Just finished Matt's labored rebuttal. He's not the best writer, so getting through the littanies of errors and badly structured sentences wasn't the most fun I've had. Here are a few notes I made.
First off, I'm absolutely astounded that he begins his rebuttal by openly admitting that the six million figure has no basis in objective scientific reality, but is rather "symbolic":
It is true that six million is not an academically rigorous estimate. Rather it amounts to a symbolic representation of the Jewish dead in popular remembrance of the Holocaust.
This is nothing short of an unbelievable admission, and it speaks volumes for the veracity of the entire Holocaust narrative. If the death toll, which has been repeated ad nauseam for decades, is merely symbolic, why should revisionists and members of the public be persecuted and prosecuted for questioning this number? Let me also point out that major Holocaust historians such as Martin Gilbert kept repeating the 4 million death toll for Auschwitz well into the 80's, highlighting that "at least 2 million" of these were Jews. However, Gilbert never adjusted the 6 million death toll after the collapse of the Soviet Union and the changing of the sign at Auschwitz. How did Gilbert account for the more than 1 million reduced deaths after the 90's? He didn't. He kept repeating the 6 million number even after the Auschwitz death toll was lowered to 1.1 million.
The idea that scholars have rejected the 6 million figure is simply ridiculous. The vast majority of historians still repeat the 6 million figure uncritically. Only a handful of specialized scholars have expressly lowered this number, and Hilberg's 5.1 million estimate is still just a guess based on deportation lists and wishful thinking. In fact, in the last edition of Hilberg's book, he had to arbitrarily add about 200 000 deaths to the Einsatzgruppen death squads because otherwise his total Holocaust death toll would have plummeted to 4.9 million given the revisions he had been forced to make for the concentration camps.
Additionally, Matt writes this:
Next, you cite New York Times and other newspapers headlines extending back to the 1880s to suggest that the idea of “six million Jews”— dying or suffering or imperilled or persecuted—predates the Holocaust and the Nazis. I sincerely do not understand what your purpose is in this regard. Do you want our readers to believe that New York Times headlines about six million Jews extending back to 1890 are evidence of a decades-long conspiracy (presumably involving the Times) to fake a genocide of Jews?
This is more proof of his disingenuous line of argumentation. Dalton was obviously making the point that Jews have often used extermination narratives to bolster their profile as an unjustly persecuted minority and to abuse the "victim hierarchy" for their own advantage. 6 million is not the only number present in early reports of purported Jewish persecution in Europe. You will routinely find reports for 3, 4 and 5 million Jews exterminated in Tsarist Russia, etc. These sorts of narratives have a deep-seated history in Jewish culture and religion, so it should not be surprising that these sorts of fake extermination narratives have been floating around non-stop since at least the 1800's. Even less surprising is the fact that the New York Times, which has a long history of Jewish ownership and lobbying, was one of the foremost newspapers to be spreading these sorts of atrocity stories on behalf of Jews.
Furthermore, Matt's references to various terminologies used by Nazis to supposedly indicate the systematic mass murder of Jews is outright dishonest. For example, he mentions one of Goebbel's very last diary entries (from April 1945!) where he calls for Jews to be "shot". This is the only reference in the entire diary where he unequivocally mentions murdering Jews. He also quotes other wordings such as "kill", "liquidate", etc., but doesn't quote their contexts because he knows these references don't relate to whole-sale extermination but rather to partisan fightning and general combat against "bandits" and "bolsheviks". Additionally, Hitler's use of the words "vernichtung" and "ausrottung" have nothing to do with a programme of extermination, because these words were used on inummerable occasions by Hitler and in various contexts, including in official diplomatic talks with other nations, and simply refered to the end of the Jewish role in Europe. He interchangably refered to the extermination of "finance Jewry", of "Jewish financiers", of "international Jewry", of "Judaism", of "the Jewish race", etc. The idea that Hitler would have used these terms to refer to a planned extermination programme as early as 1939 is ludicrous.
Other mistakes and dishonesties include the following:
1. He claims that the Sonderkommando workers wore gas masks, disregarding the fact that the vast majority of eyewitness accounts mention no PPE whatsoever. He neglects to mention even 1 testimony in support of his claim, because he knows any reference to a witness statement is bound to blow back in his face.
2. He claims that the gas chamber doors could simply be opened to ventilate the room naturally. However, actual delousing chambers using the Degesch Kreischlauf ventilation system had upwards of 70+ air exchanges per hour in mechanical ventilation. The morgues had a mere 10-15 and for Crematorium 4 and 5 there was no ventilation whatsoever. On top of this, Rudolf Hoess claimed that without ventilation equipment, the cells in Block 11 had to be ventilated for 2 days. The idea that they could simply open the doors and ventilate the gas naturally is therefore nonsense.
3. He claims that:
Your second argument is that that the Zyklon B pellets would emit poison for hours after the Jews were gassed, thereby “killing anyone who went inside” the gas chambers. However, multiple Sonderkommando testified that the pellets could be extracted from Crematoria Two and Three via a tin canister connected to a wire.
Tauber is the only witness to ever mention these "canisters connected to a wire". Kula mentioned a device whereby the entire inside of the column could be lifted up, but apart from these two witness statements, no other witnesses talked about this sort of extraction device - not to mention Hoess, who spoke of gas simply being thrown down through the roof. This absurd level of lying by omission should be borderline criminal, but claiming that "
multiple Sonderkommando testifed" to these imaginary wire canisters is outright lying. Who are these "multiple" witnesses? Dalton needs to press him on these lies.
4. Dalton had pointed out that the removal of the corpses using the extremely primitive 300 kg provisional elevator in Crematorium 2 would not be timely. Mattogno, among others, have demonstrated the utter infeasibility of this elevator and the fact that the Auschwitz SS commanders repeatedly tried to have it removed in favor of an industrial elevator. This did, however, not happen. Using this temporary elevator to haul 2000-3000 bodies up to the crematorium would have taken - literally - days, not to mention the superhuman strength of the Sonderkommandos who had to do this work in supposedly 12 hour shifts. Matt dishonestly claims that the removal of the corpses was possible because of the elevator, "thereby speeding up the body-removal and cremation process", but not only was the elevator not proportional whatsoever to the number of corpses supposedly produced daily, but speeding up the removal of the corpses obviously had no impact on the cremation process itself. He doesn't even seem aware of the elevator debacle in regards to Crematorium 2 - which, again, highlights his pathetic dilettantism.
5. Matt claims that the diesel/gasoline controversy is irrelevant and that the assumption of Nazi efficiency is fallacious. But why? The Reinhard camps were supposedly built for the sole purpose of extermination by a centralized authority. Nevertheless, the logistical development of these camps makes no sense, and the official narrative is completely at odds with the idea of actually wanting to efficiently murder millions of people. Irregardless of the supposed lack of efficiency in the Nazi extermination machinery, they somehow managed to still murder almost a million people in Treblink in a matter of months. Clearly, if the Nazis were actually inefficient and clumsy and the idea of Nazi efficiency is simply a myth, these camps could never have gassed and cremated more than 1.5 million people in less than a year. Make up your mind.
6. Matt all but glosses over the major problem of the diesel engines in the Reinhard camps. He cites a single example of someone testifying for use of gasoline engines in Kulmhof, but ignores the fact that the most important eyewitnesses for Treblinka and Belzec almost categorically claim a diesel engine was used. This is also the reason that the post-war German judiciary officially declared diesel engines as the murder weapon for Treblinka and Belzec, but neglected to mention the type of engine used at Sobibor. It is simply impossible - based on witness testimony - to reach any other conclusion.
7. He claims that the cremation problem for the Reinhard camps is irrelevant, and invokes the fallacy of the decomposition of the bodies to claim that it would have been feasible. But even including the claimed decomposition of the corpses, as Graf/Mattogno have proven, the actual cremation requirements were still absolutely enormous. For some reason, he invokes lumber reports for "Poland's state forests", but fails to explain how lumber from the rest of Poland relates to the positively ridiculous lumber requirements in the Reinhard camps. He has no evidence or witness testimony to support the idea that lumber was shipped from other locations to support the Reinhard incinerations. As Dalton already pointed out, air photographs prove that only irrelevant volumes of lumber were felled in/around the Reinhard camps, meaning the lumber must have come from elsewhere, but how plausible is it that the Germans would waste fuel and manpower to ship millions of tons of lumber to remote locations in the forests of eastern Poland?
Unfailingly, and lacking his own knowledge and arguments, he has copied most of his responses from the HC blog.
I knew his arguments would be lackluster, but this is weaker and more dishonest than anything I could have imagined.
