Anyone here a statistician? [the Hollander brothers]

[curioussoul]

I want a head count into and out of the camps.

The entire crux of the Holocaust story is the fact that there is no record of what happened to the Jews not registered in the camps, so a "head count" simply is not possible. Whenever you read about a transport of Jews being "gassed on arrival" at Auschwitz, all that means is that X amount of Jews arrived in the camp and were given registration numbers and accomodation in the camp, whereas the remaining Jews "disappeared". Often times you'll see a transport of 1,500 Jews arriving, 500 of them being registered in the camp as inmates, and the remaining deportees are not mentioned anywhere. Exterminationists insist these Jews were categorically gassed on arrival, but there is no evidence they were.

This is incorrect. Incoming transports and selections were noted in contemporary sources, including the Sonderkommando manuscripts and the camp underground reports, as being taken to the gas chambers and killed there. Some of these are quite specific and dated, others generalised, all are still evidence. The Auschwitz album photo-documents the sorting of an incoming transport of Hungarian Jews and has a section on 'unfit Jews' who are photographed disturbingly near to a crematorium. The Sonderkommando photographs include a blurry image of naked women walking towards something, which is similarly circumstantial evidence, but the written contemporary sources are direct evidence. Also rather direct is one of the 1944 air photos which when magnified at the behest of Michael Shermer and Alex Grobman revealed a line entering one of the crematoria.

Clandestine reports and tabulations from the Polish Underground Resistance Movement and from individual inmates inside of Auschwitz alleging that prisoners were murdered wholesale is not an official record of what happened to non-registered inmates as a rule. Just as reports from the Germans alleging resettlement in the Occupied Eastern Territories (in line with the official German policy at that time) also are not official records of what specifically happened to Jews that arrived in Auschwitz but were not registered in the camp. You know all this, so stop pretending otherwise. For the most part, actual tabulations by inmates don't outright allege gassings but rather list the number of inmates arriving and from what country, etc. So to pretend that there are actual records of arriving Jews being "gassed", let alone from official German sources, is outright nonsense and why you're never going to be taken seriously as a 'scholar' of the Holocaust. You're an anti-revisionist activist, nothing more. As for the Auschwitz Album, it's nothing short of laughable to imply that the Germans themselves were actually documenting their own super-secret extermination program, so in that sense the photograph proves the very opposite of gassings. As for the blurry Sonderkommando photographs of naked women washing themselves and holding literal buckets of water, they obviously do not prove anything in this regard. If you're just going to list random pieces of evidence you might as well just slap me with The Case For Auschwitz and be done with it. No one is interested in rehashing debunked evidence that's been refuted literally decades ago.

[Stubble]

Someone should start a thread on 'The Auschwitz Album'.

That it follows a group of jews with their property to 'the Canada section', before they were sent to other camps doesn't seem to me to be 'proof of homicidal gassings' in any way. At all.

Edit;

Done: https://www.codohforum.com/viewtopic.php?t=357

[fireofice]

It should be noted that the Auschwitz Album disproves the extermination claims at Auschwitz. The fact that smoke is not coming from the chimneys and smoke from the pyres isn't everywhere is another piece of evidence in favor of the revisionist position.

https://holocaustencyclopedia.com/docum ... album/380/

[Nessie]

Someone should start a thread on 'The Auschwitz Album'.

That it follows a group of jews with their property to 'the Canada section', before they were sent to other camps doesn't seem to me to be 'proof of homicidal gassings' in any way. At all.

Edit;

Done: https://www.codohforum.com/viewtopic.php?t=357

No trained investigator would present one piece of evidence as proof. They would recognise "Canada" as part of the circumstantial evidence, in this case, evidence of mass theft of personal possessions, which is consistent with the owners of that property being killed, rather than resettled.

[SanityCheck]

Clandestine reports and tabulations from the Polish Underground Resistance Movement and from individual inmates inside of Auschwitz alleging that prisoners were murdered wholesale is not an official record of what happened to non-registered inmates as a rule. Just as reports from the Germans alleging resettlement in the Occupied Eastern Territories (in line with the official German policy at that time) also are not official records of what specifically happened to Jews that arrived in Auschwitz but were not registered in the camp. You know all this, so stop pretending otherwise. For the most part, actual tabulations by inmates don't outright allege gassings but rather list the number of inmates arriving and from what country, etc. So to pretend that there are actual records of arriving Jews being "gassed", let alone from official German sources, is outright nonsense and why you're never going to be taken seriously as a 'scholar' of the Holocaust. You're an anti-revisionist activist, nothing more. As for the Auschwitz Album, it's nothing short of laughable to imply that the Germans themselves were actually documenting their own super-secret extermination program, so in that sense the photograph proves the very opposite of gassings. As for the blurry Sonderkommando photographs of naked women washing themselves and holding literal buckets of water, they obviously do not prove anything in this regard. If you're just going to list random pieces of evidence you might as well just slap me with The Case For Auschwitz and be done with it. No one is interested in rehashing debunked evidence that's been refuted literally decades ago.

No, it wasn't "refuted literally decades ago", nor even in the most recent Mattogno screeds.

It's very convenient when you attack a strawman and misrepresent someone else's argument. Nice try claiming I was trying "to pretend that there are actual records of arriving Jews being "gassed", let alone from official German sources". I very clearly stated that I was referring to contemporary sources, not to 'records' or 'official German sources'.

Contemporary non-German sources quite clearly informed the understanding in Poland (from an earlier stage) and from 1944 around the world that Auschwitz was an extermination camp using gas chambers. There were many which were not known immediately after the war, including fugitive accounts reaching the Soviets, but also the full range of camp underground and Polish underground reports, and several of the Sonderkommando manuscripts (which contrary to a claim you've made elsewhere are widely used by historians today).

These sources are just as contemporary as the 'official German records', and the combination is clearly what one finds foregrounded in document editions like the VEJ/PMJ series, and in works emphasising diaries - which is simply recognising that the perpetrators don't get to dictate what counts as historical sources by not writing things down, burning their records or covering things up or denying access to archives, a pattern we see globally in the modern era with mass violence and genocide. It doesn't mean that anything after May 8, 1945 is disregarded - but the value of contemporary sources from all perspectives should be obvious.

The end of the war in 1945 brought an absolute deluge of survivor accounts recorded across Europe, alongside a growing number of statements by SS officers and men, and their interrogations.

Transport records and the registration number series were supporting sources in most of the diverse investigations and trials over 1945-1949 involving Auschwitz - from the Jan Sehn commission to the two NTN trials in Poland, to IMT and some NMT cases, to the Dutch Red Cross and Belgian investigations, etc. They were not always factored in to some of these cases (eg the British trials) or available (eg to DEGOB in Hungary).

An investigation like the Dutch Red Cross investigation contrasted transport lists and numbers with the testimonies of returning survivors, to identify how many had returned - this and not the exact number registered at Auschwitz was the crucial part, because in the Dutch case thousands had been taken off the trains at Cosel, to work in the Schmelt camp system. A non-returning deportee might have died in the Schmelt camps, been gassed on arrival at Birkenau, died in Auschwitz-Birkenau or died after transfer in another KZ.

These various fates were reported by very large numbers of eyewitneses, whose claims were being corroborated by other witnesses, investigations (the Dutch were in touch with the Poles and exchanged at least some information), already known wartime reports, all pointing towards gassing as a major cause of death for the non-returning deportees.


Since literally every conventional account of Auschwitz from 1945 onwards, whether an investigation or book, references testimonies and most reference contemporary sources as well, the 'revisionist' insistence on pretending that only official German sources matter already looks like a deliberate misrepresentation and misunderstanding of the evidentiary landscape.

Van Pelt's The Case for Auschwitz and many other books do not convey the full extent of this early evidence from contemporary sources and the immediate postwar investigations. For most people's purposes, except of course for 'revisionists', it suffices to read about some accounts, and to learn about the ZBL Auschwitz crematoria documents. Van Pelt presented a stripped-down version to patiently explain things to a layman, he didn't present quantified evidence from the ChGK investigation, Sehn commission, Hoess and Auschwitz SS Staff trials, he only discussed some of the contemporary sources and left out or did not know about others. Nobody has summed up all of this evidence, contemporary and testimonial, certainly not Mattogno. But none of the documents can be interpreted independently of this evidence.

'Revisionists' would like to disregard non-German sources so they can advance their weird reinterpretations of isolated German documents, forgetting that they have no corroborating sources from other provenances to support their whacked-out intepretations. By the time the Soviets and Poles had come across the Vergasungskeller memo, they had heard from lots of witnesses about gas chambers in the Birkenau crematoria, and there were other contemporary and wartime sources making the same point. No source has ever been found to confirm unequivocally that the space in question was an air raid shelter, carburetion chamber, delousing chamber or exclusively used as a morgue. Inventive arguments thirty to fifty years after the fact (from Butz to the 1990s drivel post-Pressac) don't constitute evidence.

[curioussoul]

For most people's purposes, except of course for 'revisionists', it suffices to read about some accounts, and to learn about the ZBL Auschwitz crematoria documents.

Not sure what you're trying to say here, except, obviously, to misrepresent and strawman revisionist research. Don't forget, there was a good 10-15 years when revisionists were conducting cutting edge primary research and all the orthodoxy could muster was a couple of guys online futilely attempting to find spelling errors and minor mistakes in the massive tomes of previously unknown archival research being published by revisionists. I'm not even joking. Sure, orthodox historians have stepped it up in the last decade or so, but given their ideological and legal constraints it's pretty dishonest to imply that revisionists are the ones lacking in scientific rigor.

[SanityCheck]

For most people's purposes, except of course for 'revisionists', it suffices to read about some accounts, and to learn about the ZBL Auschwitz crematoria documents.

Not sure what you're trying to say here, except, obviously, to misrepresent and strawman revisionist research. Don't forget, there was a good 10-15 years when revisionists were conducting cutting edge primary research and all the orthodoxy could muster was a couple of guys online futilely attempting to find spelling errors and minor mistakes in the massive tomes of previously unknown archival research being published by revisionists. I'm not even joking. Sure, orthodox historians have stepped it up in the last decade or so, but given their ideological and legal constraints it's pretty dishonest to imply that revisionists are the ones lacking in scientific rigor.

Since there's absolutely no coherent statement of 'revisionst' methodology anywhere, just some ad hoc remarks, refrains and implicit assumptions, it's amusing to see you try to exalt 'revisionists' as being rigorous.

Another problem with exalting 'rigour' is that 'revisionism' only has one subject, and a very narrow one at that, gas chambers, the idee fixe set in motion by Celine and Rassinier after 1945.

Most of the history of the persecution and murder of European Jews from 1933-1945 is ignored, nearly everything to do with the Third Reich between 1933-1945 is ignored, the broader context of the 1930s-1940s (with the 1932 famine, Great Terror, Stalinist violence, civil wars from Spain to Greece, the Heimatvertreibungen and other five to seven figure killing events) is ignored, the comparative cases of genocide, ethnic cleansing and mass violence globally are ignored. So too are approaches to the world wars, and wars and conflicts in general in the modern era.

So 'revisionism' is rather conspicuously advancing an 'isolated demand for rigor' for certain claims, which is a typical red flag for blatant partisanship, not scientific prowess.
https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/08/14/b ... for-rigor/

It exempts itself from conventional demands for rigour by failing to provide evidence to confirm its numerous conspiracy theories, or to corroborate its whacked-out interpretations of individual documents which have been isolated from context, and by objecting like a scalded cat to any requests to provide positive evidence for its claims of what really happened instead.

'Revisionism' simply isn't history how it is conventionally presented. It is a form of commentary on a narrow set of historical events with its own style. Much of it has shifted to memes on social media, after a phase of video 'documentaries'. Some of it looks more like media commentary than actual history. Most of the recognised genres of history (biography, social history, memory studies in the empirical sense, proper historiography) are not even attempted or are delivered at parodically incompetent levels.

Only a few practitioners (i.e. Carlo Mattogno) resemble historians in doing archival research, the average 'revisionist' author has done no archival research whatsoever. Conventional narrative presentation is avoided like the plague in favour of spotlighting isolated sources to attack. There are no appeals to external methodologies in textual analysis or source analysis which can be spotted. The fact that next to no 'revisionists' were ever educated as historians is not critical, since innumerable other researchers have written recognisable histories without history degrees or indeed any degrees.

'Rigour' could also imply empirical thoroughness - doing the research and doing the work. That's what you'd like to claim about Mattogno. The other authors get conveniently forgotten since this really has been a one-man show with some sidekicks for 25 or more years. (Kues should have been the informal Doktorkind of Mattogno but dropped out a dozen years ago.) But we see amusing patterns of Mattogno being eclipsed for research by the crowd-sourced products of the mainstream, and sometimes even by other individual amateur historians. Compare Mattogno's book on Chelmno with Patrick Montague's book on Chelmno. Montague is an independent reseacher and clearly did more research on the camp than Mattogno did. Hans Metzner did even more at HC blog, delving into collections Montague hadn't factored in, although German historians researching PhDs had discovered some of the more important sources from these collections in the 2000s, entirely unbeknownst to Mattogno as well as Montague.

Analytical thoroughness is another form of rigour. Close analyses of indvidual sources or source types, genres, collections are helpful as foundational background work, but then they need to be put together: the Sonderkommano manuscripts, Sonderkommando photos, Auschwitz Album, air photos, camp underground and fugitive reports, Glaser list, the sum total of accounts from survivors, bystanders and the SS, the ZBL Auschwitz archive, the camp records, and the records of other KZs. And so on.

Most histories and historical portrayals do not assemble all of the sources together for space reasons, and because readers can follow up with more extensive studies if they are interested. But if someone wishes to dispute an event, then they had better factor in all of the sources and not leave any out, otherwise the argument will fail fairly quickly if being reminded of even just one extra source might alter the whole picture. And they should remember to discuss the sources relevant for a particular point or phase together, not as with Mattogno and the 'Bunkers', leaving the Kremer diary for an entirely separate book.

[Archie]

Wait, we have an interesting development. Apparently the story is that Zoltan was hanged but managed to survive. Lmao.

Zoltan had indeed been hung by the Nazis back in 1944, but they were in such a rush to flee, they didn’t tie the knots well. Zolton fell between the trees and played dead until he could escape. He spent years wandering Europe and eventually settled in Yugoslavia, having believed his entire family had been murdered in the war.

https://aish.com/holocaust-survivors-mi ... s-brother/

Was just rereading this and had forgotten how ridiculous this story is.

Copying it below in case they delete.

"Holocaust Survivor’s Miraculous Reunion with His Brother" by Rabbi Lev Welton

Spoiler

The Satmar Rebbe once said “Anyone who has numbers on their arm has the power to give blessings.”

My father raised me to take this seriously and would always tell me to request a blessing from Holocaust survivors, whom he referred to as “Kedoshim”, aka “The holy ones.”

When I was eleven years old, my father Rabbi BenZion Welton would gently wake me up at 6 AM to bring me to shul. It was still dark outside. As we drove over to Beth Jacob in Oakland, California, I’d nap in the car. Then we’d walk down the thin hallway to the small “morning services” chapel tucked into a forgotten corner behind the magnificent main sanctuary.

I walked in the shadow of my father towards the door. I remember hearing the muffled sounds of prayer as my nostrils widened to take in the scent of freshly brewed coffee and deliciously old books. I sat on the pew in between the two great luminaries of my childhood, my father and Chabad RabbiYehuda Ferris.

The chapel could barely house the two dozen people that gathered there every morning to pray. There was only one person whom my father would never let me leave without shaking his hand. This was Holocaust survivor Ernie Hollander, of blessed memory.

Although I didn’t know it at the time, Ernie had come from a long line of rabbis that dated all the way back to his family's persecution in the Spanish Inquisition. His great grandfather was HaRav Shlomo (ben Yosef) Ganzfried, author of the Kitzur Shulchan Aruch. Ernie’s father was also a rabbi who owned a flour mill in Czechoslovakia. Ernie and his seven siblings lived happily with their father and mother until the Nazis invaded and murdered his father before his very eyes. Ernie and the rest of the children were sent to Auschwitz. He never saw his mother again.

When the war ended, Ernie and his baby brother Alex tried to track down the rest of their family but they had all been exterminated during the war. Ernie heard a rumor that his older brother Zoltan had survived the camps only to be hung from a tree by Nazi soldiers fleeing the Allied Forces.

Devastated, Ernie fled to the only place a Jew could always call home: the land of Israel.

While in Israel, he married his wife on a rooftop in Haifa with only $3 to finance their entire ceremony. It was Nov. 29, 1947, the same day the United Nations voted for a resolution that would pave the way for the establishment of the modern State of Israel. Before their wedding ceremony was over, war had broken out. Ernie ran off to join the fight.

He served in the Irgun and battled in the Israeli War of Independence. He was wounded three times but he never turned back, even when his wife telegraphed him that their daughter Beverly had been born. Eventually, they left Israel and moved to California. Together, they opened a bakery selling Hungarian strudel in the Jewish shtetl of Oakland. He spoke with a thick accent, loved Yiddish, and referred to God as "Oybeshter", the One above".

Although he loved the smiles of people who frequented his bakery, his real passion was educating young people about the Holocaust at universities, churches and high schools all over the Bay Area. In 1991, Hollander received an invitation to debate a Holocaust denier on "The Montel Williams Show." Many felt that Ernie shouldn’t give the guy the light of day. But Ernie was not one to turn away from a fight and went anyway.

No one could have ever imagined what would happen next.

TV stations came to film the debate. It was broadcast all over the country. Ernie didn’t care about all that. He was just happy that he was able to put this guy in his place. The audience must have agreed as they gave Ernie a resounding applause. But thousands of miles away in New York, there was a man named Zika sitting on his couch flipping through the channels. At that exact moment, he flipped to the debate. As he looked at the Holocaust survivor on TV, he rubbed his eyes in disbelief.

It can't be! he thought. This survivor in California is the spitting image of my friend from Serbia. How is this possible?

Zika picked up the phone and called the number for the Montel Williams show. Through frantic rambling, he told the producers of the show that the impossible had happened. Ernie’s long-lost brother Zoltan was still alive!

Zoltan had indeed been hung by the Nazis back in 1944, but they were in such a rush to flee, they didn’t tie the knots well. Zolton fell between the trees and played dead until he could escape. He spent years wandering Europe and eventually settled in Yugoslavia, having believed his entire family had been murdered in the war. For years, he lived alone.

The Montel Williams show hung up on Zika. They were used to calls like this from crazies just wanting money or fame. But Zika wouldn’t give up. He flew to Serbia to tell his friend in person that a Hollander family from California looked a lot like him. Zoltan gave Zika the names of his grandparents, parents, brothers and sisters along with their birthdays. When Zika returned to New York, he mailed that information to The Montel Williams Show.

After receiving the letter, someone from the show telephoned the Hollander’s in Oakland, California. Ernie wasn’t home. But his beloved wife Anna was. She didn’t believe it. “But we have a memorial plaque for Zoltan at Beth Jacob?” She didn’t want to get her husband’s hopes up, only for them to be dashed if it turned out to be a hoax. “But how else would this man in Serbia know all the intimate details of Ernie’s family?” She called Rabbi Zack, the spiritual leader of their synagogue.

The rabbi advised her to tell Ernie. He suggested she not be alone. Several neighbors came over to be with her. When Ernie finally came through the door, she told him to sit down because she had some good news for him and then ran to the kitchen. He heard her sobbing. Ernie followed her inside the kitchen, put his arms around her and asked, “If this is such good news, why are you crying and why do I have to sit down?”

Moments later, everyone in the room was crying. Ernie picked up the phone and called Serbia. For the first time in 52 years, he spoke to his brother Heshy [aka Zoltan]. They spoke for hours. They spoke on the phone every day until The Montel Williams show flew Zoltan from Serbia to Oakland to televise the reunion on live TV.

Ernie waited next to his wife on stage, proudly wearing his yarmulke, with his right hand flitting nervously near his wife's hand. Finally, the announcer let Zoltan enter the room. Their eyes met and the brothers ran to embrace each other. Millions of viewers wept.

My father told me that Ernie told everyone in shul that having his brother, whom he had thought was dead for 50 years, reunited with him was the "the greatest miracle since Moses crossed the sea."

But as a kid, I didn’t know any of this.

For me, Ernie was just the jolly roly-poly “Gabbai” (“sexton”) of the shul who always smiled and gave me candy when I came to services. He'd pinch my cheeks and make jokes to make me laugh. I will never forget the reverence and solemn deference which my father always showed Ernie. He taught me and my siblings to do the same.

There are still “Kedoshim" who walk among us. Now, more than ever, we need their wisdom. We need their story. They make the world sweeter than the sweetest candy.

[Stubble]

Ze Germans,

Absolutely capable of executing thousands at a time in make shift gas chambers with a fumigant.

Also Ze Germans,

Can't tie a rope...

/shrug