How accurate is the Holocaust Controversies Blog?

[clewder]

Hello, I'm new to the subject on the legitimacy of the Holocaust. I've always had my doubts, as I find it hard to believe history's greatest liars would suddenly start telling the truth about the persecution they've repeatedly lied about. However, an interesting blog I came across has challenged my view on the subject. And since I would consider myself new to the topic of Revisionism, I would like to ask people here if there is any truth to what the blog Holocaust Controversies preaches? They seem to use good sources, so I want to see your thoughts!

Blog:

https://holocaustcontroversies.blogspot ... crosscamps

[Moderator]

To avoid clutter and a messy, hard to follow thread, I suggest that you start with one 'holocaust' topic per thread.
We're quite familiar with that group, and have taken on all their claims.

ex,:
The “Extermination Camps” of “Aktion Reinhardt”—An Analysis and Refutation of Factitious “Evidence,” Deceptions and Flawed Argumentation of the “Holocaust Controversies” Bloggers

http://holocausthandbooks.com/dl/28-tecoar-long.pdf

You can also use our search function for holocaust controversies

Welcome, M1

[borjastick]

I just had a quick scan through some of the page you linked to their matey. It is full of the usual tsunami of irrelevant details and bluff and bluster. They accuse us of doing what they themselves do from start to finish.

They never answer the real elephant or elephants in the room. They never look at the obvious because if they did they would shoot themselves in the foot.

Ignore them, use your own intellect and intuition and ask the obvious questions of your search for the truth.

It is there and very obvious if you want to see it.

[Lamprecht]

The HC bloggers were kicked off of another believer website for lying, promoting forgeries, and also bad language. That link specifically is just them attacking low-hanging fruit. Refuting "Twitter denial" is them going through Twitter and finding the weakest "Holocaust denial" arguments and attempting to refute them. Probably, these memes are posted by teenagers. Many of them were clearly made over a decade ago by cartoonist David Dees, and are not very high quality. When I look through that "Twitter denial" page, usually after someone sends it to me thinking they have "debunked" my arguments, I simply point out that I have not and do not make any of the arguments that they are addressing on that page.

[Lamprecht]

The HC bloggers were kicked off of another believer website for lying, promoting forgeries, and also bad language.

See:

In respect of the Holocaust Controversies group, it is true in their blogs they use foul language, but to be frank this is one of their lesser shortcomings, they cannot help this, and like awkward teenagers (although they are middle-aged men), maybe it is something they will grow out of.

We have an understandable dislike of this rather odious group, because of what their members have done, not what they say. They were responsible for producing countless fakes and forgeries, which they tried to implant on the http://www.deathcamps.org website. They did this over a number of years, long before they applied for membership to our team, courtesy of Michael Peters, and later during their probationary membership period. Even going so far as to mastermind a devious approach of mixing fakes and forgeries with genuine items, in a way that would be difficult to detect.

We managed to identify and contain the vast majority of these fakes and forgeries, like the forged Feix photograph from the website, sadly one or two of the higher quality fakes slipped through the net. We have removed false ID cards of Sobibor and Treblinka personnel and the fake Munzberger statement about Treblinka.It is our intention to fully re-build this website, following the shameful vandalism in 2006, but that has, and will continue to take some time.

The Holocaust Controversies purveyors of poison spin some story on their blog, but they conveniently leave out the part they played in the demise of ARC. Some researchers and historians they are?

They would appear to be tellers of half-truths and lies they seem to be masters at spreading hate and are not fit to represent anyone. They boasted about their exploits on RODOH, another hate-filled website, but they ensured that crashed into the ether when it became too incriminating for them. They have spread their poison far beyond their own blog, and can never be trusted by serious historians and researchers on the Holocaust.

http://www.deathcamps.org/editorial2013.html

[Archie]

Often HC is the only place where you can find responses to revisionist arguments on many issues. There are something like five or six people who are involved with it and most of them have graduate degrees. So they are trained to do research and they seem to have access to more sources than the average Joe. But they are defending a lie and that will unavoidably lead to a lot of prevarication and misdirection. Their main technique seems to be to produce lengthy, arcane, very confident sounding rebuttals that don't really address the problems. The intention seems to be that most people will glance at it and assume that the revisionist arguments have been satisfactorily dealt with. Naturally, revisionist writing do contain legitimate mistakes or arguable/weaker points and having critics can be useful for correcting errors on our side (although if it's something hard to check it's probably not worth going down a big rabbit hole just to find out if HC is lying to you). You definitely cannot take their word on anything. The old volume 28 of Holocaust Handbooks (recently replaced) is a very lengthy rebuttal to and HC "white paper." One of the most devastating points in there IMO is that Mattogno et al showed that HC steals citations from secondary sources (including Mattogno himself) and cites them as though they consulted the actual primary sources (for example, they sometimes accidentally reproduced typos from Mattogno's citations). Casual posters are not good with citations and this is understandable, but these guys fancy themselves to be "serious scholars."

Now, that post on Twitter denial. That is actually a pretty good example their style, although it's more to the point than usual. They go over simple memes and split hairs and try to be hyper-correct about everything without actually acknowledging the difficulties much less dealing with them. I've made a few comments on some of the items.

"Revision of the Auschwitz plaque" : It was in fact claimed that 4M were killed at Auschwitz right at the end of the war and this number was used repeatedly. Some people were even still using it up through the 80s and the Auschwitz museum didn't officially revise it until 1990. They say, oh, but at Nuremberg it was 4M people killed at Auschwitz, not just Jews. Right. They said Poles and Russians and others were killed too. So what? It's still a totally wrong BS number and it's still a problem for them because it shows that they were throwing around these numbers without any evidence whatsoever.

"The First Holocaust canard" : They say that the early six million references were coincidental and/or cherry-picked. Doesn't really matter that much because even if their analysis holds up the WWI era propaganda still shows that Jews are always crying wolf about "extermination." And the six million number was used during WWII and soon after it ended and those references CANNOT be brushed off as coincidental. The number was used prematurely and had no legitimate basis. Period.

"Gas chambers not mentioned in memoirs of Churchill" : They completely miss the point here which is that a lot of books on WWII etc from the 50s barely talk about the Holocaust at all. But then by the 70s you see this huge surge in "Holocaust" propaganda. The normal pattern is that after a major event, public interest is often high while it is fresh in memory but then it wanes over time and gets forgotten. The Holocaust is highly unusual in that it the media and academic interest in it has grown tremendously over time. This irregularity should prompt us to ask to what extent the modern "Holocaust" blitz has a firm historical basis. On it's own, this is by no means a conclusive point, but it's the sort of thing that should prompt you to dig deeper.

"Dachau gas chamber" : They declare this to be "irrelevant." Please. In the concentration camp film at Nuremberg, there is a scene with this spooky Dachau gas chamber. It was the most prominent gas chamber in the immediate postwar period. It was a major part of the concentration camp propaganda at the end of the war. And it's phony. They want us to compartmentalize all the evidence and say the Dachau gas chamber hoax shouldn't arouse any doubts about any of other supposed gas chambers. Well, it does.

[Otium]

They plagiarise their sources to give off the impression of being well-read and correct in their "research". They're simply not.

They rely on shoddy articles due to the volatile nature of the internet. Mattogno describes how this method is used to avoid putting their names to anything permanent:

It is easy to see why, after a few initial responses, I decided to refrain from continuing to reply to the claims of the “controversial bloggers” unless their claims were published in print, a condition which they, typically, interpreted as “desperation” on my part (p. 11). This condition was intended solely to establish substantially what on the web is only virtual, a fact obvious even to the bloggers themselves, since they state “internet links are ephemeral and tend to ‘decay’ as time passes.” (p. 1). In other words, in blogs one can write the most obvious nonsense and it may disappear after a few years, to the benefit of the authors of that complete nonsense. A printed text, on the other hand, remains in existence, fixing the author’s responsibility for a much longer period of time. In the second place, I am in no way interested in endless “online” disputes, fruitless by their very nature for the same reason.

Carlo Mattogno, Thomas Kues, Jürgen Graf, The “Extermination Camps” of “Aktion Reinhardt” An Analysis and Refutation of Factitious “Evidence,” Deceptions and Flawed Argumentation of the “Holocaust Controversies” Bloggers (Uckfield: Castle Hill Publishers, 2015), pp. 56-57.

By not publishing their articles or "findings" in any fixed media platform, they can simply shift the goal posts, rewrite, or remove anything that they no longer agree with or are refuted on and change tact. It's also curious why if they have conducted such in-depth research, the don't publish their findings in a book that isn't related to "combatting denial" but contributing tomes to the annals of Holocaust historiography. Mattogno also finds this odd:

A few pages further on, they add:

“Our own research into the materials from East European archives have included research trips to some of the relevant archives.” (p. 29)

Yet these vague assurances shed little or no light on the fundamental questions: who among them visited which archives? What new material did they discover there? Who visited which former “extermination camps”? And if they really did perform profound research work as they claim, why waste their time “refuting” the alleged “falsifiers” instead of providing the academic world with the precious knowledge they gained in their studies, publishing specialist monographs on each of the three main “Aktion Reinhardt” camps? Why waste such a precious opportunity to sculpt their names in the prestigious annals of Holocaust historiography!

Ibid., p. 60.

Their method isn't one of truth and discernment, but of trickery and gratuitous bombardment of plagiarised sources:

Their [The bloggers] obsessive-compulsive use of innumerable sources, most of them plagiarized, does not aim to fill this vacuum in Holocaust historiography, or even to present a summary of the existing literature, but merely to lure the reader into a dense thicket of inconclusive references through a puerile and ostentatious display of false learning.

Ibid., p. 62.

This is by far the best summary of how they operate. Their use of determined language and condescension might even help them sell their misinformation to unwitting readers, they have left no room for nuance or polite discourse, it's not their style. Hence why no academics will publicly acknowledge them, nor will they be taken seriously by any academic institutions. Despite all the errors abundant in academia, even they're not so brazen and dishonest.

[Werd]

Hello, I'm new to the subject on the legitimacy of the Holocaust. I've always had my doubts, as I find it hard to believe history's greatest liars would suddenly start telling the truth about the persecution they've repeatedly lied about. However, an interesting blog I came across has challenged my view on the subject. And since I would consider myself new to the topic of Revisionism, I would like to ask people here if there is any truth to what the blog Holocaust Controversies preaches? They seem to use good sources, so I want to see your thoughts!

Blog:

https://holocaustcontroversies.blogspot ... crosscamps

Aktion Reinhardt Camps / Holo. Controversies Debunked Again!
viewtopic.php?f=2&t=8145

HC did in fact, predictably, reply to the original volume 28 tome by Mattogno, Graf and Kues. I saw parts of Muehlenkamp's reponse to Mattogno's final two chapters that demolished Muehlenkamp's insane arguments about cremation. Nothing but old wine in new bottles.

[Otium]

HC did in fact, predictably, reply to the original volume 28 tome by Mattogno, Graf and Kues. I saw parts of Muehlenkamp's reponse to Mattogno's final two chapters that demolished Muehlenkamp's insane arguments about cremation. Nothing but old wine in new bottles.

Then they did so in a fashion that they could be sure wouldn't receive a response. Hardly much of a reply if you're only talking to yourselves in a medium you know the people you're replying to won't engage in, i.e. internet debates. HC are propagandists first and foremost, they're clearly only interested in having the last word to appear as though they've won some kind of victory, it isn't their prerogative to engage in discussion with opponents to resolve historically contentious disputes. Otherwise they'd muster the effort to put their "work", or at the very least their "reply" into a format which would be responded to by Mattogno, Graf and Kues.

Chapter 12 of the original volume 28 is the one that deals with cremation, are you saying that Robbie Rotten Muehlenkamp failed in his "response" to refute Mattogno?

I wasn't even aware that they responded to the volume, which I guess was the point seeing as their response wasn't formulated into a pdf documents like the failure of a "book" they put out.

[Hektor]

The HC bloggers were kicked off of another believer website for lying, promoting forgeries, and also bad language. That link specifically is just them attacking low-hanging fruit. Refuting "Twitter denial" is them going through Twitter and finding the weakest "Holocaust denial" arguments and attempting to refute them. Probably, these memes are posted by teenagers. Many of them were clearly made over a decade ago by cartoonist David Dees, and are not very high quality. When I look through that "Twitter denial" page, usually after someone sends it to me thinking they have "debunked" my arguments, I simply point out that I have not and do not make any of the arguments that they are addressing on that page.

That's indeed a common tactic, find weak arguments and then "refute" them. Then insinuate that this refutation is proof that the thesis that was argued against is true. Meanwhile all your work would be unnecessary, if you had strong arguments yourself.

[Werd]

Chapter 12 of the original volume 28 is the one that deals with cremation, are you saying that Robbie Rotten Muehlenkamp failed in his "response" to refute Mattogno?

100%.

His subsequent web entry was a bloody joke.

[hermod]

You can read the book :
The "Extermination Camps" Of "Aktion Reinhardt" : An Analysis And Refutation Of Factitious "Evidence," Deceptions And Flawed Argumentation of The "Holocaust Controversies" Bloggers (2015), by Carlo Mattogno, Thomas Kues, & Jürgen Graf --- https://archive.org/details/carlo-matto ... -extermina

Ever since the authors of the present study started publishing, together or separately, thorough studies about the most prominent German camps of the WWII era which are generally referred to as extermination camps, orthodox historians have made it a point to intentionally ignore these studies which they seem unable to refute. This eerie silence ended only in late 2011 when several members of the exterminationist Holocaust Controversies blog published a 570 page-long online study titled Belzec, Sobibor, Treblinka: Holocaust Denial and Operation Reinhard. With it they claim to refute three of our authors' monographs on the camps Belzec, Sobibor and Treblinka (see vols. 9, 19 and 8 of the Holocaust Handbooks series).

This lengthy orthodox critique forced our three authors to go back to the sources. After a year of archival and library research, the rebuttal of their detractors' critique was finally complete, and a few months later Mattogno's major contributions to it were translated into English. The opus seemed ready for publication. What followed next, though, was an arduous, 6-months-lasting process of thorough fact-checking and archival verification by peer reviewers as well as massive lingual improvements by numerous editors. The results are out in the open now: a work comprising more than 1,500 pages.

This work has occupied the most knowledgeable revisionists for a year and more. It has led to the postponement of numerous other projects (as can easily be gleaned from this website as well). Today's leading revisionists consider this their ultimate response and final word on the subject. From now on they have promised to focus on more productive research and publications.

As to the contents of this book, the casual reader may be warned: This work cannot be read like a novel. It is a point-by-point response to the above-mentioned Holocaust Controversies bloggers' PDF file (accessible on their website) and can be understood only in that context. It also requires that the reader be familiar with the authors' three monographs on the Belzec, Sobibor and Treblinka camps, all of which can be accessed and downloaded on this website.

It goes without saying that it is neither easy nor profitable to publish such a huge two-volume opus which will find only a very small audience. In order to make the text a little more readable and to reduce the volume of the printed version slightly, it does include only the English translations of any foreign language sources quoted. The full foreign language text can be found in the extended PDF version. Since this PDF file is accessible to everyone and can thus be searched, we have refrained from creating a cost-prohibitive index.

In summarizing the book's conclusions, Jürgen Graf writes in his Epilogue:

"Holocaust Controversies had all the time they needed to write their “refutation.” They were assisted by a host of Holocaust historians they diligently enumerate in their introduction. It did not help them a bit. […] Since the exterminationist position with regards to these two topics [gas chambers and eyewitnesses] is hopeless from the beginning, Myers had myriads of opportunities to make a fool of himself, and he missed not a single one of them. […]

However, the most preposterous chapters of the pamphlet are undoubtedly the two last ones, written by […] Roberto Muehlenkamp, who unsuccessfully tried to prove that during World War II the eternal laws of nature had to pause so that the evil Nazis could carry out their massacre in chemical slaughterhouses and get rid of the bodies without significant use of fuel. [Muehlenkamp] knew exactly that Mattogno, who has an encyclopedic knowledge of all problems related to cremation, would react to his challenge and make mincemeat of his chapters, to use Romanov’s poetic formulation for the last time. Is Muehlenkamp perhaps a masochist? Does he relish the role of the circus clown who is pelted with eggs to the roaring laughter of the audience? Now he has egg all over his face. I do not feel a bit sorry for him because he asked for it."

Note
This book exists in two versions: a “short” printed version which does not include most of the foreign language quotes, and an extended PDF version which includes all foreign language quotes. The print version's PDF files can be downloaded with the usual links below. The extended PDF version of 1554 pp. is available here (37.7 MB).

2nd, slightly corrected edition, Set of 2 tomes with a total of 1396 pages.
Tome 1: 712 pp. ISBN13: 9781591480877 (ISBN10: 1591480876)
Tome 2: 684 pp. ISBN13: 9781591480884 (ISBN10: 1591480884)
Format: pb, 6"×9", bibliography.
Published by Castle Hill Publishers (Uckfield, UK) in Apr. 2015.
For prices please see retail outlets.

[Iris]

Chapter 12 of the original volume 28 is the one that deals with cremation, are you saying that Robbie Rotten Muehlenkamp failed in his "response" to refute Mattogno?

100%.

His subsequent web entry was a bloody joke.

Hello Werd,

Are you saying that Otim's post is 100% accurate or that the Holocaust Controversies blog is 100% accurate?

[Werd]

I am saying that Otium is 100% correct. Holocaust Controversies is not. Roberto's reply to Mattogno's two chapters on cremation were and are still a pathetic joke.

[Iris]

Werd:

"I am saying that Otium is 100% correct. Holocaust Controversies is not."

Gotcha.

Werd:

"Roberto's reply to Mattogno's two chapters on cremation were and are still a pathetic joke."

It's been a while since I looked into this issue, but I can't remember a time when Muhlenkamp ever won a debate.

Or anyone else associated with the HC site.

The whole mass grave and cremation issue is the never ending Achilles' heel of those poor HC folks.