On Degrees of Wrongness: Holocaust Denial and Checking Out a Footnote

JF Ptak Science Books LLC  Post 572

In researching an unusually early pamphlet on the extermination camps of Auschwitz and Birkenau (Les Camps d’Extermination Allemands Auschwitz et Birkenau, published in Paris in the July/August 1945) I stumbled upon—slid threw, I should say—a reference to it from a paper by Carlo Mattongo published by the Institute of Historical Review.  The IHR is a decades-old organization dedicated to the denial of the Holocaust (though they would call their work something different, like challenging plagued historicism and that sort of thing).   Now I’d soon as talk about this as I would the Creationist anti-evolutionary beliefs, but the author of the much-referenced  paper footnoted the scarce Camps publication, citing it as an example of incorrect reporting and thus supporting his Holocaust denial stuff.  Well, there are many dozens of footnotes like these in the IHR paper, but since I had the source reference right in my hand, I thought that I’d check out the scholarship a little and see what the complaint was all about.

(The founders of the IHR had deep roots in such organizations as the (British) National Front (a white-only, far far right suprematist group which seems to spend a lot of time denying that they are Nazis) and the Liberty Lobby.  The Liberty Lobby was founded by a man who philosophy was absed onbt eh work of a disturbed Nazi-hagiograph named Francis Yockey (who wrote undethe name of Ulick Varange).  His own connections are a catechism of hate groups: he worked and had associations with The German-American Bund, the German-American National Alliance, William Dudley Pelley's Silver Shirts, Sir Oswald Mosley's Union Movement, George Sylvester Viereck,  H. Keith Thompson, Gerald L.K. Smith, and James H. Madole's National Renaissance Party. Such is the intellectual heritage of the IHR.)

What Mattongo uses to bolster his anti-Holocaust claim is the Les Camps Exterminer description of the crematoria at Birkenau, which he says differs with another report (above ground versus underground crematoria). This difference in description is evidently a terrifically damning contradiction for that author, and in an O.J.-glove-like move uses it to question the entire edifice of the Holocaust.    

The issue of the location of the crematoria is unclear in my reading of the document. 

What is terrifically crystal clear is what comes on the very next page, just paragraphs down, from Mattongo’s citation:

“En principe les Juifs seulement sont mis a mort par le gaz: les Aryens tres rarement, car on leur administer generalement le “traitement special” par fusillade..”  (p. 18). This states that it was pretty much only the Jews who were gassed, while everyone else was shot to death.

I guess Mattongo liberalizes this statement to be inadmissible since the report had mentioned that the crematoria may have been underground rather than above ground.  What is more deeply remarkable is that this report is one of the earliest published documents to get a close estimate on the number of Jews exterminated:  there is a table on page 32 that calculates the number of Jews exterminated at Auschwitz and Birkenau from April 1942 to April 1944.  That number is 1.765 million.  It is  a big number, and it is a number dedicated solely to the Jews.  Even in the groundbreaking May 1945 report issued by the Eisenhower investigation the Jewish element of those exterminated in these camps was not emphasized.  For Mattongo and the Holocaust deniers, all of this becomes nothing, the fabric of history caught and unraveled, as it were, snared on a bit of a mostly-imaginary nail head. 

The Holocaust deniers are deep in their own secret and dark world, inventing useful denying tools as they go along.  In this case, a reference is unclear, and the document was mined solely for supporting detritis, while ignoring every other remarkable item in it.  Here’s another example of their not-so-minor tricks that I’ve noticed in this journal—the overuse of quotation marks.  They are sometimes used properly, sort of, when quoting source material--but quotation marks are also liberally employed in general use, like when referring to words like “proof” and “murder” and “witness” and “Holocaust” when referring to them as ideas.  And so what happens is that the quoted and footnoted materials (however miserable and inaccurate they might be) are mixed in with the unattributed quotation marks, making them all look vaguely referenced in some way.  What the authors are doing is exterminating the value of the words used by others for ideas that they do not believe in. An inmate’s first-hand account of extermination at Auschwitz thus becomes a “witness”, and then becomes less than that, calling into question the absolute veracity of the first hand account.  Insidious, really. 

I’m sorry to have spent time thinking about this.  But sometimes when you’re slapped in the face with a big paddle of Wrong you just have to react. 

Here's something else: when I went web-cruising for information on some of the founders of these IHR-like movements, I came across some very plain vanilla biographies of their Nazi/fascist heritage-makers in Wikipedia.  Obviously the entries were made by people who had some form of belief in their subject, and then granted the world access to their research via the online encyclopedia.  Now I know anyone can edit these entries to reflect a more more cogent, comprehensive, appraisal of founders of hate groups, but no one had.  I bump into questionable stuff like this in Wiki a lot.  My question is:  how much wrong must there be to make something valueless?  If the Encyclopedia Britannica was known to be 8% wrong, does it still have value?  If the PDR was 4% incorrect, would people still use it?  What about Wiki?  How wrong does something need to be before it needs to be started all over gain?