" Wagner )

Wagner literally confessed to the exterminations by gassing, so you're just factually wrong to count him as someone who "did not say they were extermination facilities." Kind of funny that you are completely wrong given your glib tone.

See https://www.washingtonpost.com/archive/ ... d8d8708eb/ (an article shared by another user in the thread, but which I have discussed before on my YT channel).

To quote the article (from an interview Wagner gave the BBC):

Today, Wagner says he was depressed seeing people going to be gassed, but there was nothing he could do to help any of them: "I didn't think it was right. One saw these people exterminated who were really innocent, but there was nothing I could do. The maxim was: the fuehrer's orders must be carried out."

[hermod]

Wagner literally confessed to the exterminations by gassing, so you're just factually wrong to count him as someone who "did not say they were extermination facilities." Kind of funny that you are completely wrong given your glib tone.

See https://www.washingtonpost.com/archive/ ... d8d8708eb/ (an article shared by another user in the thread, but which I have discussed before on my YT channel).

To quote the article (from an interview Wagner gave the BBC):

Today, Wagner says he was depressed seeing people going to be gassed, but there was nothing he could do to help any of them: "I didn't think it was right. One saw these people exterminated who were really innocent, but there was nothing I could do. The maxim was: the fuehrer's orders must be carried out." (August 19, 1979)

Having Jewish killers after you, as well as other pressures, is certainly a good motive for finally repeating politically-correct lies.
Visibly not enough not to be 'suicided' by an Israeli killing squad, but still safer than Wagner's previous "unrepentant Nazi" (i.e. H-denying) stand. Well tried, Gus...

A Brief List of the Conveniently Deceased, by Thomas Kues :

Gustav Franz Wagner (b. 1911) was reportedly deputy commandant at Sobibor. After the war Wagner migrated to Syria and later in the early 1950’s to Brazil , where he lived under his own name, working as a farmhand. After Simon Wiesenthal initiated a hunt for a man falsely identified as him, the real Wagner voluntarily handed himself over to the Brazil special police in São Paulo , on May 30, 1978. According to an article in the newspaper Folha de São Paulo, June 2, 1978, Wagner had stated to the police: “I never saw any gas chamber at Sobibor” ( Eu nunca vi nenhuma camara de gas em Sobibor). On June 22, 1979, the Rio Supreme Court dismissed all claims for Wagner’s extradition. On October 30, 1980, Wagner allegedly committed suicide by stabbing himself to death in the bathroom of his rural home. The circumstances of the suicide have been deemed suspicious even by some exterminationist writers. Brazil citizen and former Sobibor inmate Stanislaw Szmajzner, who “confronted” Wagner at the time of his arrest, has let out that he “believes” that Wagner was in fact killed by Jewish “avengers” (Die Zeit, October 11, 1991). The author is currently researching the Wagner case together with local Brazilian revisionists.

https://codoh.com/library/document/a-br ... ceased/en/

[fireofice]

You guys still haven't found a single example of an eyewitness who was at the AR camps, wrote or testified about his experience (in a recorded statement), and did not say they were extermination facilities. (I recognized in my first post on the thread that a couple such witnesses exist for Auschwitz

Gustav Wagner.

(I can already picture your little hands Googling away to "debunk" Wagner )

Wagner literally confessed to the exterminations by gassing, so you're just factually wrong to count him as someone who "did not say they were extermination facilities." Kind of funny that you are completely wrong given your glib tone.

See https://www.washingtonpost.com/archive/ ... d8d8708eb/ (an article shared by another user in the thread, but which I have discussed before on my YT channel).

To quote the article (from an interview Wagner gave the BBC):

Today, Wagner says he was depressed seeing people going to be gassed, but there was nothing he could do to help any of them: "I didn't think it was right. One saw these people exterminated who were really innocent, but there was nothing I could do. The maxim was: the fuehrer's orders must be carried out."

Wow, I am good at predictions!

Of course, Gustav Wagner did deny the gas chambers.

I never saw any gas chamber at Sobibór.

https://holocausthandbooks.com/dl/19-s.pdf page 112

There is no evident lie in his statement. Just a bare denial. Whereas this other interview does have a lie in it, that Nazis were shot for not wanting to work at certain "extermination camps", a clearly self serving lie. Yet this is supposed to overturn his previous denial? Nah.

That is, if he even said this. I'm not going to believe what a journalist says about a Nazi supposedly saying something incriminating without video or audio evidence. Lots of them are straight up liars, especially when it comes to this.

[HistorySpeaks]

Wagner did testify to exterminations via gassing to the BBC in 1979. So he either was lying when he denied 'ever seeing a gas chamber' in 1978, or his first denial was some lawyerly, Bill-Clinton-esque technicality (perhaps he was saying he didn't see the inside of gas chambers).

Regardless, he cannot be classified as somebody who "did not say [the Reinhardt camps] were extermination facilities" (my earlier wording), because he did say this in the BBC interview I and others linked to. Like it or not, he went back on his denial.

[fireofice]

Wagner did testify to exterminations via gassing to the BBC in 1979. So he either was lying when he denied 'ever seeing a gas chamber' in 1978, or his first denial was some lawyerly, Bill-Clinton-esque technicality (perhaps he was saying he didn't see the inside of gas chambers).

Regardless, he cannot be classified as somebody who "did not say [the Reinhardt camps] were extermination facilities" (my earlier wording), because he did say this in the BBC interview I and others linked to. Like it or not, he went back on his denial.

He did not say he didn't see inside the gas chambers, he said he didn't see them, period.

I showed how he lied in his "retraction" which you did not address. His earlier denial carries more weight, whether you like it or not.

[Hektor]

Wagner did testify to exterminations via gassing to the BBC in 1979. So he either was lying when he denied 'ever seeing a gas chamber' in 1978, or his first denial was some lawyerly, Bill-Clinton-esque technicality (perhaps he was saying he didn't see the inside of gas chambers).

Regardless, he cannot be classified as somebody who "did not say [the Reinhardt camps] were extermination facilities" (my earlier wording), because he did say this in the BBC interview I and others linked to. Like it or not, he went back on his denial.

He did not say he didn't see inside the gas chambers, he said he didn't see them, period.

I showed how he lied in his "retraction" which you did not address. His earlier denial carries more weight, whether you like it or not.

It shows you the value of 'testimony'... People will say whatever they feel compelled to say.
"But he was not tortured".... Most false confessions come up without any physical force being applied.

And the reporting was quite malicious on Gustav Wagner in the 1970s as well:
https://www.spiegel.de/politik/der-daem ... text=issue

Basically picking up any allegation and passing it on as if it is fact.

[Rockartisten]

So from what I understand the Wagner information you are all discussing now all originates from the Panorama documentary from 1979 called Gustav Wagner: Angel of Death. The interviewees are Gustav Wagner amd Simon Wiesenlthal.

Can't find anything except that the British Film Institute have a VHS copy.

https://collections-search.bfi.org.uk/w ... /153266820

[fireofice]

I should add that for Auschwitz, Josef Kramer said that there were no mass exterminations and gas chambers at Auschwitz.

I have heard of the allegations of former prisoners in Auschwitz referring to a gas chamber there, the mass executions and whippings, the cruelty of the guards employed, and that all this took place either in my presence or with my knowledge. All I can say to all this is that it is untrue from beginning to end.

He ended up backtracking with an absurd excuse:

The first is that in the first statement I was told that the prisoners alleged that these gas chambers were under my command, and the second and main reason was that Pohl, who spoke to me, took my word of honor that I should be silent and should not tell anybody at all about the existence of the gas chambers. When I made my first statement I felt still bound by this word of honor which I had given. When I made the second statement in prison, in Celle, these persons to whom I felt bound in honor – Adolf Hitler and Reichsführer Himmler – were no longer alive and I thought then that I was no longer bound.

Arthur Butz points out how absurd this excuse is:

The absurdity of this explanation, that in the early stages of his interrogations, Kramer was attempting to maintain the secrecy of things that his interrogators were repeating to him endlessly and which by then filled the Allied press, did not deter Kramer and his lawyer from offering it in court.

Gustav's "recantation" is only a bit less absurd, although still absurd.

Of course, Kramer's "recantation" can't be taken seriously in the environment that existed. There was absolute coercion in this case, where he saw the only possible defense strategy as "admitting" the exterminations but downplaying responsibility.

Gustav Wagner was in a similar coercive situation. There was already precedent of Mossad kidnapping people as they did with Eichmann. It would behoove him to come up with a story that could be used as a defense if need be. It is also very likely he was threatened, as he ended up "committing suicide" in a strange way by stabbing himself to death. It's not just a fringe "denier" position that he didn't commit suicide either, as hermod pointed out. In that kind of circumstance, any "recantation" with known lies in the new story, can't be taken seriously, just like with Josef Kramer.

[Merlin300]

You guys still haven't found a single example of an eyewitness who was at the AR camps, wrote or testified about his experience (in a recorded statement), and did not say they were extermination facilities. (I recognized in my first post on the thread that a couple such witnesses exist for Auschwitz

The post-War prosecution did not collect testimony which contradicted their prosecution. In fact, we know that there
were large numbers of detainees who were transferred out of Majdanek and Treblinka.

[curioussoul]

Wagner literally confessed to the exterminations by gassing, so you're just factually wrong to count him as someone who "did not say they were extermination facilities." Kind of funny that you are completely wrong given your glib tone.

First off, you claimed that we couldn't find a single AR camp eyewitness who "did not say they were extermination facilities". This is clearly false, since Wagner explicitly denied the contention of Sobibor being a murder factory, regardless of whether he recanted this claim at a later point (which, as we shall see, he definitely did not do).

Secondly, since you argued in this thread that Himmler's statements were mere "second-hand recollections of what Himmler supposedly said to other people", l would like to remind you that Wagner's comments to the affect that Jews were sometimes killed in Sobibor are also mere second- or third-hand hearsay, not actual quotes from Wagner.

Thirdly, as regards Wagner's supposed claims regarding "exterminations" at Sobibor, all we have to go off are isolated quotations published by Jewish journalist Tom Bower, translated in English and published by the BBC. The entire interview, transcript or recording have never been made public and there's good reason to believe Bower altered the meaning of the statements made by Wagner to suit his own ends. I quote Kues:

In 1979 British journalist Tom Bower conducted an interview with Wagner, presumably in German. This interview, however, is only available to us in the form of isolated statements (translated into English) published in an article in the BBC magazine The Listener. [...] At the end of the article we find two statements from Wagner on his time at the Hartheim euthanasia institute:

“I worked in the office doing the paperwork. I discovered what they were doing, but that was the doctors’ decision. I didn’t feel good but I was told that I was sworn to silence.”

“I didn’t think anything about what was happening. I didn’t see how and when they were killed. Everyone knew it wasn’t a pleasant business, but it was a matter for the doctors… We never discussed it. We just played cards in the evening. I mean there were so many young girls and others… lots of young healthy people, and we just didn’t talk about it.”

As can be seen above, Wagner made only two statements to Bower in relation to Sobibór which could be considered incriminating, namely the comment that innocent “people” were “exterminated,” and the statement that he and his colleagues “knew the way they [presumably the Sobibór inmates] were going to go was hard enough.” Neither statement, however, constitute an affirmation that Sobibór functioned as a “pure extermination camps,” only that groups of people were killed in the camp. This, of course, provided that the translations of the statements are not misleading, and that Bower (or his editor) has not been “creative” in editing the interview: Can we trust, for example, that statements from Wagner relating to the euthanasia killings at Hartheim have not been moved out of context and portrayed as relating to killings at Sobibór? Note that the story about playing cards and not discussing work appear twice, the first time presumably with regard to Sobibór, the second time clearly with regard to Hartheim.

What on the other hand we can be certain about is that, if Wagner had said that Sobibór was an extermination camp, or that Jews were killed there in gas chambers, Bower would have jumped at the opportunity of including such statements in his article, as they would far outweigh the sensational value of any of the (supposed) utterances by Wagner that actually made it into the article. Indeed, Bower’s comment that Wagner “evaded the question of why it was wrong to take money from the people, but not wrong to gas them” seems perfectly suited to hide an unwillingness on Wagner’s part to go along with the gas chamber story. The only way to really evaluate an interview like this would be to scrutinize a complete, unedited recording or transcript of it. As it stands, its evidential value with regard to the “gas chamber” claims is nil.

In other words, Wagner was talking about his time at the Hartheim institute, and had his statements dishonestly attributed by Bower or his editor to Sobibor. On the other hand, even revisionists admit to the possibility that particularly frail and disease-ridden Jews were "mercy killed" as they would not survive a journey to the Occupied Eastern Territories.

[Rockartisten]

Gustav Wagner before his arrest confronting Schlomo who claims he knows him from Sobibor. He looks quite confident and calls it "rubbish".



Gustav Wagner didn't look so good during his incarceration though. This is claimed to be self inflicted in the documentary. Did BBC get their confession when he was in this state:



Taken from here:



Wagner confronting Schlomo @34:55

Wagner looking quite beaten @36:50

Here they also explain how Simon Wiesenthal put a picture in the papers on a man he knew weren't Gustav Wagner, defaming him as a massmurderer, causing this man to be killed in the streets. All to "smoke out" Wagner. So Simon is willing to do all kinds of illigalities to hunt nazis and he doesn't give a damn what happens to people.

[HistorySpeaks]

First off, you claimed that we couldn't find a single AR camp eyewitness who "did not say they were extermination facilities".

lol you're overthinking this bro. I was correct because Wagner "did say they were extermination facilities," despite his earlier (recanted) denial. This is just silly.

[hermod]

First off, you claimed that we couldn't find a single AR camp eyewitness who "did not say they were extermination facilities".

lol you're overthinking this bro. I was correct because Wagner "did say they were extermination facilities," despite his earlier (recanted) denial. This is just silly.

Wagner REPORTEDLY did say there were extermination facilities in Sobibor. As CuriousSoul explained, you can't say that Himmler's words mean nothing because they were reported by Jewish WJC official Norber Masur and that Wagner's words prove the Holocaust because they were reported by Jewish journalist Tom Bower. How was Bower more reliable than Masur?

[hermod]

Are there any other events where the existence of absurd fringe claims cause you to question the existence of the entire event?

For example, there is absurd eyewitness testimony concerning the firebombing of Dresden, which describes bodies being melted to piles of green-brown puddles with bones sticking out.* Does this lead you to question whether the firebombing of Dresden happened?

Similarly, in the aftermath of battle of Mons (1914), various testimonies to the existence of supernatural beings on the field of battle appeared. Does that make you question whether the battle happened?

Holocaust believers often use that fallacious argument in order to fool gullible lurkers. Disbelieving the Holocaust doesn't amount to claiming that WWII didn't happen. During all wars, there are propaganda lies that are entirely or mostly (*) fictitious and that are disseminated to demonize the enemy. During WWI, the Austro-Bulgar gas chambers reportedly used to suffocate many Serbian civilians to death didn't exist at all. During WWI, the German corpse factories allegedly used to turn dead soldiers into soap, fertilizer, explosive, lubricant and margarine were 100% nonexistent. During WWI, the Belgian kids with their hands supposedly cut off by the Germans existed only in the imagination of some Belgian refugees, many Allied propagandists and most of the people who had read that story in newspapers. During the Gulf War of 1990, not a single Kuwaiti baby was taken out of an incubator and left to die on the cold floor. And so on and so on. Disbelieving those atrocity stories doesn't amount to claiming that World War One and the Gulf War of 1990-1991 never happened or that a battle or another didn' take place..



* Mostly because the best liars always insert some truth into their lies.

Human beings are often gullible, confused, untruthful, or have poor memories. What's compelling about the Holocaust testimony is the extreme convergence of testimonial evidence: literally all eyewitnesses (at the Reinhardt camps and for the Einsatzgruppen mass shootings) say the same thing was happening: systematic extermination of Jews. That is an extraordinary (100%) convergence and cannot be undermined by showing odd or mistaken or exaggerated features of this or that testimony.

That's not an extraordinary convergence of evidence. That's a very ordinary convergence of BS. Alien abductions have the same convergence of testimonial "evidence."

This is why orthodox/exterminationist/antirevisionist historians MUST be regarded as some kind of ufologists and Holocaust believers as alien abduction enthusiasts...

https://postimg.cc/k6y4Pbrx