The massacre of Jews at Czestochowa (debunked)

In my last post, I discussed the claim made by Holocaust fanatics that on September 4, 1939, the German invaders carried out a massacre of Jewish civilians in the Polish city of Czestochowa. I showed that no one seems to know how many people were killed in this alleged massacre and that most of the figures seem to have been invented out of thin air. Certainly, it was obvious from the figures that the victims consisted of a mixture of both Jews and Poles, so there is, in fact, no case for any belief that the Germans massacred Jews per se. They didn't kill any Jews for being Jews, and all the books and websites which suggest that they did are lying to you.

The question of how many Jews were killed is a misleading one, because here, as throughout the entire so-called Holocaust, the Germans killed Jews who were fighting them as partisans, not Jews just because they happened to be Jews. The story of what happened at Czestochowa is a classic case of the deliberate and systematic misrepresentation of German/partisan warfare in Poland and eastern Europe as a series of German massacres. What the mainstream books and websites usually don't tell you is that on September 4, 1939, the Germans were still fighting to take control of Czestochowa. Although regular Polish troops had evacuated the city on the night of September 3-4, 1939, German troops were engaged for most of September 4 in combat with partisans, who were sniping at them in a reasonably well co-ordinated effort to defend the city. The figures given for enemy fatalities in the "Bericht ueber Tschenstochau" (mentioned in the previous post) would have been for partisans killed in action, not civilians massacred.

The Germans were so perturbed by mendacious press reports that they had been committing atrocities against the Catholic population of Czestochowa that on the morning of September 5, 1939, they flew in from Berlin a number of reporters from various countries to let them see for themselves what was happening there. Among those flown in was a leading American journalist, Louis P. Lochner of the Associated Press. Lochner's report of what he learned during his day in Czestochowa was widely published in the American press on September 7, 1939. I reproduce his report below.

This report, not the lies of the Holocaust disinformation complex which seeks to persuade you that the first thing the Germans did when they captured a Polish city was massacre the Jews, tells you in plain language what was really happening there. What was happening was that Germans were fighting partisans.

At one point Lochner refers to the snipers as civilians, which is obviously misleading. They may have been wearing 'civilian attire,' but they were civilians only in the sense that they were not part of the regular Polish army. The snipers apprehended by the Germans were, moreover, not executed. They were taken to hurriedly improvised stockades and then internment camps. Those who had killed German officers were transported to Sachsenhausen concentration camp in Germany, where, according to mainstream Holocaust sources, they were treated as the lowest of the low. No distinction was made between Polish and Jewish partisans at any stage of the process.

Holocaust 'facts' - just make 'em up!

Yesterday I came across a weblog entry by a Holocaust fanatic who declared that there was no disputing the 'historical facts.' The problem is, as this person apparently doesn't realise, is that it is precisely the 'historical facts' which are in dispute. (What the hell does he think people are arguing about, if it's not the facts?) Anyone who attempts to study the Holocaust seriously will soon discover that there are no 'facts,' for Holocaust 'facts' are manufactured at will, when and as the occasion demands.

Every single aspect of the so-called Holocaust turns out, upon close examination, to dissolve into empty allegations. For example, the Germans took over the town of Czestochowa in Poland on the evening of September 3-4, 1939. Many sources claim that a massacre of Jews followed the next day. OK, let's get down to specifics. How many Jews did the Germans kill?

This website, which cites as its source The Encyclopedia of the Holocaust, Israel Gutman, Editor in Chief, Macmillan Publishing Company: New York, 1990, mentions no massacre at all:
http://www.humboldt.edu/~rescuers/book/damski/dlinks/czest.html

Let's work our way up from zero. The lowest figure I've seen is 60. Please bear in mind that this is the total number of civilians killed, only a part of which would have consisted of Jews:

'On September 4 ... people were hunted down in the town, on the pretext that an attempt had been made to fire at German soldiers from one of the houses. ... About 60 people were seized and shot.'
http://felsztyn.tripod.com/germaninvasion/id4.html

The numbers keep rising from there, although they are usually for both Jews and Poles, not Jews alone:

According to a professional Holocaust scholar who emailed me today, German sources report 96 men and three women killed, thus a total of 99. (This would be both Jews and Poles.) I was told that the source for the information was Commander I/IR42, report "Bericht ueber Tschenstochau", Bundesarchiv-Militaerarchiv RH37/904, p. 35. Whether this report is authentic or not, I have no idea, but if it is authentic, it shows you that many people are deliberately inflating the numbers.

Now we break the 100 barrier:

The Nazis entered ‘Czestochowa on Sep. 3, 1939, and the following day they killed over a hundred Jews’:
http://www.ess.uwe.ac.uk/genocide/gcpol5.htm

‘The Nazis marched into Czestochowa on Sunday, September 3, 1939 ... The next day, which became known as Bloody Monday, approximately 150 people were shot dead in the streets.’ - Wikipedia.
The figure of 150 is also cited here:
http://www.benkazez.com/dan/crarg/town-histories.php

Lord Russell wrote in his book Scourge of the Swastika (1954) that this day ‘180 Jews were shot in the city of Czestochowa for refusing to burn the Torah.’

Die Zeit claims 'over 200' Jewish and Polish men, women and children:
http://www.stsg.de/main/dresden/archiv/presse/bilder/_.pdf

This webpage says exactly 227, although once again this is a figure for BOTH Jews and Poles: 'Soldaten des Infanterieregiments 42 treiben in der Strazacka-Straße und auf dem Marktplatz jüdische und polnische Einwohner zusammen. Bei Exekutionen kommen 227 Männer, Frauen und Kinder ums Leben.'
http://www.ghwk.de/2006-neu/raum5.htm

The basis for the 227 figure, I have been informed, was 'an exhumation that had been initiated by the German authorities on the city area' in 1940. Why the Germans would bother conducting an exhumation to determine how many people they had killed when they already had a report giving the precise figure of 99 is beyond me. It's more likely they were exhuming a mass grave to determine how many of their own people (whether soldiers or ethnic Germans) had been killed by someone else.

Anyway, let's keep moving upwards:

This page says several hundred: 'Einige hundert wurden als Vergeltung für eine ungeklärte Schießerei ermordet.'
http://www.berlinonline.de/berliner-zeitung/spezial/kritiken/buecher/44607/index.php

Another website says that ‘the Nazis killed 300 Jews, in an action known as "Bloody Monday"’:
http://www.deathcamps.org/occupation/czestochowa%20ghetto.html

‘More than 300 Jews were killed':
http://yad-vashem.org.il/about_holocaust/month_in_holocaust/june/june_lexicon/czestochowa.html
The figure of 'more than 300' is also cited here:
http://www.holocaust-chronologie.de/chronologie/1939/september/01-07.html

Now, just for fun, let's multiply the highest figure so far by twenty times (who's gonna stop us?):

Leo Scher says that when the Germans arrived in Czestochowa they ‘gather[ed] us together, and they told us to lay down on the ground face down. All the men, Jewish and Poles. … Then they killed, in the city of Czestochowa, they killed about six thousand men just for not obeying the order’:
http://www.southerninstitute.info/holocaust_education/leo_scher.html

So how many Jews did the Germans kill in the alleged massacre of September 4, 1939?

Fake Nazi Atrocity Photo 2

Ummmmm - if I wanted to hang anyone, I think I'd use gallows or some other advanced technology which doesn't let them keep their feet on the ground.

Seriously, I think this photo was meant to be cropped at the bottom before being published.

SOURCE: http://www.ushmm.org/uia-cgi/uia_doc/photos/943?hr=null
CAPTION: Two Jews are executed by hanging in Olkusz.
Date: 1940 - 1942
Credit: USHMM, courtesy of Schwartzbaum (hmmm I wonder who this Jew is? Perhaps he's the actual photographer)

Guardian 'Comment is Free' (obviously not)

British (Zionist-run) newspaper The Guardian has a chat section entitled Comment is Free, where Holocaust revisionism is currently being discussed. Since 'comment is free,' I though I might as well have my say. However, this is what happens when a Holocaust revisionist tries to post a comment:





I don't know how they do this, but I can only assume that they have a person there whose job is to censor comments in real time - as they are actually written - so that only approved posts go through. In other words, the Guardian has, from its point of view, what must be the perfect discussion of Holocaust revisionism - one without Holocaust revisionists!

Anyway, since I went to all the trouble of writing it, here's the post I had intended to contribute to the Holocaust revisionism thread:

The truth is that most people commenting on Holocaust revisionism in this thread really don't have a right to do so, because they know nothing about it.

If you've only ever been exposed to Holocaust orthodoxy you inevitably end up thinking that contrary views must be wrong, because you have no idea what the contrary arguments actually are. It's the same when you've only heard one version of any event. You simply accept that that is the way it happened because your mind has not as yet been opened to alternative possibilities. The anti-revisionist campaign of harrassment and persecution is designed to make you feel obliged to keep your minds closed.

I should point out that I can speak from experience as I used to believe in the Holocaust myself - indeed, I used to teach it - until I began to read revisionist works. I soon discovered that the revisionists had by far the better arguments. Once I knew what the arguments were, and made sure that I understood them properly, the case for the Holocaust quickly fell apart.

A few further points need to be made here:

1) David Irving isn't much of a revisionist and doesn't deserve to be mentioned as he often is as if he were the leader of the movement. In fact, he seems to be an object of so much media attention precisely because his thinking on the subject is so terribly muddy (perhaps by design, I don't know). The key figures in revisionism today are Carlo Mattogno (Italy), Juergen Graf (Switzerland), Germar Rudolf (Germany), Ingrid Weckert (Germany) and Udo Walendy (Germany). I should not to neglect major pioneers like Arthur Butz (US) and Robert Faurission (France). I would also strongly recommend the writings of Paul Grubach.

Rudolf has an excellent personal website at which you can learn a great deal about his life, his transition to revisionism and the campaign of persecution against him:

http://germarrudolf.com

Grubach's writing are available here:

http://www.codoh.com/author/grubach.html

2. Revisionists are rarely pro-Nazi. The first major revisionist was a French socialist (and former communist) Paul Rassinier. Most German revisionists were CDU supporters until they began to understand the issues more clearly. As for myself, because I am extremely concerned about global warming, and because I believe that the labour parties in all countries are shams whose real function is to mislead the people, I vote Green and have done so nearly all my life.

3. Revisionists agree with establishment historians that the Nazi state singled out the Jewish people for special and cruel treatment. The only real point of contention is whether the Nazis planned to exterminate them or deport them to the east. The evidence supports the latter conclusion. In a nutshell, this is all the fuss is about.

4. Half the people I know who complain about revisionists tell me that they know that the Holocaust is 'true' because they happen to know a Holocaust survivor. But isn't every Holocaust survivor - and there were quite literally hundreds of thousands of them, although of course most are deceased now - an argument against the idea that the Germans set out to exterminate European Jewry? As Norman Finkelstein's mother said, referring to those who receive compensation from Holocaust funds, if everyone is a Holocaust survivor, who did the Nazis kill?

5. Many people believe in the Holocaust because they know nothing about how to interpret evidence. If you don't - and be honest with yourself! - go to this website and watch the 4 hour video. It will teach you, in 30 entertaining episodes:

http://www.onethirdoftheholocaust.com/

6. Most people are so emotional about the subject that they lack all objectivity. For example, a Polish student of mine became very upset when I remarked that I didn't believe in the Holocaust. Her response was to ask me if I was calling her grandmother a liar. I tried not to respond emotionally and to take advantage of the situation to find out what piece of information had been passed down in her family. What had happened? Her grandmother had told her that she had thrown a jug of boiling water over her feet so that the Germans wouldn't take her away to work as a slave labourer. I personally wouldn't call this evidence for the Holocaust. When I told her so, she responded that she didn't want to talk about the subject any more because she was too upset!

7. The last comment I want to make is this: since Orwell's 1984 was published after the war we all became aware that the sign of a totalitarian government was its suppression of thought crime. Well, the totalitarian state is here and the revisionists are the thought criminals it persecutes. And yet most of you don'give a damn, do you?

'Bloody Wednesday' - without the blood

A great many Holocaust-related websites take the form of catalogues of horrors. The problem is that most of the horrors turn out to be either inauthentic or simply not all that horrifying. Take, for example, 'Bloody Wednesday,' a German reprisal action in the Polish town of Olkusz on July 31, 1940, which has earned considerable attention from the folks at Yad Vashem. 'According to the information in the files, the police activity on July 31, 1940 came in the wake of the killing of a German policeman, Ernest Kaddatz by members of the Polish underground on July 16, 1940. All the Jewish men were concentrated in three places: next to Czarna Gora, next to the old Electric Company installations, and in the market square. ... The collection of photographs from Olkusz provides rare and compelling testimony of a German police operation in Poland, in which Jews were especially humiliated and maltreated because they were identified as Jews.'

In their online article, "Ordinary Men, Extraordinary Photos," Judith Levin and Daniel Uziel (referred to henceforth as L and U), discuss the German photographic record of the events of 'Bloody Wednesday.' They imply that the photos possess outstanding importance as a record of the Germans' mistreatment of the Jews. "This is one of the few cases in which we possess documentation both of police actions and of the aberrations committed during them," they state. L and U examine four of the photos - the four which, we can be sure, they deemed the most incriminating. They number them photos 12-15. (We don't know how many photos were taken at Olkusz altogether, but I have seen at least another four.) Anyway, let's see the photos, starting with Photo 12:

According to L and U's caption, this is a picture of 'German policemen and SD men conduct[ing] a search during an arrest of Jews.’ Well, whatever this is a picture of, it's not very unsettling. It just seems to be a picture of two people - it's not even obvious that they are Jews - with their hands up. Whether or not anyone is being searched, I see nothing troubling about anything the Germans can be seen doing in this photo.

Presumably, the other three photos are more disturbing. Let's move along to Photo 13:

According to L and U, Photo 13 is a photo of Rabbi Moshe Isaac Hangerman, 'barefoot and wearing desecrated tefillin (phylacteries), [being] forced to pray for the amusement of the police as the townsmen lay on the ground.' If if he IS praying - and there could be other interpretations of what he is doing -
how do we know the Germans made him do so for their amusement? How do we know he did not ask to be allowed to pray? In any event, the two Germans smiling in the picture are not smiling because they are taking sadistic pleasure in the rabbi's predicament - they're smiling simply because their picture is being taken. You can tell because they are both looking directly towards the photographer. Those indifferent to the presence of the photographer are not smiling, which they would be, if in fact the rabbi was a source of amusement.

Perhaps Photo 14 is a little more 'aberrational'? A little 'bloodier'? Here it is:

L and U describe this picture as 'police and SD men are standing and smiling around a group of kneeling Jews.' In Holocaust discourse, the observation that the Jews are 'kneeling' is meant to imply that the Germans made the Jews kneel in order to humiliate them. However, as one can easily see, the Jews are NOT all kneeling. At least a third of them, in fact, are standing up, and they take up the centre of the picture. The kneeling Jews are therefore not kneeling because the Germans are trying to humiliate them, but simply because they are trying to squeeze into the picture. Although it is true that nearly all the Germans are smiling, and only one Jew is, we have what seems to be just a group photo, not an exercise in anti-semitism.

Last, photo 15.

Once again, L and U try their best to make this photo seem offensive. They introduce it thus: 'Photos of this type are well known and sometimes populated by German soldiers, in contexts in which the nature of their relationship with the Jewish population should not have moved them to engage in abuse.' Unfortunately for their purposes, the photo furnishes no evidence of abuse whatsoever. The boy in the centre of the photo, who would seem to be its subject, may or may not be a Jew. Whether he is Jewish or not, he does not appear in the least bit concerned about anything. In fact, he seems to be amused himself. Even the Jews watching the scene from the sidelines are amused. Unfortunately, it's not possible to see what the subject of the picture actually is or what prompted the smiles all round. Whatever it may be, it's not 'abuse' and there is nothing the least bit offensive about this picture.

I am starting to think that L and U chose to use the word 'aberrations' simply because aberration was the most they could ask anyone to try to see in any of these pictures. And, as it happens, the 'aberrations' all turn out to be in the minds of L and U and not in the photos, which contain nary a hint of 'aberration' or 'abuse.' The German photos lend no support whatsoever to the view that at Olkusz 'Jews were especially humiliated and maltreated because they were identified as Jews.' They merely support the claim that the Germans forced the townsmen 'to spend the day prostrate and face-down' on the ground, which punishment, being non-violent in the Gandhian sense, can hardly be considered a draconian response to the murder of a German gendarme.

By the way, L and U state that only one Jew was killed on 'Bloody Wednesday,' which is bad enough but many fewer than the word 'bloody' usually brings to mind. Admittedly, the term 'Bloody Wednesday' is due to the claim that 'Throughout the day, the German policemen kicked the men and beat them with their rifle butts.' However, the photos do not affirm that anybody - Jews or anyone else - was kicked or beaten at all. All extant photos show Jews perfectly unharmed. Somehow I don't think U2 should ditch their anthem 'Bloody Sunday,' the song which commemorates the British killing of 13 unarmed civil rights protestors in Ulster in the early 70s, anytime soon. By British standards, whatever happened at Olkusz, it was pretty much a picnic.

FURTHER COMMENTS

According to Yad Vashem and other Holohoax websites, the total number of people killed by the Germans at Olkusz on July 31, 1941, was three - two Poles and one Jew. I am unable to account for the claim on the official Olkusz town website, which states that 'On July, 31, 1940, on the day, which later would be called Bloody Wednesday, Germans shot 20 citizens and tortured hundreds of others.' It seems to me that you can just invent these figures out of thin air, while, just as easily, you can describe lying on the ground as 'torture.' This kind of boundless rhetorical inflation is precisely the sort that alerted many students - such as myself - to the absence of verifiable fact from Holocaust discourse.

We should also not take seriously the claim that the men were forced to lie face down on the ground all day. In a memoir written by one of the men, Jacob Schwarzfitter, it is stated that the townsmen (males 15 to 60) were forced to remain lying down from early in the morning until twelve o'clock, that is to say, noon. So clearly we are talking about much less than a day, only about six or seven hours.

Last, this operation did not only target Jews, and therefore cannot reasonably be represented as an anti-semitic operation. As the Yad Vashem website admits, both Jews and Poles were forced to lie down: ' ... a German police unit arrived in Olkusz on July 31, 1940, and gathered all male residents over 14 years old, including all the Jewish men in the main square. There the non-Jews and the Jews were forced to lie on the ground ... "'

LINKS
Judith Levin and Daniel Uziel, "Ordinary Men, Extraordinary Photos."
http://yad-vashem.org.il/about_holocaust/studies/ordinary/levein_uziel_full.html
http://yad-vashem.org.il/exhibitions/from_our_photo_archive/data/olkusz.html
http://www.umig.olkusz.pl/pages/eng/historia_eng.htm
http://library5.gl.iit.edu/summaries/schwa_s.html

OTHER 'BLOODY WEDNESDAY' PHOTOS
http://www.zchor.org/olkusz/olkusz3.jpg
http://www.zchor.org/olkusz/olkusz_files/image004.jpg
http://igaal.azran.free.fr/Jew/Yad/Galerie3/images/olkusz2_jpg.jpg
http://igaal.azran.free.fr/Jew/Yad/Galerie3/images/olkusz3_jpg.jpg
http://www.zwoje-scrolls.com/shoah/akcja_b.jpg

Fake Nazi Atrocity Photo 1

One of the most well-known photographs which allegedly documents the Holocaust is a photo allegedly taken by a German soldier of a German soldier shooting a woman and child, while men are working at the scene digging their grave.

This photo, however, in no sense documents the 'Holocaust.' For argument's sake, let's assume for a moment that the photo is authentic. First, there is no evidence that it depicts a German soldier. According to Hugo Haig-Thomas, the 'uniform is quite wrong. The soldier in the photograph wears boots or puttees which come up almost to his knees whereas German soldiers wore boots which came only halfway up their calves. What is more, the soldier in the photograph is wearing wide breeches-type trousers which the German soldiers never wore in the field.' Another commentator observes that 'his cap looks more Soviet than German. He's wearing a Russian or Soviet uniform, that in itself is enough to question the provenance of this photograph.'

Second, the photo provides no indications that the woman and child are Jews - it's impossible on the basis of this photo to ascribe them any nationality or religion. Third, even if the man is a German soldier and the woman and child are Jews, it's still far from clear that he's shooting AT them. In fact, his rifle appears to be pointing beyond them. The picture can therefore be interpreted as something other than an atrocity scene. Writes Haig-Thomas, 'To the right of the picture you will see a group of men who are taking cover behind what appears to be some farm machinery from shooting or some danger coming from the right. The woman with the child is running forward to join the men taking cover. The soldier is, in fact, firing beyond the woman in the direction of the danger.' Fourth, as Bradley R. Smith has asked, if the men on the right are digging a grave, where is the removed material? Why would they scatter it about rather than piling it right next to the hole?' The taking cover explanation seems to make more sense.

The reality, though, is that the photo is a fake - if you look carefully, you will see that the image of the woman and child looks unnatural, as though the woman's feet are not QUITE touching the ground, a sign that it was inserted after the original picture was taken. It's clear that some trouble was taken to do this, but that certain obvious mistakes were made in the process, such as fixing her location in the photo in a way that made it look as if the soldier was shooting beyond her. This was the result of the photo faker placing her too far in the foreground, presumably to make sure that the picture was visually striking. This may be why the photo shows two rifles at the far left. They seem to be pointing in her direction, and were presumably added to reinforce the impression that this was about the woman being shot.

The name of the photo faker is Jerzy Tomaszewski who, during the war, was was a photographer for the Polish resistance and government-in-exile. Tomaszewski has given himself away by claiming copyright on the photo. The official story is that this is an authentic German photo which was contained in a letter sent home by a German soldier who was on the Eastern Front and intercepted in 1942 by the Polish Home Army, which monitored mail from the east that passed through the post office in Warsaw. Letters and photos of interest were copied and sent on to the Polish-Government- in-exile in London. Reportedly the words "Ukraine 1942, Jewish Aktion, Ivanogrod" are written on the back of the photo.

If this story is true, there can be no question of copyright. How can Tomaszewski own the copyright for a photograph taken by a German soldier? Clearly, he has been caught up in his own lies.

In any case, the story is clearly preposterous and gives rise to numerous questions:

1) What was the name of the German soldier? (Since his letter was intercepted, it should contain that information.)
2) Why would a soldier have sent a photo like this home? (Soldiers involved in atrocities would not have wanted to advertise that fact to their relatives and friends back home.)
3) Why would German censors allow a soldier to send home an incriminating photo of an atrocity?
4) What is the name of the member of the Polish resistance who claims to have intercepted the letter containing the photo?
5) Where's the letter? Let's see it, to confirm that it actually exists.
6) What does the letter say about the photo? (Because if it doesn't say anything about the photo we have to trust the word of the unknown member of the Polish resistance who we are told intercepted it that the photo was found inside the same envelope as the letter.)
7) Why doesn't the USHMM post online the reverse of the photo, so we can see for ourselves how it is identified?
8) Where is the the negative from which the photo was made? (For those who don't know much about photo fakery, you can usually only tell for certain whether a photo is fake or not by examining the negative.)

Without answers to all these questions, there are clearly no considerations whatsoever for regarding the photo as anything other than a fake.

My conclusion is that Tomaszewski was trying to create a Nazi atrocity photo that would be as visually effective as the famous shots taken during the Spanish Civil War by American photographer Robert Capa.

LINKS
http://www.codoh.com/incon/daspiktur.html
http://freedomspeace.blogspot.com/2006/01/holocaust-photo-is-it-authentic.html
http://freedomspeace.blogspot.com/2006/01/shooting-of-woman-with-child-holocaust.html
http://www.guardian.co.uk/secondworldwar/story/0,14058,1537656,00.html