Last summer, my wife and I toured the Holocaust Museum in Washington, D.C. I still remember how drained I was when we finished our three hours there. The grim images, the mass of suitcases, shoes and hats collected from the Jews before they were gassed stay on my mind. The overwhelmingexhibits amply communicated the efficiency of the Nazis to carry out what was, for them, the final solution.
In 2001, we toured the partly restored Dachau concentration camp outside of
Munich, Germany, which opened in 1933 for political prisoners and became the model for the many other camps with ovens that the Nazis erected and used to methodically wipe out whole segments of the European landscape during World War II. More than 200,000 prisoners were housed at Dachau, a third of them Jews, according various sources. An estimated 5,000 Jews, and more than 30,000 people in all, were exterminated there. Obviously other camps like Auschwitz and Treblinka, whereasmany as5.4 million are estimated to have been executed, were the most notorious.
Somehow, there are people who insist the Holocaust never happened. Never mind the eye-witness reports, stories of American and Allied soldiers who liberated the camp, the massive photography, films, letters and the missing millions of people. Doubters have been discredited and revealed as mostly bigoted haters with no scholarly evidence.
The global Jewish news service, JTA, reports concerns raised by the disclosure that a book purported to be a memoir of the Holocaust was, in fact, a fake. They say such a book, now 11 years in circulation,will feed into narrative of those who relentlessly insist the Holocaust didnt occur. The article, which appeared in the March 7 issue of the Jewish News of Greater Phoenix, say the Holocaust deniers, like David Duke, are having a field day with the story.
A Belgian-born author, Misha Defonseca (real name Monique De Wael), who has lived outside of Boston, Mass., since the 1980s, wrote Misha: A Memoir of the Holocaust Years. The writer does not deny the fabrication. In a statement provided through her lawyer and containing an apology, Defonseca says, This story is mine. It is not actually reality, but my reality, my way of surviving, according to the news story.
The book, published in 1997 and translated into 18 languages, also was made into a popular film now playing throughout Europe, the article said. Doubts were raised repeatedly about the story when the book was published, but there was apparently no active effort to fully check it out. Seems DeFonsecas parents were Catholics and active in the Belgian resistance. They were neither killed by the Nazis but they actually collaborated with them and that the father, Robert de Wael, who died of natural causes after the war, was responsible for denouncing a number of fellow townspeople to the Gestapo.
In the memoir, the author wrote that she lived with a pack of wolves after the Nazis abducted her parents, searched for her parents across Europe for four years as a young girl and murdered a German soldier, the JTA article said. DeFonseca, who isnt Jewish, also contends that her parents were Belgian resistance fighters killed by the Nazis.
On Feb. 29, the online magazine Slate posted a detailed account of the controversy, Crying Wolf. The entire episode demonstrates how murky historical fiction can become.There’s no shortage of cases of massive inhumanity to man — Darfur,the Khmer Rougein Cambodia, Rwanda, Stalin’s Soviet Union, Timor, the Balkans, and on and on. Survivors of those kinds of holocausts have no shortage of material to tell their stories and keep to the facts.
Assuming that Mr. Griffiths is himself not a scam artist, he has been scammed.
The fact is that there is no convincing evidence that such an event as the “Holocaust” ever took place during WW-II. Certainly, Jews were persecuted - and many lost their lives - but there was never at any time a plan or program providing for their physical annihilation. There were no gas chambers in any of the concentration camps. Contrary to claims, no evidence was ever found for them. The room presented for years to tourists as a “gas chamber” at Auschwitz was afterwards admitted to be a postwar “reconstruction.” In the camp at Dachau, visitors are shown a room which is claimed to be a gas chamber - but had never been used as such. Many of the stories of so-called witnesses have proven unfounded - and even ridiculous.
As Northwestern University Professor Arthur Butz pointed out in his book, The Hoax of the Twentieth Century, “It is a fact that without the evidence generated at these (war crimes) trials, there would be no significant evidence that the program of killing Jews ever existed at all.”
Butz also wrote: “The simplest valid reason for being skeptical about the extermination claim is also the simplest conceivable reason; at the end of the war they were still there.”
Butz is not saying that they _all_ “were still there,” or that there had not been significant losses, but simply that there were far too many “still there” for there to have been an extermination program such as was claimed.
Most of the claims regarding the “Holocaust” transcend not only what is believable but even what is possible. Even the promoters of the hoax have had to revise their claims for that reason. Plaques on display in the camp at Auschwitz informed visitors that four million had been murdered there. These have since been replaced by plaques which claim the figure is 1.5 million. There is no more basis for the latter figure than for the former. At the camp of Treblinka, it is claimed that some 800,000 were gassed, buried in mass graves, subsequently disinterred and finally cremated over open fires. There is no evidence for any of this.
In 1999, a detailed forensic examination of the site of the wartime Treblinka camp, using sophisticated electronic ground penetrating radar, found no evidence of mass graves where Holocaust historians say more than half a million Jews lay buried.
The forensic team used Ground Penetration Radar and found no evidence that the ground had ever been disturbed. In addition, it found no evidence of individual graves, bone remains, human ashes, or wood ashes.
All of the camps experienced disease epidemics, mostly typhus, primarily as an indirect result of the murderous saturation bombing of Germany especially towards the end of the war. I once worked with a former soldier who had been at Dachau right after its “liberation” who tried to dispute me on the subject. In the end he was forced to concede that his only knowledge of war crimes consisted of what he had been told by superiors and, incidentally, further admitted that he himself had taken part in a ”war crime” at Dachau; namely the forced repatriation of Russian and other east European soldiers to either immediate execution or imprisonment in the infamous Soviet gulags. Showing obvious feelings of guilt, he told me, “all we knew was that we had to send a bunch of people somewhere where they didn’t want to go.”
Mr. Griffiths, if you insist on believing in the “Holocaust,” it is NOT because the evidence has convinced you (I’m sure you’re too intelligent for that), it is because it is what you WANT to
believe - in spite of the evidence - for reasons having nothing at all to do with evidence.