A Simple Guide to Holocaust Revisionism

This is my adaptation – with some corrective notes – of a pamphlet written by German chemist Germar Rudolf issued by CODOH and Castle Hill Publishers which I think summarizes what ‘Holocaust’ revisionism argues versus what the common public perception of the ‘Holocaust’ is.

What I have done is remove most of what I consider to be extraneous material and focused instead on what Rudolf says that is truly pertinent to what ‘Holocaust’ revisionism is and what it argues as well as why it does so.

Rudolf begins by explaining what – contrary to a lot of popular misperceptions due to jews engaging in a lot of fudging to try and broaden the scope of its perceived rather than actual meaning to ensure that it seems ‘more ridiculous’ to ‘deny’ it having occurred – the ‘Holocaust’ as a historical theory actually refers to:

‘The common historical narrative of the Holocaust against the Jews is postulated on the following specific points:

1. An intention on the part of the National Socialist government to physically exterminate Jews.

2. An actual plan of the National Socialist government to physically exterminate the Jews.

3. A governmental agency and a budget to carry out this plan.

4. Technically refined methods of mass killing to achieve this goal, whereby homicidal gas chambers as well as mass shootings behind the Russian front would play a major role.

5. Techniques for disposing of millions of bodies; that is, crematories or pyres with adequate capacity and fuel.

Such allegations of mass murder in fast-acting homicidal gas chambers followed by disposal of the bodies in adjoining crematoria, that is to say, expertly planned and efficiently functioning assembly lines for homicide, are described as having been “unique” in human history. They distinguish the Holocaust from all atrocities that have ever happened.’ (1)

Now most people are usually aware of points 1 and 2 as well as to an extent point 4 but rarely have they thought about points 3 and 5 which are subjects that orthodox ‘Holocaust’ scholars rarely actually engage with because… well… they are at the heart of the problem, because there is no budget nor any actual oversight – the best the orthodox ‘Holocaust’ scholars can do is simply claim it ‘was being run by Adolf Eichmann’ or something along those lines – and the ‘techniques for disposing of millions of bodies’ – which is even more problematic when you introduce the relatively short timelines that such requirements had to work within (i.e., roughly just under three years in general and for at least a third of the alleged deaths a year and a half) – are something that orthodox ‘Holocaust’ scholars almost invariably gloss over as quickly as possible and simply take implausible (and often impossible) claims as read.

Indeed, Rudolf is keen to put to rest what ‘Holocaust’ revisionism argues when he writes that:

‘First of all, because of misrepresentations by the media, it is necessary that we first clarify what Holocaust revisionism does not maintain:

– it does not deny that Jews were persecuted by the Third Reich;

– it does not deny that Jews were deprived of civil rights;

– it does not deny that Jews were deported;

– it does not deny the existence of Jewish ghettos;

– it does not deny the existence of concentration camps;

– it does not deny the existence of crematoria in concentration camps;

– it does not deny that Jews died for a great number of reasons;

– it does not deny that other minorities were also persecuted such as gypsies, Jehovah’s Witnesses, homosexuals, and political dissidents;

– and finally, it does not deny that all the above mentioned things were unjust.

None of these crimes of the National Socialist regime is doubted by Holocaust revisionists. Revisionists maintain, however, that all these injustices have nothing to do with the Holocaust, which is defined as planned and organized mass murder, carried out specifically in homicidal gas chambers.

Holocaust revisionists believe the following to be correct:

1. There was no National Socialist order or plan for the physical extermination of Jews;

2. There was no German organization and no budget for carrying out the alleged extermination plan. Consider the statement by Professor Dr. Raul Hilberg:

“But what began in 1941 was a process of destruction not planned in advance, not organized centrally by any agency. There was no blueprint and there was no budget for destructive measures [of the Jews]. They [the measures] were taken step by step. Thus came about not so much a plan being carried out but an incredible meeting of minds, a consensus mind-reading by a far-flung [German] bureaucracy.”

3. In detailed investigations of former German concentration camps, expert researchers have established: No documentation or physical evidence for the existence of homicidal gas chambers or other methods of mass murder exists, and material traces of the victims are lacking as well.

Furthermore, the reports of mass shootings were greatly exaggerated and taken out of context, and the infamous “gas van,” the so-called mobile gas chambers, are a product of wartime propaganda.

4. There were neither adequate industrial facilities nor sufficient fuel to cremate such a huge number of corpses. In fact, the capacity of the crematoria was barely enough to cremate the bodies of those who died from starvation and epidemics.

5. Mass-murder claims rely almost exclusively on eyewitness accounts, whose unreliability is legendary and widely acknowledged.

6. Despite massive surveillance by spies and resistance groups active in the vicinity of, and inside German labour, concentration and alleged extermination camps, all of Germany’s wartime enemies and adversaries conducted themselves as if no exterminations of Jews were taking place.

The charges of genocide were not seriously raised until after Germany’s defeat, when there was no German government to dispute them.

7. Statistical investigations of living Jews worldwide show clearly that the losses of this ethnic group during the Second World War were nowhere near six million. Although attempts were made to establish a somewhat more accurate figure, the truth is that we simply don’t know for certain, as a comparison of revisionist and mainstream research has shown. In fact, the six-million figure, together with extermination and Holocaust claims, has been bandied about mainly by Jewish media outlets since the late 1800s!’ (2)

This is an excellent overview of the state of play between ‘Holocaust’ orthodoxy and revisionism although I would add that the ‘six million’ figure’s origins actually date from at least the mid-1800s not the late-1800 (Rudolf is here thinking of Don Heddesheimer’s research) (3) if not earlier during in the mid-1600s.

Rudolf then moves on to explain why – contrary to received wisdom – it is ‘Holocaust’ revisionism which is primarily based upon primary documentation and archival research, while ‘Holocaust’ orthodoxy is almost entirely based on the same old recycled claims which are themselves cherry-picked from often dubious sources and not upon actually studying what allegedly happened from the official documentation.

To wit:

‘[It] is quite ironic, considering that revisionism is a reaction to orthodox historians ignoring vast amounts of evidence.

Take, for example, the infamous Auschwitz Camp. While orthodox and revisionist historians agree to a large degree about aspects of the camp’s history not related to mass murder, their views diverge drastically from each other in this latter regard. The best effort mainstream historians have mustered so far to document mass-murder claims is a 270-page volume. Each mass-murder location and method is covered in it with only a few pages. On the other hand, revisionist scholar Carlo Mattogno has published nine studies of altogether more than 3,500 pages, each one of which examines in detail these various aspects of extermination claims made about Auschwitz. The evidence presented in his studies greatly surpasses that of the orthodoxy both in quantity and quality.

Or take the so-called “Aktion Reinhardt” Camps (Belzec, Chelmno, Sobibor, Treblinka), which are said to have been pure extermination centres. Mainstream books on them are mainly based on selected quotations from cherry-picked testimonies that they never subject to any source criticism, which is the Alpha and Omega of any historical scholarship worthy of that term. Compare this with revisionist studies on these camps that critically verify what witnesses have testified in a broader context. By so doing, these studies also determine the trustworthiness of these witnesses, a factor assiduously avoided by the orthodoxy.

Hence, revisionist studies on the Holocaust are actually the only ones meeting scholarly standards. The others? They play to popular – and legally mandated – renditions of the subject matters.

They may be reassuring to the many, but they are disquieting to the discerning few.’ (4)

After this brutal expose of the reality of the absolute intellectual bankruptcy of ‘Holocaust’ orthodoxy such as it is and also by proxy explaining why mainstream ‘Holocaust’ scholars ardently avoid debated ‘Holocaust’ revisionists. Rudolf turns to the two principal objections that we anyone questioning the historical validity of the ‘Holocaust’ finds thrown in their face.

The first is the ‘there are photos of massive amounts of corpses’ argument, which Rudolf illustrates using the following (genuine) photograph taken by the British army at Bergen-Belsen in May 1945:

Rudolf then explains where these photos come from and also how they are in truth almost completely unrelated to the ‘Holocaust’ despite being often used to try and buttress its historical veracity:

‘This photo is typical of a large number of such photos often shown on Holocaust documentaries either without commentary or else with allegations that the dead are victims of the Holocaust. In fact, it is a photograph of victims of an epidemic which occurred at war’s end. The cause of death is evident from the condition of the corpses and was also demonstrated by thousands of autopsies performed after the camps’ liberation by Allied forensic experts. If they had been gassed, they would not be emaciated, and if they had died of starvation, they would have swollen joints and stomachs.

All photographs of heaps of corpses were taken in camps located in west and central Germany around the end of the war, such as Dachau, Bergen-Belsen, and Buchenwald, where historians now agree no mass murders took place. Significantly, there are no such photographs taken at the camps in which mass murder is alleged to have occurred (such as Auschwitz, Treblinka, Belzec, Sobibor, Chelmno, Majdanek.) These eastern camps were all in areas which came under Soviet control at war’s end. It is very telling that the Soviets released no pictures of mass graves or heaps of corpses, and allowed no journalists, medical professionals, or other experts to examine the camps.

Since the end of the 1980s, revisionists have been investigating these sites for evidence of mass murder, but government authorities have obstructed their efforts by all possible means.

In the absence of authentic photographs documenting mass murder, it frequently happens that photographs of those who died of malnutrition and typhus in the western camps at war’s end are presented as evidence of deliberate mass murder. To be sure, the hellish conditions in these camps at war’s end convinced many Allied observers that mass murder had taken place, as initial reports indicate.

In reality, however, these conditions resulted from a situation for which the German government was not solely responsible.

Toward the end of the war, Himmler illogically ordered the evacuation of the eastern camps as the Red Army approached, which led to hopeless overcrowding in the western camps. By that time, Allied bombing had completely destroyed the German infrastructure, making it impossible to supply the camps with food, medical and sanitation supplies.

Misunderstandings about the causes of the subsequent massive die-off continue to this day, especially among Americans. The respected leftist historian Norbert Frei has given the following reason for misinterpretation, (p. 400):

“The shock of these discoveries [piles of corpses] often led to false conclusions which turned out to be enduring.”

There is no denying that a government which imprisons people in camps is responsible for them, and so those unjustly imprisoned were therefore victims of the Third Reich, even if they died “only” of disease. However, one should not overlook the fact that by the war’s end mountains of corpses had become commonplace throughout Germany. In German cities there were 600,000 victims of Allied terror bombings. Millions more died of starvation and disease, which continued to be rampant through 1949. In Eastern Europe some two million Germans were murdered by Serbs, Czechs, Poles, and Russians in the course of history’s bloodiest ethnic cleansing. In the POW camps of the western Allies, a million young German men died and millions more vegetated. Hundreds of thousands more were shipped to the labor camps of the Soviet GULag never to be seen again. But the media show only one variety of corpse piles, those in the concentration camps. We should all ask ourselves why this is so. Should the dignity and respect, which we owe the victims of atrocities, depend on their nationality or religious affiliation?’ (5)

Rudolf’s point about the post war anti-German – and in truth more broadly anti any ethnic and/or religious group believed (rightly or wrongly) to have supported the Germans – atrocities after the Second World War which killed millions and the ethnic cleansing of tens of millions (6) is well made and an easy point of comparison in that the traditional ‘Holocaust’ narratives heavily prioritizes – to be blunt – dead jews over dead gentiles even thought there were many times more dead gentiles than dead jews.

This illustrates nicely that the photos of large amounts of corpses – note usually in a state where the Germans have obviously tried to dispose of them but have been overwhelmed – are not actually ‘Holocaust’ evidence at all and indeed suggest quite the opposite in that the Germans could have simply machine gunned all the jews in the camps and chose to have simply finished what they allegedly started and saved themselves the trouble of usual scarce resources and valuable time to transport and guard said jews.

It simply makes little sense unless one understands – per the ‘Holocaust’ revisionist position – that these camps were never ‘death camps’ but rather were large labour camps that were increasingly an integral part of the Third Reich’s war effort, which also accounts for why we find such aberrations at Auschwitz as the famous swimming pool (used by inmates as well as guards), the maternity ward (where hundreds and possibly thousands of jewish babies were born, looked after and many seem to have survived), the often forgotten Kinderlager (‘Children’s Camp’), the camp hospital, the several inmate football teams, inmate boxing tournaments and indeed the fact that Auschwitz had at least two inmate orchestras.

Add to that the eternally decreasing death tolls at the camps even in mainstream ‘Holocaust’ scholarship – yet the ‘six million’ refrain remains the same – and it is quite clear how poor the ‘evidence’ that ‘Holocaust’ orthodoxy rests on is.

This leads nicely into the second and more common reply to ‘Holocaust’ revisionism: but what about all the ‘witness testimonies?’

Rudolf explains this well by breaking down the ‘witness testimony’ into two categories - ‘perpetrator testimony’ and ‘survivor testimony’ - when he writes:

‘Let’s talk about perpetrator confessions first, as they seem most compelling. After all, why would they lie? These testimonies can be divided into roughly three groups:

1. confessions under duress

2. tactical court room confessions

3. uncoerced, voluntary confessions

On 1: Right after the World War II, the Soviet, British and US forces maintained torture centers where they systematically tortured and abused hundreds, if not thousands of German defendants (see for instance Ian Cobain’s book Cruel Britannia). Some of the most “important” confessions resulted from this, for instance that of Rudolf Höss, former commandant of the Auschwitz camp, whose family was threatened on top of it.

On 2: As the archives of the Holy Inquisition prove, tens of thousands of defendants confessed voluntarily during centuries of witch trials that they were witches and had intercourse with the devil. The vast majority of them were never put under duress. What has that to do with the Holocaust? Challenging the doctrines of the Catholic Church was as futile back then as challenging the doctrine of the Holocaust has been since the end of World War II. In both cases, any defendant put on trial could expect a mild sentence only if he confirmed the general story but tried to minimize his own involvement and responsibility. This is the exact pattern one finds with many modern defendants. Some, of course, didn’t get the message and stubbornly denied, and they were the ones who frequently were treated harshly.

On 3: These are similar to depositions by survivors, treated below. Uncoerced testimonies by survivors, bystanders or alleged perpetrators can be wrong for many reasons. When it comes to survivors, the obvious one is that some of them might exaggerate or lie resulting from a desire for revenge.

But that can explain only some of the testimony. Other possible reasons are:

– Rumors – especially during times of war and unrest, any kind of prisoner camp is a hotbed for the creation and spreading of rumors.

– Misunderstandings – partial information about events are frequently misinterpreted to fit into preconceived notions, feeding on rumors and anxieties.

– Hearsay – information not experienced directly but imparted orally has the tendency of getting distorted quickly.

– Interpolation – the human brain abhors uncertainty. We all consciously and even more so subconsciously fill the lack of data by making assumptions and jumping to conclusions, which we then perceive as “data.”

– Manipulating the human memory – research has shown that many people tend to integrate information and disinformation they receive from others into their memory in such a way that they wrongly assume it stems from their own first-hand experience.

That tendency increases with increased exposure to such information and with increased expectations by others to “remember.”

– Disease – typhus was a widespread epidemic raging in many German camps. One of its symptoms resembles meningitis in that the patient experiences nightmarish horror delusions expressing his deepest fears. Many inmates survived the disease but were unable to process the memories from their hallucinatory episodes.

– Pressure – almost everybody in the world expects survivors to “remember.” That pressure is huge, in particular for Jewish survivors, who are considered traitors if they don’t remember the “right” things.

– Fear and threats – anyone failing to remember the “right” things, or even contesting certain things, must fear negative social and sometimes even legal repercussions. After all, there is nothing viler in this world than to deny that “it” happened, whatever “it” means.

– Impunity – no matter what camp survivors say, they will be believed. The more fantastic their stories, the more riveted the audience, the more fame and money can be reaped.

If they are ever caught lying, there is no repercussion. In fact, criticizing survivors is considered blasphemous and can lead to social persecution and in many countries even prosecution. There is simply no incentive to tell the truth, but lots of incentives to lie and exaggerate.

In the end, whether we think a witness tells the truth or not should not depend on how likable or trustworthy we think he is, but on whether his or her statement is plausible, physically possible, and supported by other, verifiable evidence. After all, the unreliability of testimonies by persons who are party to a crime (victims and perpetrators) is legendary.’ (7)

Rudolf’s simple breakdown of why these ‘testimonies’ are not only unreliable but often in the case of ‘perpetrator testimonies’ directly or indirectly coerced using torture by the Western Allies (8) and the Soviet Union (9) who contrary to received wisdom routinely used torture as much as the Gestapo did is powerful precisely because it cuts to the heart of both the ‘Holocaust’ as a historical theory and its primary rhetorical vector of the ‘witnesses’.

While in the case of ‘survivor testimonies’ it is important to point that it is often not hard to see what bits of information ‘Holocaust Survivors’ are simply filling in – for example routinely seeing Dr. Mengele (who was actually the medical doctor for Auschwitz’s Gypsy sub-camp although he sometimes volunteered for additional duty at the famous ‘selection ramp’) and/or how their relative was ‘never seen again’ and ‘gassed’ (i.e., their relative was lost in the administrative shuffle of Auschwitz and they don’t know what happened to them or if even they survived the war or not) – and thus you can see that while they aren’t being necessarily dishonest – although some are (and some have even admitted as much) – they aren’t also telling you the whole truth about what happened but ‘filling in’ and so on which is extremely common with eyewitness testimony.

This then brings us to the end of this short guide to ‘Holocaust’ revisionism, what it argues and why it argues it.

References

(1) Germar Rudolf, 2018, ‘Holocaust Skepticism: 20 Questions and Answers about Holocaust Revisionism’, 1st Edition, Castle Hill: Uckfield, p. 3

(2) Ibid., pp. 3-4

(3) See my article: https://karlradl14.substack.com/p/the-origin-of-the-6-million-jews

(4) Rudolf, Op. Cit., p. 4

(5) Ibid., pp. 6-7

(6) See my article: https://karlradl14.substack.com/p/the-forgotten-genocide-of-ethnic

(7) Rudolf, Op. Cit., pp. 7-8

(8) For more on this see: Helen Fry, 2018, ‘The London Cage: The Secret History of Britain's World War II Interrogation Centre’, 1st Edition, Yale University Press: New Haven

(9) For more on this see: Alfred de Zayas, 1989, ‘The Wehrmacht War Crimes Bureau, 1939-1945’, 1st Edition, University of Nebraska Press: Lincoln