On April 7th, of 2017,
U.S.-American professor of Jewish history
and Holocaust research Deborah Lipstadt
appeared on TED-x Talks,
where she related her experiences
surrounding her courtroom battle
against British historian David Irving.
The event took place at the Sheldonian Theatre,
which is the official ceremonial hall
of the University of Oxford in England.
This is a screen shot from the event.
In this presentation, I will discuss
some of the claims she made during that speech,
which lasted only some 15 minutes.
I will show that many of her claims are not only false,
but are actually deeply rooted in prejudice
and a profoundly anti-academic attitude.
Let’s start with a statement she made
right at the beginning of her speech.
The time into her recorded presentation
at which each clip starts that I will show
can be gleaned from the time stamp
given beneath the slide number of this presentation.
Here are Dr. Lipstadt’s words:
The Holocaust, which has the dubious distinction
of being the best-documented genocide in the world.
This is a bold claim to make.
But let’s not take this for granted.
Let’s ask a few basic questions here.
The first one is:
“How are genocides and massacres documented?”
The answer to this is rather simple,
because a genocide is nothing other
than a mass murder
committed against a group of people
defined by their ethnic, religious or national identity
with the aim to wipe them all out.
So we are dealing with murder.
The rules for investigating a mass murder
are not much different than those
for single murder cases.
So, like in all murder cases,
here, too, we would prove
that a mass murder has taken place
by first finding the victims or whatever is left of them,
by determining the causes, places and times
of their death as best as possible,
and by trying to pinpoint who the perpetrators were.
That this is indeed the way
genocidal mass murder cases are investigated,
can be seen in a number of cases.
I give only three examples here:
The first is the genocide committed by the Khmer Rouge
in Cambodia in the 1970s.
Investigations have found some 20,000 individual mass grave sites
with a total of almost 1.4 million victims.
You can find out more on this human tragedy
on Wikipedia, particularly when reading
the entry for Khmer Rouge Killing Fields
and the many further-reading links given there.
The next case are the mass murders
committed during the war in former Yugoslavia
in the second half of the 1990s.
While world attention has focused
on atrocities committed by Serbs,
I may point out here
that they were not the only ones committing such atrocities.
They were simply singled out as the bad guys
by western media in that conflict,
and atrocities committed by Croats and Kosovo Albanians
were simply swept under the carpet.
But that’s beside the point I want to make here.
Fact is that numerous investigations
of mass graves were conducted
in the aftermath of that conflict,
carefully exhuming and identifying the victims’ remains.
My last example is the Soviet mass murder
committed against the Polish elite
during the first Soviet occupation
of eastern Poland between late 1939 and June 1941.
Two mass-grave sites were excavated in 1943
under the aegis of the German occupational authorities
near the towns of Katyn and Vinnitsa.
This case is probably more pertinent than the first two,
as it set an example on how it should be done in times of conflict.
Remember, in 1943 World War Two was raging at its peak,
with the Axis Powers slowly being pushed back.
At that point in time,
the Germans were wise enough
not to do their crime scene investigations
using exclusively their own experts,
but they invited observers and experts
from neutral countries to participate.
Their report on Katyn, for instance,
is a perfect example of rigorous forensic research done correctly.
Their report can be accessed online
at the address given.
During these investigations,
the mass graves were excavated,
all victims exhumed,
their identities determined,
their causes, places and times of death pinpointed,
and the perpetrators identified
within the limits of what was possible.
Today, that report is generally accepted
as being correct even by the Russian authorities.
After this long introduction into this topic,
let’s ask ourselves what the situation is
with regard to the many mass-murder sites of “the Holocaust.”
First of all, it is a sad fact
that for the first 55 years after the end of World War II,
not a single forensic investigation
by experts from countries not involved in the conflict
has ever been conducted.
Next, not a single autopsy has ever been carried out
on a victim of any German wartime camp
demonstrating that their death
was caused by poisoning or asphyxiation.
To make matters worse,
not a single document has ever been found
that proves the existence of homicidal gas chambers.
I emphasize here the adjective homicidal,
because there are many documents
proving the existence of fumigation gas chambers.
But that’s not what we’re looking for.
For instance, there are two cases
where physical evidence for the existence of gas chambers do indeed exist,
and for which orthodox historians claim
that they were used to kill people.
The first case is in the Stutthof Camp.
This image shows the inside of that building.
And the second example is the Majdanek Camp.
Here an outside view of that building.
However, in both cases, original wartime documentation clearly shows
that these buildings were built and used
as delousing chambers, not mass-murder chambers.
I will not go deeper into that topic here.
If you want to learn more about it,
see the respective entries
in the list of further reading
which you can find at the end of this presentation.
In addition to that, there are three more cases
where rooms in former Nazi concentration camps
are claimed to have served for mass slaughter:
One each in Dachau, Mauthausen and Hartheim.
Again, this is not the place to treat this in detail.
For the present purpose, it is enough to note
that the claims made about these buildings,
which are not based on forensic investigations at all
but merely on witness testimony,
are technically absurd.
Let’s now look into a few examples
of how claims about mass-graves
filled with victims of the Nazi genocide
against Jews and others were treated.
First, there is the most infamous camp of them all, Auschwitz.
Right at the end of the war,
it was claimed by a Soviet investigative commission
that some 4 million people perished there.
Today, that death toll has been reduced
to roughly a quarter of that figure.
It is not based on any forensic research,
however, but merely on train records
showing how many people were ever deported to Auschwitz,
minus some of those who can be shown to have survived.
And all this although traces of mass-graves
are clearly visible on air photos taken in 1944;
see here the area surrounded by a red circle.
To my knowledge, no attempt has ever been made
to explore this area.
The camp with the second-largest death toll claimed today,
Treblinka,
saw some forensic investigation after the war,
but it was done in absence of any neutral expert or even observer.
Yet still, the findings of these two distinct investigations
did not even remotely confirm the claims
that mass graves holding the remains
of up to 3 million victims
did indeed exist.
Today that death toll has shrunk to some 800,000.
More-recent research has managed to located some soil disturbances.
This map was prepared by the lead research of those recent efforts.
The white areas are suspected to be mass graves,
but no effort was made to excavate these areas,
let along exhume any remains and try to identify them.
Yet even if all the site that could be mass graves
turned out to be mass graves,
their combined volume is far too small
to be compatible with the claims made about this camp.
In fact, to accommodate the claimed number of buried victims,
almost the entire area free of trees shown here
needed to be covered with mass graves.
Just as is the case for Auschwitz,
here, too, the death toll is therefore not based on forensic research,
but on deportation figures to this camp.
The situation is pretty much the same with regard to the Belzec Camp,
where to my knowledge no forensic research
was done at all right after the war.
Soil samples taken from the area of that former camp
in the late 1990s indicate here as well
that there are some mass graves,
but not at the scale needed
for the death toll claimed today,
that is some 600,000.
They were also looking for leftovers
of the claimed homicidal gas chambers,
but all they found were the foundation walls
of a garage building as shown here.
Anyway, here as well, that death toll number
is based on deportation figures,
not on the result of forensic research,
which never went beyond taking a few core samples.
Another major claimed place of mass murder
is the former Majdanek Camp.
Right after the war, death toll claims ranged between 1.5 and 1.7 million,
but that has subsequently been reduced in several steps,
and currently stands at some 78,000,
as this chart shows,
so merely 5% of the original claim.
No forensic research was ever done here.
The death toll is based on mere conjecture.
The camp records show a death toll of some 42,000,
which is what revisionists claim as the minimum death toll,
for these records may not be complete.
The case of Majdanek shows
that wartime propaganda has had a major distorting influence
on claims made about German atrocities,
and that independent forensic research
is desperately needed, indeed.
My next example is the Sobibór Camp.
It’s claimed death toll currently stands at some 200,000.
No forensic research was done here right after the war.
A large forensic research effort was initiated only in the year 2000,
of which this image of 2014 is from the final stages of the dig.
Although a number of mass graves were located,
they are not compatible with the claims made,
and once they had been located,
any further research was halted.
So no effort to exhume, count, and identify the victims.
It goes without saying that such an effort
is exceedingly difficult 55+ years after the crime.
What they did find, though, were the remnants of a building with four rooms
which they declared to have been “the homicidal gas chamber”,
although there is no forensic evidence to back up that claim.
It could have had any other purpose, for all we know.
My last example is Babi Yar,
which was a ravine just outside of the Ukrainian city of Kiev.
Some 100,000 victims are said to have been murdered and buried there by the Germans,
who shortly before their retreat in 1943
are said to have excavated those graves and burned the remains.
This is the single-largest mass-murder case
of the so-called Einsatzgruppen,
German units behind the Russian front
fighting partisans and at once mass-murdering
a total of somewhere between 1.5 and 3 million civilians –
depending on who you believe.
Right after the Soviets re-conquered this area,
they forced German PoWs to excavate the area,
and some Soviet experts
wrote a very superficial report about it.
Interestingly, that report only mentions the discovery
of some 150 unidentified victims in two mass graves,
and they even published a blurred image
of one of the opened graves.
They also claimed to have found some charred remains,
but neither their nature,
their origin nor their quantity is mentioned.
The site has since been re-purposed
and plowed-over many times,
so any further investigation seems hopeless.
To sum it up,
calling the Holocaust the “best-documented genocide in the world”
pretty much turns things upside down.
The opposite is true.
Now, let’s move on to Lipstadt’s next flawed line of argument.
For deniers to be right, who would have to be wrong?
After that passage, Dr. Lipstadt lists a number of groups
who all would have to be wrong.
First, there are the victims.
Now, I’m not sure what she means by that,
because victims of mass murder are usually dead.
But of course, in an indirect way,
victims of mass murder can testify,
if they are properly, that is to say,
independently exhumed and forensically examined,
but as I mentioned before,
that has never happened.
It wasn’t even tried to systematically locate any mass graves,
let alone excavate them,
exhume the bodies
and subject them to an autopsy.
And I’m not talking here
about the sham CSI cases
conducted by the Soviet Union starting in 1943,
used to shore-up numerous show trials
in Charkov, Krasnodar and Leningrad, for instance.
These expert reports are notoriously mendacious,
as is emphasized by the Soviet forensic report on Katyn
made after the war
which blamed the Soviet mass murder on the Germans.
Next, we have the survivors.
I’m going to mentioned only a few revealing facts on that topic.
First, there are some 200,000 documented inmates
who survived Auschwitz in terms of
either having been transferred out of the camp by the Germans
or still having been in that camp
when it was occupied by the Soviets in January 1945.
That’s a huge number of potential witnesses the Germans allowed to live.
Only a small fraction of them
has ever testified about German atrocities
allegedly committed in Auschwitz.
An Israeli study concluded in the year 2000
that at that time a little more than
one million Holocaust survivors were still alive.
From well-documented longevity data
compiled by life-insurance companies,
it can be calculated that there must have been
some 5 million Holocaust survivors alive in 1945.
That fact has provoked the mother
of U.S. scholar Norman Finkelstein to exclaim:
“If everyone who claims to be a survivor really is one,
who did Hitler kill?”
You can find that quote in Finkelstein’s book
on the Holocaust Industry on page 81.
Next, there are the bystanders.
As one example, Lipstadt talks about how people experienced
the Jews being arrested and deported in trains to the east.
Now, there can be no doubt about that fact,
but seeing how people are herded together and shipped away
does not prove that they were murdered.
The same is true for Lipstadt’s second example
of people in Poland seeing how trains full of Jews
went into the camps and came out empty.
Again, that merely proves that the deportees left the trains
at the respective train stations.
It doesn’t prove that they were murdered.
To prove my point, the 200,000 Auschwitz survivors just mentioned
were all arrested, herded together, deported in trains to Auschwitz,
and the trains that brought them there subsequently returned empty.
Does that prove these 200,000 people were killed?
Of course not!
And last but not least, there are the perpetrators.
For Lipstadt, and with her probably for most people,
their quote-unquote “confessions” prove it all,
if nothing else does.
So it’s a very important point.
So important, in fact, that it is worth its own separate documentary.
I’ll make it brief, here, though,
but before addressing this,
I want to make some more general observations.
First, there is the issue of majority.
If the vast majority thinks something is true,
it just has to be true, right?
Wrong.
The English-born American theoretical physicist Freeman John Dyson
made that clear when saying,
“In the history of science, it has often happened
that the majority was wrong
and refused to listen to a minority
that later turned out to be right.”
There have been many fallacies like that in the past.
Lipstadt herself brings up one of the more famous ones,
the fallacy of the belief that the earth
is in the center of the universe
and that the sun revolves around our home planet,
which we now know is wrong.
So, let’s rephrase Lipstadt’s question:
In 1633, Galileo Galilei was sentenced by the Holy Inquisition
to life imprisonment for his heretical “Dialogue” book
in which he defended the heliocentric system –
which is flawed, too, by the way,
but that’s beside the point I want to make here.
So, who had to be wrong for Galileo to be right?
Well, almost all astronomers of the time.
Almost all other academic authorities.
All government authorities –
and that included foremost the church in those years.
And actually, all of humanity
who witnessed every single day
that it was the sun moving around the earth,
while the earth was very obviously standing perfectly still.
That was a self-evident fact, wasn’t it?
Well, what can we learn from this?
There are some very general observations
we can make from the history of science:
First, every new hypothesis which challenges old views
is initially an extreme minority opinion.
The vast majority of the rest of humanity,
authorities and experts included,
will reject that new notion.
Second, every new hypothesis
challenging the power structure of its time
is met with fierce opposition.
Einstein’s Relativity Theory wasn’t a threat to anyone in power,
but Galileo’s thesis certainly was back then.
And challenging the orthodox Holocaust narrative
is most certainly seen as a threat
by many powerful groups and governments in the world today.
But that opposition does not prove in any way
that the new thesis is wrong.
And last but not least,
science is not a democratic enterprise.
We cannot vote for a thesis to be right or wrong.
So, it doesn’t matter whether 99.99% of humanity
rejects a scientific thesis or not.
The only thing that counts is solid evidence.
In that sense, science is an absolute dictatorship of evidence,
not a democracy.
Let’s now return to the perpetrators.
Here is what Dr. Lipstadt claims about them:
In not one war-crimes trial since the end of World War Two
has a perpetrator of any nationality
ever said it didn’t happen.
Some of what Dr. Lipstadt said is misleading,
and some of it is simply wrong.
One of the first trials
conducted by the Allies after Germany’s defeat
was the trial against the bosses
of the Tesch & Stabenow Company
which, among other things,
delivered Zyklon B to various German wartime camps,
Auschwitz most prominently among them.
For that trial, the British arrested all the employees of that company.
Many of them were threatened that,
if they don’t confirm their bosses’ active involvement
in mass murder with Zyklon B,
they would be extradited to the Soviets,
where they might even be tortured.
And still, all defendants insisted
that they knew nothing about a mass murder with gas,
and also insisted that what they delivered
could be explained and was exclusively used
for disinfestations.
The most famous of all trials that also dealt with the “Holocaust”
was the International Military Tribunal at Nuremberg.
Here, too, all defendants insisted
that they were unaware of any mass murder program.
The highest Nazi official on trial, Hermann Göring,
actively denied that such a plan existed,
and he even stated
that he considered the claim made by the Allies
technically unfeasible.
Hence, he could rightly claim the title
of having been the first Holocaust revisionist.
Keep in mind that Göring is the person who,
in a letter of July 31, 1941,
put Reinhardt Heydrich in charge of coming up with a plan
for what the Nazis called
the “Final Solution to the Jewish question.”
Another defendant who survived this lynch trial,
Hans Fritzsche, a subordinate of Josef Goebbels,
shown he to the right,
wrote in his autobiography after the war
how none of the defendants initially believed the charge
that Germany had committed a wholesale mass slaughter on the Jews.
That attitude changed only after they had been shown two things:
first, a propaganda movie produced by the Americans
showing scenes with piles of corpses
found in various German camps,
who were presented as victims of mass murder.
Next, the testimony of Rudolf Höss,
the former camp commander of the Auschwitz Camp.
Höss confirmed with a brief “Jawoll!”
the accuracy of an affidavit signed by him
where the mass murder with Zyklon B in that camp is described.
But there are massive problems
with both pieces of evidence
introduced during the Nuremberg Trial:
First, the footage shown, though genuine,
did NOT show victims of mass murder,
but victims of Germany’s utter collapse,
where everyone was dying like flies
toward the end of the war,
both inside and outside the camps,
mainly due to diseases, starvation, and Allied bombings.
Three concentration camps featured prominently in that footage:
Bergen-Belsen, Dachau and Nordhausen.
Everyone agrees today that the dead bodies of Bergen-Belsen
belonged to the victims of a catastrophic typhus epidemic.
The bodies found in railroad cars at Dachau
were the victims of Allied fighter planes
attacking this train while on route to Dachau.
Regarding the Nordhausen camp,
let’s watch a section of the following documentary:
The Allies also directly bombed concentration-camp prisoners,
and today we are told
this is proof of a German-planned Holocaust.
This is another segment
from the American propaganda film
“Nazi Concentration Camps,”
which was shown at the Nuremberg Trials.
“The slave-labor camp at Nordhausen,”
“liberated by the Third Armored Division, First Army.”
“At least 3,000 political prisoners died here”
“at the brutal hands of SS troops”
“and hardened German criminal”
“who were the camp guards.”
“Nordhausen had been a depository for slaves”
“found unfit for works in the underground V-bomb plants,”
“and in other German camps and factories.”
A deceptively captioned image of Nordhausen
appears in Steven Spielberg’s The Last Days companion book.
We see American soldiers walking past corpses strewn on the ground.
The caption reads:
“The horrific scene of mass annihilation”
“within the Nordhausen concentration camp.”
Let’s look closer at the photograph.
We can see the buildings have been bombed.
Testimony of former prisoners shows
they were lucky to survive Allied bombing attacks.
This Jewish former prisoner and doctor
describes prisoners lying in the camp hospital
sick of tuberculosis in the final days of the war.
“And there, I had over 4,000 prisoners lying on tuberculosis.”
“Sick! What you’re doing? It’s tuberculosis!”
“No medications, nothing. Hardly food.”
“It was very meagre already.”
“The Germans didn’t have to eat.”
This former prisoner and doctor
described conditions in the camp in the final days of the war.
Sick prisoners didn’t have enough supplies.
However, he points out
the Germans themselves also didn’t have enough – even to eat.
Clearly, the Germans could have killed the sick prisoners at any time,
yet instead treated them in hospitals.
“And all of the sudden, it was April 3rd,”
“at 3 o’clock, alarm, and American Air Force over us,”
“and dropped the bombs just on our camp.”
“And the whole camp was entirely destroyed.”
“And out of this, 4,000 people, we were 200 [who] survived.”
“Because they died there.”
“They were in the camps, you know, hanging in the ceiling, dead bodies.”
“It was awful.”
“It was burning days and days.”
“We were still, the nurses, the doctors,”
“administration people, working administration,”
“we ran away.”
“And the Americans made a mistake,”
“because they didn’t know this is a concentration camp.”
The same documentary bearing the title Why We Believed,
which you can find on Youtube
and on www.HolocaustDocumentaries.com,
also presents evidence for the just-mentioned cases of Bergen-Belsen and Dachau.
So watch the whole thing
if you are interested in finding out more about this.
The former camp commander Höss, on the other hand,
was made drunk by force, beaten, and kept awake
for three days straight
before the British could get him to sign an affidavit in English,
which he didn’t even understand.
Here is a portrait of Höss
right after his arrest by the British
while descending from the truck that brought him to prison.
And here is Höss a few days later,
after three days of torture.
See his bloody nose and the various wounds in his face.
It is now generally accepted as a fact
that Höss was severely tortured,
also because his tormentors admitted it
and published the tale years afterwards.
That extorted affidavit was then presented at Nuremberg.
It’s not worth the paper it’s written on.
Unfortunately, Höss was not a single case.
In fact, the British, the Americans and the Soviets
systematically tortured their prisoners
to extract so-called “confessions”
from former SS men and Nazi officials.
To give you just one proof here,
let’s look at an article published on December 12, of 2005
in the leftist British newspaper The Guardian
by Ian Cobain, a journalist who managed to get access
to government files about a contemporary investigation
conducted into allegation of torture.
In it, he reports about the systematic torture
to which almost all German inmates
in the so-called “London cage” were subjected,
as well as Germans incarcerated in the prison
at the German town of Bad Nenndorf.
You can stop the video
if you want to read the unpleasant details.
Similar methods were revealed
by postwar investigative commissions of the Americans
for the prison camps they ran in Germany after the war.
But I won’t go there now,
for it would lead us too far astray.
Now, after the Nuremberg Trial had sentenced
the surviving top officials of the Third Reich,
its verdict became a kind of starting point
for all other war-crime trials
and for all historians writing about the Third Reich.
Hence, in all subsequent trials,
the fact that a Holocaust had occurred
was no longer open to dispute.
Actually, it wasn't even open to dispute
during the Nuremberg Trials themselves,
because the defense could not challenge
most of the evidence submitted to the court.
By the very statutes of the trial,
it had to accept as fact
what the prosecutors presented
as findings of their authorities.
As a result, for any subsequent defendant
charged with having contributed
in any way to “the Holocaust,”
a defense strategy challenging the over-arching story
was not only logistically impossible
—one single defendant could not take on a huge task like that—
but was also legally impossible,
for they could not defend themselves against charges
they had not been accused of,
and no later defendant has ever been charged
with having organized “the Holocaust.”
They were only charged with small aspects in the larger picture.
Hence, the only way to mount a defense
that had some prospect of success
was to concede the uncontestable,
yet minimize one’s own involvement or responsibilities.
One of the most-active German prosecutors
handling many cases of claimed mass murders,
Helge Grabitz,
wrote once that he was utterly amazed
by the total lack of any remorse among the defendants,
which was very unusual.
He even floated the idea that,
under normal circumstance,
he would suspect the defendants to be innocent,
but he then stated that this was, of course, not an option.
And there’s the rub:
innocence has never been an option in any of those trials,
none of which ever employed forensic methods
to determine whether the claimed crime
had been committed in the first place.
While denying the crime
has always been socially and legally unacceptable,
nowadays it is even outright illegal in most of the countries
that have ever conducted Holocaust-related trials.
So, what do we expect defendants to do in such a situation?
If you think that the conditions of war-crime trials
conducted for instance in Germany many years after the war
must have been better than those
conducted by the Allies right after the war,
think again.
The German defense lawyer Hans Laternser
—here is his likeness—
participated both during the Nuremberg Trials
and during the big West-German Auschwitz trial in the 1960s.
Here is what he said about that: Quote
“In the major international criminal trials in which I participated,”
“there has never been as much tension as in the Auschwitz trial”
“—not even at the International Military Tribunal in Nuremberg.”
As a matter of fact,
there is an almost perfect historical parallel
to what has been occurring since the end of World War Two.
In that other comparable historical case:
During early court cases, many defendants were tortured.
Almost all defendants confessed.
In later trials, defendants usually confessed voluntarily.
Throngs of witnesses
—victims, survivors, and bystanders—
confirmed the crime.
The overarching crime was “self-evident”,
which means it could not be challenged.
Requests by the defense for evidence were usually denied.
Defense lawyers defending their clients too ambitiously
were indicted themselves.
Denying the crime was the worst of all crimes
and led to prosecution for “denial.”
That other historical example concerns the
Medieval Witch Trials.
Yesterday’s devils are todays “Nazis”,
and yesterday’s witches are today’s deniers.
Let’s move on to the next set of clips
where Dr. Lipstadt demonizes her opponents:
Deniers are wolves in sheep’s clothing.
They are the same Nazis, neo-Nazis,
you can decided whether you want to put a neo there or not.
What I found instead were people parading as respectable academics.
It was anti-Semitism, racism, prejudice parading as rational discourse.
But underneath it’s that same extremism
that I found in Holocaust denial
parading as rational discourse.
I’m not going to discuss
whether Lipstadt’s accusations are correct or not.
In some cases, they may be,
in others they are not.
Just like some of the ladies persecuted as witches
may indeed have practiced “medicine”
or other activities in a questionable way.
What I am getting at here
is the technique of demonizing one’s opponents
rather than confronting their arguments.
That’s the same technique used against Galileo.
Instead of dealing with his arguments,
they accused him of violating church dogma,
and thus challenging the power structure of his time.
It is not much different now.
Today, anyone opposing the orthodox narrative
of what exactly transpired between 1941 and 1945
with the Jews under Nazi domination
is deemed an anti-Semite, or a “denier,”
declared a pariah,
and in 20 countries even threatened with severe criminal sanctions.
Let me analyze Lipstadt’s language here,
so we can get a handle on the issue.
She calls revisionists “extremists.”
But what exactly is an extremist?
On an individual level,
an extremist can be described as a person
who pursues his political agenda with all kinds of means,
violence included.
What that means in the present context
can be seen from some examples:
This is what was left of the car
of French revisionist François Duprat
after a Jewish group planted a bomb in his car and killed him.
This is the result of the most severe of ten cases
where French revisionist Robert Faurisson was assaulted by Jewish gangsters.
This is what was left of the revisionist Institute for Historical Review,
after a Jewish group committed an arson attack against it in 1985.
This is how the headquarters
of the British revisionist publishing company
Historical Review Press looked like
after it had been firebombed
by leftwing extremists in the late 1990s.
This is how the house of German-Canadian revisionist Ernst Zündel looked like
after it had been firebombed by an extremist terror organization.
Perpetrators in most cases: Jewish extremists.
As far as I know,
there is not a single case of revisionist violence,
because violence is not among the methods
with which revisionist are pursuing their goals.
Hence, not the revisionists are extremists,
but some of their opponents certainly are.
On a political level,
an extremist is someone who pursues his political agenda
by denying opponents their civil rights.
Here are some examples:
In 2007, the “United Nations” declared
that persecuting peaceful historical dissidents
—when it come to the Holocaust—
is not only ok, but is actually expected.
Here is the actual United Nations website
with the text of that resolution.
They didn’t outright call for outlawing revisionism,
but their declaration sure sent the message
that this is something perfectly acceptable.
We read here that the United Nations
“urges all member states unreservedly”
“to reject any denial of the Holocaust,”
whatever that entails.
In that context, it is good to know
that there are currently 21 dictatorships in the world
where the orthodox Holocaust narrative
is enforced by law in one way or another.
Here they are, in alphabetical order.
This map shows in red the countries of Europe
outlawing peaceful historical dissent
about the orthodox Holocaust narrative,
with the year given in parentheses
when each country outlawed it.
Germany introduced its hate speech legislation already in 1960.
But only in 1994 did Germany expressly add “denial”
to the list of banned quote-unquote “hate speech,”
but many individuals had been sentenced to fines and prison terms
years before that
under the older version of that law
for this quote-unquote “propaganda offense,”
as the German authorities call these kinds of thought crimes.
The Netherlands, on the other hand,
has no dedicated law against revisionism to this very day.
It uses its hate speech law instead to prosecute dissidents.
So, here you have the real extremists
operating on a government level,
sending peaceful dissidents to prison and ruining their lives.
That’s what happens to peaceful dissidents,
if they are successfully demonized by powerful groups,
of which Dr. Lipstadt is a prominent and very active exponent.
Let’s move on to the next set of clips
where Dr. Lipstadt makes false accusations
and false factual claims.
First, here is what she claims
British historian David Irving
thinks about the fate of the Jews during the Nazi era:
And the Jews, whatever happened to them,
they sort of deserved it.
I don’t think Irving ever said anything remotely like it.
He merely raised the question
that maybe the Jews should ask themselves why,
for the past 2,000 years,
they have been consistently thrown out of one country after another.
As provocative as that question may seem,
Irving never gave an answer to it,
and he certainly never said they deserved “it,”
whatever “it” may be in each case.
But let me try to give an answer to Irving’s question.
I will limit myself to one of the root causes
of National Socialist anti-Semitism,
and I’ll quote Jews,
because when it comes to these issues,
most of us Gentiles never believe anything a Gentile says anyway.
It must come from a Jew to be acceptable, right?
That tells you a lot about the world we live in.
Already in 1924,
a group of Jewish intellectuals
wrote the following prophetic words, quote:
“The overly ambitious participation of the Jewish Bolsheviks”
“in the subjugation and destruction of Russia”
“is a sin that already contains a revenge within itself. […]”
“All nations and all people will be flooded by waves of judeophobia.”
“Never before have such storm clouds”
“gathered above the heads of the Jewish people.” Unquote
That was while Hitler was in jail for treason,
and nine years before he rose to power.
Here is another, more recent quote in the same vein
by a certain Jerry Muller,
taken from an article of his
published in the Jewish periodical Commentary.
Muller discussed the issues of Jewish involvement in communism,
and concluded his essay in a similar fashion:
Quote: “The Trotskys make the revolution”
—that is to say, including the communist atrocities—
“and the Bronsteins pay the bills”
in the Holocaust.
So, Irving’s question has in fact been addressed by some Jews,
and the results have been published somewhat prominently.
It’s just that certain other Jews like Lipstadt
won’t face that issue, because it is highly embarrassing
and dulls Jewry’s sword and shield, the Holocaust.
Now to Lipstadt’s next false statement
about what Irving allegedly claims.
And what is that version?
There was no plan to murder the Jews.
There were no gas chambers.
There were no mass shootings.
Hitler had nothing to do with any suffering that went on.
And the Jews have made this all up
to get money from Germany
and to get a state.
And they’ve done it
with the aid and abbetance of the Allies.
They’ve planted the documents
and planted the evidence.
Fact is, however,
that Irving never said there were no mass shootings.
Not even the most radical revisionist claims
that there were no mass shootings.
The guerilla warfare in the east was extremely brutal
and entailed lots of mass shootings
—of partisans, collaborators
and normal civilians as reprisal,
to name only a few reasons.
It also makes no sense to state
that Hitler had nothing to do with any suffering.
There is no denying that Jews suffered under Hitler
and because of his politics;
you don’t need gas chambers
to inflict sufferings, you know.
Furthermore, neither Irving nor any serious revisionist
has ever claimed that “the Jews made it all up”
—again, whatever “it” may be in this context.
Even mainstream historians have admitted on many occasions
that certain claims were indeed made up,
but not necessarily by Jews.
It’s called wartime atrocity propaganda.
The question is:
what part of the narrative is true,
and what part is propaganda.
Finally, no one has ever claimed
that anyone planted all the evidence.
What evidence are we talking about anyway?
The physical evidence that doesn’t exist to begin with
and that no one ever bothered looking for?
Now to the next clip:
We proved that what he said happened,
and by extension all deniers,
because he either quotes them,
or they get their arguments from him,
is not true.
What they claim,
they don’t have the evidence to prove it.
That is the old lie
of revisionists having no evidence for their claims,
and that they therefore engage in,
quote, “incestuous citation cartels,” unquote,
where they support their claims merely
by quoting each other in turn.
It’s a lie, plain and simple.
To prove it in the present case,
I have done my homework.
First, I have searched the books by Carlo Mattogno,
the most prolific revisionist writer.
Here is what I found out
about Mattogno referring to David Irving:
In 20 English-language books written or coauthored by him so far,
Irving is mentioned in only 8 out of 11,887 footnotes.
Among those 8, 5 are not even Mattogno’s footnotes,
but footnotes of his co-authors.
Not a single one of Irving’s writings
can be found in any of Mattogno’s bibliographies.
Not ONE!
On the other hand, David Irving admitted to me personally
that he has never even read a revisionist book,
let alone quoted it!
Not paying attention to what others in the field are writing
is one of Irving’s major flaws.
When Lipstadt talks about having shown in court
that the deniers are wrong,
she primarily refers to her expert witness on Auschwitz
Robert van Pelt.
But van Pelt did not refute revisionism.
Revisionism wasn’t on trial in London.
David Irving’s views were scrutinized.
But Irving has never written a single article on the Holocaust,
let alone a monograph.
He is not an expert in the field.
So, refuting him,
if that’s really what happened in London,
doesn’t equate refuting the quote-unquote “deniers.”
Van Pelt may have addressed some aspects
of revisionist’s claims about the Holocaust,
but he never addressed anything major
revisionists have written about it.
In fact, with a major rebuttal of van Pelt’s writings,
we revisionists refuted him .
Here is a picture of the 2015 edition
of Mattogno’s 760-page volume
The Real Case for Auschwitz,
the first edition of which appeared already in 2010.
If Lipstadt were a scholar,
she would be aware of it
and would be more careful with her claims.
This book is packed with references to primary source material
from various archives around the world
—and not a single reference to anything of what Irving has written.
The next set of brief clips
reveals Dr. Lipstadt’s anti-intellectual mindset:
Many of us have been taught the thing:
there are facts and there are opinions.
After studying deniers, I think differently.
There are facts,
there are opinions,
and there are lies.
And what deniers want to do, is take their lies,
dress them up as opinions
—maybe edgy opinions,
maybe sort of out-of-the-box opinions.
But then, if they are opinions,
they should be part of the conversation.
And then, they encroach on the facts.
That needs explanation.
In her book Denying the Holocaust,
Lipstadt has developed the hypothesis
that anything claiming to be an opinion
has to be based on undeniable facts.
If that is not so,
she denies it the status of an opinion,
and thus the right to be heard.
Censorship of non-opinions is therefore perfectly alright,
according to her.
The question is, of course,
who defines what counts as an undeniable fact?
A government Ministry of Truth?
Or maybe Dr. Lipstadt herself?
To get to the core of this,
we again need to define our terms.
So bear with me for a few moments.
First of all, a fact is a true statement about reality.
How do we know it is true?
Well, fact is that we can never be absolute certain, but…
we can gain a very high probability of certainty for our views
by exposing them to attempts at refutation.
That is called the critical, scientific method.
If even the toughest attempts at refuting a claim fail,
we can be rather certain that our claim is true.
If those refutations succeed, however,
we’re back to square one and have to start over.
It is plainly obvious from all her writings and speeches
that Dr. Lipstadt does not want the mainstream Holocaust narrative
to be exposed to critical scrutiny and attempts at refutation.
Quite to the contrary,
she wants to protect it from all skeptical eyes.
However, this attitude is profoundly anti-academic,
anti-intellectual,
anti-scholarly,
and anti-scientific.
It is exactly the hallmark of a dogmatist
whose world view can be maintained only
by declaring it a taboo,
and by arrogantly dismissing any dissident
as not worthy of recognition,
let alone debate.
Here is her next clip proving my point:
…where we were taught, everything is open to debate.
But that’s not the case!
There are certain things that are true!
There are indisputable facts!
Objective truths!
Galileo taught it to us centuries ago.
Even after being forced to recant by the Vatican
that the earth moves around the sun,
he came out, and what is he reported to have said?
“And yet, it still moves!”
Did you notice something?
She actually got it all upside down,
because if anyone can be compared to Galileo
and the fate he had to suffer,
it’s the revisionists,
not Dr. Lipstadt and her oppressive ilk.
Her philosophy of certain undeniable truths
that are not open to debate
is also profoundly flawed.
German philosopher Immanuel Kant stated some 250 years ago,
that we come into this world
with some a priori knowledge about our world.
Among them he listed
that space is three-dimensional and Cartesian in nature,
that time is constant
that every effect has a cause,
and that things don’t simply pop into existence out of nothing and vice versa.
But he got it all wrong.
Werner Heisenberg has shown
that on the atomic level
cause and effect don’t work,
and that things can indeed pop in and out of existence.
Furthermore, Albert Einstein has shown
that time is not flowing constantly,
and that space is in fact warped, not rectangular.
And last but not least,
biology has shown that the a priori quote-unquote “knowledge”
that we get from our genes
is neither unalterable nor even necessarily “true”
in terms of infallibly accurate.
So, how can anyone be dogmatic about anything,
if the most profound “truths” about the world we live in
have turned out to be untrue or at least inaccurate?
This is even more true when it comes to claims about “the Holocaust,”
many of which have turned out to be erroneous
or based on simple lies and propaganda.
And I’ll give two examples here
where Dr. Lipstadt was caught with egg on her face.
First, in an article by her printed on April 19, 1983,
on page five of the Los Angeles Times,
she revived the claim
that 1.7 million inmates had died at the Majdanek Camp,
even though that figure had been exposed
as vastly exaggerated wartime propaganda
already in the late 1940s by the Poles themselves.
Next, in her 1986 book Beyond Belief,
she wrote on page 262
that the claims made by the Soviets about Auschwitz
at war’s end were “essentially correct”,
and then she repeated the false four-million death toll claim,
which had been denounced as wrong
by many Jewish mainstream historians for decades,
yet Dr. Lipstadt still bandied it about as “truth” in the mid-1980s.
Considering all this, it is beyond ridiculous,
nay, it is idiotic
for anyone to claim that the orthodox narrative
of this complex set of historical events called the Holocaust,
which spanned an entire continent,
lasted some 4 years,
and affected the fate of millions of people,
and which is indubitably steeped in wartime propaganda,
is absolutely beyond debate.
As a matter of fact, precisely the opposite is true:
exactly because the orthodox Holocaust narrative
is the only topic that is protected by a worldwide taboo,
and also by penal law in many countries,
it needs and deserves the most intense skeptical scrutiny
by scholars and lay persons alike.
From all this we can conclude with certainty
that those who are avoiding an open debate
on the orthodox Holocaust narrative
either have something to hide
or a lot to lose
—or probably both.
The next statement by Dr. Lipstadt
which deserves a few comments is the following:
Many of us in this audience write books or writing books.
We always make mistakes.
That’s why we’re glad to have second editions
—to correct the mistakes.
The first edition of her book
titled Denying the Holocaust
which caused David Irving to sue her
and kicked off the entire avalanche
of Lipstadtian mental diarrhea,
appeared in 1993.
Here is the front cover of that hardcover edition.
A paperback edition with this cover art appeared a year later.
Due to the public attention Lipstadt’s case got
in the wake of the 2016 movie Denial
which dramatized her distorted version of events,
her 1993 book was released in a new edition in 2016.
Here is its cover art,
strongly resembling that of the 1994 paperback edition.
When I compared the two editions, however,
I discovered that literally NOTHING had been changed,
except for the page breaks.
So, if she didn’t change anything,
does that mean she didn’t make any mistakes?
Nope, that isn’t it either.
In fact, she repeated all the claims that caused Irving to sue her,
including those which the court found false and defamatory.
In addition, and much more importantly,
her entire list of documents
which allegedly prove the existence
of homicidal gas chambers at Auschwitz
has turned out to be wrong from top to bottom!
Lipstadt had relied 100% on the results
of French Auschwitz researcher Jean-Claude Pressac,
but his studies had been refuted
by Italian Auschwitz scholar Carlo Mattogno
with this book,
which was published the same year
Lipstadt’s first paperback edition came out
—that is, in 1994.
During Irving’s libel trial against Dr. Lipstadt,
Dutch cultural historian Robert van Pelt
had repeated Pressac’s vacuous arguments
in his expert report for Lipstadt’s defense team,
while completely ignoring Mattogno’s counter-arguments.
Such a biased behavior renders an expert unfit
to testify in any proper court of law,
by the way.
Undeterred by that,
Mattogno subsequently went to great length
to once and for all root out the nonsense
churned out by Lipstadt and her quote-unquote “expert”
who both didn’t do much else than cite Pressac
or – in the case of van Pelt – plagiarize him.
Mattogno’s two-volume book came out in 2010.
Already in slide six, I showed an image of the newer 2015 edition.
That being so, Lipstadt has no excuse at all
for ignoring those counter-arguments.
Her joke about second editions
does therefore apparently not apply to herself.
It looks like she thinks that she never makes a mistake
and never has to correct anything.
By the way, none of her other books
seem to have ever appeared in any second editions either.
Now to a few points where Dr. Lipstadt and I actually agree.
We cannot be beguiled by rational appearances.
We’ve got to look underneath,
and we will find there the extremism.
Well, I totally agree with her there.
Of course, that applies to everyone.
So let’s not be beguiled by Lipstadt’s rational appearance
and let’s look beneath the upper varnish.
Here is what I have found,
written down in my recent analysis
of Lipstadt’s Denying the Holocaust:
After what I have exposed during this presentation,
it should not surprise you anymore
that Lipstadt exhibits the same kind of dogmatic,
anti-intellectual attitude in her book
as she does in her speeches.
In fact, it appears that Dr. Lipstadt
—how did she get that academic degree?—
that she has not even understood
the principles and methods of science and scholarship
—or at least she doesn’t apply them.
While I am not a trained historian myself,
I was struck by her superficial knowledge
of the historical issues involved.
Next, I found that she misquotes her sources,
relies on faulty translations,
and misrepresents and misinterprets the evidence she adduces.
In addition, throughout her book
she makes a lot of claims she doesn’t back up with any sources,
and many of the sources she does quote
are considered unquotable by serious scholars.
Even though she claims
that we revisionists don’t recognized general standards of evidence,
she is the one who puts so-called survivor stories
at the top of what she considers reliable.
One of the most important rules of scholarship is
that you deal with factual arguments
and strictly abstain from personal attacks,
but her book is mainly an exercise
in demonizing individuals she disagrees with.
All this taken together makes it very clear
that scholarship and reason are not at the top of her agenda.
In fact, trying to get to the truth of the matters involved
is evidently the opposite of what she is trying to achieve.
She wants to prevent people from digging for the truth
and to uncritically accept her version of history
as indisputable truth.
What she has said about us revisionists
therefore hits her like a boomerang:
Her book is an exercise
in anti-intellectual pseudo-scientific arguments,
an exhibition of ideological radicalism
that rejects anything which contradicts its preset conclusions.
Now listen to another clip from her speech
that I find rather revealing:
I’m reminded of a New Yorker cartoon,
a quiz show, recently appeared in the New Yorker,
where the host of the quiz show is saying
to one of the contestants:
'Yes, ma'am, you had the right answer,'
'but your opponent yelled more loudly than you did,'
'so he gets the point.'
Again she turns the truth upside down.
While those peddling the orthodox Holocaust narrative
have all the funding and publishing venues of the world at their disposal,
we revisionists get censored and muted everywhere:
governments persecute, prosecute, fine and imprison us,
eBay and Amazon ban our books,
YouTube regularly blocks our videos,
Google censors their search results to exclude or downgrade our websites;
credit card processing companies refuse to deal with revisionist outlets;
PayPal closes any account used for, quote, “denial” activities;
and so do other banks on occasion.
Internet service providers delete our websites,
and in some cases, the phone companies owning the internet backbone
deny our servers any access to the internet.
The list could go on, but you get the picture.
Not the revisionists are screaming at the top of their lungs
to drown out the truth and to get their flawed message across.
There is no other group of people on this planet
who are so successfully gagged and muzzled as we are.
Dr. Lipstadt is the individual with the highest profile
among those arguing to censor us
and to deny us any right to be heard.
But what is freedom of speech worth,
if there is a lobby so powerful
that they can make sure nobody hears us?
Their power to put just about anyone under pressure is incredible.
What does that teach us?
Well, if you want to know who controls your country,
find out whom you cannot criticize or disagree with
without having to deal with career- or life-destroying retaliation.
Hence the shoe is on the other foot, Dr. Lipstadt:
Yes, we revisionists are right,
but the Lobby screams the loudest,
so they get all the points.
Now to the next clip
where Dr. Lipstadt says somethings that’s very true:
When someone makes an outrageous claim,
even though they may hold one of the highest offices in the land,
if not the world,
we must say to them:
Where is the proof?
Where is the evidence?
We must hold their feet to the fire!
Yeah!!!
That’s exactly what we revisionists have been saying and doing all along.
We have been asking those in power,
and those who have spread powerful messages
with the help of those in power.
They did spread outrageous claims about mass-murder chambers
operated with • high voltage,
• with steam,
• with vacuum,
• or with chlorine
• with Zyklon B,
• with diesel exhaust,
• or with bottled carbon monoxide.
Together with Dr. Lipstadt, we ask:
• Where is the proof for these homicidal gas chambers?
• Where is the evidence for one single gassed inmate?
We ask those making outrageous claims about mass graves:
• Where are they located?
• How big are they?
• How many corpses did or do they contain?
• What was their cause and time of death?
• What is the identity of the victims?
• Can it be determined with certainty
who the perpetrators were?
Contrary to what many think,
this is not trivial at all,
in particular when talking about
the territory of the former Soviet Union.
In a land where millions were killed
by communist atrocities prior to the war,
where millions more died during the war of many causes,
and where millions died during the postwar purges
and ongoing communist atrocities,
how can we be certain that a mass grave
located in the former Soviet Union
contains victims of German atrocities,
rather than victims of any of the other tragedies?
In addition, we also ask those
making outrageous claims about mass cremations
of thousands of corpses every day:
• How was that possible, technically speaking,
be it in crematories or on pyres?
• And where are the traces of those cremated?
And to be absolutely clear:
Just because a powerful person claims something,
that doesn’t make it true.
In fact, we can generalize that statement:
Just because any person claims anything,
that doesn’t make it true either.
It doesn’t matter whether that person
is the President of the United States
or a Holocaust survivor.
A claim is not evidence.
It requires evidence
before it can be accepted as true.
Now to the last two clips,
which I’ve merged together.
Here, Dr. Lipstadt tries to be funny,
but strictly speaking, it backfires on her. Here she goes:
Holocaust denial?
The flat-earth folks?
The Elvis-is-alive people?
I should study them?
The earth is not flat!
The climate is changing!
Elvis is not alive!
And most importantly:
truth and fact are under assault!
Of course, she is absolutely right.
And I can add here
that we DID go to the moon,
that evolution is not just a theory but does exist,
and that pigs cannot fly,
plus, and that’s where things backfire on her:
Corpses don’t burn fast and by themselves,
as has been claimed by “survivors.”
Mass graves don’t disappear tracelessly,
as is also one of the standard stories
told about the Holocaust.
Or consider the claim that corpses were burned in deep trenches in a swampy area
—not possible
diesel exhaust is unsuited for mass murder,
because killing with it takes hours at best,
or worst, rather.
Zyklon B leaves tell-tale traces in masonry,
but we don’t find them in the walls of the buildings at Auschwitz
where mass gassings are said to have been carried out.
You cannot squeeze 20 people onto 10 square feet,
as several witnesses have claimed,
or 25 corpses into a cubic meter,
as some want to make us believe
in order to make the claimed death toll
of the so-called extermination camps
fit to the limited volume of disturbed soil found there.
Or take the claim by some “survivor”
that mass graves squirted blood geysers.
I could go on for hours telling stories like this.
All this tells us is that people lie and exaggerate on occasion.
Ask yourself.
If you lied on occasion in your life,
can you seriously expect
that all five million holocaust survivors
have been truthful at all times?
What I am getting at is the following:
The orthodox Holocaust narrative is full of
logically, physically, and technically impossible or untrue claims.
In that respect, these aspects of the narrative
resemble the flat-earth theory,
creationism, moon-landing denial, etc.
Hence, the shoe is once more on the other foot.
It is true that revisionists deny some aspects of the orthodox narrative,
but Lipstadt and her ilk are evidence deniers,
fact deniers,
logic deniers,
you name it.
Apart, comparing revisionism
with any of the wacky themes mentioned by Dr. Lipstadt
misses the main feature
that set revisionists miles apart from the rest.
No one denying climate change,
evolution, the moon landings,
the spherical nature of Earth,
or that Elvis is dead,
is censored, dragged into courts,
denied any defense, and sent to prison.
That treatment is reserved for revisionists,
who are thus sharing Galileo’s fate.
So, with all her dodging the facts
and demonizing her opponents,
the question is:
What are you afraid of,
Deborah debate-denier Lipstadt?
Thank you for watching this presentation.
The rest of this movie
merely contains several lists of movies and books
which you can consult in case you want to learn more
about what revisionists really say,
what their arguments are,
and what evidence they have to support their claims.
Most of the material listed here
is available as free downloads
from our website at
www.HolocaustHandbooks.com.
Feel free to take advantage of it.