Manufacturing 'historical facts'

[Hebden]

Says Irving: Ja, die feige deutsche Historikerschaft! (Yes, the coward German historians!)

We shall post Professor Nolte's opinion on Mr. Irving's book Hitler's War tomorrow.

Prof. Nolte, of "Historikerstreit" fame, is suffering from the German laws against Holocaust Denial, and accordingly must watch his tongue/writings ("angeblich", alleged, etc). His "real mind" cannot be readily read under such circumstances.

This on the other hand is correct too IMO.

fge

As befits a student of Professor Heidegger, Professor Nolte knows the value of saying too little rather than too much.

One could say that his theory that the crimes of Nazism should be considered in the context of the rise and threat of Soviet Communism presumes the factuality of the organised mass murders. Otherwise, what remains, the legal and professional discrimination against the Jews, plus the drive for emigration and finally expulsion, could be more simply explained by recourse to traditional theories of anti-semitism and German history.

[Hannover]

Hebden posted:

One could say that his theory that the crimes of Nazism should be considered in the context of the rise and threat of Soviet Communism presumes the factuality of the organised mass murders. Otherwise, what remains, the legal and professional discrimination against the Jews, plus the drive for emigration and finally expulsion, could be more simply explained by recourse to traditional theories of anti-semitism and German history.

- Yes, there is this conditioned mindset which assumes the 'holocaust' as alleged to be fact. That assumption begets a Pavlovian response about National Socialism.

- Another way to look at things:
There's the National Socialists with the '6,000,000 & gas chambers', and there's the National Socialists without the '6,000,000 & gas chambers'.

- As for traditional 'anti-semitism'; it would seem that Jews behaviour is in need of scrutiny here. Or are they simply never guilty of anything as they seem to believe?

'antisemitic' - any person or thought that a Jew does not like

Hannover

[Hebden]

Says Irving: Ja, die feige deutsche Historikerschaft! (Yes, the coward German historians!)

We shall post Professor Nolte's opinion on Mr. Irving's book Hitler's War tomorrow.

The following comes from an original article Between Myth and Revisionism? The Third Reich in the Perspective of the 1980s published as one of a collection of essays in the book Aspects of the Third Reich (ed. H.W. Koch, Macmillan, 1985):

A completely different motive is at the basis of the attempt at revision by another Englishman: David Irving's 1975 book Hitler und seine Feldherren whose English version appeared only two years later under the title Hitler's War. Irving's goal is undisguidedly a vindication of Hitler who, according to him, 'alone did not have any voice after 1945' whereas his friends and foes alike, through one-sided descriptions and genuine errors, gave an untrue picure of the war. It was characteristic that the German publisher refused to incorporate in the German edition the most controversial assertion by the author, that Hitler had not known anything about the 'Final Solution'. This is said to come from a telegram discovered by Irving in which, so he says, Hitler forbade the liquidation of Jews. [Irving reprints Himmler's note of a telephone conversation with Hitler on 30 November 1941, in which Hitler ordered a particular transport of Berlin Jews not to be liquidated. Ed.] But in reality this is the weakest point of the whole book since, seen in the true perspective, this telegram expresses the exact contrary, because it presupposes the fact of these widespread liquidations. However, not all of Irving's theses and references can be set aside so easily. What Irving suggests as a general impression is certainly more than questionable, namely that Hitler could have won the war if those surrounding him had better grasped his strategic ideas and had turned them into reality without hesitation and attempts at sabotage. But it can hardly be denied that Hitler had good reasons to be convinced of his enemies' determination to annihilate him much earlier than when the first information about Auschwitz came to the knowledge of the world. The 1940 pamphlet 'Germany must perish' by Theodore N. Kaufmann has often been mentioned in the literature, but I do not remember seeing it (sic) in any of the more important German books I have read about Chaim Weizmann's official declaration in the first days of September 1939, according to which Jews in the whole world would fight on the side of England. Anyway, I have to reproach myself for not knowing of this statement in 1963 and not having made use of it, although it can be found in the Archiv der Gegenwart of 1939, and it might justify the consequential thesis that Hitler was allowed to treat the German Jews as prisoners of war and by this means to intern them. Equally Irving's a priori thesis that the bomb attack on Hamburg in July 1943 bore witness to the Allies' will to destroy the German civilian population, and that this could not have its origin in any knowledge of the 'Final Solution', cannot be refuted. Irving's tendency to place Auschwitz as well into a more comprehensive perspective would be remarkable even if the counter-thesis were acknowledged as convincing, namely that not even the President of the Jewish Agency had the right to pronounce something like a declaration of war, and that the attack on Coventry preceded the one on Hamburg by three years. [However, there is now a general consensus that, apart from several specific 'retaliation' raids, of which Coventry was one, the Luftwaffe's attacks were restricted to military and industrial targets. For the fact that Hitler opposed the attacks on civilian targets as late as August 1940, see p. 306 below. Ed.]

[Sailor]

The following comes from an original article Between Myth and Revisionism? The Third Reich in the Perspective of the 1980s

What a courageous man this Prof. Nolte indeed!

I guess they don’t make them in Germany anymore like Martin Luther, who wrote in the year 1517 his complaints about the church on a piece of paper and nailed it to the door of the Cathedral in Wittenberg. And was subsequently banned by the pope in Rome.

[Hannover]

Hebden's quote still contains much classic unsubstantiated, conformist recitation. It's a start however.

- "vindication of Hitler "..that assumes the allegations of the 'holocaust'...what the NS were doing was nothing different from what was occurring worldwide at that time

- their is nothing to substantiate an alleged policy of 'extermination' , and there is no Hitler order for it

- the trainload of Jews could have simply been a load of captured common criminals/saboteurs that Hitler gave a reprieve to, thereby saving them from the common practice of military execution in wartime....that assumes the authenticity of "Himmler's note of a telephone conversation with Hitler" to begin with

- the bombing canard..while touched upon, is lacking....the British RAF were the first to engage in the targeting of civilians, by many months...after Hitler pleaded with them to not enage in such actions...Coventry was a mere reaction to RAF mass murder

Hannover

[Hebden]

Hebden's quote still contains much classic unsubstantiated, conformist recitation. It's a start however.

- "vindication of Hitler "..that assumes the allegations of the 'holocaust'

Whilst the Holocaust is always there in the background, the main concern of Hitler's War is to justify Mr. Hitler's conduct of the war.

- the trainload of Jews could have simply been a load of captured common criminals/saboteurs that Hitler gave a reprieve to, thereby saving them from the common practice of military execution in wartime

Was it common practice to deport condemned criminals, and a thousand at a time, to Riga in order to shoot them? The transport of Berlin Jews consisted of civilians. Here is Mr. Irving's account of events:

It was Heydrich and the fanatical gauleiters in the east who were interpreting with murderous thoroughness Hitler’s brutal decree that the Jews must ‘finally disappear’ from Europe. Himmler’s personal role is ambivalent. On November 30, 1941 he took his train over to the Wolf’s Lair for a secret ‘bunker’ conference with Hitler, at which the fate of a trainload of 1,035 Berlin Jews was evidently on the agenda. A page from the Himmler file in the Moscow archives lists the Reichsführer’s appointments for that day. He received SS Sturmbannführer Gunther d ’Alquèn, a Goebbels journalist, from midday to one p.m. (to ‘report on trip to SS Police Division and Death’s-Head Division’); he worked for an hour (‘gearbeitet’), received General Dietl for a half-hour conference about an SS brigade on the Murmansk front, and lunched until four p.m.with Hitler (‘Mittagessen b.Führer’). Himmler’s all-important telephone notes, recorded on a different sheet, show that at 1:30 p.m. he spoke by telephone from ‘the bunker’ – that is, Hitler’s bunker – to Heydrich and dictated the explicit order that the Berlin trainload of Jews was not to be liquidated.*
The extermination programme had however gained a momentum of its own. The Goebbels article had been taken as a sign from the highest level. In fact, nobody needed any orders or written authority. There could be no clearer proof that the former Führer-State had become a state without a Führer. Five thousand Jews, including the trainload which had left Berlin three days before, the seventh to leave the capital city, had already been plundered of their valuables and shot to death in pits at Skirotawa, a few miles outside Riga, by nine a.m. that same morning, November 30.
The different roles of the SS, the army, and Hitler’s headquarters in this massacre are now well documented. The 1,035 German Jews, expelled from Berlin by train, had arrived outside Riga that morning in sub-zero temperatures, and they were shot out of hand even before the trucks loaded with four thousand Jews from Riga arrived and met the same fate. When Colonel Walther Bruns, a local army engineer-officer, learned a few hours earlier that he was about to lose his Jewish work-force he weakly protested to the city’s German mayor Hugo Wittrock and to his SS Stabsleiter, Werner Altemeyer, a baby-faced young SS officer with ash-blond hair and grey-blue eyes – then drove out to witness the liquidations in progress for himself. Four years later he still recalled the coarse yelling of the gunmen; he could still see in his mind ’s eye one of the victims, a ‘raving beauty’ in a flame-red blouse.


[...]

On the day after the shootings, December 1, Himmler again telephoned Heydrich at about one p.m., this time explicitly about the ‘executions at Riga.’

Somebody – and this can only have been Hitler himself – had reprimanded Himmler, because that same day, he sent not one but two radio messages to his SS police commander at Riga, SS Obergruppenführer Friedrich Jeckeln, warning of punishments for any further arbitrary and disobedient acts (‘Eigenm ä chtigkeiten und Zuwiderhandlungen ’) which contravened the guidelines laid down ‘by myself or by the Reichssicher- heitshauptamt on my orders’ on how to deal with the Jews who were being ‘out-placed to the Ostland [Baltic provinces ].’*
Himmler ordered Jeckeln, the recalcitrant mass-murderer, to report to his headquarters forthwith; their interview took place on the fourth, and for many months the multiple shootings of German Jews halted.

- the bombing canard..while touched upon, is lacking....the British RAF were the first to engage in the targeting of civilians, by many months...after Hitler pleaded with them to not enage in such actions...Coventry was a mere reaction to RAF mass murder

Let's see if we can establish a timeline for the development and escalation of the air war.

When do you claim that the RAF first bombed civilians?

[Hannover]

Hebden posts:

Whilst the Holocaust is always there in the background, the main concern of Hitler's War is to justify Mr. Hitler's conduct of the war.

And then goes on to quote wild assertions of unsubstantiated 'exterminations' which have never been substantiated.

He then says:

Was it common practice to deport condemned criminals, and a thousand at a time, to Riga in order to shoot them? The transport of Berlin Jews consisted of civilians.

Well yes, criminals were deported to various camps and no one said they were not civilians as criminals and saboteurs would be civilians. There is certainly a lack of information on this alleged 'almost happened' event. Without further material evidence the whole thing is idle conjecture, therefore unworthy of attaching bizarre 'holocaustic' claims to it.

Hebden then quotes further text from Irving which cannot be substantiated or confirmed, and there is no physical/forensic evidence for any of the assertions included. And physical evidence would be a simple procedure..if true. They supposedly know where these alleged sites are, but again as is customary with the 'holocaust'...nothing. It is merley text with no basis in fact. I notice that Hebden makes no attempt to substantiate any of it.

I am not a big Irving supporter. He has done some good work, but has failed in many ways, as the quoted text from Hebden clearly indicates.

I also challenge Hebden to start separate threads for any and all the allegations in Irving's text. I challenge him to bring his best arguments for each and every one of the allegations. Will he?

As for the British deliberately bombing civilans long before the Germans at Coventry, that too Hebden should start a new thread on. I would be more than pleased to back-up that rather well known fact. I welcome that thread. Will he start it?

This thread has long ago ceased being relevant to the original topic.

- Hannover

[elbod]

Very interesting quotes from Burg’s books posted by Widukind! Thank you!

On the Third Reich Forum Holocaust&Warcrimes section, the Moderator there has posted some very interesting scannings from the affidavit of Hans Marsalek (”Affidavit taken from "Nazi Conspiracy and Aggression" vol. VI, pp. 790-796:”) (“The Last Words of Franz Ziereis”)
http://www.thirdreichforum.com/phpBB2/viewtopic.php?t=14129

“Part 2” of the scanning mentions a

Kommando of Lithograps and Graphic experts in Camp Schlier. They were exclusively occupied in printing false Pound Sterling notes, as well as the falsification of identification papers and stamps from all over the world.

This “Camp Schlier” is not mentioned by Burg, but is it out of the question that the lithographs and graphic experts were engaged in their occupations after the war, too? For other purposes?

Marsalek/Ziereis mention a lot of camps I’ve never read about, except Linz and Mauthausen.

45 camps! (”Camp Schlier” had 1000 inmates). Were those camps used as DP or ”Denazification” camps after the war? Like Dachau?

[widukind]

You might want to check Burg's "Schuld und Schicksal" online at VHO.

(http://www.vho.org/D/sus/6.html)

He reveals a few things on how Displaced Persons faked documents in the Jewish DP-Camp Föhrenwald bei Wolfratshausen to cash in reparations for people already dead, for people not entitled to receive any etc. At this camp was created a secret forgery workshop, led by a Jew and a Pole. It was possible to obtain any document or certificate needed, in any language : seals, signatures, were forged en masse. One of such cases has gone down in the history of reparations frauds under the name "Wildflecken" (the name of a DP camp) : 111 reparations claims for suffered KZ imprisonment were submitted in the summer of 1950 in favour of non-existing Jews or Jews who had already emigrated. The forms and signatures all came from Bavaria (...)

Gruppenweise kassierte man für Nichtbezugsberechtigte ja sogar auf den Namen Toter Wiedergutmachungen. Im Judenlager Föhrenwald bei Wolfratshausen entstand eine geheime Fälscherwerkstätte, die von einem Juden und einem Polen betrieben wurde. Hier wurden alle Bestätigungen und Dokumente hergestellt, die man haben wollte. In allen Sprachen der Welt. Falsche Stempel und gefälschte Unterschriften wurden am laufenden Band produziert. Einer dieser Fälle ist unter dem Namen Wildflecken in die Geschichte des Wiedergutmachungsbetruges eingegangen. Im Sommer 1950 wurden im Stuttgarter Wiedergutmachungsamt 111 Haftentschädigungsanträge (für erlittene KZ-Haft) für nichtexistierende oder bereits ausgewanderte Juden eingereicht. Die Unterlagen und Unterschriften hierfür kamen alle aus Bayern. (...)

[Hannover]

Translation please. I can fumble through it, but there are many who probably cannot. Thanks.

- Hannover

[widukind]

Sorry, I thought my summary would suffice. The rest on Wildflecken was only anecdotical. I preferred to provide a more complete summary than a literal translation. Check my posting again.

[elbod]

Since widukind has supplied us with excellent postings on this thread maybe I can take on the translation as a "service in return"?

As you can see, widukind’s summary does what it says!

But make some allowances for incorrect juridical terms in English (ie, “detention reparation applications”)

"In groups did one cash in for those not entitled for reparations, and even compensations in the name of dead persons. In the Jewish camp Föhrenwald at Wolfratshausen was a secret forgery workshop established, run by a Jew and a Pole. Here all kinds of desired certificates and documents were manufactured – in all the languages of the world. False seals and falsified signatures were produced as on an assembly line. One of those cases has gone to the history of Reparation Frauds under the name of Wildflecken. During the summer 1950 were 111 detention reparation applications for non-existing or already emigrated Jews presented to the Stuttgart Board of Reparations.The documents and signatures for this all came out of Bavaria…"

Regards/elbod

[Hebden]

It is, we believe, instructive to compare Mr. Irving's interpretation of events with that of Mr. Christopher Browning, to be found in his 2000 book Nazi Policy, Jewish Workers, German Killers.

Mr. Irving:

It was Heydrich and the fanatical gauleiters in the east who were interpreting with murderous thoroughness Hitler’s brutal decree that the Jews must ‘finally disappear’ from Europe. Himmler’s personal role is ambivalent. On November 30, 1941 he took his train over to the Wolf’s Lair for a secret ‘bunker’ conference with Hitler, at which the fate of a trainload of 1,035 Berlin Jews was evidently on the agenda. A page from the Himmler file in the Moscow archives lists the Reichsführer’s appointments for that day. He received SS Sturmbannführer Gunther d ’Alquèn, a Goebbels journalist, from midday to one p.m. (to ‘report on trip to SS Police Division and Death’s-Head Division’); he worked for an hour (‘gearbeitet’), received General Dietl for a half-hour conference about an SS brigade on the Murmansk front, and lunched until four p.m.with Hitler (‘Mittagessen b.Führer’). Himmler’s all-important telephone notes, recorded on a different sheet, show that at 1:30 p.m. he spoke by telephone from ‘the bunker’ – that is, Hitler’s bunker – to Heydrich and dictated the explicit order that the Berlin trainload of Jews was not to be liquidated.*
The extermination programme had however gained a momentum of its own. The Goebbels article had been taken as a sign from the highest level. In fact, nobody needed any orders or written authority. There could be no clearer proof that the former Führer-State had become a state without a Führer. Five thousand Jews, including the trainload which had left Berlin three days before, the seventh to leave the capital city, had already been plundered of their valuables and shot to death in pits at Skirotawa, a few miles outside Riga, by nine a.m. that same morning, November 30.
The different roles of the SS, the army, and Hitler’s headquarters in this massacre are now well documented. The 1,035 German Jews, expelled from Berlin by train, had arrived outside Riga that morning in sub-zero temperatures, and they were shot out of hand even before the trucks loaded with four thousand Jews from Riga arrived and met the same fate. When Colonel Walther Bruns, a local army engineer-officer, learned a few hours earlier that he was about to lose his Jewish work-force he weakly protested to the city’s German mayor Hugo Wittrock and to his SS Stabsleiter, Werner Altemeyer, a baby-faced young SS officer with ash-blond hair and grey-blue eyes – then drove out to witness the liquidations in progress for himself. Four years later he still recalled the coarse yelling of the gunmen; he could still see in his mind ’s eye one of the victims, a ‘raving beauty’ in a flame-red blouse.


[...]

On the day after the shootings, December 1, Himmler again telephoned Heydrich at about one p.m., this time explicitly about the ‘executions at Riga.’

Somebody – and this can only have been Hitler himself – had reprimanded Himmler, because that same day, he sent not one but two radio messages to his SS police commander at Riga, SS Obergruppenführer Friedrich Jeckeln, warning of punishments for any further arbitrary and disobedient acts (‘Eigenm ä chtigkeiten und Zuwiderhandlungen ’) which contravened the guidelines laid down ‘by myself or by the Reichssicher- heitshauptamt on my orders’ on how to deal with the Jews who were being ‘out-placed to the Ostland [Baltic provinces ].’*
Himmler ordered Jeckeln, the recalcitrant mass-murderer, to report to his headquarters forthwith; their interview took place on the fourth, and for many months the multiple shootings of German Jews halted.

Mr. Browning:

Gerlach also argues that no general destruction order could have been given before mid-December because only 6 of 41 transports of Reich Jews were liquidated immediately upon arrival before Hitler's December 12 speech. What Gerlach omits mention of, however, is that only 2 of the next 39 transports between mid-December and the end of April were liquidated upon arrival. A significant reduction in the number of transports subject to liquidation following Hitler's speech of December 12 is hardly convincing evidence for the Hitler Grundsatzentscheidung ['basic decision'] that Gerlach has claimed for that date.

Gerlach has provided much new evidence concerning a flurry of activity related to Nazi Jewish policy in December 1941. If the scenario he provides for this flurry of activity is unpersuasive, what did happen that month? I have argued that Hitler solicited the preparation of a plan for the Final Solution in mid-July 1941 and approved the resulting outline in early October. In the following month initial steps were taken: the deportation of Reich Jews and death camp construction began, Jewish emigration came to an end, and various officials of the Foreign Office and Ostministerium joined a widening circle of initiates. Until late November the deported Reich Jews were interned in ghettos in Lodz and Minsk. Then, suddenly, on November 25 and 29, 1941, all five transports from Berlin, Munich, Frankfurt, Vienna, and Breslau to Kovno were massacred at Fort IX. Did this occur as the result of a local initiative, as Gerlach has intimated? Or was it the point at which the Nazi regime officially crossed the threshold between deporting and murdering German Jews not just in conception but also in practice? I would suggest the latter interpretation.

As Gerlach's own research has shown, the deportation and killing of Reich Jew killings in Kovno gave rise to complications and complaints. Therefore, as the first transport of German Jews destined for Riga was arriving on November 30, Himmler telephoned, from Hitler's headquarters, to Heydrich in Berlin with the message: "Jewish transport from Berlin. No liquidation." Such an intervention, I think, suggests that prior to this telephone call both Himmler and Heydrich, as well as HSSPF Friedrich Jeckeln in Riga, understood that these transports of Reich Jews were to be liquidated; there would have been no occasion for a message to the opposite effect if it was not needed to countermand existing policy. This intervention was too late, however, and the Berlin transport that arrived in Riga in the midst of the ghetto liquidation was immediately massacred.

The following day Himmler discussed "executions in Riga" with Heydrich. Moreover, he sent Jeckeln an angry radio message on December 1, 1941, that was intercepted by the British: "The Jews resettled into the territory of the Ostland are to be dealt with only according to the guidelines given by me and the Reich Security Main Office acting in my behalf. I will punish unilateral acts and violations." And on December 4, 1941, Himmler met with Hitler in the morning and Jeckeln, recalled from Riga, in the afternoon. Given Himmler's insistence that German Jews in the east be treated only according to his guidelines and the lack of any repercussions against Karl Jager for the Kovno massacres (similar to those threatened against Jeckeln), I think this episode and the surviving documentation indicates that the five Kovno transports were liquidated on Himmler's directive and the first to Riga was liquidated simply because Himmler's new policy was not countermanded in time. Given the complications that emerged, Himmler temporarily retreated from killing German Jews, and thereafter, with just two exceptions, the winter transports to Riga that completed the first wave of deportations were lodged in the recently cleared Riga ghetto or in the nearby camps of Jungfernhof and Salispils. It would appear, therefore, that early December 1941 was not the date of a decision by which the Nazi regime sealed the fate of German Jewry but rather the date at which the murder of German Jewry was briefly postponed when the Himmler-sanctioned executions at Kovno resulted in too many complications.

[Hannover]

Neither quotes are convincing in the slightest. Considering we have alleged 'eyewitnesses' at supposed specific sites (which are easily accessible) we should then have massive forensic evidence. We have nothing. Neither Irving or Browning are the least bit credible in this case.

I see a reference to Bruns; please see his story shot down here:
http://forum.codoh.com/viewtopic.php?t=15

Also, perhaps in the future Hebden could actually state an opinion about specifics of his quotes, rather than simply posting text with no comment.

- Hannover

[Sailor]

It is, we believe, instructive to compare Mr. Irving's interpretation of events with that of Mr. Christopher Browning, to be found in his 2000 book Nazi Policy, Jewish Workers, German Killers.

Here we have the opinions of one semi-exterminationist and one full-blown fanatic exterminationist. Both base their believes on interpretations and speculations.
Of course I have my own opinion, which differs from both somewhat.

But isn’t the topic here Manufacturing 'historical facts'?

Anyway:

Irving: The different roles of the SS, the army, and Hitler’s headquarters in this massacre are now well documented. The 1,035 German Jews, expelled from Berlin by train, had arrived outside Riga that morning in sub-zero temperatures, and they were shot out of hand even before the trucks loaded with four thousand Jews from Riga arrived and met the same fate.

Which documents is Irving referring to? I thought, that the instructions were not to execute these people. And now this means that they were to be shot?

Are we all still in the same universe here?

fge