Good afternoon ladies and gentlemen, Honoured Guests,
First of all, thank you for inviting me to this seminal conference. My name is Alexander Baron, and I am probably something of an anomaly at a gathering of this nature. Although I have spent many thousands of hours over the last eighteen years or so researching in the British Library and other archives, I am not an academic in the proper sense of the word. Technically I am a journalist, but my efforts to earn a living by means of this dubious profession have been sporadic and largely unsuccessful.
In his book Esau’s Tears, Professor Lindemann complained that many books on the Holocaust have been characterised by “disappointing intellectual standards and doubtful conclusions”.
Commenting on a critically acclaimed book by another Jewish scholar, Daniel Goldhagen, he says that its thesis is far from original and that it represents the case for the prosecution but that “a major problem is that few serious historians would want to present a case for the defense” adding that “history should not...be written in the same way that cases are presented to a jury”.
A major criticism of Holocaust Revisionism is that it seeks to present only the case for the defence, another Jewish scholar, Professor Mayer has written that Revisionists – to whom he refers as skeptics – are “outright negationists [who] mock the Jewish victims with their one-sided sympathetic understanding for the executioners” and that they are “ill-disguised anti-Semites and merchants of prejudice” whose “morally reprehensible posture disqualifies them from membership in the republic of free letters and scholarship”.
This statement is both unkind and untrue. Although to some extent Holocaust Revisionism can be said to have begun during the Holocaust itself, and although pamphlets and books on the subject have been published since the end of the Second World War, it would be true to say that the first thoroughly documented scientific study was The Hoax Of The Twentieth Century, by Professor Arthur Butz, which was first published in 1976.
Herein, Professor Butz writes “When Germany collapsed in the spring of 1945 it was after a long Allied propaganda campaign which had repeatedly claimed that people, mainly Jews, were being systematically killed in German ‘camps’. When the British captured the camp at Bergen-Belsen in northern Germany they found a large number of unburied bodies lying around the camp.”
The scenes at Dachau were similarly used. In his book he reproduces a photograph of a delousing chamber used at this camp which was captioned a gas chamber by the US Army.
When I was researching the Holocaust in the 1990s I found original photographs in the archive of the prestigious Imperial War Museum which bore the imprint of this lying propaganda. Two publications in particular spring to mind, one is a book which was produced in the immediate aftermath of the Second World War. Lest We Forget was published in September 1945 by the Daily Mail newspaper. In this, photographs of the gassed at Dachau – quote unquote – and of the non-existent Dachau gas chamber are exhibited with the candid statement that they are to be used to re-educate the Germans.
Now in all fairness, there was a great deal of genuine confusion at this time about the nature of these gas chambers – real and imagined – and tabloid journalists have never been the most reliable source of information about any subject, least of all war, but in spite of media misrepresentations, the truth about Dachau and Belsen did eventually come out, so there was no excuse in 1963 when the Board of Deputies of British Jews published a pamphlet called Letters To My Daughter in which the same tiresome lies were repeated. And there was absolutely no excuse a decade and a half later when the South African Board of Deputies used exactly the same miscaptioned photographs and outright lies in their successful campaign to make questioning the Holocaust a criminal offence in that country, which if you recall, was at that time ruled by a racist Apartheid régime.
Uncritical belief in the Holocaust in the West is an act of faith, of zealotry, even the most outrageous lies go unchallenged. My favourite piece of Holocaust nonsense is a story that appeared in the supposedly prestigious New York Times newspaper in 1988. According to Holocaust survivor Morris Hubert, a most remarkable menagerie existed in Buchenwald:
“In the camp there was a cage with a bear and an eagle,” he said. “Every day, they would throw a Jew in there. The bear would tear him apart and the eagle would pick at his bones.”
“But that’s unbelievable,” whispered a visitor.
“It is unbelievable,” said Mr. Hubert, “but it happened.”
This story is prima facie ludicrous; that doesn’t mean it couldn’t have happened, of course, but as far as I know, it is a unique claim: there are no reports of the same acts of barbarism from any other source. Has anyone here heard of bears being kept in the Nazi concentration camps? And how would the Nazis or anyone keep an eagle in the same cage as a bear without the bear tearing it to pieces? Perhaps it was a special breed of bear, a man-eating koala trained to perform this particular task?
I don’t wish to sound uncharitable, or to mock the afflicted, but it would help if newspapers such as the New York Times didn’t insult my intelligence, and yours, by endorsing such nonsense.
No one summed up the religious fervour over the Holocaust better than your own charismatic President; speaking in December last year he pointed out that:
“If someone were to deny the existence of God... or prophets and religion, they would not bother him.
However, if someone were to deny the myth of the Jews’ massacre, all the Zionist mouthpieces and the governments subservient to the Zionists tear their larynxes and scream against the person as much as they can”.
Although testimonies about the Nazi gas chambers are rare, there are some eyewitness testimonies, the problem they all have is that where they are credible they do not support the Exterminationist position, and when they do support it, they are just not credible.
We are particularly fortunate to have two such striking testimonies, both from Polish Jewesses, which were given at the main Belsen Trial in the immediate aftermath of the Second World War.
The testimony of Holocaust survivor Sophia Litwinska falls into the ludicrous category in the light of the laws of physics, because she would have the court and the world believe not that she had simply witnessed the wicked SS administering the Zyklon to a group of ill-fated Jews, but that she herself had actually been gassed, and was for some inexplicable reason dragged out of the gas chamber by an SS man just as the darkness was about to overcome her.
Litwinska’s testimony concerning the Auschwitz gas chamber on the seventh day of the trial, September 24, 1945, reads in part as follows:
“We left the trucks and were led into a room which gave me the impression of a shower bath. There were towels hanging round and sprays, and even mirrors.”
She was then asked: “Were the doors closed?”
And replied: “I cannot say; I have never thought when I was there I shall leave and be here present in the court to speak about it.”
But just as the darkness was about to overcome her “…I heard my name called. I had not the strength to answer it, but I raised my arm. Then I felt somebody take me and throw me out from that room.”
Her rescuer was Franz Hoessler, who was in the dock at this trial. One might have thought this death defying act of remarkable courage would have earned him some sort of commendation at the very least. Instead, he was hanged.
In the book INDUSTRIAL POISONS IN THE UNITED STATES, Harvard medic Alice Hamilton writes: “The indiscriminate use of this very dangerous gas by persons quite unfamiliar with it led to the accidental death in Cleveland of four persons who inhaled hydrocyanic gas with which a restaurant under their apartment was being fumigated.”
Hamilton gives the lethal dosage as .25 parts per thousand for men stood at rest for two minutes, and .375 parts per thousand for a minute and a half without dizziness.
The lethal dose is a mere 60mg minimum or .8 to 1mg per kg of body weight.
One might ask how the laws of physics changed between the publication of Professor Hamilton’s book in 1925 and the rescue of Litwinska less than twenty years later.
Can anyone give any credence whatsoever to the ludicrous claim that as a large group of people is being gassed to death, an SS man opens the door, dives in, and whisks one of them out? The military court which tried Franz Hoessler did, apparently.
Another survivor, Regina Bialek, told much the same story.
As well as generating ludicrous evidence of mass gassings, the Belsen Trial gave the world the claim of four million dead in Auschwitz. This claim is based on hearsay.
Ada Bimko (Bimko that is, not Bimbo) was a Jewish doctor who was interned at Auschwitz for fifteen months before being transferred to Belsen.
Asked if any of the prisoners kept records in respect of the operation of the alleged gas chambers, she replied: “Yes...One of those who took part...a man called Grzecks, told me that others of those kommandos before having been gassed had complete records of all those transports which did arrive and then eventually were destroyed. This man Grzeck [sic] told me that others who took part in these kommandos, and in fact he himself, kept records and that the number of those Jews who were destroyed in this gas chamber would be about four million.”
That is in one gas chamber, one room, not in the entire camp. If you imagine a football stadium, the largest football stadium you can think of, and imagine it filled again and again and again and again and again, many, many, many times, then think of all these people exterminated in one room, that should give you an idea of just how ludicrous are these claims.
One might have expected medical men to have taken an interest in the mechanics of this unique form of mass murder, but their curiosity appears never to have been aroused. I made a fairly detailed study of all the major English language medical journals published immediately after the Second World War; they contain scant mention of Nazi crimes – real and imagined – and none at all about mass gassings.
For those who remain skeptical about the Revisionist position, or indeed for those who are skeptical of the perceived wisdom, I propose a solution. In some countries, including Israel, a murderer who freely admits his crime is made to re-enact it. This was the case with the November 1995 assassination of Yitzhak Rabin by the Zionist fanatic Yigal Amir.
As the Nazis freely admitted their crimes – so we are told – why should not a re-enactment of a mass gassing be ordered? Or a simulation? Nowadays computers can do wonderful things. There have been simulations of the Kennedy assassination which dispel the numerous ill-informed claims that Lee Harvey Oswald was not the assassin; why not a simulation of a couple of thousand Jews being marched into a gas chamber and exterminated with a lighter than air gas that was dropped from the ceiling while the SS stood around drinking coffee and smoking Woodbines? If my tone sounds facetious I apologise not; the scenario really is that ludicrous.
I want now though to examine a few documented facts which are totally at odds with the claims of a mass extermination programme. In particular I want to discuss the way prisoners of war were treated by the Nazis.
On one occasion while I was pottering about in the library of the Imperial War Museum I came across The Prisoner Of War, a magazine published during the Second World War by the Red Cross. Some of the articles therein make extraordinary reading; Allied servicemen in the Nazi camps staged boxing matches, some had the use of swimming pools, prisoners had access to a wide range of educational classes including modern languages, economics and gas fitting (ironically). And they even took examinations.
One article though struck me as absolutely astonishing; the September 1942 issue reported that one prisoner, Ronnie Wells, who was described as “the Bournemouth Speed Skating champion and stilt skater” had been allowed a very special privilege while interned in Poland the previous year. And I quote: “the German authorities allowed him to buy two pairs of skates and to go ten miles outside the camp to practise on a large lake”.
We find similar anomalies of security in the survivor literature. In her book Prisoners Of Fear, the Gentile doctor and former Auschwitz inmate Ella Lingens-Reiner reports matter of factly that prisoners went outside to the ponds on working parties some considerable distance from the camp, and that while they were breaking rocks or doing whatever concentration camp inmates do around ponds, their SS guards busied themselves with their fishing rods.
But perhaps the most remarkable account of life in Auschwitz comes from a British soldier named Charles Coward whose story is related in the book The Password Is Courage. Coward ended up working at Monowitz for IG Farben, and he was so unhappy with his working conditions that he threatened to report them to the Red Cross. He complained about “the bad food here” and about “other things”, the other things being gassings to which came the response: “Gassings? Killings? You must be out of your mind. Don’t talk lightly of such things, Mr Coward. It might be dangerous for you to make such wild statements about the Government and this company.”
Even worse, you might lose your beer ration!
Yes, one of the complaints the Auschwitz personnel department received from the Red Cross concerned the distribution of beer for the POWs. As the saying goes, you couldn’t make it up.
Another quite remarkable but little known testimony can be found in a book by another female Auschwitz survivor.
smoke over birkenau by Seweryna Szmaglewska was published in New York in 1947; in this book the author says that women would take a long, hot steam bath then a cold shower and then they were sprayed with “some evil-smelling liquid, with which they disinfect your head”. This was clearly a precaution against typhus, which was rampant in the concentration camp system. Then she goes on:
“It had been announced that while the women took their bath their clothes would be disinfected in the gas chamber and in a steam kettle. But actually it turned out that the men working in the gas chambers could not catch up with their work. So we wait naked, in the big, cold hall.”
Gas chambers, she says, but clearly she does not mean homicidal gas chambers.
“After an hour the first batch of gassed clothes is brought.”
There can be little doubt that the reports of mass gassings based on the flimsiest of evidence coupled with the myriad lies that have been and are continually parroted about the Holocaust to this day taint the subject more than any other event in history. Much of the evidence for the existence of an extermination programme was generated at trials which were likewise tainted. In an earlier era, legal tribunals made findings of fact to the effect that women had copulated with the Devil; in some ways those judgments were less tainted; confessions were not always extracted by torture, and denuded old women with no fear of death sometimes proved credible witnesses, more so than many of those tried by their vanquishers in the aftermath of the bloodiest war in history.
In the British courts, if a conviction is sufficiently tainted, it will be quashed by the Court Of Appeal. Certainly if prosecution witnesses lie repeatedly under oath – as police officers often do – and if the forensic evidence is doubtful, non-existent, or even impossible, then the court will say enough, and the conviction will fail. It may be that the accused will never be completely exonerated, but he will to all intents and purposes be considered innocent, and may even be eligible for compensation.
Having seen delousing chambers persistently misrepresented as gas chambers, having seen retouched, or outright faked photographs – of which there are many – having listened to the most ludicrous nonsense such as the story of the bear and the eagle at Buchenwald, and seeing otherwise cynical people like journalists, pundits and even powerful politicians lap up these lies without exercising the slightest critical faculty, I had just about had enough of the Holohoax. Then I took a deeper look at the case of Commandant Kramer, and I arrived at my current position regarding homicidal gas chambers.
Kramer was sentenced to death and hanged for crimes allegedly committed at Belsen and Auschwitz. He was defended at the Belsen Trial by the spirited Major Winwood, who by his own account met his client only two to three weeks before the start of the proceedings. Winwood’s papers – which nobody else in the world appears to have read – are held by the Imperial War Museum.
Amongst them is a short dissertation on the Belsen Trial called Over Their Shoulder. As soon as I read it, something Winwood said in this paper struck me as curious; after the indictment was drawn up against Kramer he expressed relief that he was not to be charged with crimes allegedly committed at the Natzweiller camp; this camp, also known as Struthof, is not to be confused with Stuthof. Kramer had worked at Struthof too, and after his arrest he had confessed freely and voluntarily to the murders of 87 Jews – 50 men and 37 women – who had been gassed for “medical purposes”.
The thought that struck me was why was Kramer so worried about the Struthof charge when he didn’t appear worried at all about the Belsen and Auschwitz charges? It’s a bit like Osama bin Laden being arrested in New York and telling his lawyer he’s afraid he’ll be deported as an illegal alien. And the answer I came up with, and I stress this is only my answer, is that Kramer’s confession to the Struthof murders was bona fide; charges had been put to him, and he had admitted them, whereas he had not participated in murder or brutalities at either Belsen or Auschwitz, at least no more than prison guards of that era normally did. In short, his conscience was clear, at least on the major charges against him.
Now, Struthof, Kramer made his confession to Major Jadin on July 26, 1945; curiously, in a book edited by self-styled Nazi hunter Serge Klarsfeld, the arch anti-Revisionist Jean-Claude Pressac states uncaterogically that the way in which Kramer claimed the gassings were carried out “cannot be considered credible. He would have ended up gassing himself.”
Kramer described a chemically impossible reaction “Because of the absurdity of this modus operandi and his ignorance about the substances involved, some quite legitimate historical suspicion has weighed on the procedure and on the very existence of the gas chamber at Struthof.”
The gassings were said to have been carried out on three days (in the evening) in August 1943. Kramer said he gassed a total of 80-85 individuals on 4 or 5 different occasions, ie in total.
It is ironic that the Klarsfelds of all people cannot see the absurdity of this claim. Small scale gassings were impossible – as described by Kramer – but mass gassings, question them at your peril. Indeed in Germany as I am sure you know it is a criminal offence even to suggest such gassings didn’t happen, not that they couldn’t have happened but simply that they didn’t happen.It is my considered opinion that whatever technical mistakes Kramer made in this statement, he did indeed participate in these – by comparison – small scale acts of mass murder at this particular camp. Clear as his conscience was on the major charges, he was still a mass murderer; okay, he was only a technician, he was only following orders, only doing his job, as the saying goes, but the orders he followed were clearly illegal. Jews were never outlaws in Nazi Germany, and whatever deprivations they suffered in the Hitler era, from his accession to power to September 1939 and later, it was always a criminal offence to murder Jews per se, and I am convinced that however many people Hitler murdered in his bombing campaign against Britain, a campaign that was murderous on both sides, however many British and other soldiers his troops killed on the battlefield, that neither he nor anyone at the top of the Nazi hierarchy ordered the extermination of Jews in gas chambers.
The gassings – ie the acts of murder – that were carried out in Struthof, and very likely were carried out on a small scale in other camps, were unsanctioned acts which were punishable under Nazi law.
We know that the British in particular had an extremely competent and incredibly devious black propaganda department, the Special Operations Executive, and that this department under the control of Sefton Delmer churned out atrocity propaganda by the bucketload. It is my belief that the extermination programme was a child of this British black propaganda, and that small scale acts of mass murder – if I may use that oxymoron – were magnified and distorted out of all proportion, until like many similarly successful propaganda campaigns, it took on a life of its own; the witchcraft hysteria of an earlier age is a good example of this.
In closing, I will say that it is important for Revisionists to face these facts; we must not fall into the trap of Nazi apologetics, and we must certainly not try to outdo the Zionist propaganda machine in guile and cunning; in the first instance, they are so much more devious, sly and cunning than us that we must be on a loser from the start. In the second instance, unless we learn from the mistakes of the past, we are doomed forever to repeat them. The foreign policies of the United States, of the United Kingdom, and of nearly all the Western powers towards the Middle East have been based on misunderstandings, wilful distortions and at times the most outrageous lies for at least the past half century. Only by facing and exposing the lies, and the real crimes of all the Western powers of those past eras, and of today, can we pave the way to a just and peaceful world. Nowhere is this more important than here, for the people of the Middle East, and most especially at this time for the people of Iran.
[I illustrated this speech by handing out some photographs; please refer to the unedited version to see these.]