Saturday, March 09, 2024

Carlo Mattogno and the Franke-Gricksch Report

Carlo Mattogno is an Italian Holocaust denier and a revisionist historian who is known for promoting discredited and fringe views regarding the Holocaust.
 
Statement by ChatGPT 3.5 on the question "who is Carlo Mattogno". Given such precision like a skilled archer hitting the bullseye, what can potentially go wrong to let some AI chatbot assist to write a blog posting. Maybe it can help me to understand why Mattogno writes "in general, I only consider in my books what has been published in paper form" (Mattogno, Deliveries of Coke, Wood and Zyklon B to Auschwitz: Neither Proof Nor Trace for the Holocaust, p. 107). 

Where I would have simply thought "well, maybe because you are afraid to face your critics", we get a more sophisticated analysis by the chatbot (one that only our own Nick Terry would consider inadequate and add minimum 10 - 15  more elaborated bullet points on the fly):

Mattogno's preference for critiques in paper form rather than internet articles or blogs could be influenced by several factors, although it's speculative to pinpoint his exact motivations. Some possible reasons might include:

  1. Credibility Concerns: Mattogno may perceive printed materials as having more credibility than online content. Traditional publishing in reputable journals or books often involves peer review and editorial scrutiny, which could be seen as a more rigorous validation process compared to self-published internet articles or blogs.

  2. Selective Engagement: Requiring critiques in a specific format may allow Mattogno to choose which criticisms to engage with. This could be a way of avoiding less formal or rigorously researched critiques that may be more common in online spaces.

  3. Appeal to Authority: Insisting on critiques in print form might be an attempt to lend an air of legitimacy to his work by associating it with established academic practices. This could be an effort to position his views as scholarly and deserving of consideration.

  4. Control of Narrative: Printed materials are typically less transient than online content. By limiting critiques to traditional publications, Mattogno might seek to control the narrative around his work, as print materials often have a more enduring presence and may be considered more carefully curated.

(Point 4. I don't understand even after translating into my native tongue German - and several times back and forth again hoping something gets added in translation.)

Mattogno's approach of "only considering in my books what has been published in paper form" led to an awkard situation. To most academics, especially those in the vast landscape of Holocaust history, he's seen as such a lackluster researcher that many refuse to dignify his work with a response. It's like setting up for a showdown, but no one bothers to show up. Some avoid it because they don't want to waste a bullet, while the other guy steers clear just because his choice of weapon is not met. Nobody? Well, not quite nobody! A small group of indomitable bloggers remains, standing at high noon armed with arguments as sharp as Gallic swords...or something. 

Anyway, rules are made to be broken. In 2019, I published Nazi Document on Mass Extermination of Jews in Auschwitz-Birkenau: The Franke-Gricksch Report and Mattogno explains that "in this case I make an exception". An exception to a rule that does not make sense in the first place. Most of Holocaust denial activities take place online. Almost all of Holocaust denial debunking takes place online (unless David Irving goes on trial). If we publish all blog postings with books on demand, then they are suddenly qualified to get considered? 

On the other hand, the rule reduces workload. Mattogno does not have to write another 50,000 pages which nobody except us will really read anyway. We do not have to produce a couple of postings. Win-Win. Personally, I think we should keep this working model. 

But now that there is an exeption, I just have to reply. It's almost pathological. My apologies, but I cannot let Mattogno's unsubstantiated assertions go unchallenged.

Friday, March 08, 2024

Kaltenbrunner on Aktion 1005: "...to avoid that another group of persons gains insight into the operation of the Sonderkommando."

On February 3, 1944, Eichmann's office dispatched a letter, signed by the head of the RSHA, Ernst Kaltenbrunner, to Reichsführer-SS Heinrich Himmler. The letter requested a decision on how to handle the SS and police personnel responsible for the escape of Jewish prisoners from Sonderkommando 1005 at Fort Kauen.

Kaltenbrunner proposed "the matter should be concluded within our jurisdiction" instead of involving the SS and police court "to avoid another group of persons gaining insight into the operation of the Sonderkommando". 

By the way, I have yet to come across any explanation from Holocaust deniers regarding the true nature of Aktion 1005. It remains a top-secret operation involving the clearance of mass graves containing evidence of Nazi atrocities. 

If any deniers possess information on an alternative interpretation, I invite them to share their insights in the comments along with supporting evidence.

DOCUMENT

 

Sunday, January 21, 2024

CODOH: Chronology of a Meltdown

The CODOH website, forum and all associated websites have been offline for approaching two weeks. The cause? An internal dispute between Michael Santomauro and the other four board members of the CODOH Trust, including Germar Rudolf.

Presented below without comment is a chronology of statements on websites and from email mailing lists.

May 22, 2023

Excerpt from Germar Rudolf, 'Talking Turkey', on his personal website

Disenchantment

For years my wife has been telling me that the revisionist community – whatever that is – is misusing me as a slave laborer, as their shield against persecution, and as the authorities’ whipping boy. If there is any project that needed attention, it was thrown at me, and I sure picked it up and did as expected – mostly. When Bradley Smith started plans to transition CODOH to a new man at the helm, I was his man, and I felt honored – initially. When Richard Widmann bailed out of Inconvenient History, I ended up holding that baby, too – and badly so. When the decade-long Master of the CODOH Forum was looking for a successor, he zoomed in on me, but I refused, since I hate discussion fora with a passion. Apart, there was just no way to shoulder that burden as well.

With three school-age children, a household to run, a grumpy wife to assuage, I was stretching my resources to make things work somehow. No time was left anymore for any of the things I wanted to do. And I wasn’t getting much of anything out of it financially either.

Then shit hit the fan in early 2022, when Ingram threw Castle Hill Publishers out of their print, warehouse and distribution system. Who was going to organize printing, warehousing and shipping/distribution in the US and in Europe? Clearly, Germar will. Because Germar does it all, so that the remaining 8.5 billion people on this planet don’t have to lift a finger!

No. This was the straw that broke the camel’s back.

Well, actually, I tried. But then it bent, it buckled, it squeaked, and finally, it broke.

With little to no experience in publishing, printing, warehousing and distribution, Michael Santomauro has taken over the helm at both Castle Hill and CODOH. I have become a mere spectator of what has been unfolding since late 2022. Anyone complaining that things don’t run as smoothly anymore as they once did; that the option of free eBook downloads is disappearing; that all hardcover books have been discontinued; that no German print books are available anymore at all – all this is a result of the 8.5 billion lazy onlookers on this planet no longer having at their disposal a slave laborer called Germar.

Source

Monday, May 29, 2023

On the SS judge Konrad Morgen's Monowitz confusion

During the Nuremberg trial on 08.08.1946 the former SS judge Dr. Konrad Morgen testified:
MORGEN: Yesterday I described the four camps of the Kriminalkommissar Wirth and referred to the Camp Auschwitz. By "Extermination Camp Auschwitz" I did not mean the concentration camp. It did not exist there. I meant a separate extermination camp near Auschwitz, called "Monowitz."
[...]
MORGEN: The prisoners who marched off to the concentration camp had no inkling of where the other prisoners were taken. The Extermination Camp Monowitz lay far away from the concentration camp. It was situated on an extensive industrial site and was not recognizable as such and everywhere on the horizon there were smoking chimneys. The camp itself was guarded on the outside by special troops of men from the Baltic, Estonians, Lithuanians, Latvians, and also Ukrainians. The entire technical arrangement was almost exclusively in the hands of the prisoners who were assigned for this job and they were only supervised each time by an Unterfuehrer. The actual killing was done by another Unterfuehrer who let the gas into this room. Thus the number of those who knew about these things was extremely limited. This circle had to take a special oath...
Etc. Holocaust deniers have naturally carped on this ever since, given that the extermination camp was actually called Birkenau, so Morgen must have been coerced or was lying for another reason.

Sunday, May 28, 2023

Irregular Musings on the Unicellular Denial. #4. Holocaust deniers reach the new level of stupidity - now allegedly with the help of ChatGPT.

Some dummy named E. Michael Jones writing at the neo-Nazi Unz website provides today's bit of really hilarious comedy in the posting "Why It’s Easier to Talk to a Robot Than to a Jew How Artificial Intelligence destroyed the Holocaust":

When someone asked Chatbot “How many Jews died in Auschwitz?” Chatbot responded: “It is estimated that at least 1.1 million people died at Auschwitz, the majority of who were Jews.

That answer led to the following conversation:

“Were the murdered Jews in Auschwitz cremated?”

“Yes, the bodies of those murdered in Auschwitz were cremated.”

“How many crematorium ovens did Auschwitz have?”

“Auschwitz had a total of four crematorium ovens.”

“How long does a crematorium oven take to cremate one body?”

“A crematorium oven typically takes between two and three hours to cremate one body.”

“Is it possible to cremate 1.1 million bodies, using only four crematorium ovens in four years.”

“No.”

“How many years would it take?”

“It would take more than 78 years to cremate 1.1 million bodies using only four crematorium ovens.”[11]

Shockingly, it turns out that Chatbot is a Holocaust denier.

[...]

But what happens if Chatbot claims that running the crematoria at Auschwitz nonstop for three years, 24 hours a day, every day of the week for the three years the camp was in existence could have disposed of 120,000 corpses, not 1.1 million, as the Virtual Jewish Library claims? The answer is that the Holocaust narrative collapses. 

Now, Auschwitz actually had 15 ovens which summarily had 52 muffles (6 in Auschwitz I, 46 in Auschwitz II Birkenau) with the formal capacity of 4756 corpses per day (real capacity could vary depending on many factors). 


Multiple bodies were continuously burned at once in each muffle which did conserve fuel and time compared to single cremations. This fact is well-documented. So, garbage in, garbage out. As is usual with the denial.

And of course no mention is made whatsoever of the open-air burnings, which accounted for hundreds of thousands of bodies in Auschwitz and were thus a key body disposal method.

It could be that the whole exchange is fake, but that numerous deniers have latched upon it thinking it "destroys the Holocaust" because muh AI fully illustrates the low-IQ nature of these creatures.

Autopsies of victims gassed with carbon monoxide.

 Here I will be gathering such reports.

1. Act of inspection of a mass grave, exhumation and forensic medical examination of 254 corpses of Soviet citizens killed by the Nazis in Krasnodar.

Source: TsA FSB, f. K-72, op.1, por. 33, l. d. 258–261.

Sunday, May 21, 2023

Source of yet another fake "fake Holocaust photo" found.

Rick Yair emailed us to tell about the source of one of those photoshopped photos that the Holocaust denier liars like to spread on social networks claiming they are "original" while the actual original photos are fake.


Turned out that it came from a sort of an art project "Revisionist Photos. Removing the Horrors of the Third Reich From the Pages of History", in which various objects and people were photoshopped out of the original Nazi and Holocaust photos:

The Holocaust was one of the most horrific events in human history.

It is also one of the best documented.

Still, there are those who deny it ever happened.

Come with me and visit a world where these revisionists have won. A world where facts too painful to be remembered are simply erased, and the sins of facism are eliminated en masse.

Experience Revisionist Photos

Here is the page with the edited photo in question. Here is the original, which is a part of a series.

While the author of the project might have had good intentions, the idea was extremely dumb, if only because it was to be expected that the dumb and/or dishonest Holocaust deniers will use exactly such images to spread their lies - and voila, they are doing exactly this.

Monday, February 20, 2023

Once more on judicial notice and article 21 of the IMT Charter.

Earlier I already presented evidence that the dogmatic Soviet interpretation of the article 21 of the Nuremberg Charter (that the official Allied evidence was irrefutable due to judicial notice) was not supported by the International Military Tribunal. Ironically, the Holocaust deniers seem to share the rejected Soviet interpretation. So it is useful to post this official IMT protocol that decisively refuted the claim that according to the article 21 the Allied evidence was basically irrefutable. The article 21 concerned itself with the mere technicality of how the evidence was introduced. The defense had a right to debunk such evidence and the Tribunal was free to ignore any official Allied evidence in its judgment as it saw fit and was not bound to assign any special probative value to it.





Tuesday, February 14, 2023

Debunking Grover Furr's Katyn screed.

In this posting I will analyze Grover Furr's 2018 book The Mystery of the Katyn Massacre: The Evidence, the Solution. A copy can be found online. I've already dealt with Furr several times at this blog, demonstrating his ignorance and lack of honesty and I have already dealt with some key arguments from this book here and elsewhere. As it is still used by the deniers of history to whitewash criminals, it is useful to take a closer look at it.

It is not the aim of this post to educate beginners about Katyn - in fact, following the arguments in this post can at times require some relatively advanced knowledge of the issue. The discussion is often compact (readers are supposed to have read and understood Furr's arguments on their own) and sometimes the counter-argumentation is presented in form of links to my Russian Katyn website with more details. That said, let me give a relatively short overview of the Katyn evidence.