You Want Soap? You Get Soap

[ehrli...@aol.com]

<quote>At Douzy on the 1st October, 1586, Anna Ruffa confessed that she
had helped another witch named Lolla to dig up in this way a corpse which
had been recently buried, and from its burned ashes they compounded a
potion that they afterwards used for killing those whom they would.

The evidence of the witch Briceia at Vorpach in August, 1587 is clear
concerning the digging up of an infant's body which had been buried the
day before by its father, Wolf the Smith. It differs from the case we
have just quoted only in the fact that they did not burn the body to
ashes, but melted it into a solid lump so that they could more easily make
an unguent from it. But they reduced the bones to ashes with which they
sprinkled the trees of orchards to prevent them from bearing fruit.
<endquote>**

ANALYSIS

These confessions are proof positive that these things happened.

There is no proof that the confessions were coerced in any way, therefore
they must be true.

There is no physical evidence and there doesn't have to be any.

The fact that corpses and ashes do not act in the manner described is
irrelevant.
Who said witches were smart?

Anyone who doubts the veracity of these claims is _ipso facto_ a Devil
worshipper.

** Source: *Compendium Maleficarium*, Francesco Maria Guazzo, (1608,
1929, 1988), trans. E. A. Ashwin, p. 89, Dover Books

[Michael P. Stein]

In article <19970202235...@ladder01.news.aol.com>,

Poor analysis, poor analogy.

Circumstancial physical evidence: there were corpses in the Anatomical
Institute; there was a recipe on Institute letterhead.

While corpses cannot be used to create magical ointments, animal fats
are in fact used in the making of soap. Unlike the witch case, there is
no physical impossibility in attempting an experiment as described.

Mazur's confession is not claimed as proof positive that these things
happened. Rather, it is pointed out that given the physical possibility,
flat assertions that it did not happen do require a modicum of
counter-evidence. It certainly requires a bit more honesty than the IHR
showed in its dishonest and deceptive editing of Gitta Sereny's remarks -
or, for that matter, than shown in your attempt to draw an analogy here.
I really expected better from you.

Posted/emailed.
--
Mike Stein The above represents the Absolute Truth.
POB 10420 Therefore it cannot possibly be the official
Arlington, VA 22210 position of my employer.

[ehrli...@aol.com]

In article <5d3m7q$e...@access5.digex.net>, mst...@access5.digex.net
(Michael P. Stein) writes:

>>
>>Anyone who doubts the veracity of these claims is _ipso facto_ a Devil
>>worshipper.
>
> Poor analysis, poor analogy.
>
> Circumstancial physical evidence: there were corpses in the Anatomical
>Institute; there was a recipe on Institute letterhead.

Corpses in the Institute prove nothing, not even who put them there. The
recipe was not on letterhead. It was engraved on a board like a
*tabulatur*. I would like someone to comment on the feasibility of this
recipe.

>
> While corpses cannot be used to create magical ointments, animal fats
>are in fact used in the making of soap. Unlike the witch case, there is
>no physical impossibility in attempting an experiment as described.

I think you are wrong. Human fat is not like the fat of, for example,
cows. I have read differently, and I believe from a conventionalist
source.

>
> Mazur's confession is not claimed as proof positive that these things
>happened. Rather, it is pointed out that given the physical possibility,
>flat assertions that it did not happen do require a modicum of
>counter-evidence. It certainly requires a bit more honesty than the IHR
>showed in its dishonest and deceptive editing of Gitta Sereny's remarks -
>or, for that matter, than shown in your attempt to draw an analogy here.
>I really expected better from you.

You expected better of me if you think that I was merely attempting to
refute the claims of soap-making. In reality, the claims of soap-making
-- absent any physical evidence -- are in no more need of refutation than
the melting of the Polar Ice Cap is necessary to prove the non-existence
of Santa Claus.

But that was not my point. My point is that just because someone
confesses to something, and there is no physical proof thereof, that does
not mean that what is being confessed to actually occurred. More than
that, my point was that it is unjust to accuse people of evil motives when
they simply cannot rationally accept the veracity of a claim.

>
> Posted/emailed.

Ditto.

[ehrli...@aol.com]

In article <19970203035...@ladder01.news.aol.com>,
ehrli...@aol.com writes:

>
>Corpses in the Institute prove nothing, not even who put them there. The
>recipe was not on letterhead. It was engraved on a board like a
>*tabulatur*. I would like someone to comment on the feasibility of this
>recipe.
>
>

Wrong! I correct myself here, and point out other aspects of Mazur's
testimony:
(USSR -197)

1. Mazur was interrogated in Polish with his remarks translated into
Russian.

2. The recipe was typed on Institute letterhead, and then affixed to a
plywood board.

3. Mazur took human soap home with him on 3-4 occasions in the Winter of
1945, and tried to get his mother and sisters to use it.

4. The Institute had a building for boiling the flesh off of corpses to
make anatomical skeletons.

5. But beginning in the Winter of 43-44, Spanner directed that the fat not
be thrown away.

6. In February, 1944, Spanner gave Mazur a recipe for making soap, as
follows:

5 kg human fat
10 litres water
500-1,000 g caustic soda

boil 2-3 hours and let cool. Add more salt, soda, and water, and boil for
2-3 hours.

7. The first corpses so processed came from a psychiatric hospital.

8. Many decapitated corpses were used, from Koenigsberg and Danzig
prisons.

9. Four Russians were also so treated.

10. Boilings took 3-7 days, and Dr. Spanner took the soap (about 80 kg)
and stored it in his home.

11. The government was interested in these experiments, several ministers
and professors from other institutes visited the institute.

12. In addition, several co-workers from the Institute took soap home
with them for personal use, as well as several students.

13. Professor Spanner insisted that the production of soap from human fat
must be kept secret.

14. Professor Spanner was negotiating with other camps to procure as many
corpses as possible for production.

15. Professor Spanner ordered that human skin be collected, after it was
degreased it was stored in a box and then taken away for special purposes.

********************

So there it is. Believe it if you like. But if you do believe Mazur's
testimony as summarized above, you must also admit that it has nothing to
do with the Holocaust as we normally use that term, or even in terms of
the larger definition of the Holocaust as used by Nizkor.

[DvdThomas]

As I have pointed out on several occasions, the Mazur anecdote dodges the
central issue. It has to do with the meaning of the "soap story" that is
referred to. People who mention this in practically all cases are
referring to the systematic large-scale production of soap from human
cadavers, similar to the rumors spread about the Germans in WWI. There is
zero evidence that this ever happened in WWI or WWII. That is the basis
of my call for an open understanding between opposing viewpoints in this
forum that the soap story still widely associated with a number of camps,
Auschwitz, Buchenwald and so on, and believed by a great many people in
the world, is a myth.

Using Mazur to frustrate this minor attempt to find at least one point of
agreement is tantamount to the effort to establish another point of
agreement, that Dachau was not a killing center.

Of course Dachau did have gas chambers, clearly marked, intended, and
designed for fumigating clothing and other items, but not for killing
people.

Thus the statement, "There were no gas chambers at Dachau" (meaning that
there were no mass homicidal facilities there and that it clearly was not
constructed as a death camp, something now generally accepted by
historians) is greeted with, "On the contrary, here is a picture of one of
the gas chambers (an inarguable fact irrelevant to the direction of the
first statement, presented in order to make it appear false and thus avoid
addressing the issue of continuing widespread public belief that Dachau
was a "death camp").

In both cases, attempts to delineate the main points get bogged down in
extensive discussions of irrelevancies like Mazur and alleged or actual
experiments in Dachau which killed some small number. Even if these
irrelevancies turn out to be true (and there is a hell of a lot about
Mazur which doesn't ring that way) they have nothing to do with these
statements:

(1) The Germans did not systematically produce soap from human cadavers
of any ethnic orientation. The "soap story" quoted periodically in the
media does not refer to things like Mazur, it refers to the myth that
there existed soap factories to process the bodies of dead Jews. That
last is not true.

(2) Dachau was not a "death camp," and neither was any other facility
located within the borders of Germany. Immediately after the war, it was
claimed that Dachau and a number of other large camps within Germany were
large-scale death centers utilizing gas chambers for mass homicides. The
claim, supported by many "confessions" and "eye-witness testimonies" was
determined by 1960 to be as false as the soap story. Yet it persists in
the public imagination and media references, which is the source of the
objection "But there were no gas chambers in Dachau (i.e. no mass
homicidal facilities).

I can see no purpose for semantic hair-splitting in these two areas except
to avoid the obvious truth by making a case that the objector is in error.
A tiny and questionable exception does not destroy the validity of the
much larger case being addressed.

Perhaps it comes down to something Yale Edeiken mentioned here once, the
"Reagan Principle"--(Republicans should never criticize other Republicans
in public, regardless of how much they disagree with them). When applied
to this forum it can be stated, "Holocaust traditionalists should never
agree with revisionists on any point which refutes an element of the
traditional story, regardless of how small or unsupportable that element
might be."

This is more than a little like discussions between religious
fundamentalists and anyone who claims that not every word in their
particular Holy Book is the direct and inarguable word of God. The
fundamentalist will never accept that claim, and logic is irrelevant to
the stance. Faith is what it is.

Best,
David Thomas

Please do not send emailed copies of Usenet or other public forum posts to this address. Thank you for your consideration.--David Thomas 1/16/97

[Charles Power]

dvdt...@aol.com (DvdThomas) writes:

>As I have pointed out on several occasions, the Mazur anecdote dodges the
>central issue. It has to do with the meaning of the "soap story" that is
>referred to.

You are deciding for yourself which soap story is involved. The question
for me is, is there evidence that the Nazis used human remains for soap
production? Answer, yes. Qualifications should follow: never on a grand
scale, probably never more than experimentally, and cadavers involved were
those of executed criminals, not Jewish concentration camp inmates. Now
the only reason this comes up on this group, as far as I can see, is that
deniers keep accusing others of trying to push a lie. When this accusation
is made, how is one to react other than demonstrating that there is some
evidence to support the soap story? If deniers never brought this up, I
doubt this or lampshades would continue to be a topic of discussion here.

As for the understanding of some theoretical uninformed member of the
public, I don't know what evidence you have for deciding what that
understanding is. However, I see no defender of orthodox history (among
whom I count myself and others referred to variously as Holohuggers,
Nizkorites, etc.) trying to post anything other than the facts. Who has
been claiming that soap production took place on a grand scale at
Auschwitz? If you can't point to anyone doing this, why the hell are you
whining?

>Of course Dachau did have gas chambers, clearly marked, intended, and
>designed for fumigating clothing and other items, but not for killing
>people.

>Thus the statement, "There were no gas chambers at Dachau" (meaning that
>there were no mass homicidal facilities there and that it clearly was not
>constructed as a death camp, something now generally accepted by
>historians) is greeted with, "On the contrary, here is a picture of one of
>the gas chambers (an inarguable fact irrelevant to the direction of the
>first statement, presented in order to make it appear false and thus avoid
>addressing the issue of continuing widespread public belief that Dachau
>was a "death camp").

Here you're just playing stupid. You know quite well that the discussion
on the orthodox side has never been that fumigation facilities count as
"gas chambers", but rather that there is very clear evidence that a gas
chamber meant for killing humans was constructed at Dachau. We know that
it was never used on any grand scale, and it is quite possible that it
was never used at all. But it was there, and so denier assertions to the
contrary must be refuted. Again, if deniers didn't bring this up, nobody
would.

Oh, and please check the fatality rate at Dachau before denying that it
was a death camp. That it was not among those technically labelled
"extermination camps" such as Auschwitz and the Operation Reinhard group
doesn't mean that it wasn't meant, ultimately, for the murder of Jews.
--
***********************************************************************
Charles R.L. Power ftp://ftp.clark.net/pub/karlpov/
Documents in Envoy format, including the Bible in Esperanto, Doctor Syn
(Scarecrow of Romney Marsh) novels, other neat stuff

[ehrli...@aol.com]

In article <5d5764$4...@explorer2.clark.net>, kar...@explorer2.clark.net
(Charles Power) writes:

>
>You are deciding for yourself which soap story is involved. The question
>for me is, is there evidence that the Nazis used human remains for soap
>production? Answer, yes. Qualifications should follow: never on a grand
>scale, probably never more than experimentally, and cadavers involved
were
>those of executed criminals, not Jewish concentration camp inmates. Now
>the only reason this comes up on this group, as far as I can see, is that
>deniers keep accusing others of trying to push a lie.

It keeps coming up because it is part of the game.

Some guy comes on the board and says: *There's a bunch of this stuff I
just don't believe!*

Some guy baits him to be specific.

He mentions, inter alia, *soap.* The battle is joined.

Rarely will a conventionalist on this board admit the proposition that the
Allies deliberately lied and faked materials for the IMT/NMT. Or that
people all over Europe could have been gulled and completely disoriented
by a particularly juicy horror story. Every point of non-correspondence
between The Story, 1945 and The Story, 1997 is explained away by
*mistakes* or *misunderstandings* or *confusion* or is even ascribed to
the Germans themselves! (cf. the recent excuse, namely, that the soap
stories were only believed because the Germans taunted the Jews with
them.) But it never seems to occur to anyone that some of this stuff
might have just been made up.

The upshot of it is that we get these ridiculous face-offs about soap.
Revisionists can't believe that you really believe it. You can't believe
that Revisionists are convinced that it's a phony story. And round it
goes.

Tell you what. If you really believe Mazur's affidavits, I've got a book
by Daniel Goldhagen I'd like to sell you. :)

[Dene Bebbington]

DvdThomas <dvdt...@aol.com> wrote:
>As I have pointed out on several occasions, the Mazur anecdote dodges the
>central issue. It has to do with the meaning of the "soap story" that is

>referred to. People who mention this in practically all cases are
>referring to the systematic large-scale production of soap from human
>cadavers, similar to the rumors spread about the Germans in WWI. There is
>zero evidence that this ever happened in WWI or WWII. That is the basis
>of my call for an open understanding between opposing viewpoints in this
>forum that the soap story still widely associated with a number of camps,
>Auschwitz, Buchenwald and so on, and believed by a great many people in
>the world, is a myth.

I'm confused about this, on this newsgroup the people who usually bring
up the subject of human soap production are in fact the revisionists.
I've yet to see any documentation here about this wild "soap story", and
evidence to suggest that it is widely believed.

The people on the other side of the fence to the revisionists have been
careful to present the facts that are known about some experiments to
produce human soap (and skin on lampshades), yet the revisionists are
content to bombard us with assertions about a "soap story" without any
attempt at using facts to back up their position.

Draw your own conclusions about the revisionists.

[rest snipped]

--
Dene Bebbington

"I mean, who would have noticed | "It is impossible to enjoy idling
another madman around here?!" | unless one has plenty of work to do."
- Blackadder | - Jerome K Jerome

[Michael P. Stein]

In article <19970203165...@ladder01.news.aol.com>,

DvdThomas <dvdt...@aol.com> wrote:
>As I have pointed out on several occasions, the Mazur anecdote dodges the
>central issue. It has to do with the meaning of the "soap story" that is
>referred to. People who mention this in practically all cases are
>referring to the systematic large-scale production of soap from human
>cadavers, similar to the rumors spread about the Germans in WWI. There is
>zero evidence that this ever happened in WWI or WWII. That is the basis
>of my call for an open understanding between opposing viewpoints in this
>forum that the soap story still widely associated with a number of camps,
>Auschwitz, Buchenwald and so on, and believed by a great many people in
>the world, is a myth.

That would be fine except that the IHR website, in its discussion of
the issue, explicitly raises the Mazur testimony (dismissively), and goes
on to deceptively edit Gitta Sereny's work (with its reference to the
experiment) to suggest that she rejects all such stories, including Mazur.

[...]

>In both cases, attempts to delineate the main points get bogged down in
>extensive discussions of irrelevancies like Mazur and alleged or actual
>experiments in Dachau which killed some small number. Even if these
>irrelevancies turn out to be true (and there is a hell of a lot about
>Mazur which doesn't ring that way) they have nothing to do with these
>statements:
>
>(1) The Germans did not systematically produce soap from human cadavers
>of any ethnic orientation. The "soap story" quoted periodically in the
>media does not refer to things like Mazur, it refers to the myth that
>there existed soap factories to process the bodies of dead Jews. That
>last is not true.

That is correct, it is not true, and has been acknowledged not to be
true for some time. The legend persists; I had to speak up when a guest
rabbi perpetrated it in my own synagogue last year. But the IHR (at
least) tries to deny the Danzig story based on the falsity of the myth
(and on deceptive editing of Gitta Sereny). Now, it's one thing to say
you don't believe it; it's quite another to assert as fact that it's false
and use deceptive editing and invalid logic to try to convince people that
the falsity has been generally accepted.

>
>(2) Dachau was not a "death camp," and neither was any other facility
>located within the borders of Germany. Immediately after the war, it was
>claimed that Dachau and a number of other large camps within Germany were
>large-scale death centers utilizing gas chambers for mass homicides. The
>claim, supported by many "confessions" and "eye-witness testimonies" was
>determined by 1960 to be as false as the soap story. Yet it persists in
>the public imagination and media references, which is the source of the
>objection "But there were no gas chambers in Dachau (i.e. no mass
>homicidal facilities).
>
>I can see no purpose for semantic hair-splitting in these two areas except
>to avoid the obvious truth by making a case that the objector is in error.
> A tiny and questionable exception does not destroy the validity of the
>much larger case being addressed.

I disagree as to the point of the exercise. The larger case that _I_
am trying to put forward is that "revisionism," as exemplified by the IHR
at least, is overstating its case, and deceptively so.

>Perhaps it comes down to something Yale Edeiken mentioned here once, the
>"Reagan Principle"--(Republicans should never criticize other Republicans
>in public, regardless of how much they disagree with them). When applied
>to this forum it can be stated, "Holocaust traditionalists should never
>agree with revisionists on any point which refutes an element of the
>traditional story, regardless of how small or unsupportable that element
>might be."

Going by the deceptive behavior of the IHR with regard to Mazur and
Sereny, as well as other issues, there seems to be an analogous principle
among many "revisionists," i.e.: never agree with traditionalists that any
German definitely committed any crime against any Jew or committed any
atrocity, even if done in a personal capacity contrary to official policy.

>This is more than a little like discussions between religious
>fundamentalists and anyone who claims that not every word in their
>particular Holy Book is the direct and inarguable word of God. The
>fundamentalist will never accept that claim, and logic is irrelevant to
>the stance. Faith is what it is.

Are you really blind to the same phenomenon in the revisionist camp
- e.g., Pope Faurisson's excommunication of David Cole for daring to
suggest that there is enough documentary evidence to establish that Dr.
Hirt really did have the SS build him a gas chamber to collect his
anatomical specimens?

[Charles Power]

ehrli...@aol.com writes:

>It keeps coming up because it is part of the game.

>Some guy comes on the board and says: *There's a bunch of this stuff I
>just don't believe!*

>Some guy baits him to be specific.

This is "baiting"? I would consider it a perfectly reasonable attempt
to establish a basis for discussion. Would you prefer it if this newsgroup
fully degenerated into "Yes, it happened, d******d" vs. "No it didn't,
c********r"? I thought you preferred a more elevated atmosphere. That's
bloody difficult to obtain without getting down to specifics.

>He mentions, inter alia, *soap.* The battle is joined.

If he accuses conventionalists of "pushing" a "fake" soap story (this
is usually the context in which the soap business comes up), yes, it
is indeed necessary to clarify what is involved, i.a. that the soap story
has some basis in reality, that it was not some Allied invention (even if
it should not, properly speaking, be considered part of the Holocaust).
How else could one legitimately react?

>Rarely will a conventionalist on this board admit the proposition that the
>Allies deliberately lied and faked materials for the IMT/NMT.

That's a nice broad statement. Please produce a genuine instance of a
clear lie and/or falsification by the Allied prosecution which the
"conventionalists" on this newsgroup refuse to admit as such.

> Or that
>people all over Europe could have been gulled and completely disoriented
>by a particularly juicy horror story. Every point of non-correspondence
>between The Story, 1945 and The Story, 1997 is explained away by
>*mistakes* or *misunderstandings* or *confusion* or is even ascribed to
>the Germans themselves! (cf. the recent excuse, namely, that the soap
>stories were only believed because the Germans taunted the Jews with
>them.) But it never seems to occur to anyone that some of this stuff
>might have just been made up.

Er, please note that it's you who are refusing to believe that some of
this stuff might just have been made up--by the Nazis taunting Jewish
inmates. Oh gee, but I guess that wasn't what you meant, was it?

Of course people are gulled by juicy stories. Yes indeed, soap and
lampshades have become popular icons of the Holocaust, although soap
really has nothing to do with it, and the lampshades are something of
an aberration. (I would not equate Koch with Dahmer, BTW, but rather
with Bathory, another woman who tormented and murdered the helpless with
considerable complicity by underlings.) However, I don't see this as the
result of some conspiracy, any more than I ascribe other popular
misconceptions to conspiracy--unless there is evidence of such.

Your implication that there is some monolithic "Story, 1945" which is
systematically transformed into another similarly monolithic "Story, 1997"
again implies a conspiracy. In fact there are many "stories" from many
victims, perpetrators, bystanders, investigators, researchers, etc.
As with any event of similar extent, some of these stories are
inconsistent with others (I can give you examples in the three Synoptic
Gospels, for instance), and some are clearly inaccurate. None of which
demonstrates that the event of which they form a part of the record
didn't happen.

>Tell you what. If you really believe Mazur's affidavits, I've got a book
>by Daniel Goldhagen I'd like to sell you. :)

Again, you attempt to avoid specifics with a sneer. Do you think this
sort of thing will convince anybody? I'd still like to see your own
critique of Goldhagen.

[ehrli...@aol.com]

In article <5d5okk$2...@access5.digex.net>, mst...@access5.digex.net
(Michael P. Stein) writes:

> Going by the deceptive behavior of the IHR with regard to Mazur and
>Sereny, as well as other issues, there seems to be an analogous principle
>among many "revisionists," i.e.: never agree with traditionalists that
any
>German definitely committed any crime against any Jew or committed any
>atrocity, even if done in a personal capacity contrary to official
policy.
>

There is a fine line between eliding details and deliberately suppressing
them. I am not familiar enough with the writings of which you speak to be
sure what is going on here. Usually, if I am researching a topic -- and
especially through secondary sources -- I take it for granted that I am
only going to get a piece of the puzzle from a given source. Secondary
sources that manage to cover _all_ the bases are rare, in any field of
history.

Now to your point -- I entirely agree. On _this_ board (as opposed to
private correspondence or real person-to-person contact) you get a
stiffening of resolves and a refusal to concede everything. And the
question is why bother? Does it get you anywhere? It might get me
somewhere in private correspondence with some conventionalists, but
basically there are enough posters here who are going to accuse you of all
kinds of wickedness simply by maintaining a profile here. Indeed, I have
conceded much. Didn't do me any good. :)

So, sure, it is well known that a great many Jews perished and largely
through the policies of the (then) German government, and that a lot of
Jews were killed just because they were Jews and the German government
(and its agents) simply preferred to kill them rather than do something
else with them. Look at what is objected to. Stories about mass
shootings in Russia -- some which even _I_ have posted -- are nearly
always met with shamed and embarrassed silence. That should tell you
something.

>
>>This is more than a little like discussions between religious
>>fundamentalists and anyone who claims that not every word in their
>>particular Holy Book is the direct and inarguable word of God. The
>>fundamentalist will never accept that claim, and logic is irrelevant to
>>the stance. Faith is what it is.
>
> Are you really blind to the same phenomenon in the revisionist camp
>- e.g., Pope Faurisson's excommunication of David Cole for daring to
>suggest that there is enough documentary evidence to establish that Dr.
>Hirt really did have the SS build him a gas chamber to collect his
>anatomical specimens?

The problem with marginalizing the argument, which I consider perfectly
valid, about massive gassing rates in the camp system is that it creates a
situation of *no boundaries* for the people thus marginalized. If the
claims for gassing victims were not so fantastically high many of us --
certainly me -- never would have noticed the problem. But because such a
query about numbers is considered *Denial* it creates total rejection of
the gassing concept. Aside from this there is the fact that there is very
little on the technical side with respect to _this__single__aspect_ of the
Holocaust from the conventionalist side, whereas there is quite a bit on
the revisionist side. It is true, and worthy of note, that Nizkor has
tried to refute the claims of Berg, Leuchter, Lueftl, Rudolf, et al. But
some of these individuals are distinguished in their training and/or
accomplishments and have put their careers on the line to make their
evaluations. It shouldn't be too much trouble for conventionalist
advocates to find, and even retain, a series of reports penned by
recognized authorities in chemistry, engineering, gas chambers, crematory
operations, etc. etc. to settle these matters once and for all. The
Krakow report, such as it is, is a start, but there needs to be more. An
upfront refutation of revisionist technical analyses by reputable and
recognized Western scientists -- something along the lines of the Leuchter
and Rudolf reports -- and patiently explaining how all of these *apparent*
problems had arisen -- would satisfy me. Completely. So where is it?

[Yale F. Edeiken]

> dvdt...@aol.com (DvdThomas) writes:
> As I have pointed out on several occasions, the Mazur anecdote dodges the
> central issue. It has to do with the meaning of the "soap story" that is
> referred to. People who mention this in practically all cases are
> referring to the systematic large-scale production of soap from human
> cadavers, similar to the rumors spread about the Germans in WWI. There is
> zero evidence that this ever happened in WWI or WWII. That is the basis
> of my call for an open understanding between opposing viewpoints in this
> forum that the soap story still widely associated with a number of camps,
> Auschwitz, Buchenwald and so on, and believed by a great many people in
> the world, is a myth.

> In both cases, attempts to delineate the main points get bogged down in
> extensive discussions of irrelevancies like Mazur and alleged or actual
> experiments in Dachau which killed some small number. Even if these
> irrelevancies turn out to be true (and there is a hell of a lot about
> Mazur which doesn't ring that way) they have nothing to do with these
> statements:

> (1) The Germans did not systematically produce soap from human cadavers
> of any ethnic orientation. The "soap story" quoted periodically in the
> media does not refer to things like Mazur, it refers to the myth that
> there existed soap factories to process the bodies of dead Jews. That
> last is not true.

> (2) Dachau was not a "death camp," and neither was any other facility
> located within the borders of Germany. Immediately after the war, it was
> claimed that Dachau and a number of other large camps within Germany were
> large-scale death centers utilizing gas chambers for mass homicides. The
> claim, supported by many "confessions" and "eye-witness testimonies" was
> determined by 1960 to be as false as the soap story. Yet it persists in
> the public imagination and media references, which is the source of the
> objection "But there were no gas chambers in Dachau (i.e. no mass
> homicidal facilities).

> I can see no purpose for semantic hair-splitting in these two areas except
> to avoid the obvious truth by making a case that the objector is in error.
> A tiny and questionable exception does not destroy the validity of the
> much larger case being addressed.

[Much material snipped so that my newsreader would post]

I think you are confusing two different points. The Mazur stories have less
to do with the charge that the nazis committed genocide and more to an examination
of the way that the nazi philosophy affected people.

Even experimenting with with making soap from human bodies is rather
bizarre behavior, In the U.S. anybody doing anything like this would be ranked with
Jeffrey Dahlmer or Johm Wayne Gacy. In Hitler's Germany it was unremarkable. The
same can be said of the bizarre medical experiments conducted in some of the KZ.

The real point is not just that these experiments were conducted but that
noone seemed to find them strange or unusual. Himmler's active interest in the
medical experiments, for example, is well-known.

If you equate "death camp" with "extermination center" you are correct
(with ne cavil). Neither Dachau or Belsen was an "extermination center" per se. They
certainly qualify as "death camps" especially at the end of the war when thousands
were dumped in those camps and food and water deliberately withheld. The intent
was that those people should die.

The cavil is, of course, Auschwitz. The territory on which Auschwitz was
placed was specifcally annexed by Germany. I do not consider this a quibble for,
while it is irrelevant in any study of Auschwitz, it is vital in understanding Frank's
explanations about his relationship to and knowledge of the camps at Auschwitz.

--YFE

[Arleigh Burke]

On {Mon, 3 Feb 1997 20:05:14 +0000}, {Dene Bebbington <de...@bebbo.demon.co.uk>}
wrote in {alt.revisionism}:
[AG the goose]

>DvdThomas <dvdt...@aol.com> wrote:
>>As I have pointed out on several occasions, the Mazur anecdote dodges the
>>central issue. It has to do with the meaning of the "soap story" that is
>>referred to. People who mention this in practically all cases are
>>referring to the systematic large-scale production of soap from human
>>cadavers, similar to the rumors spread about the Germans in WWI. There is
>>zero evidence that this ever happened in WWI or WWII. That is the basis
>>of my call for an open understanding between opposing viewpoints in this
>>forum that the soap story still widely associated with a number of camps,
>>Auschwitz, Buchenwald and so on, and believed by a great many people in
>>the world, is a myth.
>

>I'm confused about this,

correct

on this newsgroup the people who usually bring
>up the subject of human soap production are in fact the revisionists.

Then you missed McVay posting it as though it were absolute truth only
last week. Why did you not read that? Why, if you did read it, do you pretend
you did not?

[ehrli...@aol.com]

In article <5d64bb$c...@explorer2.clark.net>, kar...@explorer2.clark.net
(Charles Power) writes:

>ehrli...@aol.com writes:
>
>>It keeps coming up because it is part of the game.
>
>>Some guy comes on the board and says: *There's a bunch of this stuff I
>>just don't believe!*
>
>>Some guy baits him to be specific.
>
>This is "baiting"? I would consider it a perfectly reasonable attempt
>to establish a basis for discussion. Would you prefer it if this
newsgroup
>fully degenerated into "Yes, it happened, d******d" vs. "No it didn't,
>c********r"? I thought you preferred a more elevated atmosphere. That's
>bloody difficult to obtain without getting down to specifics.

As you well know, Charles, virtually every thread on this board descends
_precisely_ to that level eventually. Unless one of the interlocutors has
the wit to quit the discussion.

>
>>He mentions, inter alia, *soap.* The battle is joined.
>
>If he accuses conventionalists of "pushing" a "fake" soap story (this
>is usually the context in which the soap business comes up), yes, it
>is indeed necessary to clarify what is involved, i.a. that the soap story
>has some basis in reality, that it was not some Allied invention (even if
>it should not, properly speaking, be considered part of the Holocaust).
>How else could one legitimately react?

Now let's remember how this came up. Some guy said that the soap story
was fake. He was taunted first by Joel Rosenberg (who actually said, you
don't believe the ashes of corpses were used to make soap, which is, of
course, wrong, but which makes more sense than Mazur's recipe) and then by
Ken McVay. Everything we have been doing is footnote to that.

So, now that we have localized the story to Mazur's affidavit, and the two
British affidavits which are largely supplementary, and we have agreed
that there is no physical evidence, and we have gone over the main points
of Mazur's *confession*, we have to decide as to its veracity.

Now you clearly believe that these three affidavits provide *some basis*
for the claim. OTOH, my position is that the claim is so bizarre and so
fantastic that I would require something more than three affidavits which
were never subjected to cross-examination _and_ some positive ID'd
physical evidence before I would say that there was *some basis* to this
story. In my opinion, one might as well say that there was *some basis*
to stories about Bigfoot and UFO's.

>
>>Rarely will a conventionalist on this board admit the proposition that
the
>>Allies deliberately lied and faked materials for the IMT/NMT.
>
>That's a nice broad statement. Please produce a genuine instance of a
>clear lie and/or falsification by the Allied prosecution which the
>"conventionalists" on this newsgroup refuse to admit as such.

I said *rarely* I did not say *never.* Even though it has now been
clearly established that Mazur's testimony has nothing to do with the
Jewish ordeal _per se_, I note a general reluctance to accept what I would
consider a commonsense rejection of the whole story.

>
>> Or that
>>people all over Europe could have been gulled and completely disoriented
>>by a particularly juicy horror story. Every point of non-correspondence
>>between The Story, 1945 and The Story, 1997 is explained away by
>>*mistakes* or *misunderstandings* or *confusion* or is even ascribed to
>>the Germans themselves! (cf. the recent excuse, namely, that the soap
>>stories were only believed because the Germans taunted the Jews with
>>them.) But it never seems to occur to anyone that some of this stuff
>>might have just been made up.
>
>Er, please note that it's you who are refusing to believe that some of
>this stuff might just have been made up--by the Nazis taunting Jewish
>inmates. Oh gee, but I guess that wasn't what you meant, was it?

To the contrary! I think it is quite likely that some of the Germans and
some of their Eastern European auxiliaries taunted the Jewish inmates (and
other inmates as well)
with horror stories to frighten them. That merely added to the terror, I
am sure. But I have also heard that the *RIF* soap rumors began even
while the Jews were still being concentrated into ghettoes, I gather,
therefore, that the Germans were not the only source of such rumors. I
also remind you that -- by all accounts -- many Jews would commit suicide
while on route to the camps on the basis of rumors of their impending
murder. My guess, therefore, is that there were rumors all around, spread
by all, and including by Allied propaganda efforts. It would, after all,
be in the Allied interest to foster civil war and rebellion in areas
controlled by Germany.

However, for what I have in mind you have to go through and read the
materials that were presented at Nuremberg, mostly but not exclusively by
the Soviets, and in particular to the theme of extermination for
industrial purposes. There is simply quite a bit of testimony, and
affidavits, attesting to _large_ amounts of _finished goods_ made from
human skin, human fat, and human hair, and human teeth. The usual
response of conventionalists is that bales of hair, some material claimed
(but never proved) to be soap, a bucket of gold teeth, and two or three
strips of human skin from Buchenwald provide *some basis* for the claim.
I disagree. I think these remains were hysterically and even deliberately
used as a basis for making claims of (again) _large_ amounts of finished
goods. Yet these finished goods never materialized in quantity.
Therefore, while it is evident that millions of Jews perished under German
control, the argument of extermination for industrial purposes cannot
reasonably stand.

No, it cannot be *proved* that these witnesses and prosecutors were doing
anything other than making *innocent* *mistakes.* This is where common
sense comes in play. I mean: do you really believe OJ?

>
>Of course people are gulled by juicy stories. Yes indeed, soap and
>lampshades have become popular icons of the Holocaust, although soap
>really has nothing to do with it, and the lampshades are something of
>an aberration. (I would not equate Koch with Dahmer, BTW, but rather
>with Bathory, another woman who tormented and murdered the helpless with

I assume you have in mind the murderess Erzsebet Bathory (1560-1614)? But
if you really believe all of the stories about her, according to the
various *confessions*, namely, that she murdered 650 young girls in the
course of 6 years, and bathed in their blood, then you probably believe
all of the details alleged about the historic Bluebeard, too. And in that
case I can only compliment you on maintaining your inner child with such
integrity!

>considerable complicity by underlings.) However, I don't see this as the
>result of some conspiracy, any more than I ascribe other popular
>misconceptions to conspiracy--unless there is evidence of such.

Do you think they show trials of the Soviet Union were conspiracies?
Nothing more than that was required. Remember that many of the claims
made at Nuremberg were merely by affidavit. Many of the attested claims
made at early trials were not, or were not allowed to be, effectively
challenged. All you need are willful prosecutors who procure (or create)
affidavits saying what they want, witnesses who will say what they are
told to say, and some faking of evidence. The irrefutable example is of
course Katyn Forest.

>
>Your implication that there is some monolithic "Story, 1945" which is
>systematically transformed into another similarly monolithic "Story,
1997"
>again implies a conspiracy.

I am afraid that you are the one looking under beds for conspirators.
Certainly our understanding of German actions in Eastern Europe has
changed since 1945. It has changed so much that I think it moves on
several levels. Most of the wildest claims from the immediate postwar era
have quietly been dropped over the years as evidence as surfaced. Yet
many of these remain in the popular consciousness -- not true, but part of
the folklore. The question is how much of this is folklore and how much
deliberate. I think considerable amounts, and I think much of it has been
identified. I just think it odd that Telford Taylor -- so far -- is the
only historian of Nuremberg to even broach the subject of exaggerated
claims at that trial. Much less the political motives of the victorious
Allies. In this regard, I differ sharply with many other revisionists,
insofar as I don't think this involved the Jews as a people at all, or
even *Zionists* as a group, indeed, I think the Jewish people remained
victims, victims, victims well into the late '50's.

In fact there are many "stories" from many
>victims, perpetrators, bystanders, investigators, researchers, etc.
>As with any event of similar extent, some of these stories are
>inconsistent with others (I can give you examples in the three Synoptic
>Gospels, for instance), and some are clearly inaccurate. None of which
>demonstrates that the event of which they form a part of the record
>didn't happen.

Again, it comes down to believability, what one believes on the basis of
what one knows and has experienced. I have read a lot of oral history.
Including Jewish survivors of the Holocaust, German expellees, Soviets in
the 20's-30's-40's, war veterans on all sides, and civilians in the
combatant nations. And that covers only the 20th Century. My overall
assessment is that oral history is very much like folklore: it may reflect
a measure of historical reality, but more than anything else it reflects
the values, concerns, and imagination of the teller. As a historical
source it provides great texture, but as a reliable source of fact it must
be used with great care.

>
>>Tell you what. If you really believe Mazur's affidavits, I've got a
book
>>by Daniel Goldhagen I'd like to sell you. :)
>
>Again, you attempt to avoid specifics with a sneer. Do you think this
>sort of thing will convince anybody? I'd still like to see your own
>critique of Goldhagen.
>

I told you where it was. We have been over this already. What more is
there to say?

[Daniel Keren]

dvdt...@aol.com (DvdThomas) writes:

# Of course Dachau did have gas chambers, clearly marked,
# intended, and designed for fumigating clothing and other
# items, but not for killing people.

As usual, "DvdThomas" is lying.

http://www.nizkor.org/ftp.cgi?people/r/rascher.sigmund/
images/Rascher1.jpg,images/Rascher2.jpg

Two pages of letter from Dr. Rascher to Reichsfuehrer Himmler,
suggesting to use the Dachau gassing facilities to test "combat
gases" on inmates. Page 2 contains the following: translation
courtesy of John Morris.

Wie Sie wissen, wird im KL Dachau dieselbe Einricht[ung] wie
in Linz gebaut. Nachdem die "Invalidentransporte" sowieso in
bestimmten Kammern enden, frage ich, ob nicht in diesen Kammern
an der sowieso dazu bestimmten Personen die Wirkung unserer
verschiedenen Kampfgase erprobt werden kann? Bis jetzt liegen
nur Tierversuche bezw. Berichte ueber Unfaelle bei Herrstellung
dieser Gase vor. Wegen dieses Absatzes schicke ich den Brief
als "Geheimsache."

[As you know, the very same equipment is in the concentration
camp at Dachau as was used at Linz [Hartheim]. Whereas the
"invalid transports" end up in certain chambers [at Linz]
anyway, I ask whether we cannot test some of our various
combat gases on specific persons who are involved in the
action. Up till now there have only been animal tests
or accounts of accidental deaths in the manufacture of these
gases. Because of this paragraph, I have sent this letter
marked "Secret"].

<end quote>

-Danny Keren.

[Dene Bebbington]

Arleigh Burke <abu...@navy.mil> wrote:
>On {Mon, 3 Feb 1997 20:05:14 +0000}, {Dene Bebbington <de...@bebbo.demon.co.uk>}
>wrote in {alt.revisionism}:
> [AG the goose]
>
>>DvdThomas <dvdt...@aol.com> wrote:
>>>As I have pointed out on several occasions, the Mazur anecdote dodges the
>>>central issue. It has to do with the meaning of the "soap story" that is
>>>referred to. People who mention this in practically all cases are
>>>referring to the systematic large-scale production of soap from human
>>>cadavers, similar to the rumors spread about the Germans in WWI. There is
>>>zero evidence that this ever happened in WWI or WWII. That is the basis
>>>of my call for an open understanding between opposing viewpoints in this
>>>forum that the soap story still widely associated with a number of camps,
>>>Auschwitz, Buchenwald and so on, and believed by a great many people in
>>>the world, is a myth.
>>
>>I'm confused about this,
>
> correct

I know, that's why I said it.

>on this newsgroup the people who usually bring
>>up the subject of human soap production are in fact the revisionists.
>
> Then you missed McVay posting it as though it were absolute truth only
>last week.

Posting known facts about the matter is far removed from saying it is
absolute fact.

> Why did you not read that? Why, if you did read it, do you pretend
>you did not?

I don't pretend any such thing, my belief is that Mr McVay posted this
because some revisionists were yet again harping on about the subject.

[Charles Power]

ehrli...@aol.com writes:

>Now let's remember how this came up. Some guy said that the soap story
>was fake.

He did a bit more than that. He labelled the soap story one of
various "ridiculous exaggerations", adding that "All these tales
do is form the basis of a good marketing campaign to sell more
movies [sic] tickets."

Now this is fairly peppery rhetoric. Yet you don't fault him for
that: You fault conventionalists for "taunting" him--with the
truth.

>Now you clearly believe that these three affidavits provide *some basis*
>for the claim. OTOH, my position is that the claim is so bizarre and so
>fantastic that I would require something more than three affidavits which
>were never subjected to cross-examination _and_ some positive ID'd
>physical evidence before I would say that there was *some basis* to this
>story. In my opinion, one might as well say that there was *some basis*
>to stories about Bigfoot and UFO's.

Considering that the Nazis gratuitously converted several million
noncombatants to cadavers, I find it anything but bizarre or
fantastic to suppose that they might have tried to find some use
for cadavers. In principle, I frankly rather like the idea of
recycling human remains, though in our culture this is generally
approved only in the case of organ transplants (or, somewhat less
gloriously, dissection). I find your comparison ridiculous.

>>That's a nice broad statement. Please produce a genuine instance of a
>>clear lie and/or falsification by the Allied prosecution which the
>>"conventionalists" on this newsgroup refuse to admit as such.
>
>I said *rarely* I did not say *never.*

Fine. Please produce a genuine instance of a clear lie and/or
falsification by the Allied prosecution which, with rare
exceptions, conventionalists on this newsgroup refuse to admit as
such.

> Even though it has now been

>clearly established that Mazur's testimony has nothing to do with the
>Jewish ordeal _per se_, I note a general reluctance to accept what I would
>consider a commonsense rejection of the whole story.

Your "commonsense rejection" is idiosyncratic, nor, even if the
story were untrue, would this be proof of a deliberate lie and/or
falsification by the prosecution. Are you capable of producing
even one clear example of such a lie and/or falsification which
the majority of conventionalists on this newsgroup refuse to
admit as such? Still waiting....

> My guess, therefore, is that there were rumors all around, spread
>by all, and including by Allied propaganda efforts. It would, after all,
>be in the Allied interest to foster civil war and rebellion in areas
>controlled by Germany.

I find your "guess" pretty ridiculous, since there has been quite
a bit of scholarship bemoaning the fact that the Allies were slow
to accept reports of genocide or to recognize their importance.
Any Allied propaganda distributed in countries under the jackboot
which detailed the reality of the Holocaust, let alone associated
less reliable rumors, would be a strong counter-argument to this
viewpoint. Yet I've never seen any evidence that the Allies
spread these stories. But you "guess" that Allied propagandists
must have been the source. Again, rumors can arise, if we take
your view, only through some organized conspiracy.

>I disagree. I think these remains were hysterically and even deliberately
>used as a basis for making claims of (again) _large_ amounts of finished
>goods. Yet these finished goods never materialized in quantity.
>Therefore, while it is evident that millions of Jews perished under German
>control, the argument of extermination for industrial purposes cannot
>reasonably stand.

I know of no halfway serious scholar (or conventionalist on this
newsgroup) who has ever argued that Jews were murdered "for
industrial purposes", so this "argument" is altogether
irrelevant. The question is whether, incidentally to murdering
vast numbers of Jews, Nazis used some of the remains for
industrial purposes. As I say, I find such use profoundly
unshocking: the evil of the Holocaust is that so many living,
breathing human beings were converted to cadavers, not that the
cadavers were put to one use or another. Admittedly, I may be
unusual in this: there is a great deal of what I consider rather
superstitious veneration of leftover human meat in this culture.
In any case, I remember the pile of human hair I saw at Oswiecim.
Where do you think it came from?

>I assume you have in mind the murderess Erzsebet Bathory (1560-1614)? But
>if you really believe all of the stories about her, according to the
>various *confessions*, namely, that she murdered 650 young girls in the
>course of 6 years, and bathed in their blood, then you probably believe
>all of the details alleged about the historic Bluebeard, too. And in that
>case I can only compliment you on maintaining your inner child with such
>integrity!

I envy you for living on a planet so harmonious that all stories
of human cruelty can be dismissed with a smile. I don't suppose
you ever heard of Charles Ng? Oh, he's probably just a story
someone made up.

> All you need are willful prosecutors who procure (or create)
>affidavits saying what they want, witnesses who will say what they are
>told to say, and some faking of evidence. The irrefutable example is of
>course Katyn Forest.

Yes, this is indeed the example I know you were itching to use
earlier, except that I held you to your original assertion that
there were prosecutorial lies/falsifications *which have been
defended on this newsgroup*. You can't do it. Of course the Sovs
lied about Katyn, and of course this has been readily admitted.

> The question is how much of this is folklore and how much
>deliberate. I think considerable amounts, and I think much of it has been
>identified.

We're going over old ground. I'm waiting for examples, with
evidence (not just your feelings or guesses) that deliberate
lies or falsifications were involved. Katyn doesn't count, since
practically no one, in East or West, ever believed the Soviet
version.

>>Again, you attempt to avoid specifics with a sneer. Do you think this
>>sort of thing will convince anybody? I'd still like to see your own
>>critique of Goldhagen.
>
>I told you where it was. We have been over this already. What more is
>there to say?

I saw what appeared to be a URL to Neusner's critique, which
doesn't much interest me. (I recall Neusner's authority being
invoked years ago by another netnut to support Arno Mayer's
considerably flawed book. As far as I'm concerned, Neusner has no
authority in this area.) Is your own personal, original critique
available at this site as well?

[DvdThomas]

Mike Stein wrote:

>DvdThomas <dvdt...@aol.com> wrote:
>>As I have pointed out on several occasions, the Mazur anecdote dodges
the
>>central issue. It has to do with the meaning of the "soap story" that
is
>>referred to. People who mention this in practically all cases are
>>referring to the systematic large-scale production of soap from human
>>cadavers, similar to the rumors spread about the Germans in WWI. There
is
>>zero evidence that this ever happened in WWI or WWII. That is the basis
>>of my call for an open understanding between opposing viewpoints in this
>>forum that the soap story still widely associated with a number of
camps,
>>Auschwitz, Buchenwald and so on, and believed by a great many people in
>>the world, is a myth.
>
> That would be fine except that the IHR website, in its discussion of
>the issue, explicitly raises the Mazur testimony (dismissively), and goes
>on to deceptively edit Gitta Sereny's work (with its reference to the
>experiment) to suggest that she rejects all such stories, including
Mazur.

My comments on this subject involve two forums--alt.revisionism and the
effect of media content on public opinion and vice versa. What is or
isn't on the IHR site, or the Nizkor site, or anywhere else is a different
subject, off topic, digression and in general doesn't have zip to do with
my points.

>>(1) The Germans did not systematically produce soap from human cadavers
>>of any ethnic orientation. The "soap story" quoted periodically in the
>>media does not refer to things like Mazur, it refers to the myth that
>>there existed soap factories to process the bodies of dead Jews. That
>>last is not true.
>
> That is correct, it is not true, and has been acknowledged not to be
>true for some time. The legend persists; I had to speak up when a guest
>rabbi perpetrated it in my own synagogue last year.

Good for you. I admire both your honesty and courage in doing this. Such
insistence on factual correctness helps keep the growth of legendary
non-happenings in check.

>But the IHR (at
>least) tries to deny the Danzig story based on the falsity of the myth
>(and on deceptive editing of Gitta Sereny). Now, it's one thing to say

> don't believe it; it's quite another to assert as fact that it's false
>and use deceptive editing and invalid logic to try to convince people
that
>the falsity has been generally accepted.

Again, I am not addressing anything said in anyone's website.

>>I can see no purpose for semantic hair-splitting in these two areas
except
>>to avoid the obvious truth by making a case that the objector is in
error.
>> A tiny and questionable exception does not destroy the validity of the
>>much larger case being addressed.
>
> I disagree as to the point of the exercise. The larger case that _I_
>am trying to put forward is that "revisionism," as exemplified by the IHR
>at least, is overstating its case, and deceptively so.

That sounds like a good topic for discussion--in another thread directed
toward the topic you raise--IHR (again:-)

>>Perhaps it comes down to something Yale Edeiken mentioned here once, the
>>"Reagan Principle"--(Republicans should never criticize other
Republicans
>>in public, regardless of how much they disagree with them). When applied
>>to this forum it can be stated, "Holocaust traditionalists should never
>>agree with revisionists on any point which refutes an element of the
>>traditional story, regardless of how small or unsupportable that element
>>might be."
>
> Going by the deceptive behavior of the IHR with regard to Mazur and
>Sereny, as well as other issues

Like the issue I raised? ;-)

(continued)

[DvdThomas]

>there seems to be an analogous principle
>among many "revisionists," i.e.: never agree with traditionalists that
any
>German definitely committed any crime against any Jew or committed any
>atrocity, even if done in a personal capacity contrary to official
policy.

I don't think I can agree with you here. I believe the kind of person
you're referring to does not disagree with the truth of German atrocities,
he or she simply doesn't view them as atrocities. I'm pleased to note
that you put the word revisionist in quotes, since the attitude just
described has even less to do with revisionism than Mazur has to do with
the soap myth. What you describe certainly does not apply to my outlook
or statements. Of course great atrocities were committed by the Germans
against the Jews, and Gypsies, and homosexuals, and poltical undesirables,
and Russians, and Poles--and by Russians, and Poles, and Czechs, and
various Eastern European countries, and France, Britain, the U.S. and, in
brief, by pretty much every nation involved. Who was the winner in the
slaughter category? Don't know. After the first hundred thousand or so
defenseless people are slaughtered, how much difference does it make?

>>This is more than a little like discussions between religious
>>fundamentalists and anyone who claims that not every word in their
>>particular Holy Book is the direct and inarguable word of God. The
>>fundamentalist will never accept that claim, and logic is irrelevant to
>>the stance. Faith is what it is.
>
> Are you really blind to the same phenomenon in the revisionist camp
>- e.g., Pope Faurisson's excommunication of David Cole for daring to
>suggest that there is enough documentary evidence to establish that Dr.
>Hirt really did have the SS build him a gas chamber to collect his
>anatomical specimens?

Of course not. To deserve having that thrown at me out of the blue, I
would have had to have said something like, "No conventionalist has ever
disavowed any wild Holocaust claim, never will, and no one does this but
them." I said no such thing. I observed that no one supporting the
conventionalist position here, per my recollection, will allow a statement
that "The soap story was not true" to pass without dragging out Mazur as
somehow relating to this remark, when it in fact does not. There are also
disingenuous comments that people don't know what you're talking about
when you say "soap story" (Which soap story? and give examples please.).
Some even twist this so far as to say the remark about the soap story myth
is aimed at Mazur and thus must be refuted. The irrelevant bit of side
trivia involving Mazur does not have anything to do with the referenced
soap story, the one circulated by word of mouth, books, movies, newspapers
and so on for the past 50 years that the Germans systematically used the
bodies of Jews to make soap. The soap canard is just one part of a set of
falsehoods and distortions intended to paint the German as some unique
kind of subhuman creature, different than other peoples, inherently evil.
It's a common approach meted out to losers of wars, but usually runs its
course in a few years. A half century later, this one gathers strength.
Something wrong with that picture.

Best wishes,
David

[Mike Curtis]

ehrli...@aol.com wrote:

>
>As you well know, Charles, virtually every thread on this board descends
>_precisely_ to that level eventually. Unless one of the interlocutors has
>the wit to quit the discussion.

Sounds like Ehrlich606 is back to the sour grapes routine.

Mike Curtis
E-mail mcu...@inetport.com
Nizkor Web: http://www.nizkor.org/

[Mike Curtis]

ehrli...@aol.com wrote:

>
>Now to your point -- I entirely agree. On _this_ board (as opposed to
>private correspondence or real person-to-person contact) you get a
>stiffening of resolves and a refusal to concede everything. And the
>question is why bother? Does it get you anywhere? It might get me
>somewhere in private correspondence with some conventionalists, but
>basically there are enough posters here who are going to accuse you of all
>kinds of wickedness simply by maintaining a profile here. Indeed, I have
>conceded much. Didn't do me any good. :)
>

Pish posh. If you make a substantiated point, it'll be recognized by
some on this board. You are making a self-fullfilling prophecy here,
Ehrlich.

>So, sure, it is well known that a great many Jews perished and largely
>through the policies of the (then) German government, and that a lot of
>Jews were killed just because they were Jews and the German government
>(and its agents) simply preferred to kill them rather than do something
>else with them. Look at what is objected to. Stories about mass
>shootings in Russia -- some which even _I_ have posted -- are nearly
>always met with shamed and embarrassed silence. That should tell you
>something.
>

Not at all. No one here is denying the Soviet crimes. You have been
told this over and over ad nauseum. Do you want to admit this? I
haven't seen it. The concern here is with the Holocaust and what is
being denied. If you want to discuss Soviet WW2 crimes go to the
proper forum where it matters. No one here, I'll say again, is denying
Soviet war crimes. They are legion, but they are not denied as are the
Nazis crimes in the Holocaust.

>
>The problem with marginalizing the argument, which I consider perfectly
>valid, about massive gassing rates in the camp system is that it creates a
>situation of *no boundaries* for the people thus marginalized. If the
>claims for gassing victims were not so fantastically high many of us --

What is fantastically high? What number is this?

>certainly me -- never would have noticed the problem.

Define the PROBLEM.

> But because such a
>query about numbers is considered *Denial* it creates total rejection of
>the gassing concept.

Bull. It is _how_ it is denied and with what data and sources.

> Aside from this there is the fact that there is very
>little on the technical side with respect to _this__single__aspect_ of the
>Holocaust from the conventionalist side, whereas there is quite a bit on
>the revisionist side.

You are kidding. Support this rhetoric with substance.

> It is true, and worthy of note, that Nizkor has
>tried to refute the claims of Berg, Leuchter, Lueftl, Rudolf, et al. But
>some of these individuals are distinguished in their training and/or
>accomplishments and have put their careers on the line to make their
>evaluations. It shouldn't be too much trouble for conventionalist
>advocates to find,

What are conventialists? You refuse to answer this question. You have
avoided answering this question. This must be the 20th time I have
asked you.

> and even retain, a series of reports penned by
>recognized authorities in chemistry, engineering, gas chambers, crematory
>operations, etc. etc. to settle these matters once and for all. The
>Krakow report, such as it is, is a start, but there needs to be more.

Why? To what purpose? What did the Krakow report miss? The Lachout
document was shown to be a fraud. What is missing there? Details?

I'll bet you'll just ignore all this won't you?

> An
>upfront refutation of revisionist technical analyses by reputable and
>recognized Western scientists -- something along the lines of the Leuchter
>and Rudolf reports -- and patiently explaining how all of these *apparent*
>problems had arisen -- would satisfy me. Completely. So where is it?
>

Give us a reason _why_ scientists should expend the time. what is the
historical basis to even consider stuff from people whose works have
been shown to be of little merit?

[Richard J. Green]

In article <19970204043...@ladder01.news.aol.com>,
<ehrli...@aol.com> wrote:

>Now let's remember how this came up. Some guy said that the soap story
>was fake. He was taunted first by Joel Rosenberg (who actually said, you
>don't believe the ashes of corpses were used to make soap, which is, of
>course, wrong, but which makes more sense than Mazur's recipe) and then by
>Ken McVay. Everything we have been doing is footnote to that.

Mr. Ehrlich,

I am very interested in the fact that you seem to think there is a
problem with Mazur's recipe. I'd like to know what you think that
problem is. I believe that the recipe you posted required taking fat
adding caustic soda (NaOH)* and heating. Before responding, I suggest
that you take a look at _any_ undergraduate book in organic chemistry
under saponification of esthers and saponification of fats.

Heck, I'll do it for you:

From Morrison and Boyd,_Organic Chemistry_, Boston: Allyn and Bacon
5th ed. (1987), p.1268:

R
|
CH2-OC=O CH2OH RCOO- Na+
| |
| R' |
| | + NaOH => CHOH + { R'COO- Na+ }
CH2-OC=O |
| |
| R" CH2OH R"COO- Na+
| |
CH2-OC=O

A glyceride Glycerol Soap
(A fat)

Regards,

Rich Green

PS Yes, we all know the RIF story is untrue. No informed person in this
group has said otherwise. The evidence for an experiment seems
rather strong, however, don't you think?

--
------------------------------------------------------------------
Richard J. Green Dept. of Chemistry
r...@lyman.Stanford.EDU Stanford University
http://www-leland.Stanford.EDU/~redcloud Stanford, CA 94305-5080

Quantum materiae materietur marmota monax si marmota monax materiam
possit materiari?

[Richard J. Green]

Hi all,

I meant to footnote my last post that the Merck Index, twelfth edition
identifies caustic soda as sodium hydroxide (8772).

Regards,

Rich Green

[Yale F. Edeiken]

> kar...@explorer2.clark.net (Charles Power) writes:

> Yes, this is indeed the example I know you were itching to use
> earlier, except that I held you to your original assertion that
> there were prosecutorial lies/falsifications *which have been
> defended on this newsgroup*. You can't do it. Of course the Sovs
> lied about Katyn, and of course this has been readily admitted.

I sometimes wonder why the "revisionists" are so intent on bringing up the
Soviet attempt to pin Katyn Forest on the Germans. Considering that the both the
western prosecutors and the Nuremberg tribunal itself saw it aas a transparent lie
and treted it as such, it does more to destroy the argument that the IMT was a
"show trial" with no judicial integrity than to support it.

> I saw what appeared to be a URL to Neusner's critique, which
> doesn't much interest me. (I recall Neusner's authority being
> invoked years ago by another netnut to support Arno Mayer's
> considerably flawed book. As far as I'm concerned, Neusner has no
> authority in this area.) Is your own personal, original critique
> available at this site as well?

I have read Neusner's critique. It contains little solace for the
"revisionists." Neusner, like Craig, accepts Goldhagen's factual work but disagrees
with his conclusions. Neusner does so because he sees nothing unique about
anti-Semitism in Germany. His statements are that virulent anti-Semitism was a fact
of life in middle Europe and, if anything, worse in Austria and Poland. It should also
be noted that, whatever his "authority" as a historian (and it is considerable), he is
also writing as a person with direct personal experience with European
anti-Semitism.

--YFE

--YFE

[Charles Power]

ya...@enter.net (Yale F. Edeiken) writes:

> I have read Neusner's critique. It contains little solace for the
>"revisionists." Neusner, like Craig, accepts Goldhagen's factual work but disagrees
>with his conclusions. Neusner does so because he sees nothing unique about
>anti-Semitism in Germany. His statements are that virulent anti-Semitism was a fact
>of life in middle Europe and, if anything, worse in Austria and Poland.

Actually, there is nothing here which contradicts Goldhagen. Contrary
to how many of his critics represent his book, Goldhagen never, as far
as I recall, asserts that German antisemitism was unique or more virulent
than antisemitism anywhere else. His view is that German antisemitism was
of a particular variety which, in combination with other (historically
dependent) factors, made the Holocaust possible. If Germans had not been
antisemites, or if their antisemitism had been of, say, the Roman Catholic
variety (Judaism is mistaken or even odious but Jews can and should be
saved by conversion), the Holocaust could not have happened. Very few of
Goldhagen's critics understand this, or attempt to refute it.

[ehrli...@aol.com]

In article <5dc0eo$d...@d31rz0.Stanford.EDU>, r...@d31rz0.Stanford.EDU
(Richard J. Green) writes:

>Mr. Ehrlich,
>
>I am very interested in the fact that you seem to think there is a
>problem with Mazur's recipe. I'd like to know what you think that
>problem is. I believe that the recipe you posted required taking fat
>adding caustic soda (NaOH)* and heating. Before responding, I suggest
>that you take a look at _any_ undergraduate book in organic chemistry
>under saponification of esthers and saponification of fats.

RIchard, I don't think Esther (ester) would appreciate that. Thank you
for your opinion on the recipe. Now let me ask you a question: is there
any differences between human fat and animal fat that might affect the
manner whereby they can be saponified? You are the (default) expert here,
I do not know.

And, no, as stated elsewhere, I don't think these affidavits on their own
are the least compelling.

[Gord McFee]

Charles Power wrote:

[deleted]

> Actually, there is nothing here which contradicts Goldhagen. Contrary
> to how many of his critics represent his book, Goldhagen never, as far
> as I recall, asserts that German antisemitism was unique or more virulent
> than antisemitism anywhere else. His view is that German antisemitism was
> of a particular variety which, in combination with other (historically
> dependent) factors, made the Holocaust possible. If Germans had not been
> antisemites, or if their antisemitism had been of, say, the Roman Catholic
> variety (Judaism is mistaken or even odious but Jews can and should be
> saved by conversion), the Holocaust could not have happened. Very few of
> Goldhagen's critics understand this, or attempt to refute it.

Charles, as I read the book, especially the second and second-last
chapters, I found several references that would imply that Goldhagen
believes in the unique nature of German eliminationist antisemitism.
His critics jump on that and fail to remember that he placed that
antisemitism in *time* as well as in *place*. Unfortunately, apart from
one footnote (footnote 38 of chapter 15), he does not expand on this.
(In other words, he believes that the Germany of 1997 would not and
could not behave as the Germany of the 1940s. It took a series of
converging factors (antisemitism, the war, Hitler and so on) for the
Germans to do what they did.) Whether one agrees with him or not, he
has unintentionally sowed many of the seeds for his opponents attacks on
him.

Much of Neusner's criticism of Goldhagen is based on this kind of thing:
he finds Goldhagen's *methodology* severely deficient.

--
Gord McFee
I'll write no line before its time

[Mike Curtis]

ehrli...@aol.com wrote:

Ehrlich606 tries to equate 16th century superstition with historical
evidence.

>
><quote>At Douzy on the 1st October, 1586, Anna Ruffa confessed that she
>had helped another witch named Lolla to dig up in this way a corpse which
>had been recently buried, and from its burned ashes they compounded a
>potion that they afterwards used for killing those whom they would.
>
>The evidence of the witch Briceia at Vorpach in August, 1587 is clear
>concerning the digging up of an infant's body which had been buried the
>day before by its father, Wolf the Smith. It differs from the case we
>have just quoted only in the fact that they did not burn the body to
>ashes, but melted it into a solid lump so that they could more easily make
>an unguent from it. But they reduced the bones to ashes with which they
>sprinkled the trees of orchards to prevent them from bearing fruit.
><endquote>**
>
>ANALYSIS
>
>These confessions are proof positive that these things happened.
>

What may have happened is that they may have dug up another corpse
recently buried. That one was thought to be a witch or that what they
made would work is their perception.

>There is no proof that the confessions were coerced in any way, therefore
>they must be true.
>

That they dug up a body? I have no problem with that possibility. As
for coercion at a 16th century witch trial; I think you haven't
provided us with all the details.

>There is no physical evidence and there doesn't have to be any.
>

Physical evidence of what? The fact of testimony from the 16th
century? From you have supplied here, and it isn't much. We seem to
have much testimony that suggests a digging up of a body. We have Anna
Ruffa and her accomplice Briceia. The father, Wolf the Smith, must've
also testified. If three people say a body was dug up, I must assume
that a body was dug up.

>The fact that corpses and ashes do not act in the manner described is
>irrelevant.

As you can see, my concern is with the body being dug up.

>Who said witches were smart?
>

Yes, Ehrlich606 is lucky to be alive in such enlightened times to make
a judgment on the perceptions of people who lived 400 years ago.

>Anyone who doubts the veracity of these claims is _ipso facto_ a Devil
>worshipper.
>

How's this work?

Mike Curtis

Nizkor (USA) - An Electronic Holocaust Educational Resource
Anonymous ftp: http://ftp.nizkor.org/ftp.cgi?
European mirror: http://www1.de.nizkor.org/~nizkor/
Nizkor Web: http://www.nizkor.org/ (Under construction - permanently!)

[Mark Van Alstine]

One wonders if Dr. Neusner would criticize, say, Dr. Dawidowicz, for
coming to basically the same conclusions, in her _The War Against The
Jews_, as Goldhagen about the evilution and character of German
anti-Semitism, and how it was used by the Nazis?

Truly, it seems that critics of Goldhagen's _Hitler's Willing
Executioners_ are grasping at straws in trying to portray Goldhagen's
assertions about German "eliminationist" anti-Semitism as not being
fundementally different from what has _already_ been put forward by other
historians, such as Dawidowicz. The bottom line is that German
anti-Semtism, due to its shift from religion to "biology," and it's
culmination as part of the National Socialist ideology (one might even say
"theology"), _was_ different from the anti-Semitism of the rest of Europe
at that _time and place_ in history.

Mark

posted/e-mailed

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
"Gradually it was disclosed to me that the line separating good and evil passes
not through states, nor between classes, nor between political parties--but
right through every human heart--and all human hearts."

-- Alexander Solzhenitsyn, "The Gulag Archipelago"
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

[Mark Van Alstine]

Truly, it seems that some critics of Goldhagen's _Hitler's Willing

Executioners_ are grasping at straws in trying to portray Goldhagen's

assertions about German "eliminationist" anti-Semitism as being
somehow fundementally different from what has _already_ been put forward

by other historians, such as Dawidowicz. The bottom line is that German

anti-Semitism, due to its shift from religion to "biology," and it's

[ehrli...@aol.com]

In article <32fa1e49...@news.zilker.net>, mi...@aimetering.com (Mike
Curtis) writes:

>
>ehrli...@aol.com wrote:
>
>Ehrlich606 tries to equate 16th century superstition with historical
>evidence.
>
>>
>><quote>At Douzy on the 1st October, 1586, Anna Ruffa confessed that she
>>had helped another witch named Lolla to dig up in this way a corpse
which
>>had been recently buried, and from its burned ashes they compounded a
>>potion that they afterwards used for killing those whom they would.

Hey, Mike, where have _you_ been? You should know that posts that emanate
from the *ix.com* source do not download on my system. I do not know why.
I assume therefore that I have missed many of your analyses. What a
pity! :)

Know too that you can e-copy your comments if you like. I used to think
you were a jerk but I now know you to be one of the gents hereabouts.

Now as to the point. Yes, in this particular case I picked literally the
first episode I came across from the book, and I saw something that fit in
a general sense the soap allegations so I somewhat mischievously just
threw it out there.

Of course you realize that assessing these kind of documents is virtually
impossible from such a remove, but I am inclined to agree with you,
namely, that there was some kind of reality behind this tale. _Perhaps_.
The problem is that then you would have to come up with a credible
scenario for the reality that lay behind the non-fantastic parts of the
accusation. For example, why would these two ladies dig up a baby? Black
magic? Or was it dug up by a wolf or other scavenger? Or was it dug up
by some medieval pervert? Or alchemist (a sort of pre-med type)? First we
have to make a guess on that.

I tend to doubt that two women would dig up a baby's body. There doesn't
seem to be much support in what I know about Abnormal Psych for women to
act in that fashion. So then we are left with the idea of black magic,
and I don't see justification for that. To be sure, my reaction to this
particular story may have been colored by the fact that the one I read
just before this that had a guy seeing a neighborhood widow fly into a
tree. I think we can agree that that didn't happen.

But I do agree that there was an _event_: the baby was dug up and
disappeared. The rest, however, was gravy. But you'll notice that the
story makes much more of it. Does this event, which I think we can agree
had accreted elements that are hard to believe, have a modern correlate?
You decide.

[Mike Curtis]

ehrli...@aol.com wrote:

>In article <32fa1e49...@news.zilker.net>, mi...@aimetering.com (Mike
>Curtis) writes:
>
>>
>>ehrli...@aol.com wrote:
>>
>>Ehrlich606 tries to equate 16th century superstition with historical
>>evidence.
>>
>>>
>>><quote>At Douzy on the 1st October, 1586, Anna Ruffa confessed that she
>>>had helped another witch named Lolla to dig up in this way a corpse
>which
>>>had been recently buried, and from its burned ashes they compounded a
>>>potion that they afterwards used for killing those whom they would.
>
>Hey, Mike, where have _you_ been? You should know that posts that emanate
>from the *ix.com* source do not download on my system. I do not know why.
> I assume therefore that I have missed many of your analyses. What a
>pity! :)
>

Please don't snip my comments so completely. I lose track of past
points.

>Know too that you can e-copy your comments if you like. I used to think
>you were a jerk but I now know you to be one of the gents hereabouts.
>

I'm the same old jerk I've always been. :-)

>Now as to the point. Yes, in this particular case I picked literally the
>first episode I came across from the book, and I saw something that fit in
>a general sense the soap allegations so I somewhat mischievously just
>threw it out there.
>

I saw all this smoke about soap and looked through my library. Only
three of my books had it indexed. The first from 1960 was Hilberg.
I've never seen the word rumor used so often. All three locations had
that word with the soap allegations. Then the _Anatomy_ book said the
same thing as did the Lipstadt book. Historically this is what is
important. Historians seem to admit that the rumors were there but
they do not attach credibility to those rumors. This seems to be the
basic point to be made when looking at holocaust historiography.

>Of course you realize that assessing these kind of documents is virtually
>impossible from such a remove, but I am inclined to agree with you,
>namely, that there was some kind of reality behind this tale.

A body was dug up. What you did snip was the point I made concerning
the corroborating testimony of the father and the accused witch.

> _Perhaps_.
>The problem is that then you would have to come up with a credible
>scenario for the reality that lay behind the non-fantastic parts of the
>accusation.

Fantastic to you at this time in history. But was it fantastic to the
court or to the parties under question? We must assume not if we
consider the state of belief at that time in history.

> For example, why would these two ladies dig up a baby? Black
>magic?

This seems to be what they thought they were doing. Whether they
thought it was black magic or not is questionable. Magicians accused
of black magic were looking for short cuts into heaven. (Levi was a
later one.) He was accused of black magic.

> Or was it dug up by a wolf or other scavenger? Or was it dug up
>by some medieval pervert? Or alchemist (a sort of pre-med type)? First we
>have to make a guess on that.
>

Maybe it was dug up by the two women just as they testified. Think?

>I tend to doubt that two women would dig up a baby's body.

Then there is doubt about many odd stories involving the actions of
human beings. Grave robbers used to dig up bodies to sell to medical
schools. This gave us a Robert Lewis Stevenson story and even
_Frankenstein_. A man was murdered in Harvard medical school, a Doctor
Parkman, and his body was cut up and distributed throughout the
school. The victim's eyes of Anton Proubst were photographed because
people believed that the last thing seen before death would be
recorded in the eye. This was in 1865 in Pennsylvania. Human beings do
odd things for a variety of reasons that would seem silly today.

> There doesn't
>seem to be much support in what I know about Abnormal Psych for women to
>act in that fashion.

Huh? Who says it is abnormal to think as they did in the 16th century?

> So then we are left with the idea of black magic,
>and I don't see justification for that.

White magic? How about just magic or the casting of a spell?

> To be sure, my reaction to this
>particular story may have been colored by the fact that the one I read
>just before this that had a guy seeing a neighborhood widow fly into a
>tree. I think we can agree that that didn't happen.
>

I've read many an accusation. Most of them are ludicrous. 50% were
believed unfortunately. I _highly_ recommend John Demos's
_Entertaining Satan_ for I can't do justice to the ideas in that work
here. There is a social element that you are forgetting here that is
far apart from the religious or fantastic aspect of witchcraft trials.

>But I do agree that there was an _event_: the baby was dug up and
>disappeared. The rest, however, was gravy. But you'll notice that the
>story makes much more of it. Does this event, which I think we can agree
>had accreted elements that are hard to believe, have a modern correlate?
>You decide.
>

The biggest problem is that we do not have much of the story or the
testimony. What you have appears to be what was recorded in a court
ledger. What I'm trying to tell you is that the evidence available in
this particular example is sparce and to many suppositions must be
drawn.

posted and emailed as requested

[John Morris]

In <19970206141...@ladder01.news.aol.com>, ehrli...@aol.com
wrote:

>In article <5dc0eo$d...@d31rz0.Stanford.EDU>, r...@d31rz0.Stanford.EDU
>(Richard J. Green) writes:

>>Mr. Ehrlich,

>>I am very interested in the fact that you seem to think there is a
>>problem with Mazur's recipe. I'd like to know what you think that
>>problem is. I believe that the recipe you posted required taking fat
>>adding caustic soda (NaOH)* and heating. Before responding, I suggest
>>that you take a look at _any_ undergraduate book in organic chemistry
>>under saponification of esthers and saponification of fats.

>RIchard, I don't think Esther (ester) would appreciate that. Thank you
>for your opinion on the recipe. Now let me ask you a question: is there
>any differences between human fat and animal fat that might affect the
>manner whereby they can be saponified? You are the (default) expert here,
>I do not know.

You could look it up:

Oils and fats used are compounds of glycerin and a fatty acid,
such as palmitic, or stearic acid. When these compounds are
treated with an aqueous solution of an alkali, such as sodium
hydroxide-a process called saponification-they decompose,
forming glycerin and the sodium salt of the fatty acid. The
fat palmitin, for example, which is the ester of glycerin
and palmitic acid, yields sodium palmitate (soap) and glycerin
upon saponification. The fatty acids required for soapmaking
are supplied by tallow, grease, fish oils, and vegetable oils
such as coconut oil, olive oil, palm oil, soybean oil, and
corn oil. Hard soaps are made from oils and fats that contain
a high percentage of saturated acids, which are saponified
with sodium hydroxide. Soft soaps are semifluid soaps made
from linseed oil, cotton-seed oil, and fish oils, which are
saponified with potassium hydroxide. Tallow used in
soapmaking ranges from the cheapest grades, recovered from
garbage and used for cheaper soaps, to the best edible grades,
used for fine toilet soaps. Tallow alone yields a soap that is
too hard and too insoluble to provide satisfactory lathering,
and therefore it is usually mixed with coconut oil.

--"Soap," Microsoft(R) Encarta(R) 96 Encyclopedia. (c)
1993-1995 Microsoft Corporation. All rights reserved.
(c) Funk & Wagnalls Corporation. All rights reserved.

Or you could indulge in magisterial musing about how the work isn't
being done to refute kooks.

>And, no, as stated elsewhere, I don't think these affidavits on their own
>are the least compelling.

Colour me surprised.

--
John Morris <John....@UAlberta.CA>
at University of Alberta <Scripture veteris capiunt exempla futuri>
--
The Nizkor Project | http://www.nizkor.org/

[Richard James Green]

In article <19970206141...@ladder01.news.aol.com>,
<ehrli...@aol.com> wrote:

>>I am very interested in the fact that you seem to think there is a
>>problem with Mazur's recipe. I'd like to know what you think that
>>problem is. I believe that the recipe you posted required taking fat
>>adding caustic soda (NaOH)* and heating. Before responding, I suggest
>>that you take a look at _any_ undergraduate book in organic chemistry
>>under saponification of esthers and saponification of fats.
>
>RIchard, I don't think Esther (ester) would appreciate that.

:-)

>Thank you
>for your opinion on the recipe. Now let me ask you a question: is there
>any differences between human fat and animal fat that might affect the
>manner whereby they can be saponified? You are the (default) expert here,
>I do not know.

No, the functional groups involved are present in all animal fats.

>And, no, as stated elsewhere, I don't think these affidavits on their own
>are the least compelling.

I asked you specifically about the recipe which you seem to think there
is some problem with. If there is a problem with it, you must know
something that I don't know about saponification. Otherwise, I presume
that you would not be insinuating the existence of some problem. One
might think you were playing the denier game, if he or she didn't know
better. Someone specifically raised the issue of Mazur's recipe. One
might think that person was hoping that no one reading the message had ever
taken an undergraduate course in organic chemistry. Or perhaps that
person was hoping that people whouldn't know the meaning of the words
"caustic soda," "lye," or "fat."

I know, of course, that you, Mr. Ehrlich, are too smart to play that
game, but do you understand why people begin to think that you may be a
denier?

Regards,

Rich Green

[Gord McFee]

Mark Van Alstine wrote:
>
> In article <32FA12...@ibm.net>, Gord McFee <gmc...@ibm.net> wrote:

[deleted]

> > Charles, as I read the book, especially the second and second-last
> > chapters, I found several references that would imply that Goldhagen
> > believes in the unique nature of German eliminationist antisemitism.
> > His critics jump on that and fail to remember that he placed that
> > antisemitism in *time* as well as in *place*. Unfortunately, apart from
> > one footnote (footnote 38 of chapter 15), he does not expand on this.
> > (In other words, he believes that the Germany of 1997 would not and
> > could not behave as the Germany of the 1940s. It took a series of
> > converging factors (antisemitism, the war, Hitler and so on) for the
> > Germans to do what they did.) Whether one agrees with him or not, he
> > has unintentionally sowed many of the seeds for his opponents attacks on
> > him.
> >
> > Much of Neusner's criticism of Goldhagen is based on this kind of thing:
> > he finds Goldhagen's *methodology* severely deficient.
>
> One wonders if Dr. Neusner would criticize, say, Dr. Dawidowicz, for
> coming to basically the same conclusions, in her _The War Against The
> Jews_, as Goldhagen about the evilution and character of German
> anti-Semitism, and how it was used by the Nazis?

I can't speak for Dr. Neusner, but I have read his article several
times, and I as I see it, his main problem with Goldhagen is that he
disagrees with his conclusion and he disagrees with the methodology
employed to come to that conclusion. I think it is Goldhagen's
exclusion of virtually all other eliminationist antisemitism, and his
implication that it was purely a German phenomenon, that are at the root
of this. For example, he glosses over the fact that some of Hitler's
most willing executioners were Latvians, Lithuanians, and Ukrainians.
He fails to mention that murderous pogroms were carried out against the
Jews in post-WWI Poland. He fails to mention that there was a massacre
of Jews in Poland *after* the Germans had withdrawn. Thus, his analysis
is sorely exclusionary; he fails completely to engage in the comparative
model necessary to cement his hypothesis. In addition, his "proof" of
his theory is almost exclusively secondary sources. Anyone who has
written a Master's or Doctoral dissertation will recognize the danger in
that. Finally, he engages in far too much "Because I say so".

For me, that is a pity. Goldhagen indeed presents an important
perpective of the Holocaust that has been lacking, that of the
"ordinary" perpetrators. He takes us right inside the killing fields,
and portrays the vulgarity of the killing by "ordinary" Germans. And
for that, we owe him much.

> Truly, it seems that some critics of Goldhagen's _Hitler's Willing
> Executioners_ are grasping at straws in trying to portray Goldhagen's
> assertions about German "eliminationist" anti-Semitism as being
> somehow fundementally different from what has _already_ been put forward
> by other historians, such as Dawidowicz. The bottom line is that German
> anti-Semitism, due to its shift from religion to "biology," and it's
> culmination as part of the National Socialist ideology (one might even say
> "theology"), _was_ different from the anti-Semitism of the rest of Europe
> at that _time and place_ in history.

I can agree with much of that. Too many of Goldhagen's critics have not
bothered to read the book, which makes their criticism a little bit
specious. But my argument is not with his time and place theory
(although I wish he had expanded on the time factor a bit more than one
bloody footnote [38] in chapter 15), but with his *uniqueness* theory,
for which there is simply too much counter-evidence.

Posted and e-mailed.

[ehrli...@aol.com]

In article <32fb5a28...@news.srv.ualberta.ca>,
John....@UAlberta.CA (John Morris) writes:

>--"Soap," Microsoft(R) Encarta(R) 96 Encyclopedia. (c)
> 1993-1995 Microsoft Corporation. All rights reserved.
> (c) Funk & Wagnalls Corporation. All rights reserved.
>
>Or you could indulge in magisterial musing about how the work isn't
>being done to refute kooks.
>

>>And, no, as stated elsewhere, I don't think these affidavits on their
own
>>are the least compelling.
>

>Colour me surprised.
>
>

All that your quotation from Microsoft proves is that the combination of
fats and sodium hydroxide is sufficient for the production of soap, which
is identical to the information Green already provided. But that simply
means that the recipe could have been taken from any textbook on chemistry
which covered the topic of saponification. The question I asked above is
whether human fat has any properties that would make it more difficult to
render into soap than tallow. Which you did not answer.

You are thus in a position to have to assert, that three affidavits,
accusing a man of directing the making of human soap, but who was never
brought to trial for this action, on the basis of one affidavit in
particular which I challenge you to endorse in all of its particulars,
which includes a recipe for soap that could be copied from any textbook on
chemistry, _proves_ that attempts were made to make soap out of human
beings, _even__though_ not a single piece of human fat soap has ever been
verified. Color _me_ bored.

As for your inference that people like Rudolf, Lueftl, and the rest are
simply *kooks* :
a fundamental characteristic of crank scientists is that they usually have
their origins outside of any context of professionalism or peer review.
Rudolf's report was initially prepared for the Chemistry Faculty at
Goettingen, and Walter Lueftl is a highly regarded Austrian engineer.
Leuchter has worked for years in a professional capacity on the design of
execution chambers. Ivan Lagace is a professional cremationist. And the
list goes on.

No one from Nizkor has comparable credentials, although Mssrs. Green and
Schultz are clearly talented chemists. I hope they know that they would
earn the gratitude and the adulation of millions, if not the Nobel Prize,
for writing the report that would refute Rudolf and affirm the traditional
story. But so far they have not. So then we are left with the
magisterial musings of volunteers who have no credentials and no context
for their claims, and who have nothing to lose by expounding on chemistry,
engineering, crematoria, and execution chamber design because they have no
stature in these fields and they do not earn their bread by claiming and
_having_ social and peer recognized expertise in these fields. And behind
them we have a pharmacist with no professional training in any of these
fields, no professional context, no peers, and -- apparently -- no book
distributors, because the *ultimate refutation of revisionism* is
impossible to find. So tell me again about who the real *kooks* are.

[ehrli...@aol.com]

In article <5dfqum$m...@elaine15.Stanford.EDU>,
redc...@leland.Stanford.EDU (Richard James Green) writes:

>Subject: Re: You Want Soap? You Get Soap
>From: redc...@leland.Stanford.EDU (Richard James Green)
>Date: 7 Feb 1997 10:06:14 -0800

>
>In article <19970206141...@ladder01.news.aol.com>,
> <ehrli...@aol.com> wrote:
>
>>>I am very interested in the fact that you seem to think there is a
>>>problem with Mazur's recipe. I'd like to know what you think that
>>>problem is. I believe that the recipe you posted required taking fat
>>>adding caustic soda (NaOH)* and heating. Before responding, I suggest
>>>that you take a look at _any_ undergraduate book in organic chemistry
>>>under saponification of esthers and saponification of fats.
>>
>>RIchard, I don't think Esther (ester) would appreciate that.
>
>:-)
>
>
>>Thank you
>>for your opinion on the recipe. Now let me ask you a question: is there
>>any differences between human fat and animal fat that might affect the
>>manner whereby they can be saponified? You are the (default) expert
here,
>>I do not know.
>
>No, the functional groups involved are present in all animal fats.
>

>>And, no, as stated elsewhere, I don't think these affidavits on their
own
>>are the least compelling.
>

>I asked you specifically about the recipe which you seem to think there
>is some problem with.

Yes, because I have read that is virtually impossible to make soap from
human fat. I will look for the reference.

If there is a problem with it, you must know
>something that I don't know about saponification. Otherwise, I presume
>that you would not be insinuating the existence of some problem.

I wouldn't insinuate anything, pal.

One
>might think you were playing the denier game, if he or she didn't know
>better. Someone specifically raised the issue of Mazur's recipe. One
>might think that person was hoping that no one reading the message had
ever
>taken an undergraduate course in organic chemistry. Or perhaps that
>person was hoping that people whouldn't know the meaning of the words
>"caustic soda," "lye," or "fat."

As a matter of fact, I posted Mazur's recipe and I asked for expert
reaction to it, which I have received. The fact that I itemized
_everything_ in the affidavit (including the recipe) does not mean that I
thought everything in it was contentious: I simply itemized everything of
concrete character in that document, since there is so much discussion of
it but no specifics about it. But, OTOH, I still don't quite understand
why such a simple recipe could be characterized as *virtually impossible*.
That is why I was skeptical of the validity of the recipe and asked for
expert opinion. I understand the ball is in my court as far as finding
the reference(s) for that counter-assertion. I'll let you know.

But the recipe was only one thing that was contained in the affidavit. Do
you endorse everything else in there, as well? And if you do, and the
production of soap was so widely known, and so widely distributed, such
that even students were given bars to wash themselves and do their laundry
with, don't you think it odd that not a single verifiable bar of human fat
soap has ever turned up? Or that there are no more corroborating
witnesses for the goings on at the Danzig Institute? And do you accept
the assertion about the skin that was collected and then taken away for
special purposes? And if you do, what happened to it?

Understand this. You have affidavits produced in a hysterical postwar
environment by a state with a bad reputation for forging affidavits,
confessions, and documents. You consider these sufficient proof of the
charge, even when by so doing you endorse many other elements in the same
affidavit which are improbable.

You also accept the sufficiency of this story although you have no
physical evidence, and no professional historian (i.e., Hilberg, Bauer,
Lipstadt) who will explicitly endorse the Mazur affidavit, and who also,
somewhat more ambiguously, deny the soapmaking allegation. So ..... who
is it really who is in a state of denial? I don't think it's me.

>I know, of course, that you, Mr. Ehrlich, are too smart to play that
>game, but do you understand why people begin to think that you may be a
>denier?

I call them the way I see them. I don't try to *set people up* --
although I have been accused of that. I think we have fairly well
established in the past week or so that there is no physical evidence to
substantiate the idea of the *industrial usage of human beings* even _if_
we were to accept the stories about the Buchenwald lampshades and the
Danzig soap. I think we have also fairly well established that neither of
these incidents, from which a pattern has been (I think without
foundation) extrapolated, has anything to do with the Holocaust, because
there is no indication, and indeed, just the opposite, that they had
anything to do with Jews or mass murder on a racial basis. The refusal to
accept either my analysis or the consensus of most modern historians on
these two claims puzzles me, but I will let it go.

I can't make people trust my intentions, or my interest, or my
contributions on this topic. If someone wishes to see all of those in a
negative light, and portray me as a wicked person, there is really nothing
I can do to stop them. I am convinced that the Holocaust will benefit
from more light, not less, and from more exposure to argument, not less.
Because when we do those things we immediately have to establish the
things we are not going to argue about, and while my admissions -- which
have hardly changed since I first appeared here -- concerning German mass
murders of Jews who were killed because they were Jews in numbers of
several million -- while such a characterization, I say -- may not qualify
me for the epithet *Holohugger* it still does not, I contend, to
reasonable people, qualify me for the sister epithet *Denier*.

OTOH, if you think I am going to use this discussion on the *industrial
usage of human beings* as a launch pad for a discussion of *industrial
exterminations* you are wrong. I really don't care how the details turn
out in the end. But what I really _do_ care about is that anyone would
ever pass laws forbidding the discussion on these details. That probably
has more to do with my presence here -- right now, and during my brief
visits over the past several months -- than anything else.

If I may be so bold: I notice that recently you posted that you do not
believe in G-d, yet here, you seem to indicate a belief in soap made out
of human fat. You might want to reverse the two concepts for a while, and
see if your perspective improves.

V/R

E606

[ehrli...@aol.com]

In response to a charge from Richard Green, I have been attempting without
success to find the text where I read *we now know it is virtually
impossible to make soap out of human fat.* But I cannot find it, although
I did find some other stuff, and I would like to make some general
comments.

The first thing I would say is that I have looked at the Soviet
presentation on the Danzig soap bit, in February, 1946. It certainly
looks to me like the two Brits, Witton and Neely, contradict each other in
their affidavits. Beyond that, they both seem to contradict Mazur. The
timings for the boiling and treatment, the allegation of a special soap
making machine (which, AFAIK, has never materialized) conflict among
themselves. Smirnov, the Soviet prosecutor, also specifically entered
some of this human soap into evidence along with some human skin.

Nizkor has several articles on soap including some legends about Spanner
from a Polish text that show an incredible amount of knowledge on the part
of local Poles insofar as the experiments were supposed to be secret.
They also contain the allegation that Spanner got the recipe from the
countryside, although it appears that the recipe would be a standard one
for saponification.

I read some articles on soap-making and saponification and they indicate
that there should be fixed ratios of sodium hydroxide to fat for the
boiling process to be effective, but again a chemist should comment on
that. Another indication is that, although almost any fat (I don't know
which ones can't) can be turned into soap, you are going to get a wide
variety of quality, apparently because of the molecular structure of fats
in different animals and the presence of different impurities in different
animals. In this regard, it is worth noting that the Soviet Soap
introduced at Nuremberg was characterized as being white and looking like
ordinary house soap. I assume this would mean no impurities, but there is
nothing about the removal of impurities in the recipe.

Something else that I thought was pretty neat had to do with detergent
soap. This is important because it has to do with the RIF soap rumor that
was rampant in Eastern Europe in WW2. In 1890, A. Krafft, a German
research chemist, invented detergent soap. In WWI, when the British
Blockade cut down on German access to natural fats, two more German
chemists, H. Gunther and M. Hetzer, came up with a commercial detergent
designed to take the place of (natural fat) soap, since these fats were
now being diverted for military purposes. After WWI, shampoo grew out of
these detergent soaps, as did of course many other types of detergent (cf.
Panati, *Extraordinary Origins of Ordinary Things*, a fun book, p.152f).

In WW2, the same shortages occurred, and the Germans again distributed
non-fat soap, the so-called *RIF* soap <fReichsstelle fuer Industrielle
Fettversorgung> which was misconstrued as *RJF* soap, that is, *reines
juedisches Fett* <pure Jewish fat> throughout Eastern Europe. The actual
source of this rumor need not detain us, but there are two points to
mention: (a) it was widespread and generally believed, (b) that it was
believed may serve as a barometer of Jewish anxiety and fear during the
war. In this regard we should always keep in mind that even for the
survivors of the Holocaust they were under Nazi German control for five
years or more.

I also consulted an article on soap by Mark Weber, which is located on the
IHR site, as well as (in part) on the Nizkor site, with, it appears, some
approval. There are two problems with Weber's article. (1) He is not
precise in his references. I will shortly mention several authors who
agree that the soap stories are false, none of whom -- at least according
to this article -- have ever explicitly accepted the Danzig story. But
there is no way I an check his references, and that's a problem. Everyone
should footnote references whenever possible!

The second problem (2) with Weber's article is that it is tendentious.
That is, we have soap stories, and they were given judicial notice at
Nuremberg. From this he extrapolates that that fact invalidates many other
things given notice at Nuremberg. I'm sorry, and I may make some
revisionists angry with me for saying this, but that does not follow.
Just because the IMT made mistakes -- and I believe it did -- that does
not invalidate anything other than the mistakes it made. If
conventionalists want to hammer at something, it should be this _non
sequitur_.

Above and beyond that, Weber makes it sound like everyone who believes the
soap rumor is lying. I am afraid he is showing little or no sensitivity
to the minds of East Europeans (and East European Jews) caught up in this
terrible war. To suggest high levels of anxiety, fear, loss, trauma, and
long-term psychological damage is probably to understate the case.
Therefore I think we should grant that Jewish survivors who attest to soap
rumors are in the vast majority of cases telling the truth as they know
it, even if it is not objective truth. As a Rumanian Jewish friend of
mine told me once, after perusing some particularly hard to believe
testimony, *well, you know, these people suffered a lot.* And they did,
so we don't have to create a conspiracy to account for the discrepancy.

OTOH, Weber's article does contain some good research. He cites the fact
that Spanner was never tried:

<quote>Shortly after the war the public prosecutor's office of Flensburg,
Germany, began legal proceedings against Dr. Rudolf Spanner for his
alleged role in producing human soap at the Danzig Institute. But after
an investigation the charge was quietly dropped. In a January 1968 letter,
the office stated that its inquiry had determined that no soap from human
corpses was made at the Danzig Institute during
the war.<quote>

OK, that's that. In addition, the following authors are cited:

<quote>More recently, Jewish historian Walter Laqueur "denied established
history" by acknowledging in his 1980 book, The Terrible Secret, that the
human soap story has no basis in reality. Gitta Sereny, another Jewish
historian, noted in her book Into That Darkness: "The universally accepted
story that the corpses were used to make soap and fertilizer is finally
refuted by the generally very reliable Ludwigsburg Central Authority for
Investigation into Nazi Crimes."<endquote>

NOTE: Mike Stein has said several times that Sereny was selectively
quoted. I believe Mike, so the above could be elaborated.

<quote>Deborah Lipstadt, a professor of modern Jewish history, similarly
"rewrote history" when she confirmed in 1981: "The fact is that the Nazis
never used the bodies of Jews, or for that matter anyone else, for the
production of soap." <endquote>

<quote>In April 1990, professor Yehuda Bauer of Israel's Hebrew
University, regarded as a leading Holocaust historian, as well as Shmuel
Krakowski, archives director of Israel's Yad Vashem Holocaust center,
confirmed that the human soap story is not true. Camp inmates "were
prepared to believe any horror stories about their persecutors," Bauer
said. At the same time, though, he had the
chutzpah to blame the legend on "the Nazis." <endquote>

All of these quotes from Mark Weber, the article in on Greg Raven's IHR
site, and let's give credit where credit is due.

***************

Now this closes out my elaborations on the soap story. I feel I am well
within a range of broad scholarly credibility to reject the soap stories
_in toto_. If I find anything else of interest, I will post. But frankly
I am tired of this subject now.

Best Regards,

E606

[Mark Van Alstine]

In article <19970208025...@ladder01.news.aol.com>,
ehrli...@aol.com wrote:

[Danzig soap experiment issues snipped]

> In WW2, the same shortages occurred, and the Germans again distributed
> non-fat soap, the so-called *RIF* soap <fReichsstelle fuer Industrielle
> Fettversorgung> which was misconstrued as *RJF* soap, that is, *reines
> juedisches Fett* <pure Jewish fat> throughout Eastern Europe. The actual
> source of this rumor need not detain us, but there are two points to
> mention: (a) it was widespread and generally believed, (b) that it was
> believed may serve as a barometer of Jewish anxiety and fear during the
> war. In this regard we should always keep in mind that even for the
> survivors of the Holocaust they were under Nazi German control for five
> years or more.

Some insight to the soap rumors (and _not_ the Danzig experiments) is
offered by Hilberg:

<begin quote>

The SS and Police (i.e. Himmler) had decided to make Lublin a German city
and to make the Lublin district a German district. On October 1, 1942, the
police carried out a _razzia_ in the northern section of the city of
Lublin. All inhabitants of the section were called out and assembled in
one place. All work certificates were checked, and all Poles - male or
female - who could not prove that they were employed were carted away to a
camp, while their children under fifteen were sent to an orphanage.

Immediately, rumors swept the city like wildfire. Many Poles stopped in
the streets and said: "Weren't we right that the resettlement across the
Bug was going to come> It has come, earlier than we supposed. Punctually
on October 1, 1942, in the morning it has come!" The Poles were convinced
that this _Aktion_ was the same as the "resettlement" of the Jews. In
Lublin the belief was strong that the Jewish "resettlers" had been killed
and that the fat from their corpses had been used ijn the manufacture of
soap. Now the pedestrians in Lublin were saying it was the turn of the
Poles to be used - just like the Jews - for soap production.

[...]

There is more evidence that the news of the killing centers trickled into
Slovakia, not only in government circles but to the public as well. In
July 1942, a group of 700 ethnic German "asocial" were "resettled" from
Slovakia. As the asocials were about to leave, a rumor began to circulate
that the "resettlers" would be "boiled into soap" (zur Seife verkocht
werden). That rumor referred to the popular belief that the Germans in the
killing centers were turning human fat into soap cakes. (We may recall
that in October 1942, an identical rumor was spread in the
_Generalgouvernement district of Lublin. Probably the rumor originated
there.

[...]

On July 29, 1942, the chief of the ethnic Germans in Slovakia, Karmasin,
had written a letter to Himmler in which he described the "resettlement"
of 700 "asocial" ethnic Germans. One of the difficulties, wrote Karmasin,
was the spreading of the rumor (furthered by the clergy) that the
"resettlers" would be boiled into soap" (das die Aussiedler "zur Seife
verkocht werden"). In October, 1942, the Propaganda Division in the Lublin
district reported the rumor circulating in the city that now it was the
turn of the Poles to be used, like the Jews, for "soap production" (Die
Polen kommen jetzt genau wie die Juden zur Seifenproduktion dran).

We are not concerned here with the question whether soap cakes of human
fat were produced in the killng centers (the answer is propbably not) or
whether such cakes were produced at all. To us the importance of the soap
rumor lies in its effectiveness as a carrier of information about the mass
killings. In 1942 that rumor had already been recorded in two different
places, Lublin and Bratislava. Such spacing indicates that the rumor had a
powerful impact and a wide distribution.

<end quote>

Source: Hilberg, _The Destruction of the Euopean Jews_, pp. 331,470,624.

[Weber et. al. issues snipped]

> <quote>In April 1990, professor Yehuda Bauer of Israel's Hebrew
> University, regarded as a leading Holocaust historian, as well as Shmuel
> Krakowski, archives director of Israel's Yad Vashem Holocaust center,
> confirmed that the human soap story is not true. Camp inmates "were
> prepared to believe any horror stories about their persecutors," Bauer
> said. At the same time, though, he had the
> chutzpah to blame the legend on "the Nazis." <endquote>
>
> All of these quotes from Mark Weber, the article in on Greg Raven's IHR
> site, and let's give credit where credit is due.

Indeed. Given that historians such as Hilberg, for example, have
discounted the soap rumors as having any basis in reality _decades_ ago,
one can hardly offer kudos to Mr. Weber for coming, in his own peculiar
way, to similar conclusions decades later.

> ***************
>
> Now this closes out my elaborations on the soap story. I feel I am well
> within a range of broad scholarly credibility to reject the soap stories
> _in toto_.

The "soap production" rumors? Certainly. Historians have _always_
discounted them (e.g. Hilberg circa 1961). But the Danzig soap
experiments? How can Mr. Kennady, given his hodge-podge of assumptions and
poorly documented sources in addition his _inability_ to produce a source
for his claim that "we now know it is virtually impossible to make soap
out of human fat," claim (with a straight face) that "the soap stories"
can be rejected "_in toto_?"

> If I find anything else of interest, I will post.
> But frankly I am tired of this subject now.

That is quite understandable of Mr. Kennady under the circumstances.

Mark

[Charles Power]

ehrli...@aol.com writes:

>You are thus in a position to have to assert, that three affidavits,
>accusing a man of directing the making of human soap, but who was never
>brought to trial for this action,

In the context of WW2 war crimes, why would anyone bring to trial a man
whose "crime", if any, involved misuse of the remains of executed
criminals? Was there even any crime involved? Good heavens, Germany
protects the identities of individuals involved in mass shootings of
innocents. Why would it go after the Soap Doctor?

[ehrli...@aol.com]

In article <32fb2ad3....@news.zilker.net>, mi...@aimetering.com (Mike
Curtis) writes:

>
>ehrli...@aol.com wrote:
>
>>In article <32fa1e49...@news.zilker.net>, mi...@aimetering.com
(Mike
>>Curtis) writes:
>>
>>>
>>>ehrli...@aol.com wrote:
>>>
>>>Ehrlich606 tries to equate 16th century superstition with historical
>>>evidence.
>>>
>>>>
>>>><quote>At Douzy on the 1st October, 1586, Anna Ruffa confessed that
she
>>>>had helped another witch named Lolla to dig up in this way a corpse
>>which
>>>>had been recently buried, and from its burned ashes they compounded a
>>>>potion that they afterwards used for killing those whom they would.
>>

[cut]

>
>>Now as to the point. Yes, in this particular case I picked literally
the
>>first episode I came across from the book, and I saw something that fit
in
>>a general sense the soap allegations so I somewhat mischievously just
>>threw it out there.
>>
>
>I saw all this smoke about soap and looked through my library. Only
>three of my books had it indexed. The first from 1960 was Hilberg.
>I've never seen the word rumor used so often. All three locations had
>that word with the soap allegations. Then the _Anatomy_ book said the
>same thing as did the Lipstadt book. Historically this is what is
>important. Historians seem to admit that the rumors were there but
>they do not attach credibility to those rumors. This seems to be the
>basic point to be made when looking at holocaust historiography.

I agree with you on this. Whatever revisionists may think of the Standard
Story, HIlberg is for the most part a very intelligent and subtle writer.
That doesn't mean I always agree with him.

The soap allegations are rumors and all scholars are going to treat them
gingerly. There appears to have been a slight shift in Lipstadt's take on
the issue, insofar as she has moved from saying (apparently) *no soap* in
1981 to *no soap from Jewish cadavers*. My surmise is that she is trying
to bracket -- without saying so -- the Soviet presentation at Nuremberg.
And I think the bracketing is taking place because revisionists are trying
to use the *soap story* as a wedge issue to discredit the IMT altogether.
But, no, it doesn't work that way. I would like to append a quote from
Telford Taylor, who sums up the Soviet presentation this way:

(*Anatomy of the Nuremberg Trials*, p. 315

<quote>Were the statistics inflated? Were the atrocities invented or
overstated? Total reliance on official reports based on untested
depositions by unseen witnesses is certainly not the most reliable road to
factual accuracy. Furthermore, some of the numerical totals .... are
plainly estimates ...... Considering the number of deponents and the play
of emotional factors, not only faulty observation but deliberate
exaggeration must have warped many of the reports. But granting all that,
were the flaws so numerous and so deep as to undermine the general
accuracy of the picture presented?<endquote>

Taylor then quotes one of the British judges whose notes indicate that
even he felt that there was exaggeration, but that the point was that the
Germans used calculated cruelty as a policy.

Now _that_ is the context in which Taylor and a British judge evaluated
the Soviet presentation, including the soap story, and including many of
the strangest stories that came from Nuremberg. HOWEVER, it must be said
that the discussion of the Jewish Holocaust came a few days later, i.e.,
these comments do not necessarily apply to that.

My opinion is that the soap story was a Soviet hoax a la Katyn that -- to
the extent that it was believed at all -- indicates something about the
hysterical beliefs people entertained about Germans and the Nazis at that
time. But that does not invalidate the general criminality and/or
violations of human rights by the National Socialist government in terms
of common sense morality, _if not_ in terms of the victors' justice and
_ex post facto_ laws. In other words, the case can certainly be made the
Allies -- and in particular the Soviets -- were also guilty of some of the
things that the Germans were accused of. But that's not the point. So
there was a mixture of justice and injustice to the Trials.

The concept -- which I accept -- that exaggerations and deliberate hoaxes
and/or forgeries were part of the IMT -- I cannot attest to their explicit
legal status in those proceedings -- does not invalidate the Trials
altogether nor does it excuse the Germans of gratuitous killings and
maltreatment that no one can deny. If you want to talk about bad things
the Allies (and particular, the Soviets) did, save it for another time.
That at least is my view.

>
>>Of course you realize that assessing these kind of documents is
virtually
>>impossible from such a remove, but I am inclined to agree with you,
>>namely, that there was some kind of reality behind this tale.
>
>A body was dug up. What you did snip was the point I made concerning
>the corroborating testimony of the father and the accused witch.

I would say -- a body was missing. We can't be sure if these gals dug it
up.

>
>> _Perhaps_.
>>The problem is that then you would have to come up with a credible
>>scenario for the reality that lay behind the non-fantastic parts of the
>>accusation.
>
>Fantastic to you at this time in history. But was it fantastic to the
>court or to the parties under question? We must assume not if we
>consider the state of belief at that time in history.

Good point. At this point in history, people were likely to ascribe
everything that they did not understand to the power of witches. As to
the other piece of your point, that superstition may have led some gals to
dig up babies and play with the corpses, that's conceivable, but I would
want more eivdence on medieval/early modern superstition.

>
>> For example, why would these two ladies dig up a baby? Black
>>magic?
>
>This seems to be what they thought they were doing. Whether they
>thought it was black magic or not is questionable. Magicians accused
>of black magic were looking for short cuts into heaven. (Levi was a
>later one.) He was accused of black magic.
>
>> Or was it dug up by a wolf or other scavenger? Or was it dug up
>>by some medieval pervert? Or alchemist (a sort of pre-med type)? First
we
>>have to make a guess on that.
>>
>
>Maybe it was dug up by the two women just as they testified. Think?

Possible, but with these kinds of charges -- that again I think should be
treated very gingerly. I am not denying that people viewed their universe
differently in those days -- in fact, I am sure they did. But to say that
there might have been a reality underlying these claims leads too easily
to a justification of the witchcraft process, and I think it would be
irresponsible to validate a process which from our perspective was
irresponsible and hysterical.

>
>>I tend to doubt that two women would dig up a baby's body.
>
>Then there is doubt about many odd stories involving the actions of
>human beings. Grave robbers used to dig up bodies to sell to medical
>schools. This gave us a Robert Lewis Stevenson story and even
>_Frankenstein_. A man was murdered in Harvard medical school, a Doctor
>Parkman, and his body was cut up and distributed throughout the
>school. The victim's eyes of Anton Proubst were photographed because
>people believed that the last thing seen before death would be
>recorded in the eye. This was in 1865 in Pennsylvania. Human beings do
>odd things for a variety of reasons that would seem silly today.

And -- I would maintain that people do and believe things that will seem
silly in a hundred years.

>
>> There doesn't
>>seem to be much support in what I know about Abnormal Psych for women to
>>act in that fashion.
>
>Huh? Who says it is abnormal to think as they did in the 16th century?
>

I mean it in the sense that killings or corpse manipulation in this manner
seems -- according to current wisdom -- to be an offshoot of usually
solitary or semi-solitary male pyschosexual pathologies. And the
standard line is that women are rarely victim to these pathologies.

>> So then we are left with the idea of black magic,
>>and I don't see justification for that.
>
>White magic? How about just magic or the casting of a spell?
>
>> To be sure, my reaction to this
>>particular story may have been colored by the fact that the one I read
>>just before this that had a guy seeing a neighborhood widow fly into a
>>tree. I think we can agree that that didn't happen.
>>
>
>I've read many an accusation. Most of them are ludicrous. 50% were
>believed unfortunately. I _highly_ recommend John Demos's
>_Entertaining Satan_ for I can't do justice to the ideas in that work
>here. There is a social element that you are forgetting here that is
>far apart from the religious or fantastic aspect of witchcraft trials.

The social aspect is important, and worth exploring. I will look for the
book. Thanks for the recommendation.

>
>>But I do agree that there was an _event_: the baby was dug up and
>>disappeared. The rest, however, was gravy. But you'll notice that the
>>story makes much more of it. Does this event, which I think we can
agree
>>had accreted elements that are hard to believe, have a modern correlate?

>>You decide.
>>
>
>The biggest problem is that we do not have much of the story or the
>testimony. What you have appears to be what was recorded in a court
>ledger. What I'm trying to tell you is that the evidence available in
>this particular example is sparce and to many suppositions must be
>drawn.

Correct.

>
>posted and emailed as requested

Thanks.
>
>
>Mike Curtis
>
>

[DvdThomas]

Mark, using a name other than that someone posts under makes your already
hard to follow posts even harder to follow. Besides, it's gratuitous
rudeness. But then, folks in your Frisco circle of friends are known for
many things before their civility.

Summing up the soap issue as briefly as possible: It's not the opinion of
historians which is in question here. It's the continuance of the canard
in media references, and the odd Mazurity that the discussion takes in
this forum when that fact is mentioned. This is an example, one of many,
of the tacit support of a falsehood for reasons best known to the
supporters.

Regards,
David Thomas

[DvdThomas]

>I know, of course, that you, Mr. Ehrlich, are too smart to play that
>game, but do you understand why people begin to think that you may be a
>denier?
>

>Regards,
>
>Rich Green

If they do, it will be primarily because of unwarranted and repeat use of
what is intended to be an epithet, such as you illustrate in the
preceding. The man asked a simple question, and minds oriented to the
devious turn it into a philosophy that would have to be based on a
pronounced level of stupidity or the mindset of a fanatic. Ehrlich
exhibits neither of these traits, and your remarks are far off base.

Best,

[Daniel Keren]

Allan B. Kennady (ehrli...@aol.com) writes:

# As for your inference that people like Rudolf, Lueftl, and
# the rest are simply *kooks* :

I'm not sure that they are all kooks - Leuchter is clearly a
nutcase, about the others I don't know.

# Rudolf's report was initially prepared for the Chemistry
# Faculty at Goettingen,

This proves nothing about the content of the report.

# and Walter Lueftl is a highly regarded Austrian engineer.

So, is he a liar, or an idiot? You tell us.

Luftl wrote that the testimonies about the Treblinka and other
gas chambers are "physically impossible", because, so he claimed,
"exhaust from a 500 BHP diesel engine cannot harm anyone". We
know, however, that scientific tests were conducted, in which
animals exposed to the exhaust of a 6 BHP diesel engine have
died ("The Toxicity of Fumes from a Diesel Engine Under Four
Different Running Conditions", by Pattle et al., British Journal
of Industrial Medicine, 1957, Vol 14, p. 47-55). We know that
scientific studies prove that it's easy to tune a diesel engine
so that its exhaust contains up to 6 percent CO, which is
much higher than the lethal concentration (Holtz & Elliot,
"The Significance of Diesel Exhaust Gas Analysis", Trans. of the
ASME, vol. 63, 1941, p. 97-105).

Now, I am not an engineer. Yet, I found these two papers
quite easily. I would expect that Luftl would conduct some
minimal research before he published his report. Obviously,
he did not; or maybe he did, but he decided to ignore it.
Either way, his report is useless; it's a piece of garbage.
Nothing you can do about it.

Can you comment on how Luftl's "report" should be viewed,
in light of these scientific studies? I'm not interested in
your empty rhetoric. Address the facts, please.

# Leuchter has worked for years in a professional capacity on
# the design of execution chambers.

He never did any work on any gas chamber. Why are you lying?
Why are you defending the most idiotic "scientific report"
on "revisionism" ever written? Leuchter claimed that the SS-men
who dropped the Zyklon inside would die "because the gas would
rise towards them". He never heard of gas masks? What kind of
stupidity is this? How stupid must someone be, in order to
write something like this, and how stupid must someone else
be, in order to support it?

# Ivan Lagace is a professional cremationist.

Who claims corpses would explode like napalm bombs in a
cremation furnace. Give me a break.

# No one from Nizkor has comparable credentials,

True. No one from Nizkor is such a pathetic liar, who makes
such obviously ridiculous claims such as "diesel exhaust
cannot kill anyone", etc.

You're pathetic, Kennady. How desperate must you be, to seek
the company of these deranged, hateful idiots?

-Danny Keren.

[Mike Curtis]

dvdt...@aol.com (DvdThomas) wrote:

[snip]

>Summing up the soap issue as briefly as possible: It's not the opinion of
>historians which is in question here.

It had better be, Mr. Thomas. Isn't this what REVISIONISM is supposed
to be about? The history.

> It's the continuance of the canard
>in media references,

What media and what references?

[John Morris]

In <19970207194...@ladder01.news.aol.com>, ehrli...@aol.com
wrote:

>In article <32fb5a28...@news.srv.ualberta.ca>,
>John....@UAlberta.CA (John Morris) writes:

>>--"Soap," Microsoft(R) Encarta(R) 96 Encyclopedia. (c)
>> 1993-1995 Microsoft Corporation. All rights reserved.
>> (c) Funk & Wagnalls Corporation. All rights reserved.

>>Or you could indulge in magisterial musing about how the work isn't
>>being done to refute kooks.

>>>And, no, as stated elsewhere, I don't think these affidavits on their

>own
>>>are the least compelling.

>>Colour me surprised.

>All that your quotation from Microsoft proves is that the combination of
>fats and sodium hydroxide is sufficient for the production of soap, which
>is identical to the information Green already provided. But that simply
>means that the recipe could have been taken from any textbook on chemistry
>which covered the topic of saponification. The question I asked above is
>whether human fat has any properties that would make it more difficult to
>render into soap than tallow. Which you did not answer.

Quite so. I didn't answer your specific objection.

Apparently human fat does not have any properties which make it
difficult to turn it into soap. I seem to recall that the 1960
Institut fuer Zeitgeschichte report on Spanner and the Danzig
Institute noted that saponification of human fat occurs as an
by-product of the maceration of skeletons for use as anatomical
specimens. I also seem to recall that Spanner said so to the Flensburg
prosecutor which _may_ be the reason charges were not brought against
him. But I don't have this material in front of me right now.

But there is one thing that appears to distinguish human fat from the
fat of other mammals and that is that soap produced from human fat
stinks something fierce.

>You are thus in a position to have to assert, that three affidavits,
>accusing a man of directing the making of human soap, but who was never

>brought to trial for this action, on the basis of one affidavit in
>particular which I challenge you to endorse in all of its particulars,
>which includes a recipe for soap that could be copied from any textbook on
>chemistry, _proves_ that attempts were made to make soap out of human
>beings, _even__though_ not a single piece of human fat soap has ever been
>verified. Color _me_ bored.

Isn't this the kind of non sequitur that someone who almost got a PhD
should have been trained to avoid? Why does my failure to answer your
specific objection put me in the position of making any assertion at
all about whether soap was manufactured from human fat at Danzig?
Where, exactly, did I give my opinion of the quality of the evidence?
Where did I say that the recipe *proves* anything?

You can get as huffy as you like with me, but that does not give you
any insight into where I stand on this issue.

>As for your inference that people like Rudolf, Lueftl, and the rest are
>simply *kooks* :

>a fundamental characteristic of crank scientists is that they usually have
>their origins outside of any context of professionalism or peer review.
>Rudolf's report was initially prepared for the Chemistry Faculty at
>Goettingen, and Walter Lueftl is a highly regarded Austrian engineer.
>Leuchter has worked for years in a professional capacity on the design of
>execution chambers. Ivan Lagace is a professional cremationist. And the
>list goes on.

You, of all people, should know better than this. Waving about
someone's professional credentials is no guarantee either that their
conclusions are sound or that their assertions are truthful.

Although doctoral candidates command a good deal more respect in
Europe than they do in North America, I think it a little disingenuous
to refer to Rudolf's dissertation as a report as if it had been
commissioned by the Chemistry Faculty at Goettingen. I would add that
it is always a scandal when a dissertation fails at the oral defense,
and it is unfortunate that Rudolf's should have failed when his
dissertation was on so controversial a subject.

As for Leuftl, doesn't he assert that the Treblinka gas chamber would
have exploded from the overpressure from pumping engine exhaust into
it for half an hour or so? Don't other revisionist scientists [sic]
argue (rather more plausibly) that the engine would have stalled
instead? Which is it? And if Lueftl, who is actually credentialed in
another specialization than the one he writes on, is such an
authority, why did he miss the article on the British diesel
experiments? I gather that this article is in one of the standard
research journals in the field.

And Leuchter: was it one gas chamber that he actually built? Or none?
Does this actually qualify as "a professional capacity" for his
expertise? I had rather got the impression that his actual
professional expertise consisted mainly of making the rounds of talk
shows and TV news magazines feeding the current appetite for the
macabre.

Lagace I find a little more interesting. He is indeed a professional
cremationist, which needs mean no more than that he knows how to turn
on the machine and stuff a body into it. But in all fairness, he does
seem to have taken an interest in the mechanics of cremation. But so
has the crematory operator who wrote on cremation mechanics in an
article posted here by Michael Stein, and so has the Internet
Cremation Society, and so has the man I spoke to at a local
crematorium. Where he agrees with other experts, Lagace's testimony at
the Zuendel trial tends to support mass cremation capacity at
Auschwitz. Where he disagrees with the consensus of other experts, it
is safe to say that he is probably wrong.

As you well know, disagreement between experts is one of the proofs
that it is fallacious to assert the credentials of experts as proof of
their assertions. You will have to do far more than wave people's
credentials under my nose if you want to convince me.

>No one from Nizkor has comparable credentials, although Mssrs. Green and
>Schultz are clearly talented chemists.

Perhaps you missed Brian Harmon's series on Leuchter and Lueftl at

http://ftp.nizkor.org/ftp.cgi?camps/auschwitz/cyanide

in the files named cyanide.001, cyanide.002, and cyanide.003.

> I hope they know that they would
>earn the gratitude and the adulation of millions, if not the Nobel Prize,
>for writing the report that would refute Rudolf and affirm the traditional
>story. But so far they have not. So then we are left with the
>magisterial musings of volunteers who have no credentials and no context
>for their claims, and who have nothing to lose by expounding on chemistry,
>engineering, crematoria, and execution chamber design because they have no
>stature in these fields and they do not earn their bread by claiming and
>_having_ social and peer recognized expertise in these fields. And behind
>them we have a pharmacist with no professional training in any of these
>fields, no professional context, no peers, and -- apparently -- no book
>distributors, because the *ultimate refutation of revisionism* is
>impossible to find. So tell me again about who the real *kooks* are.

In other parts of this thread, you have cited another expert on
cremation technology, Carlos Mattogno. I agree with you that "a

fundamental characteristic of crank scientists is that they usually
have their origins outside of any context of professionalism or peer

review." Is this, perhaps, why you have disguised further reference to
this expert under the phrase "and the list goes on"?

Mattogno is, of course, a specialist in Italian literature. Apparently
you are now arguing that Mattogno should be dismissed with an airy
wave because he has "no credentials and no context for [his] claims,
and [has] nothing to lose by expounding on chemistry, engineering,
crematoria, and execution chamber design because [he has] no stature
in these fields and [does] not earn [his] bread by claiming and
_having_ social and peer-recognized expertise in these fields."

I haven't had time to go over Mattgono's claims very carefully, but
perhaps you could enlighten me as to why all of Mattogno's data on
crematory fuel consumption are based upon studies which predate the
development of the Ludwig-Volckmann design adapted by Topf and Sons
for the commercial market and further adapted for use at Auschwitz. I
gather that these designs dramatically increased fuel economy.
Perhaps, too, you know why Mattogno does not take up the very relevant
question of whether the studies he uses calculated fuel consumption
from a cold start or whether they measured fuel consumption for
subsequent cremations in a hot crematory. Certainly, the studies would
not have measured the fuel required for multiple simultaneous
cremations. All the experts I have heard agree that each situation
requires markedly different amounts of fuel per kilogram of mass
cremated.

And of course, behind the list of dubious revisionist experts we have
Francis Parker Yockey, a diagnosed schizophrenic, Paul Rassinier, a
demonstrable liar, and Arthur Butz, a computer engineer posing as an
historian.

I am not simply making a tu quoque argument here. I am satisfied that
the bulk of the claims of your dubious experts have been refuted, and
I am wholly unconvinced by an argument which seems to imply that
because Rudolf has not yet been refuted, he will not be refuted or
cannot be refuted. I am also troubled by the implication that Rudolf
is being offered as the *ultimate confirmation of revisionism*. There
are other sorts of evidence besides scientific evidence, and I find it
impossible to imagine that you would actually argue that, because a
failed PhD candidate (i.e., without peer-recognized expertise) had
questions about cyanide outgassing rates, we should dismiss a
substantial chunk of history.

Lastly, I would quarrel with your implication that we can only refer
to the credentials of credentialed experts when trying to decide these
questions. It implies that reasonably intelligent laymen cannot grasp
the technical side of these questions and that we cannot decide
between them when they disagree. I assume that you would include
yourself among the inexpert who cannot assess the validity of the
findings of the experts you cite.

[Richard J. Green]

In article <19970207194...@ladder01.news.aol.com>,
<ehrli...@aol.com> wrote:

>No one from Nizkor has comparable credentials, although Mssrs. Green and

>Schultz are clearly talented chemists. I hope they know that they would

>earn the gratitude and the adulation of millions, if not the Nobel Prize,
>for writing the report that would refute Rudolf and affirm the traditional
>story. But so far they have not. So then we are left with the
>magisterial musings of volunteers who have no credentials and no context
>for their claims, and who have nothing to lose by expounding on chemistry,
>engineering, crematoria, and execution chamber design because they have no
>stature in these fields and they do not earn their bread by claiming and
>_having_ social and peer recognized expertise in these fields. And behind
>them we have a pharmacist with no professional training in any of these
>fields, no professional context, no peers, and -- apparently -- no book
>distributors, because the *ultimate refutation of revisionism* is
>impossible to find. So tell me again about who the real *kooks* are.

No, neither I nor Mr. Schultz were involved in the work that refutes
Rudolf:

The Crackow team has demonstrated that HCN was present in the homicidal
gas chambers at levels above background. Deniers have no explanation for
the presence of HCN in a facility built after the typhoid epidemic at
levels above background.

It should be noted that the researchers used a calibrated method and that
they discriminated against Prussian blue whose origin is not clear.
Leuchter and Rudolf did not do so.

ftp://ftp.almanac.bc.ca/pub/orgs/polish/institute-for-forensic-research/post-leuchter.report

I'm not sure if this URL has changed with the recent changes at Nizkor.

[Richard J. Green]

In article <19970207223...@ladder01.news.aol.com>,
<ehrli...@aol.com> wrote:

>Yes, because I have read that is virtually impossible to make soap from
>human fat. I will look for the reference.

Please do. One can't take such claims very seriously unless one posts a
compelling reason to believe it. Now, it may be the case that the soap
is low quality. Perhaps, that was the point of experimenting.

>>If there is a problem with it, you must know
>>something that I don't know about saponification. Otherwise, I presume
>>that you would not be insinuating the existence of some problem.
>
>I wouldn't insinuate anything, pal.

Mr. Ehrlich, I'd prefer it it if you referred to me as Mr. Green.
You will note that I always maintain a polite form of address to you and
that, in addition, I respect your anonymity.

> One
>>might think you were playing the denier game, if he or she didn't know
>>better. Someone specifically raised the issue of Mazur's recipe. One
>>might think that person was hoping that no one reading the message had
>ever
>>taken an undergraduate course in organic chemistry. Or perhaps that
>>person was hoping that people whouldn't know the meaning of the words
>>"caustic soda," "lye," or "fat."
>
>As a matter of fact, I posted Mazur's recipe and I asked for expert
>reaction to it, which I have received. The fact that I itemized
>_everything_ in the affidavit (including the recipe) does not mean that I
>thought everything in it was contentious: I simply itemized everything of
>concrete character in that document, since there is so much discussion of
>it but no specifics about it. But, OTOH, I still don't quite understand
>why such a simple recipe could be characterized as *virtually impossible*.

I don't either; that's why I questioned your claim that such a recipe
seemed doubtful.

> That is why I was skeptical of the validity of the recipe and asked for
>expert opinion. I understand the ball is in my court as far as finding
>the reference(s) for that counter-assertion. I'll let you know.

Please do.

>But the recipe was only one thing that was contained in the affidavit. Do
>you endorse everything else in there, as well?

I neither endorse nor do not endorse items in an affidavit I have not
seen. I prefer to restrict my comments to areas in which I know what
I'm talking about. The plausibility of Mazur's recipe happens to be
such an area. You claimed that Mr. Rosenburg's recipe was more
reasonable than Mazur's; I assumed you had a better reason than rumor.
I suspect that when you trace down the origin of this claim that you
will find that someone is assuming that you don't know what lye and
caustic soda arei and hoping to deceive based on ignorance.

>Understand this. You have affidavits produced in a hysterical postwar
>environment by a state with a bad reputation for forging affidavits,
>confessions, and documents. You consider these sufficient proof of the
>charge, even when by so doing you endorse many other elements in the same
>affidavit which are improbable.

Please don't tell me what I consider sufficient evidence.

>You also accept the sufficiency of this story although you have no
>physical evidence, and no professional historian (i.e., Hilberg, Bauer,
>Lipstadt) who will explicitly endorse the Mazur affidavit, and who also,
>somewhat more ambiguously, deny the soapmaking allegation. So ..... who
>is it really who is in a state of denial? I don't think it's me.

No, rather you are in a state of attributing to me beliefs that I have
never claimed.

>I call them the way I see them. I don't try to *set people up* --
>although I have been accused of that. I think we have fairly well
>established in the past week or so that there is no physical evidence to
>substantiate the idea of the *industrial usage of human beings* even _if_
>we were to accept the stories about the Buchenwald lampshades and the
>Danzig soap.

Absolutely, and I don't think anyone in this discussion has claimed
otherwise with the possible exception of Mr. Roseberg, but I am not
interested in defending his beliefs.

>I think we have also fairly well established that neither of
>these incidents, from which a pattern has been (I think without
>foundation) extrapolated, has anything to do with the Holocaust, because
>there is no indication, and indeed, just the opposite, that they had
>anything to do with Jews or mass murder on a racial basis. The refusal to
>accept either my analysis or the consensus of most modern historians on
>these two claims puzzles me, but I will let it go.

Who precisely has refused to accept these claims. Please be specific
and name names.

>OTOH, if you think I am going to use this discussion on the *industrial
>usage of human beings* as a launch pad for a discussion of *industrial
>exterminations* you are wrong. I really don't care how the details turn
>out in the end. But what I really _do_ care about is that anyone would
>ever pass laws forbidding the discussion on these details.

And virtually everyone who posts here, including me agrees with you.

>That probably has more to do with my presence here -- right now, and
>during my brief visits over the past several months -- than anything else.

Well then perhaps, you need to start reading as carefully as you write.
Who on this newsgroup has called for censorship? Please name names.

>If I may be so bold: I notice that recently you posted that you do not
>believe in G-d, yet here, you seem to indicate a belief in soap made out
>of human fat. You might want to reverse the two concepts for a while, and
>see if your perspective improves.

I believe that there is some evidence to suggest that experimentation
was done at Danzig. The attempted refutations of that evidence contain
statements that I know to be untrue. I have not stated a position one
way or the other about whether soap was made. I have stated that the
RIF story seems to be false.

[Richard J. Green]

In article <19970208025...@ladder01.news.aol.com>,
<ehrli...@aol.com> wrote:

>Now this closes out my elaborations on the soap story. I feel I am well
>within a range of broad scholarly credibility to reject the soap stories
>_in toto_. If I find anything else of interest, I will post. But frankly
>I am tired of this subject now.

Before you leave us, I would be interested in your view as to whether
any of the claims that you have read about the possibility of making human
soap have relied on falsely assuming that no lye was used.

[Charles Power]

dvdt...@aol.com (DvdThomas) writes:

>Summing up the soap issue as briefly as possible: It's not the opinion of

>historians which is in question here. It's the continuance of the canard
>in media references, and the odd Mazurity that the discussion takes in
>this forum when that fact is mentioned. This is an example, one of many,
>of the tacit support of a falsehood for reasons best known to the
>supporters.

Again, for the trillionth time, when "revisionists" in a maximally
offensive manner charge that there is some conspiracy by Nizkor or
other persons and institutions to spread a lie about Nazis making
soap from Jews, there is not much we can do except put the facts on
the table (and of course the facts include that Nazis by all accounts
never did make soap from Jews). How is this supporting any falsehood?
The problem is that "revisionists" tend to imply that there is some
sort of deliberate misrepresentation going on ("tacit support of a
falsehood for reasons best known to the supporters", to quote your
own odious and offensive bullshit). There is none.

And where are all these "media references"? I very rarely hear anything
about soap in the media, and I do follow Holocaust stories to some
extent. Soap and lampshades have become symbols of the Holocaust more
by word of mouth than anything else, as far as I can see. Anyone who
looks into the matter will find, if he finds references to soap and
lampshades at all, that they are anything but typical of the Holocaust.

[Greg Raven]

Mike Curtis wrote:
>
> dvdt...@aol.com (DvdThomas) wrote:
>
> [snip]

>
> >Summing up the soap issue as briefly as possible: It's not the opinion of
> >historians which is in question here.
>

> It had better be, Mr. Thomas. Isn't this what REVISIONISM is supposed
> to be about? The history.
>

> > It's the continuance of the canard
> >in media references,
>

> What media and what references?
>
> Mike Curtis
> E-mail mcu...@inetport.com
> Nizkor Web: http://www.nizkor.org/

--
Greg Raven (ihr...@kaiwan.com)
PO Box 10545, Costa Mesa, CA 92627
http://www.kaiwan.com/~ihrgreg

[Anthony Sabatini]

Mike Curtis <mcu...@inetport.com> wrote in article
<33021e05...@news.inetport.com>...
> ehrli...@aol.com wrote:
>
> >
> >As you well know, Charles, virtually every thread on this board descends
> >_precisely_ to that level eventually. Unless one of the interlocutors
has
> >the wit to quit the discussion.
>
> Sounds like Ehrlich606 is back to the sour grapes routine.

Careful there, Mike. Wasn't it you who was recently whining about "deniers"
attacking Nizkor, not debating the Holocaust, et. al? If so, then what's
the meaning of this "sour grapes" routine? More hypocrisy showing through?
Surely not!?!

[.sig snipped]

[Anthony Sabatini]

Richard J. Green <r...@d31rz0.Stanford.EDU> wrote in article
<5dc0eo$d...@d31rz0.Stanford.EDU>...
> In article <19970204043...@ladder01.news.aol.com>,
> <ehrli...@aol.com> wrote:
>
> >Now let's remember how this came up. Some guy said that the soap story
> >was fake. He was taunted first by Joel Rosenberg (who actually said,
you
> >don't believe the ashes of corpses were used to make soap, which is, of
> >course, wrong, but which makes more sense than Mazur's recipe) and then
by
> >Ken McVay. Everything we have been doing is footnote to that.
>
> Mr. Ehrlich,

>
> I am very interested in the fact that you seem to think there is a
> problem with Mazur's recipe. I'd like to know what you think that
> problem is. I believe that the recipe you posted required taking fat
> adding caustic soda (NaOH)* and heating. Before responding, I suggest
> that you take a look at _any_ undergraduate book in organic chemistry
> under saponification of esthers and saponification of fats.
>

> Heck, I'll do it for you:

[formula snipped]

Mr. Green, this is all very well and good, but what does this all prove?
There are "recipes" for making bombs in most home encyclopedias, but does
this mean the owners actually constructed these devices?

> PS Yes, we all know the RIF story is untrue. No informed person in this
> group has said otherwise. The evidence for an experiment seems
> rather strong, however, don't you think?

Then how do you explain Mr. Stein's insistence on arguing the point? Are
you claiming that Mr. Stein is "[un]informed"?

While we're at it, would you mind answering another simple question? TIA.

If the Nazis conducted "experiments" on how to make "human soap", and they
even succeeded in creating a working formula (according to you as per
above), then why did they not go into mass production mode, so to speak? I
mean, why go through all the trouble or research, finally achieve success,
and then just scrap the whole idea? You have to admit that it sounds pretty
silly...

[.sig snipped]

[Mark Van Alstine]

In article <32fde370...@news.srv.ualberta.ca>,
John....@UAlberta.CA (John Morris) wrote:

[snip]

> As for Leuftl, doesn't he assert that the Treblinka gas chamber would
> have exploded from the overpressure from pumping engine exhaust into
> it for half an hour or so? Don't other revisionist scientists [sic]
> argue (rather more plausibly) that the engine would have stalled
> instead? Which is it? And if Lueftl, who is actually credentialed in
> another specialization than the one he writes on, is such an
> authority, why did he miss the article on the British diesel
> experiments? I gather that this article is in one of the standard
> research journals in the field.

In regard to Leuftl claiming that the Treblinka gas chambers would have
exploded due to overpressure, he appears to have "overlooked" the
following in regard to the construction of the gas chambers at Belzec, as
related by Stanislaw Kozak, a Pole who helped in the construction of the
gas chambers at Belzec:

<begin quote>

In each of the three chambers of this barrack a water pipe was installed
10 cm above the floor. In addition, on the western wall in each chamber in
the corner, was a water pipe 1 meter above the ground, with an open joint,
turned toward the center of the room. These pipes with the joint were
connected through the wall to a pipe that ran under the floor. In each of
the three chambers in this barrack was installed an oven weighing 250 kg.
It was expected that the pipe joint would later be connected with the
oven. The oven was 1.10 meter high, 55 cm wide, and 55 cm long.

<end quote>

Source: Arad, _Belzec, Sobibor, Treblinka_, p.25.

Now, Given that the gas chambers at Belzec, Sobibor, and Treblinka were
similar to each other, one might suspect that the gas chambers at
Treblinka too had a similar piping configuration for the engine exhaust.
The relevent point here, of course, is that in the Belzec gas chambers
there was a pipe installed 10 cm above the floor. Assuming that the
_other_ pipe that was installed "1 meter above the ground, with an open
joint, turned toward the center of the room" was part of the piping system
connected to the engine, what was the pipe installed 10 cm above the floor
for? Arguably, it was to facillitate the displacemnt of the air from the
chamber. This 10 cm pipe would have allowed the engine exhaust to easily
replace the breathable air in the gas chamber with toxic exhaust without
concern for any backpressure on the engine.

[snip]

> I haven't had time to go over Mattgono's claims very carefully, but
> perhaps you could enlighten me as to why all of Mattogno's data on
> crematory fuel consumption are based upon studies which predate the
> development of the Ludwig-Volckmann design adapted by Topf and Sons
> for the commercial market and further adapted for use at Auschwitz. I
> gather that these designs dramatically increased fuel economy.
> Perhaps, too, you know why Mattogno does not take up the very relevant
> question of whether the studies he uses calculated fuel consumption
> from a cold start or whether they measured fuel consumption for
> subsequent cremations in a hot crematory. Certainly, the studies would
> not have measured the fuel required for multiple simultaneous
> cremations. All the experts I have heard agree that each situation
> requires markedly different amounts of fuel per kilogram of mass
> cremated.

Specifically, in regard to "markedly different amounts of fuel per
kilogram of mass cremated," it should be noted that, according to Pressac,
Walter Mu"ller (of the engineering firm of Allach) claimed in regard to
his proposal to "construct a single-muffle furnace [for the SS] without an
economizer and with a compressed-air device" (i.e "the Ludwig-Volckmann
design"), that "there was a direct relation between increased use and
increased economy. If the cold furnace required 175 kilograms (kg) of coke
to start up a new incineration, it needed only 100 kg if it had been used
the day before; a second and third incineration on the same day would not
require any extra fuel, thanks to the compressed air, and those that
followed would call for only small amounts of extra energy." (cf. Gutman,
_Anatomy_, p.185-186.)

Additinally, such claims by Mu"ller appear to be in supported by the
"Operating Instructions For Coke-Fired Topf Double-Muffle Incineration
Furnace" which states:

<begin quote>

[...]

Once the cremation chamber (muffle) has been brought to a good red heat
(approximately 800°C), the corpses can be introduced one after another in
the cremation chambers.

Now the pulsed air blower situated to the side of the furnace should be
switched on and run for about 20 minutes, ensuring that the two cremation
chambers do not receive too much or too little fresh air.

Regulation of the fresh air is by means of a rotary valve in the air duct.
In addition, the air intakes, to the right and left of the chamber doors,
should be half open.

As soon as the remains of the corpses have fallen from the chamotte grid
to the ash collection channel below, they should be pulled forward towards
the ash removal door, using the scraper. Here they can be left for a
further 20 minutes to be fully consumed, then the ashes should be placed
in the container and set aside to cool.

In the meantime, further corpses can be introduced one after the other
into the chambers.

Every evening, the furnace fire bars must be cleaned of clinker and the
cinders removed.

In addition, care must be taken that at the end of operations, as soon as
the furnace, having burnt everything is empty and no coals remain, that
the air valves, doors and damper are closed, so that the furnace does not
cool.

After each incineration, the temperature rises in the furnace. For this
reason, care must be taken that the internal temperature does not rise
above 1100°C (white heat).

This increase in temperature can be avoided by introducing additional fresh air.

<end quote>

Source: Pressac, _Technique_, p.136.

In turn both Mu"ller's claims and the Topf operating instructions [which
were identical for the Topf triple-muffle furnace) are supported by Henryk
Tauber's deposition from the Ho"ss trial:

<begin quote>

In Krematorium I, there were three two-muffle furnaces, as I have already
mentioned. Each muffle could incinerate five human human bodies. Thirty
corpses could be incinerated at the same time time in this crematorium. At
the time when I was working there, the incineration of such a charge [5
corpses in one muffle] took up to an hour and a half, because they were
bodies of very thin people, real skelatons, which burned very slowly. I
know this from the experiance gained by observing cremation in
Kremartorien II and III that the bodies of fat people burn very much
faster. The process of cremation is accelerated by the combustion of human
fat which thus produces additional heat.

[...]

As I have already said, there were five furnaces in Krematoium II, each
with three muffles. The flues of these hearths came out above the ash
[collection] boxes of the two side muffles. Thus the flames went first
round the two side muffles then heated the centre one., from where the
combustion gases were lead out below the furnace, between the two firing
hearths. Thanks to this arrangement, the incineration process for the
corpses in the side muffles differed from that of the centre muffle. The
corpses of <<musulmans>> or of wasted people with no fat burned rapidly in
the side muffles and slowly in the centre one. Conversely, the corpses of
people gassed directly on arrival, not being wasted, burned better in the
centre muffle. During the incineration of such corpses, we used coke only
to light the fire of the furnace initially, for fatty corpses burned of
their own accord thanks to the combustion of the body fat.[...]

<end quote>

Source: Pressac, _Technique_, pp.495,489.

[snip]

Mark

posted/e-mailed

[Mike Curtis]

Greg Raven <ihr...@kaiwan.com> wrote:

Before I deal with the soap article, you should feel inclined to
defend your Hoess article first.

[DvdThomas]

Random line excerpted from Danny Keren's load of bile spewed at Erhlich:

>So, is he a liar, or an idiot? You tell us.

Look in a mirror, Daniel. You have the manners of a goat.

Why can't you even offer the simple courtesy of respecting the man's
screen name? In a lot of forums, the inability to observe even the basics
of Net ettiquette would get you shown to the digital door, but for you
here it's standard procedure. Your use of the information known to anyone
who follows this group for more than a month smacks of a small,
mean-spirited attempt to intimidate. As if you were inviting fellow
guttermouths more conveniently located to escalate beyond your gratuitous
verbal harrassment. That sort of conduct sucks, my friend, philosophies
involved being quite irrelevant.

David

[Richard Schultz]

DvdThomas (dvdt...@aol.com) wrote:

: In a lot of forums, the inability to observe even the basics

: of Net ettiquette would get you shown to the digital door, but for you
: here it's standard procedure. Your use of the information known to anyone
: who follows this group for more than a month smacks of a small,
: mean-spirited attempt to intimidate. As if you were inviting fellow
: guttermouths more conveniently located to escalate beyond your gratuitous
: verbal harrassment. That sort of conduct sucks, my friend, philosophies
: involved being quite irrelevant.

Now, the question is: Will Mr. Thomas *ever* direct this kind of
diatribe against, say, Matt "kikemouth" Giwer?

Ha ha.

-----
Richard Schultz sch...@ashur.cc.biu.ac.il
Department of Chemistry tel: 972-3-531-8065
Bar-Ilan University, Ramat-Gan, Israel fax: 972-3-535-1250
-----
They do not think whom they souse with spray.

[Michael P. Stein]

In article <5d64bb$c...@explorer2.clark.net>,
Charles Power <kar...@explorer2.clark.net> wrote:
>ehrli...@aol.com writes:

[...]

>>He mentions, inter alia, *soap.* The battle is joined.
>
>If he accuses conventionalists of "pushing" a "fake" soap story (this
>is usually the context in which the soap business comes up), yes, it
>is indeed necessary to clarify what is involved, i.a. that the soap story
>has some basis in reality, that it was not some Allied invention (even if
>it should not, properly speaking, be considered part of the Holocaust).

The first mention of soap _was_ an invention, though it is not clear
as to how it originated. The experiment described by Mazur was in 1944,
after the first rumors had appeared. It would be grimly ironic if the
rumors had given rise to someone thinking, "You know, I wonder if that
_would_ work...."

>How else could one legitimately react?
>
>>Rarely will a conventionalist on this board admit the proposition that the
>>Allies deliberately lied and faked materials for the IMT/NMT.

What I would like to see is some evidentiary basis for many of the
claims of lying and fakery. If the "revisionists" claim that solid
evidence of crimes is required, then they should live up to their own
standards and provide some evidence of the forgery they claim. In an era
when file copies were typed by hand, and only the original would bear a
signature, it seems to me that the lack of a signature (the mainstay of
Porter's claims) should unfortunately be not that surprising a thing.

Two letters about gassing vans written to Walter Rauff have long been
asserted to be a forgery. Unfortunately, Rauff gave a 1972 deposition in
Chile (where he was safe from extradition, and hence seems to have had no
motive to lie) where he confirmed receiving a letter from Becker about the
introduction of the gassing vans. While he did not specifically
authenticate that particular letter - it was after all many years later -
it would seem we have a piece of physical evidence (the letter from Becker
to Rauff) and a testimony from the recipient untainted by any possible
allegation of torture acknowledging the truth of the central point of the
letter. To wit: there were specially modified trucks whose exhaust was
used for murder. This is a violation of the "no gassing" article of faith
held by many "revisionists." (As to why this should be so bitterly
fought, I suggest it is a camel's nose thing: once it is admitted that
engine exhaust was used to gas people, it becomes easier to believe that
such was also done at Treblinka, Belzec, and Sobibor. Admit that, and it
becomes easier to believe that Hoess's testimony is true.)

With regard to the larger forgery issue, particularly amusing is the
split over the Himmler Posen speech tape: for the most part, those who I
have seen accept it as genuine claim his words don't really mean
extermination; those who accept that the words would be evidence of intent
to commit mass murder suggest the tape was faked or doctored in some way.
(Notes for the speech do exist in Himmler's own hand. That particular
section does not have notes, but then again these were notes, not a
completely prepared text.)

A put-your-money-where-your-mouth-is proposal was offered to split the
cost of a scientific analysis not available at the time of the trials
(later amended to a loser-pays proposal). There was an amazing lack of
interest on the part of those suggesting it was faked. This gets back to
my observation that many Holocaust "revisionists" are not historians
searching for the truth, but defense lawyers seeking to get their clients
acquitted on appeal.

[remainder - no comment; deleted for brevity]

Posed/emailed.
--
Mike Stein The above represents the Absolute Truth.
POB 10420 Therefore it cannot possibly be the official
Arlington, VA 22210 position of my employer.

[Michael P. Stein]

In article <19970206141...@ladder01.news.aol.com>,
<ehrli...@aol.com> wrote:
>In article <5dc0eo$d...@d31rz0.Stanford.EDU>, r...@d31rz0.Stanford.EDU

>(Richard J. Green) writes:
>
>>Mr. Ehrlich,
>>
>>I am very interested in the fact that you seem to think there is a
>>problem with Mazur's recipe. I'd like to know what you think that
>>problem is. I believe that the recipe you posted required taking fat
>>adding caustic soda (NaOH)* and heating. Before responding, I suggest
>>that you take a look at _any_ undergraduate book in organic chemistry
>>under saponification of esthers and saponification of fats.
>

>RIchard, I don't think Esther (ester) would appreciate that. Thank you

>for your opinion on the recipe. Now let me ask you a question: is there
>any differences between human fat and animal fat that might affect the
>manner whereby they can be saponified? You are the (default) expert here,
>I do not know.

I tried to drop some hints as to why this point, even if true, does
not really affect Mazur's testimony about an _experiment_ (hint, hint).
Let me drop another one: if the unsuitability of human fat for soapmaking
is logically valid as evidence that no such _experiment_ (hint, hint) was
performed, then by the exact same reasoning your pseudonym should by
rights be ehrlich001.

Posted/emailed.

[Mike Curtis]

ehrli...@aol.com wrote:

Pardon my beautifying this post by snipping the address crap. :-)

>>>>ehrli...@aol.com wrote:

[snipped the witch stuff. This did make for an interesting discussion]

Mike Curtis:

>>I saw all this smoke about soap and looked through my library. Only
>>three of my books had it indexed. The first from 1960 was Hilberg.
>>I've never seen the word rumor used so often. All three locations had
>>that word with the soap allegations. Then the _Anatomy_ book said the
>>same thing as did the Lipstadt book. Historically this is what is
>>important. Historians seem to admit that the rumors were there but
>>they do not attach credibility to those rumors. This seems to be the
>>basic point to be made when looking at holocaust historiography.
>

Ehrlich606:

>I agree with you on this. Whatever revisionists may think of the Standard
>Story, HIlberg is for the most part a very intelligent and subtle writer.
>That doesn't mean I always agree with him.
>

It hasn't been just Hilberg, but other historians.

>The soap allegations are rumors and all scholars are going to treat them
>gingerly. There appears to have been a slight shift in Lipstadt's take on
>the issue, insofar as she has moved from saying (apparently) *no soap* in
>1981 to *no soap from Jewish cadavers*.

I'm only familiar with two of her books. _Beyond Belief_ and _Denying
the Holocaust_. What writing has this change of thought been in?

> My surmise is that she is trying
>to bracket -- without saying so -- the Soviet presentation at Nuremberg.

Is this the Danzig stuff that is being discussed in another thread?

>And I think the bracketing is taking place because revisionists are trying
>to use the *soap story* as a wedge issue to discredit the IMT altogether.
>But, no, it doesn't work that way. I would like to append a quote from
>Telford Taylor, who sums up the Soviet presentation this way:
>
>(*Anatomy of the Nuremberg Trials*, p. 315

Let's be clear about what figures Taylor is speaking of so the readers
here will not be confused. This is reference to Soviet figures such as
632,253 during the blockade of Leningrad, 100,000+ at Vilna, 70,000 at
Kaunas, about 200,000 at the Yanov camp, and 1.5 million at Maidanek.

>
><quote>Were the statistics inflated? Were the atrocities invented or
>overstated? Total reliance on official reports based on untested
>depositions by unseen witnesses is certainly not the most reliable road to
>factual accuracy. Furthermore, some of the numerical totals .... are
>plainly estimates ......

This is a smashing of what Taylor wrote. I don't think you meant to do
this, but let's go ahead and do the whole sentence. "Furthermore, some
of the numerical totals, such as those for Maidanek and the German
occupied cities are plainly estimates, in contrast to Leningrad, where
circumstances made exact counts possible.

> Considering the number of deponents and the play
>of emotional factors, not only faulty observation but deliberate
>exaggeration must have warped many of the reports. But granting all that,
>were the flaws so numerous and so deep as to undermine the general
>accuracy of the picture presented?<endquote>
>

>Taylor then quotes one of the British judges whose notes indicate that
>even he felt that there was exaggeration, but that the point was that the
>Germans used calculated cruelty as a policy.
>
>Now _that_ is the context in which Taylor and a British judge evaluated
>the Soviet presentation, including the soap story,

Excuse me? Let me look back over the pages. 314 = No soap evidence.
313 = Katyn and Zyclon-B but no soap allegations
312 = Treatment of Soviet prisoners, but no soap allegations
311 = Paulis testimony and no soap allegations
310 = Paulis and no soap
307-309 = No soap
315 -318 the end of chapter I find no soap allegations.

I may have missed it with my skimming but I see absolutely no soap
context in these pages to associate the passage you present with the
subject you want--soap.

> and including many of
>the strangest stories that came from Nuremberg.

No, Ehrlich606, the judge and Taylor were talking about specific
testimony at that time and the impression it made. I think you are
trying to sweep everything into one basket and that is not what Taylor
or the judge is doing. Details should be paid attention to when
reading historical events so that mistakes like this do not happen.

> HOWEVER, it must be said
>that the discussion of the Jewish Holocaust came a few days later, i.e.,
>these comments do not necessarily apply to that.
>

Oh, and so now I'm confused about everythin you said above. Aren't
you?

>My opinion is that the soap story was a Soviet hoax a la Katyn that

Katyn happened. The Soviets wanted to put the blame on the Germans.
Katyn itself wasn't a hoax. You also know that the Katyn charges
didn't figure into the decisions made by the judges. You know this,
but it doesn't stop you from continually bringing up this canard that
no one bought at the time the presentation was made. So isn't it
curious that the judges would not accept the Soviet Katyn charge but
the impression Taylor had of the evidence presented at the top of this
post was that "neither judges, nor defense council, nor other
onlookers appear to have concluded that the Soviet evidence was
basically untrustworthy." You will note that tha impressions were not
the same with the Katyn evidence.

As for soap evidence, I'm still confused about the Danzig stuff that
is being discussed in another thread. If it was true and that a small
rumor of the experiment got out, I can see how such a rumor could
spread and be believed by the Jewish populations who were threatened
to death. My understanding of Jewish customs concerning death do not
include burning the body or turning the remains into soap.

>-- to
>the extent that it was believed at all --

Many things are believed. In fact, there was rumor in April 1865 that
Sherman had shot Grant. People believed it for a time and I'll bet
that rumor grew to wild proportions. The 4th Armored Division were
known a Roosevelt's Butchers. The Germans thought that they were
released deat row inmates with nothing to lose. Rumors work in
mysterious ways.

> indicates something about the
>hysterical beliefs people entertained about Germans and the Nazis at that
>time. But that does not invalidate the general criminality and/or
>violations of human rights by the National Socialist government in terms
>of common sense morality,

Common sense morality. Hmmm. Not being a German alive in this period
could I understand what was common sense to the majority of the German
people when it came to those they murdered and this doesn't include
just the Jews. The T4 where the mentally ill destined for elimination
were placed in hermetically sealed rooms and gassed with carbon
monoxide. Some were just injected with poison.

> _if not_ in terms of the victors' justice and
>_ex post facto_ laws. In other words, the case can certainly be made the
>Allies -- and in particular the Soviets -- were also guilty of some of the
>things that the Germans were accused of. But that's not the point. So
>there was a mixture of justice and injustice to the Trials.
>

Good lord, Ehrlich606, every trial I know of meets the conditions of
the last statement.

>The concept -- which I accept -- that exaggerations and deliberate hoaxes
>and/or forgeries were part of the IMT -- I cannot attest to their explicit
>legal status in those proceedings

I think I have suggested in the past that you look into this.

> -- does not invalidate the Trials
>altogether nor does it excuse the Germans of gratuitous killings and
>maltreatment that no one can deny. If you want to talk about bad things
>the Allies (and particular, the Soviets) did, save it for another time.
>That at least is my view.
>

Doesn't that fence post your sitting on really hurt? :-)

>>
>>>Of course you realize that assessing these kind of documents is
>virtually
>>>impossible from such a remove, but I am inclined to agree with you,
>>>namely, that there was some kind of reality behind this tale.
>>
>>A body was dug up. What you did snip was the point I made concerning
>>the corroborating testimony of the father and the accused witch.
>
>I would say -- a body was missing. We can't be sure if these gals dug it
>up.
>

They said they did. The father said they did. Beyond that I can't
conjecture beyond the data you have given. That's the point. I'd be a
pretty bad historian to jump to all these personal opinions based on
my personal biases and come to the end conclusion you have offerred
here. Understand? We may realize that witchcraft didn't happen and
think that magic (white or black) isn't possible. Take out the
fatastic and what are you left with. The testimony of the two girls
and the father. That's it. You need more to show that the father went
out and found the grave empty and so he accused the two women. You
didn't offer any evidence for this incite.

>>
>>> _Perhaps_.
>>>The problem is that then you would have to come up with a credible
>>>scenario for the reality that lay behind the non-fantastic parts of the
>>>accusation.
>>
>>Fantastic to you at this time in history. But was it fantastic to the
>>court or to the parties under question? We must assume not if we
>>consider the state of belief at that time in history.
>
>Good point. At this point in history, people were likely to ascribe
>everything that they did not understand to the power of witches.

Well, it goes deeper than that. A cow stops giving milk. Terrible
thing and it hurts the income of the farmer. So there's this troubling
55-75 year old woman who is always bothering the farmer's family by
bringing cakes and being overly nice. She's a pest and the since she
started dropping over the cow(s) have stopped giving milk. She must be
a witch. Must be. Imaginations start and then we have a typical New
England witchcraft trial.

> As to
>the other piece of your point, that superstition may have led some gals to
>dig up babies and play with the corpses, that's conceivable, but I would
>want more eivdence on medieval/early modern superstition.
>

I've read so many cases that I recall several of this type. I must
remind you that this is a side issue and really has nothing to do with
the concern of this newsgroup. I'd hate to bore them to tears.

>>Maybe it was dug up by the two women just as they testified. Think?
>
>Possible, but with these kinds of charges -- that again I think should be
>treated very gingerly.

All you have is that single two paragraph case. You need to examine
the area of the charges and other witchcraft cases to find parrallels.
Then you need to find out about the folk-lore of the area. This
includes the fairy tales. What do you think of those fairy tales. Oh,
and do you think it was logical for the French to put animals on
trial?

> I am not denying that people viewed their universe
>differently in those days -- in fact, I am sure they did. But to say that
>there might have been a reality underlying these claims leads too easily
>to a justification of the witchcraft process,

I'm not saying that. I'm suggesting to you that _they_ thought there
was an underlying reality to what they believed. They had nothing else
to tell them otherwise. Have you read _Wonders of the Invisible World_
by Cotton Mather? He was a Harvard educated Doctor of Divinity. How
about his _Cases of Conscience Concerning Evil Spirits Personating
Men; Witchcrafts, Infallible Proofs of Guilt in such are Accused of
that Crime. All According to the Scriptures, History, Experience, and
the Judgment of many learned Men._ Great title, eh?

> and I think it would be
>irresponsible to validate a process which from our perspective was
>irresponsible and hysterical.
>

No one is validating it, Ehrlich606, but to read history and to teach
it you must place yourself into the time you are dealing with.
Otherwise you are using hindsight and your perceptions will interfere
with you analysis. It's tough and can't altogether be done to
perfection, but it is the method I try and use. You can't think with
your twentieth century mind about 16th, 17th, 18th, or even 19th
century perceptions.

[snip]

>
>>
>>> There doesn't
>>>seem to be much support in what I know about Abnormal Psych for women to
>>>act in that fashion.
>>
>>Huh? Who says it is abnormal to think as they did in the 16th century?
>>
>I mean it in the sense that killings or corpse manipulation in this manner
>seems -- according to current wisdom -- to be an offshoot of usually
>solitary or semi-solitary male pyschosexual pathologies. And the
>standard line is that women are rarely victim to these pathologies.
>

Oh, pish posh. Two gals thought they could dig up a dead body to make
a potion for some purpose. Rather extreme and desperate, but they were
16th century gals who believed in the power of magic to solve their
problems. Much like the old fairy tales when magic went a long way.
Where did those fairy tales come from? You know the one's where no one
saves Little Red Riding Hood. She simply get eaten. There is no
woodsman. They came from the common folk. Ring around the Rosie was
about the Black Death and everyone falls in the end. It came from the
same place.

[snip]

posted and emailed as requested

[Michael P. Stein]

>In article <19970207223...@ladder01.news.aol.com>,
> <ehrli...@aol.com> wrote (to Rich Green):

[snip]

>You also accept the sufficiency of this story although you have no
>physical evidence, and no professional historian (i.e., Hilberg, Bauer,
>Lipstadt) who will explicitly endorse the Mazur affidavit, and who also,
>somewhat more ambiguously, deny the soapmaking allegation. So ..... who
>is it really who is in a state of denial? I don't think it's me.

Regarding Bauer, I would like to call to your attention the following:

<begin quote>

_Jerusalem Post_, 29 May 1990, p. 4:

To the Editor of the Jerusalem Post:

Sir, - Neil Kuchinsky (letters, May 20) quotes from the Nuremberg
trial transcripts to show that the Germans made soap from human
bodies at the Danzig Anatomic Institute, basing himself on the
testimony of two British PoWs and a German laboratory assistant.
The facts are correct. They were quoted in extenso in a Czech-
language book by Ota Kraus and Erich Kulka, and are well-known to
historians.

The reason why no historian has ever claimed that Germans made
industrial use of human bodies for the production of soap is also
contained in those very testimonies. They show that the
"Institute" was established in the course of 1944 by a Danzig
Nazi scientist (Dr. Spanner) who invented the method by which
this could be done, and persuaded an apparently enthusiastic
Berlin authority (we do not know who it was) to support his
experiments.

According to the somewhat contradictory evidence, 25 kg. of
perhaps more of this horrible substance was made, and one source
claims that it was used experimentally in Danzig itself. It
emerges very clearly that this was a first and unique experiment
and that it was in its experimental stages. The bodies used may
have been those of prisoners of war and forced labourers from the
immediate vicinity. It is also clear that had the war continued,
the Nazis were certainly capable of turning this into another
mass horror.

There was no industrial production, and the pieces of soap
inscribed R.I.F. which Jewish victims were told were made of
human fat were found to contain ordinary non-organic fats (R.I.F.
means Reichsstelle fuer Industrielle Fettversorgung, or State
Centre for Supply of Fats, and not Pure Jewish Fat, as the
victims were told by the Nazis).

The reason why one has to be accurate is that one has to exercise
tremendous responsibility and deep respect towards the victims
and their relatives and towards the memory of the millions of
Jewish dead. What the Nazis did is horrendous enough; we do not
need to believe the additional horrors they thought about but did
not have time to realize. The Holocaust deniers waiting in the
wings are eager to pick up any inaccuracies we may inadvertently
commit, and we should not ease their "work."

Yehuda Bauer

<end quote>

[Michael P. Stein]

In article <01bc156b$36b0c650$307213cc@server>,

Anthony Sabatini <anth...@infobahnos.com> wrote:
>Richard J. Green <r...@d31rz0.Stanford.EDU> wrote in article
><5dc0eo$d...@d31rz0.Stanford.EDU>...
>> In article <19970204043...@ladder01.news.aol.com>,
>> <ehrli...@aol.com> wrote:
>>

[snip]

>[formula snipped]
>
>Mr. Green, this is all very well and good, but what does this all prove?
>There are "recipes" for making bombs in most home encyclopedias, but does
>this mean the owners actually constructed these devices?

Not by itself. However, if instead of just being found in a book, the
owner of the house copied that recipe onto a piece of paper found in the
basement, it is a much stronger indication that there was some intent to
make use of that recipe - can you figure out why this is so? A recipe on
institute letterhead (NOT in a book!) is physical evidence supported by
Mazur's testimony of use. Even by Matt Giwer's standards, that passes the
test for acceptable legal evidence.

>> PS Yes, we all know the RIF story is untrue. No informed person in this
>> group has said otherwise. The evidence for an experiment seems
>> rather strong, however, don't you think?
>
>Then how do you explain Mr. Stein's insistence on arguing the point? Are
>you claiming that Mr. Stein is "[un]informed"?

Are _you_ claiming that I have claimed the RIF story is true? Would
you like to produce a quote to support such a claim? If you cannot, would
you please explain your reference to my arguing the point and tell me just
what you were trying to say and why?

Please answer this question and do not evade or divert from it.

>While we're at it, would you mind answering another simple question? TIA.
>
>If the Nazis conducted "experiments" on how to make "human soap", and they
>even succeeded in creating a working formula (according to you as per
>above),

There is some question as to how well it worked....

>then why did they not go into mass production mode, so to speak? I
>mean, why go through all the trouble or research, finally achieve success,
>and then just scrap the whole idea? You have to admit that it sounds pretty
>silly...

I can think of a number of possibilities, but they would all be
speculation based on no real evidence. The quality of the product was
poor; the worsening war situation made it infeasible for logistical
reasons (note the 1944 date on the experiments); others decided that it
would be bad for public morale if word got out that they were using corpse
soap. Again, I freely admit I have no real evidence; these are just three
reasonable possibilities any of which would provide a logically valid
answer to your question about why it was not done.

[Annie Alpert]

DvdThomas wrote:
>
> Random line excerpted from Danny Keren's load of bile spewed at Erhlich:
>
> >So, is he a liar, or an idiot? You tell us.
>
> Look in a mirror, Daniel. You have the manners of a goat.
>
> Why can't you even offer the simple courtesy of respecting the man's

> screen name? In a lot of forums, the inability to observe even the basics

> of Net ettiquette would get you shown to the digital door, but for you
> here it's standard procedure. Your use of the information known to anyone
> who follows this group for more than a month smacks of a small,
> mean-spirited attempt to intimidate. As if you were inviting fellow
> guttermouths more conveniently located to escalate beyond your gratuitous
> verbal harrassment. That sort of conduct sucks, my friend, philosophies
> involved being quite irrelevant.

David,

I am a great believer in the value of nettiquette and I applaud your effort to direct
the discussion in a courteous manner--however I disagree with your interpretation of the
rules. I don't think a screen name is a sacred trust that should be respected when a
person's 'real' name is known to the poster. For one thing, we are (or should be)
friendly, and friends use each other's names. Secondly, many folks here switch screen
names with regularity, making it tremendously difficult to keep track of the
conversation. It's an act of charity to keep the discussion on firm footing by
directing responses to the 'real' writer of a note, don't you think?
>
--
Nizkor (USA) - An Electronic Holocaust Educational Resource
Nizkor Web: http://www.nizkor.org/
European mirror: http://www1.de.nizkor.org/~nizkor/

And my own web page: http://www.ccnis.net/~miasaura

[Jamie McCarthy]

ehrli...@aol.com wrote:

> Now this closes out my elaborations on the soap story. I feel I am well
> within a range of broad scholarly credibility to reject the soap stories
> _in toto_. If I find anything else of interest, I will post. But frankly
> I am tired of this subject now.

Sure; you are of course welcome to accept or reject whatever you like.

I only have a problem when people claim that there is no evidence worth
even looking at ("move it along, nothing to see here"); when people
insist that this story is a deliberate fabrication born in propaganda
from a quarter-century prior, without offering any evidence; when
people take quotes out of context; when people use faulty arguments and
shoddy research to back up their conclusions; and when people announce
that, in so doing, they are speaking the truth as opposed to fifty years
of Zionist lies.

Various of the above list has been done by various "revisionists," most
notably Mark Weber and (the first and second items on the list) DThomas.
I struggle against the errors and deliberate lies, not against people's
personal interpretations of the facts.

Just wanted to make that clear.

Posted; not emailed by request.
--
Jamie McCarthy http://www.absence.prismatix.com/jamie/
ja...@voyager.net Co-Webmaster of http://www.nizkor.org/

[Daniel Keren]

It's a pity that none of the participants in this thread
tries to find out more details from the German authorities
who investigated the relevant case.

In response to my query, the German "Institute for
Contemporary History" in Munich sent me material - apparently
xeroxed from a book - which states that when corpses
were "mazerated" in the vats of the Danzig Anatomical
Institute, the fat that collected on the top of the vats
was mistakenly thought to be soap.

This may be true, this may be false, but it's probably
a worthwhile effort to obtain the transcripts of the
investigation, which may include Spanner's testimony.

It was certainly not beyond the Nazis to utilize corpses;
they obviously used human hair and gold teeth extracted from
corpses - this is well documented and there is unquestionable
physical evidence to prove it - however the soap allegation
requires further study.

In the true spirit of "revisionism", instead of trying to
find out what the facts are, our "revisionist scholars" are
endlessly beating around the bush and getting nowhere. During
all the years this "debate" has been taking place, no one
of them made any attempt to find out what the facts are.

Just like that stupid putz Walter Luftl, who writes a
"report" stating that people cannot be killed with the
exhaust of a 500 BHP diesel engine, while scientific
studies prove that animals in a closed chamber die when
exposed to the exhaust of a 6 BHP diesel engine. These
stupid "revisionist" schmucks just don't bother to do any
minimal research before spewing their rubbish. And then
they whine when people rightfully call them stupid schmucks.

-Danny Keren.

[John Morris]

In <19970209073...@ladder01.news.aol.com>, dvdt...@aol.com
(DvdThomas) wrote:

>Random line excerpted from Danny Keren's load of bile spewed at Erhlich:

>>So, is he a liar, or an idiot? You tell us.

>Look in a mirror, Daniel. You have the manners of a goat.

And this responds to Danny's argument how exactly?

The "randomly" quoted line refers to Walter Lueftl and not to The-man-
who-doesn't-want-his-real-name-used-but-whose-real-name-can-be-found-
out-by-a-simple-member-directory-search-at-aol.

Don't you think it is rather bad manners to misrepresent the context
of the quote that way? Or is this simply the habit of a revisionist
lifetime?

>Why can't you even offer the simple courtesy of respecting the man's
>screen name? In a lot of forums, the inability to observe even the basics
>of Net ettiquette would get you shown to the digital door, but for you
>here it's standard procedure. Your use of the information known to anyone
>who follows this group for more than a month smacks of a small,
>mean-spirited attempt to intimidate. As if you were inviting fellow
>guttermouths more conveniently located to escalate beyond your gratuitous
>verbal harrassment. That sort of conduct sucks, my friend, philosophies
>involved being quite irrelevant.

But if you are content to concede Danny's point with yet another
whinge on other people's manners, who am I to complain?

Perhaps when you actually have something to say, you could flag it in
the subject line.

[Gord McFee]

Mike Curtis wrote:
>
> Greg Raven <ihr...@kaiwan.com> wrote:
>
> Before I deal with the soap article, you should feel inclined to
> defend your Hoess article first.

I hate to break it to you, but it ain't gonna happen. If you any
response at all, it will be one of (a) what Hoess article?; (b) I
haven't got the time or (c) a repost of the Hoess article.

--
Gord McFee
I'll write no line before its time

[Gord McFee]

Richard Schultz wrote:
>
> DvdThomas (dvdt...@aol.com) wrote:
>
> : In a lot of forums, the inability to observe even the basics

> : of Net ettiquette would get you shown to the digital door, but for you
> : here it's standard procedure. Your use of the information known to anyone
> : who follows this group for more than a month smacks of a small,
> : mean-spirited attempt to intimidate. As if you were inviting fellow
> : guttermouths more conveniently located to escalate beyond your gratuitous
> : verbal harrassment. That sort of conduct sucks, my friend, philosophies
> : involved being quite irrelevant.
>

> Now, the question is: Will Mr. Thomas *ever* direct this kind of
> diatribe against, say, Matt "kikemouth" Giwer?

I take it that was a rhetorical question, Rich.

[ehrli...@aol.com]

Subj: Re: You Want Soap? You Get Soap
Date: 02/09/97
To: mst...@access.digex.net

In a message dated 97-02-09 09:55:44 EST, you write:

>
> Two letters about gassing vans written to Walter Rauff have long
been
> asserted to be a forgery. Unfortunately, Rauff gave a 1972 deposition
in
> Chile (where he was safe from extradition, and hence seems to have had
no
> motive to lie) where he confirmed receiving a letter from Becker about
the
> introduction of the gassing vans. While he did not specifically
> authenticate that particular letter - it was after all many years later
-
> it would seem we have a piece of physical evidence (the letter from
Becker
> to Rauff) and a testimony from the recipient untainted by any possible
> allegation of torture acknowledging the truth of the central point of
the
> letter. To wit: there were specially modified trucks whose exhaust was
> used for murder. This is a violation of the "no gassing" article of
faith
> held by many "revisionists." (As to why this should be so bitterly
> fought, I suggest it is a camel's nose thing: once it is admitted that

> engine exhaust was used to gas people, it becomes easier to believe
that

> such was also done at Treblinka, Belzec, and Sobibor. Admit that, and
it
> becomes easier to believe that Hoess's testimony is true.)
>

Unfortunately, Mike, the Camel sticks his nose in both tents. The refusal
to discount the soap claim is, it seems to me, a matter of the
conventionalist tent in this case.

Now, I am _not_ going to get into a discussion of *industrial
exterminations* no matter how much abuse Danny Keren wants to throw at me
-- I think he has fairly well established that he is beyond any type of
rational or civilized behavior -- because his bellowings do not make him a
scientific expert nor do his accusations make me one. However, I will
make two points. #1: I liked your diesel analysis even though I don't
think it is authoritative, and #2 if a couple of Brits kill a few small
mammals in a chamber with diesel that doesn't refute everyone else who has
written on this topic.

BECAUSE the timings alleged in the Pattle experiments, as well as your own
analyses, don't match the timeline of the testimonies. Pattle asserts that
it took 3 hours or so to kill the guinea pigs and other small rodents, as
per references to this article, *British Journal of Industrial Medicine*,
14, (1957), pp. 47-55, see esp. note 35, 36, in spaces already full of
gas, whereas testimonies assert 20 minutes _tops_ for chambers into which
the CO is slowly introduced. What does it mean? I don't know, but it
does mean that Keren's foaming at the mouth is irrelevant.

ALL YOU HAVE TO DO is get some experts on diesels (engineers and stuff)
and some scientists and chemists, write some reports, publish them the
same way revisionists do, and maintain calm. Vicious personal attacks and
loss of temper certainly do not contribute to anyone's claims of
scientific objectivity. And I have Dan Keren in mind when I make this
statement.

Finally, on this subject, I don't know and I don't pretend to know whether
mass gassings occurred at the locations mentioned, or, more precisely, how
many were killed, and I have never pretended to have a direct line to
Truth to prove the one or the other. My personal opinion is that it
doesn't matter to the reality of the Holocaust in any way. However, so
long as technical experts from the revisionist side are going to say that
it can't be done, then conventionalists owe their point of view similar
technical backup. But you simply can't dismiss the technical experts on
the revisionist side so cavalierly.

Too many of the people on your side (not you) seem to think that people
develop an interest in the revisionist side because they have either a
Nazi-apology or anti-semitic agenda. That is not true in my case. And I
deeply resent the assertion that it is. What has long bothered me is that
this movement has gathered momentum and there are no clear, calm, and
objective refutations that are inclusive, widely available, authoritative
and complete. I do not defend revisionism because I defend the political
agenda of some, or even most revisionists. I defend revisionism because I
am not going to be distracted in my own thinking by vicious personal
attacks. In short, I have learned the lessons of 20th Century
demagoguery, even if some of my opponents have not.

As long as this issue continues to be handled with hysteria it _creates_
danger. That is obvious to me. And it is also obvious that
alt.revisionism is not the place to get anywhere on it. But a consensus
of Reason will eventually emerge on this emotional and painful topic, and
if I have to be a lightning rod for it, so be it. But you and your
associates would be well advised to note the plea behind my words: it will
come, and there are ways to absorb it so that it does no harm. Look:
revisionism is much more in the public eye than 20 years ago when everyone
-- including me -- dismissed Butz as a nutcase. There is no reason to
think that it will fade, especially since now your advocates are moving to
make it a thoughtcrime.

You should think about ways of shifting gears and noting where there is
danger and where there is none.

Best Regards,

E606

PS - Defense lawyers trying to get their clients off? Puh-leez. I have
condemned the antisemitic policies of the Hitler government many times.
This is about shaking off the cobwebs of credulity and establishing a
consensus. If the polar opposites on these issues don't want to concede
anything, then that suggests that both sides have other reasons for being
the way they are. And that applies to the fanatics on both sides.

[ehrli...@aol.com]

There are three references specifically to *Jewish cadavers* in Lipstadt's
book *Denying ... * I know of no others.

>
> > My surmise is that she is trying
> >to bracket -- without saying so -- the Soviet presentation at
Nuremberg.
>
> Is this the Danzig stuff that is being discussed in another thread?

yup.

I don't think this is a smashing at all: on the previous page, p. 313,
footnote, Taylor specifically mentions that Smirnov's presentation is
based on over 57,000 claimed deponents for which no witnesses were called.
Judging by Taylor's wording, I submit that he is referring to the
totality of Smirnov's presentation, especially since he speculates on
whether the atrocities were invented or exaggerated. That, in turn, would
have no relevance, to say, Leningrad.

>
> >Taylor then quotes one of the British judges whose notes indicate that
> >even he felt that there was exaggeration, but that the point was that
the
> >Germans used calculated cruelty as a policy.

As of the date February 15. That is, during Smirnov's presentation.

> >
> >Now _that_ is the context in which Taylor and a British judge
evaluated
> >the Soviet presentation, including the soap story,
>
> Excuse me? Let me look back over the pages. 314 = No soap evidence.
> 313 = Katyn and Zyclon-B but no soap allegations
> 312 = Treatment of Soviet prisoners, but no soap allegations
> 311 = Paulis testimony and no soap allegations
> 310 = Paulis and no soap
> 307-309 = No soap
> 315 -318 the end of chapter I find no soap allegations.

You may not know, but it is in the record that Smirnov read _portions_ of
the three affidavits into the record on February 19, 1946. This is the
same presentation about which both the Judge and Taylor expressed
reservations. No: Taylor does not specifically mention the soap
allegation, nor, for that matter, does Persico. Conot, who references it,
and who also references Balachowsky's _testimony_ about books bound with
human skin, makes no authorial judgment about the materials he presents in
his book. Now -- why do you think that Taylor specifically expresses
doubts over Smirnov's presentation, but does not mention the soap story?
And why does Persico not mention it? Do you think that perhaps they
forgot?

> > and including many of
> >the strangest stories that came from Nuremberg.
>
> No, Ehrlich606, the judge and Taylor were talking about specific
> testimony at that time and the impression it made. I think you are
> trying to sweep everything into one basket and that is not what Taylor
> or the judge is doing. Details should be paid attention to when

> reading historical events so that mistakes like this do not happen.

There is _no_ specificity in their remarks. Moreover, there was _no_
testimony during Smirnov's presentation. That's what it says. he read
affidavits from Soviet Special commissions into the record. That's all.

>
> > HOWEVER, it must be said
> >that the discussion of the Jewish Holocaust came a few days later,
i.e.,
> >these comments do not necessarily apply to that.
> >
>
> Oh, and so now I'm confused about everythin you said above. Aren't
> you?

No: Smirnov did not begin his presentation on the the Jewish massacres
until February 25, at least according to Taylor, (p. 317).

>
> >My opinion is that the soap story was a Soviet hoax a la Katyn that
>
> Katyn happened. The Soviets wanted to put the blame on the Germans.
> Katyn itself wasn't a hoax. You also know that the Katyn charges
> didn't figure into the decisions made by the judges. You know this,
> but it doesn't stop you from continually bringing up this canard that
> no one bought at the time the presentation was made. So isn't it
> curious that the judges would not accept the Soviet Katyn charge but
> the impression Taylor had of the evidence presented at the top of this
> post was that "neither judges, nor defense council, nor other
> onlookers appear to have concluded that the Soviet evidence was
> basically untrustworthy." You will note that tha impressions were not
> the same with the Katyn evidence.

The crux here is *basically* -- and there are several other weasel words
in Taylor's sentence as well. The Soviet Special Commission report on
Katyn, including the witness testimony at the IMT, most certainly _was_ a
hoax.

>
> As for soap evidence, I'm still confused about the Danzig stuff that
> is being discussed in another thread. If it was true and that a small
> rumor of the experiment got out, I can see how such a rumor could
> spread and be believed by the Jewish populations who were threatened
> to death. My understanding of Jewish customs concerning death do not
> include burning the body or turning the remains into soap.

As argued elsewhere, Mike Stein and I believe it was the other way around.
Except that I think the Soviets faked it, while Mike Stein seems to think
it gave Immune-from-Prosecution-Spanner ideas.

> > _if not_ in terms of the victors' justice and
> >_ex post facto_ laws. In other words, the case can certainly be made
the
> >Allies -- and in particular the Soviets -- were also guilty of some of
the
> >things that the Germans were accused of. But that's not the point.
So
> >there was a mixture of justice and injustice to the Trials.
> >
>
> Good lord, Ehrlich606, every trial I know of meets the conditions of
> the last statement.

You seem awfully complacent about it.

>
> >The concept -- which I accept -- that exaggerations and deliberate
hoaxes
> >and/or forgeries were part of the IMT -- I cannot attest to their
explicit
> >legal status in those proceedings
>
> I think I have suggested in the past that you look into this.

You want to send me the transcripts?

>
> > -- does not invalidate the Trials
> >altogether nor does it excuse the Germans of gratuitous killings and
> >maltreatment that no one can deny. If you want to talk about bad
things
> >the Allies (and particular, the Soviets) did, save it for another
time.
> >That at least is my view.
> >
>
> Doesn't that fence post your sitting on really hurt? :-)

Attempting to arrive at a consensus garners one no rewards. :)

[Yale F. Edeiken]

> ehrli...@aol.com writes:

> You may not know, but it is in the record that Smirnov read _portions_ of
> the three affidavits into the record on February 19, 1946. This is the
> same presentation about which both the Judge and Taylor expressed
> reservations. No: Taylor does not specifically mention the soap
> allegation, nor, for that matter, does Persico. Conot, who references it,
> and who also references Balachowsky's _testimony_ about books bound with
> human skin, makes no authorial judgment about the materials he presents in
> his book. Now -- why do you think that Taylor specifically expresses
> doubts over Smirnov's presentation, but does not mention the soap story?
> And why does Persico not mention it? Do you think that perhaps they
> forgot?

> There is _no_ specificity in their remarks. Moreover, there was _no_

> testimony during Smirnov's presentation. That's what it says. he read
> affidavits from Soviet Special commissions into the record. That's all.

This is not an accurate representation of either Taylor's comments or
Smirnov's case. Additionally it should be noted that Taylor was not present at
Nuremberg on February 19 as he was in the U.S. (page 316). He describes
Smirnov's case as follows:

"On February 19, Smirnov turned to the mass executions in the death
camps found by the Soviet forces as they occupied Poland -- Auschwitz,
Maidenek, Chelmo, Treblinka, Sobibor, and Belzec. The credibility of the evidence
was reinforced by captured German photographs. These were the photographs
that Rudenko had previously shown me. Since the source was German, and the
pictures often portrayed identifiable locations or individuals -- e.g. SS generals Arthur
Gebauer and Karl Strock -- their authenticity was solid. The scenes were in line
with the content of the documentary evidence. There were also Soviet motion
pictures of the captured camps and the sites of other Nazi atrocities." page 316)

Taylor continues:

"Of more significance was the fact that despite the Soviet government's
reluctance to recognize Jewry as a primary and unique victim of Nazism, in the
afternoon of of February 26, Smirnov started presenting evidence on Nazi
'persecution of the Jews,' which continued through most of February 27 . . . . ."

"Smirnov relied largely on American captured documents concerning the
Einsatzgruppen and on reports of the Soviet and Polish governments describing the
death camps. He then called four Jewish witnesses who described, from personal
experience, the activities of the German Einsatz unit in Vilna, where the Jewish
population was reduced from approximately 80,000 to 600 persons; the procedures
of the Treblinka camp, where, with the use of 13 gas chambers, several thousand
Jews were killed each day within a few minutes of their arrival; and the treatment of
Jewish children at the Birkenau section of the Auschwitz camp." (page 317)

It should also be noted that Judge Birkett, who had very little good to say
in his diary about the prosecution in general and the Soviets in particular, was
favorably impressed with the presentations on the concentration camps.

--YFE

[Daniel Keren]

dvdt...@aol.com (DvdThomas writes:

# Random line excerpted from Danny Keren's load of bile spewed
# at Erhlich:

## So, is he a liar, or an idiot? You tell us.

(This was actually directed at Walter Luftl, not "ehrlich").

# Look in a mirror, Daniel. You have the manners of a goat.
# Why can't you even offer the simple courtesy of respecting
# the man's screen name?

The question implicitly assumes that I view "revisionists" as
ordinary people, who should be treated with courtesy. But I
don't. I view them as something entirely different.

And don't give me the crap about "you hate everyone who doesn't
agree with you". That is a lie, plain and simple. There are
people with whom I have severe disagreements, but I respect them
nontheless.

You spit on the memory of millions of innocents, murdered by
your beloved Nazis. I can forgive you calling me a goat. I cannot
forgive your mockery of the dead.

It is true that you never use four-letter words; it is true that
your articles are reasonably polite and calm; but poison is poison,
even when coated with a thin layer of artificial colors.

I can forgive a young member of the "Einsatzgruppen" more than I can
forgive you. He had an excuse: he was brought up to believe that
Jews are vermin that should be annihilated. You, on the other hand,
grew up in a tolerant, open-minded society. And yet, you follow
the path taken by those who educated that "Einsatzgruppen" member.

You do not deserve any compassion, any friendship, any
understanding, any courtesy. You are "the other side", and
I will forever hate what you stand for.


-Danny Keren.

[John Morris]

In <32FE5A...@ibm.net>, Gord McFee <gmc...@ibm.net> wrote:

>Mike Curtis wrote:

>> Greg Raven <ihr...@kaiwan.com> wrote:

>> Before I deal with the soap article, you should feel inclined to
>> defend your Hoess article first.

>I hate to break it to you, but it ain't gonna happen. If you any
>response at all, it will be one of (a) what Hoess article?; (b) I
>haven't got the time or (c) a repost of the Hoess article.

Or "show me or draw me a Nazi gas chamber." And when you do, the
inevitable "That ain't a Nazi gas chamber. It's a _______."

The blank can be filled with a morgue, a bomb shelter, a gigantic
delousing chamber, a coal gasification plant, or a coke carburetion
plant. Any one of which is actually in another building than the one
shown in the photograph.

[DvdThomas]

DvdThomas wrote:
>
>> Random line excerpted from Danny Keren's load of bile spewed at
Erhlich:

>>
>> >So, is he a liar, or an idiot? You tell us.
>>

>> Look in a mirror, Daniel. You have the manners of a goat.
>>

>> Why can't you even offer the simple courtesy of respecting the man's
>> screen name? In a lot of forums, the inability to observe even the

basics
>> of Net ettiquette would get you shown to the digital door, but for you
>> here it's standard procedure. Your use of the information known to
anyone
>> who follows this group for more than a month smacks of a small,
>> mean-spirited attempt to intimidate. As if you were inviting fellow
>> guttermouths more conveniently located to escalate beyond your
gratuitous
>> verbal harrassment. That sort of conduct sucks, my friend,
philosophies
>> involved being quite irrelevant.
>

>David,
>
>I am a great believer in the value of nettiquette and I applaud your
effort to direct
>the discussion in a courteous manner--however I disagree with your
interpretation of the
>rules. I don't think a screen name is a sacred trust that should be
respected when a
>person's 'real' name is known to the poster. For one thing, we are (or
should be)
>friendly, and friends use each other's names. Secondly, many folks here
switch screen
>names with regularity, making it tremendously difficult to keep track of
the
>conversation. It's an act of charity to keep the discussion on firm
footing by
>directing responses to the 'real' writer of a note, don't you think?

Annie,

Thanks for your comments, and even more so for the civil manner in which
you present them. It seems odd to thank someone for being normal, but you
have to consider where we are and what passes for normal here. I agree
with much of what you say, but not all when you take this particular
instance into account.

--Ehrlich606 has not and does not switch screen names. There is no doubt
who is writing posts with that name unless you count the slapstick period
when a couple of super-sleuths obsessed with the "realness" of people
they'll never meet except on a computer screen decided that he and I were
one and the same. So there's no problem keeping track of posts or thread
because of Ehrlich.

--Of greater importance is what I allude to at the end of my paragraph.
This is an emotional subject we discuss here, and emotions such as Danny
Keren expresses are not given to charity or friendliness. Worse, they
serve as encouragement for weaker minds than Dan's, leading to occasional
incidents of real harassment, the serious kind where peace of mind or
property or person are injured by some pumped up zealot or group of same.
I say occasional, but believe me, one is way too many when it's directed
at you. Bet I can collect more incidents of serious physical assault
committed by defenders of the Righteous position than you can the reverse.
So my objections have to do with more than politeness in this case.

I made the comments above after reading only a portion of the post.
Closed it in disgust, then came back later and saw that I missed the more
appropriate quote which requires my abject apology to all goats, past
present and future.

>You're pathetic, Kennady. How desperate must you be, to seek
>the company of these deranged, hateful idiots?
>
>-Danny Keren.

GOATS, I'M SORRY, MY REMARK WAS WAY OUT OF LINE.--D. Thomas

And while we're on the subject, I'd like to say that post titles like
"Annie Alpert The Aryan Beauty of Latest Report", "The Fable of the
Fabulous Hebrew Turd", "Cowardly Gutless Nazis", and kike this and nazi
that are more of a put-off than some of the contents. You open the window
to this newsgroup, scan the new stuff and get the feeling you could close
your eyes and still smell it. There's a nagging feeling the whole time
of, "What the hell am I doing here?" Yeah, I know, several people wonder
the same thing--there's a good straight line boys, go for it.

Anyway, thanks for your comments, and for having the maturity to realize
that put-downs accomplish not one damned thing aside from whatever curious
satisfaction they give the afflicted devotees.

By the way, a minor Netiquette point. I believe I read that one of the
no-no's of the innocent days back in, say 1994, was that persisting in
calling someone by any name after they have objected to its use and have
not posted by it is considered rude. (Like Harry Mazal objecting
strenuously to being called Harry, and generally having that wish
respected--except for a couple of times by myself until I saw the nonsense
in it.) And rudeness will rightly get you kicked out of many forums.
(Get in one of the academic groups and call a New York snot "Bubba"
several times and see how long you last.) Not here of course, so I
suppose my objections have no technical validity and must be based only on
a sense of decency. But that doesn't cut anything here either. What is,
is. And what I is is turned off by it.

Best wishes,

[DvdThomas]

Daniel Keren wrote:

>So, is he a liar, or an idiot? You tell us.
>

>Luftl wrote that the testimonies about the Treblinka and other
>gas chambers are "physically impossible", because, so he claimed,
>"exhaust from a 500 BHP diesel engine cannot harm anyone". We
>know, however, that scientific tests were conducted, in which
>animals exposed to the exhaust of a 6 BHP diesel engine have
>died ("The Toxicity of Fumes from a Diesel Engine Under Four
>Different Running Conditions", by Pattle et al., British Journal
>of Industrial Medicine, 1957, Vol 14, p. 47-55). We know that
>scientific studies prove that it's easy to tune a diesel engine
>so that its exhaust contains up to 6 percent CO, which is
>much higher than the lethal concentration (Holtz & Elliot,
>"The Significance of Diesel Exhaust Gas Analysis", Trans. of the
>ASME, vol. 63, 1941, p. 97-105).
>
>Now, I am not an engineer. Yet, I found these two papers
>quite easily. I would expect that Luftl would conduct some
>minimal research before he published his report. Obviously,
>he did not; or maybe he did, but he decided to ignore it.
>Either way, his report is useless; it's a piece of garbage.
>Nothing you can do about it.
>
>Can you comment on how Luftl's "report" should be viewed,
>in light of these scientific studies? I'm not interested in
>your empty rhetoric. Address the facts, please.

Well, OK. The question wasn't addressed to me, but I'll be happy to
provide some cogent facts to flesh out your own admittedly unqualified
minimal research.

Consider these points regarding Pattle's experiments:

1) They achieved a 0.22% concentration of CO with limited oxygen intake
(as opposed to 0.4% which is the minimum lethal level required to kill a
human after an hour or so).

2) They used a small chamber, only a few decimeters in size.

3) 40 mice, 4 rabbits and 10 guinea pigs were killed in repeated
experiments

4) The animals took more than 3 hours to die, 3 hours and 20 minutes on
the average, if I read it correctly.

5) The animals were put in the chamber after the gas had already achieved
concentration.

How then can it be deemed feasible to accelerate the death process to a
half hour or less (seven times faster than Pattle's experiments)and at
concentrations of at least 0.4%, considering the strain such abnormal
operation puts on the engine and starting from zero CO concentration?
Just curious.

Glad to be of help here.

># Leuchter has worked for years in a professional capacity on
># the design of execution chambers.
>
>He never did any work on any gas chamber. Why are you lying?
>Why are you defending the most idiotic "scientific report"
>on "revisionism" ever written?

Careful now, feet don't taste too good, especially when they're your own.
Bet you money you're dead wrong on this. And even if that weren't the
case, why in heaven's name can't you just say that the guy is wrong if
that's what you think, instead of calling him a liar? Do you suppose this
increases your own credibility or is this just something you can't
control? The former is wrong, the latter is unfortunate. But, Johnson
was afflicted with Tourette's and it didn't hamper him much. Then again,
he overcame the effects of his uncontrollable outbursts of grossness in
public by dint of a first-rate intellect and wit, so maybe there is no
hope in this case.

Regards,

[General Bullmoose]

On {Sun, 09 Feb 1997 06:07:27 -0700}, {mvan...@rbi.com (Mark Van Alstine)}
wrote in {alt.revisionism}:
[AG the goose]

The point is rather that you and Leuftl are both wrong. There is no need
for and "exhaust" pipe unless the room had been quite expensively and obviously
built to be air tight and withstand pressure in the first place.

Thus there could never have been any pressure build up and no increase in
the amount of CO in the room greater than the amount in the exhaust as
generated.

One finger is all a real American needs.

[General Bullmoose]

On {9 Feb 1997 11:43:22 GMT}, {sch...@ashur.cc.biu.ac.il (Richard Schultz)}

wrote in {alt.revisionism}:
[AG the goose]

>DvdThomas (dvdt...@aol.com) wrote:
>
>: In a lot of forums, the inability to observe even the basics

>: of Net ettiquette would get you shown to the digital door, but for you
>: here it's standard procedure. Your use of the information known to anyone
>: who follows this group for more than a month smacks of a small,
>: mean-spirited attempt to intimidate. As if you were inviting fellow
>: guttermouths more conveniently located to escalate beyond your gratuitous
>: verbal harrassment. That sort of conduct sucks, my friend, philosophies
>: involved being quite irrelevant.
>

>Now, the question is: Will Mr. Thomas *ever* direct this kind of
>diatribe against, say, Matt "kikemouth" Giwer?
>

>Ha ha.

An incomplete but to the point description of kikemouth follows.

Jim, you have been sorely mislead by this Ken McVay fellow.
He has a lot of followers and of course he can not be held
responsible for them. But the simple fact is that their posts to
the conference he refers to as combatting hate on the internet
could not be repeated on the airwaves in any country in the
world.

The scatological references to male genitalia alone would
result in every sponsor pulling their ads and the FCC making it
occasional jousts with Howard Stern look like a church picnic.
His followers are into the foulest, most obscene references that
can be imagined.

And it is not just the men but the women also who engage in
these statements. It is a bit misleading to call them
references, they are vulgar and explicit from both the men and
the women.

And to the embarrassment of jews everywhere, these males and
females identify themselves as Jews.

Imagine if you will that even publications like Penthouse in
the worst of its days would not publish things like this.
Moreover, you will not find statements like these in your vilest
triple X rated porno magazines.

There is literally no place in the world, this entire earth,
which would permit the public reading or recounting of the posts
of self-proclaimed Jews. Think about that for a moment. There
is no censorship system on this planet that would permit their
posts to be read on the air or put in print.

And that is Ken McVay and the supporters of Ken McVay.

There is no way I am being ultrasensitive here. These are
the facts about these self-proclamed jews.

To go further, these people never condemn each other for
their language save in mild terms and then only so that they can
say they did.

And these are the people defending the Holocaust on the
internet.

They are literally the vilest, the foulest mouthed, literally
making a sailor blush, male and female, of any people on the face
of the earth.

This is Ken McVay and his followers and supporters. They are
the defenders of the Holocaust.

And that is what the Holocaust has come down to, its
defenders vying for the greatest scatological obscenity since the
beginning of time against those who merely point out there is no
physical evidence for these Soviet claims.

But then that is only the beginning of the crimes of McVay
and his followers. They engage in character assassination at the
wholesale level. They engage in telephone harrassment. The
harrass the families of those they dislike. The harrass the
employers of those they dislike and the employers of their
families.

And on the internet they engage in every form of
harrassment, denial of service, interference with contract, lies,
you name it and they do it. Their actions are rivaled only by
their public obscenities but rarely do them justice.

Anyone can read alt.revisionism and see that they are of a
sort so crude in their sexual references that not even the most
vulgar publication outside the law would repeat them. This is
the type of person that supports and defends the Holocaust.

If on no other grounds, the Holocaust should be rejected
because its defenders lack character and integrity.

Canadian TV, being a small country and lacking local color,
seeks out the likes of the leader of the obscene contingent of
holocaust defenders to interview. However any interviewer who
read the posts of his supporters (at my choosing and without
censorship) would be on the dole within the hour. But rather
McVay is treated like some kind of hero for inspiring the kind of
obscenity that internet censors wish to keep from children.

But even worse, the kind of vulgarity he has promoted and
inspired is the kind that censors would like to keep from late
teenagers nad in some cases early adults. His followers and
supporters are clearly sexually depraved and at the same time
self proclaimed Jews.

It is exactly the kind of material Ken McVay and his
followers and supporters promote that has given the internet a
bad name among those concerned for their children. It is exaclty
this kind of sexually depraved material that will lead to the
censorship of the internet.

One can only wonder if this is not the real agenda of the
McVays of the world.

[Mark Van Alstine]

In article <01bc1563$90513d00$307213cc@server>, "Anthony Sabatini"
<anth...@infobahnos.com> wrote:

> Mike Curtis <mcu...@inetport.com> wrote in article
> <33021e05...@news.inetport.com>...
> > ehrli...@aol.com wrote:
> >
> > >
> > >As you well know, Charles, virtually every thread on this board descends
> > >_precisely_ to that level eventually. Unless one of the interlocutors
> has
> > >the wit to quit the discussion.
> >
> > Sounds like Ehrlich606 is back to the sour grapes routine.
>
> Careful there, Mike. Wasn't it you who was recently whining about "deniers"
> attacking Nizkor, not debating the Holocaust, et. al? If so, then what's
> the meaning of this "sour grapes" routine? More hypocrisy showing through?
> Surely not!?!

Surely not. Mr. "Sabatini," besides licking Nazi boots, seems to have
taken hypocrisy to new heights all by himself.

For those interested in proof of Mr. "Sabitini's" Holocaust denial,
intellectual dishonesty, anti-Semitism, and outright lies, please visit:

http://www.nizkor.org/ftp.cgi?people/s/sabatini.anthony

Mark

[General Bullmoose]

On {Mon, 10 Feb 1997 07:56:31 GMT}, {dke...@world.std.com (Daniel Keren)} wrote

in {alt.revisionism}:
[AG the goose]

>dvdt...@aol.com (DvdThomas writes:

>
># Random line excerpted from Danny Keren's load of bile spewed
># at Erhlich:
>
>## So, is he a liar, or an idiot? You tell us.
>
>(This was actually directed at Walter Luftl, not "ehrlich").
>
># Look in a mirror, Daniel. You have the manners of a goat.
># Why can't you even offer the simple courtesy of respecting
># the man's screen name?
>
>The question implicitly assumes that I view "revisionists" as
>ordinary people, who should be treated with courtesy. But I
>don't. I view them as something entirely different.

Daniel, your mirror is very dark. You have entirely missed the point of
the observation.

>And don't give me the crap about "you hate everyone who doesn't
>agree with you". That is a lie, plain and simple. There are
>people with whom I have severe disagreements, but I respect them
>nontheless.

Miss one.

>You spit on the memory of millions of innocents, murdered by
>your beloved Nazis. I can forgive you calling me a goat. I cannot
>forgive your mockery of the dead.

And in this you reveal that you are both a rational person and that you
deliberately and willfully equate anyone disagreeing with your absurd and lying
opinions on the holocaust (e.g. your refusal to note the deaths of the animals
in the diesel engine experiments took 1 1/2 to 2 hours.)

Thing Keren you are a liar from the getgo. You are another blot upon the
reputation of British Columbia via OBE.

>It is true that you never use four-letter words; it is true that
>your articles are reasonably polite and calm; but poison is poison,
>even when coated with a thin layer of artificial colors.

And again you exemplify the Jewish refusal to debate the holocaust and
choose to attack instead.

>I can forgive a young member of the "Einsatzgruppen" more than I can
>forgive you. He had an excuse: he was brought up to believe that
>Jews are vermin that should be annihilated. You, on the other hand,
>grew up in a tolerant, open-minded society. And yet, you follow
>the path taken by those who educated that "Einsatzgruppen" member.

Perhaps they were simply communists and clearly deserved to be
exterminated. Have you ever thought of that? Of course you have and you know
they were the foundation of the communist party and richly deserved anything
that happened to them as communists.

>You do not deserve any compassion, any friendship, any
>understanding, any courtesy. You are "the other side", and
>I will forever hate what you stand for.

And of course no communist at any time or any place in history deserves
any form of compassion whatsoever. They are all murders as gross and vile as
Elmer the Chuckle Fairy. But then, such murderers are always on the side of you
jews.

[Daniel Keren]

Hoo...@holler.mil (General Bullmoose) writes:

[Nothing of importance]

# One finger is all a real American needs.

Matt, you sorry old slob. You stole this from
Al Bundy, didn't you?

-Danny Keren.

[Gord McFee]

DvdThomas wrote:
>
> Daniel Keren wrote:

[deleted]

> ># Leuchter has worked for years in a professional capacity on
> ># the design of execution chambers.
> >
> >He never did any work on any gas chamber. Why are you lying?
> >Why are you defending the most idiotic "scientific report"
> >on "revisionism" ever written?
>
> Careful now, feet don't taste too good, especially when they're your own.
> Bet you money you're dead wrong on this. And even if that weren't the
> case, why in heaven's name can't you just say that the guy is wrong if
> that's what you think, instead of calling him a liar? Do you suppose this
> increases your own credibility or is this just something you can't
> control? The former is wrong, the latter is unfortunate. But, Johnson
> was afflicted with Tourette's and it didn't hamper him much. Then again,
> he overcame the effects of his uncontrollable outbursts of grossness in
> public by dint of a first-rate intellect and wit, so maybe there is no
> hope in this case.

Mr. Thomas, if you would re-read the Zuendel trial transcripts and the
follow-ups, you would notice that Mr. Leuchter *admitted* under oath
that he had lied about (a) his professional qualifications (he has a
degree in the humanities) and (b) his gas chamber work. That is
Leuchter himself in court talking, not Dr. Keren. Dr. Keren describing
Leuchter as a liar is simply a statement of fact.

Let me know how much you are prepared to bet.

And how do *your* feet taste?

[Gord McFee]

Matt Giwer, posting as General Bullmoose wrote:

Gee Matt, these names are getting more juvenile every day. Really lost
it, haven't you?

> On {Mon, 10 Feb 1997 07:56:31 GMT}, {dke...@world.std.com (Daniel Keren)} wrote
> in {alt.revisionism}:

[deleted]

> And in this you reveal that you are both a rational person and that you
> deliberately and willfully equate anyone disagreeing with your absurd and lying
> opinions on the holocaust (e.g. your refusal to note the deaths of the animals
> in the diesel engine experiments took 1 1/2 to 2 hours.)
>
> Thing Keren you are a liar from the getgo. You are another blot upon the
> reputation of British Columbia via OBE.

Pretty feeble Matt. We expected a lot better.

[Greg Raven]

John Morris wrote:
>
> In <32FE5A...@ibm.net>, Gord McFee <gmc...@ibm.net> wrote:
>
> >Mike Curtis wrote:
>
> >> Greg Raven <ihr...@kaiwan.com> wrote:
>
> >> Before I deal with the soap article, you should feel inclined to
> >> defend your Hoess article first.
>
> >I hate to break it to you, but it ain't gonna happen. If you any
> >response at all, it will be one of (a) what Hoess article?; (b) I
> >haven't got the time or (c) a repost of the Hoess article.
>
> Or "show me or draw me a Nazi gas chamber." And when you do, the
> inevitable "That ain't a Nazi gas chamber. It's a _______."
>
> The blank can be filled with a morgue, a bomb shelter, a gigantic
> delousing chamber, a coal gasification plant, or a coke carburetion
> plant. Any one of which is actually in another building than the one
> shown in the photograph.

Your response implies that you know of a Nazi gas chamber that is so
called on some contemporaneous German document. I would be most grateful
if you could produce this document, and tell us to which Nazi gas
chamber it refers.

The reason I keep asking for persons such as yourself to show me or draw
me a Nazi gas chamber is precisely because your answer always seems to
be along the lines of "This morgue was a gas chamber"! If all it takes
to make a building gas chamber is your say-so, then what's the point of
history?

--
Greg Raven (ihr...@kaiwan.com)
PO Box 10545, Costa Mesa, CA 92627
http://www.kaiwan.com/~ihrgreg

[Mike Curtis]

ehrli...@aol.com wrote:

[snip]

>> I'm only familiar with two of her books. _Beyond Belief_ and _Denying
>> the Holocaust_. What writing has this change of thought been in?
>
>There are three references specifically to *Jewish cadavers* in Lipstadt's
>book *Denying ... * I know of no others.
>

Then there doesn't seem to be anything NEW from her.

[snip]

There is no mention of Soap in the book and he's very specific about
what he was commenting on.

>>
>> >Taylor then quotes one of the British judges whose notes indicate that
>> >even he felt that there was exaggeration, but that the point was that
>the
>> >Germans used calculated cruelty as a policy.
>
>As of the date February 15. That is, during Smirnov's presentation.
>

He doesn't comment on the whole presentation. Taylor was specific
about what he was commenting on as I showed by filling in the
ellipses.

>> >
>> >Now _that_ is the context in which Taylor and a British judge
>evaluated
>> >the Soviet presentation, including the soap story,
>>
>> Excuse me? Let me look back over the pages. 314 = No soap evidence.
>> 313 = Katyn and Zyclon-B but no soap allegations
>> 312 = Treatment of Soviet prisoners, but no soap allegations
>> 311 = Paulis testimony and no soap allegations
>> 310 = Paulis and no soap
>> 307-309 = No soap
>> 315 -318 the end of chapter I find no soap allegations.
>
>You may not know, but it is in the record that Smirnov read _portions_ of
>the three affidavits into the record on February 19, 1946. This is the
>same presentation about which both the Judge and Taylor expressed
>reservations. No: Taylor does not specifically mention the soap
>allegation,

Thanks. Finally. Taylor WAS specific about what he was commenting on
in his book. If he wanted to bring up the soap allegations he would
have.

> nor, for that matter, does Persico. Conot, who references it,
>and who also references Balachowsky's _testimony_ about books bound with
>human skin, makes no authorial judgment about the materials he presents in
>his book.

We were speaking about Taylor. Are we changing sources now?

> Now -- why do you think that Taylor specifically expresses
>doubts over Smirnov's presentation, but does not mention the soap story?

Because he was discussing his impression about numbers? Yes, he was
very specific, Ehrlich. These are his memoirs and his impressions.

>And why does Persico not mention it? Do you think that perhaps they
>forgot?
>

Why don't you write to them if this concerns you. Maybe they thought
it was insignifant to the history of the proceedings. Maybe they
thought it was of little event. It seems that most historians think
so. Is there something wrong with that? Do you have evidence that this
stuff figured prominently into the decision making process? If so,
present it please.

>> > and including many of
>> >the strangest stories that came from Nuremberg.
>>
>> No, Ehrlich606, the judge and Taylor were talking about specific
>> testimony at that time and the impression it made. I think you are
>> trying to sweep everything into one basket and that is not what Taylor
>> or the judge is doing. Details should be paid attention to when
>> reading historical events so that mistakes like this do not happen.
>
>There is _no_ specificity in their remarks. Moreover, there was _no_
>testimony during Smirnov's presentation. That's what it says. he read
>affidavits from Soviet Special commissions into the record. That's all.
>

Granted. Then the comment was on the numbers. The book of Taylor's is
the source at hand. He is very specific about what he is commenting
on. It was in the ellipses which I provided back into the picture.

>>
>> > HOWEVER, it must be said
>> >that the discussion of the Jewish Holocaust came a few days later,
>i.e.,
>> >these comments do not necessarily apply to that.
>> >
>>
>> Oh, and so now I'm confused about everythin you said above. Aren't
>> you?
>
>No: Smirnov did not begin his presentation on the the Jewish massacres
>until February 25, at least according to Taylor, (p. 317).
>

This was after the above was read into the record, right?

>>
>> >My opinion is that the soap story was a Soviet hoax a la Katyn that
>>
>> Katyn happened. The Soviets wanted to put the blame on the Germans.
>> Katyn itself wasn't a hoax. You also know that the Katyn charges
>> didn't figure into the decisions made by the judges. You know this,
>> but it doesn't stop you from continually bringing up this canard that
>> no one bought at the time the presentation was made. So isn't it
>> curious that the judges would not accept the Soviet Katyn charge but
>> the impression Taylor had of the evidence presented at the top of this
>> post was that "neither judges, nor defense council, nor other
>> onlookers appear to have concluded that the Soviet evidence was
>> basically untrustworthy." You will note that tha impressions were not
>> the same with the Katyn evidence.
>
>The crux here is *basically* -- and there are several other weasel words
>in Taylor's sentence as well. The Soviet Special Commission report on
>Katyn, including the witness testimony at the IMT, most certainly _was_ a
>hoax.
>

Katyn happened. It wasn't a hoax. What the soviets did could be
considered a hoax, BUT it did not factor into the decision making
process. If you have evidence that it did, then please present it.

>>
>> As for soap evidence, I'm still confused about the Danzig stuff that
>> is being discussed in another thread. If it was true and that a small
>> rumor of the experiment got out, I can see how such a rumor could
>> spread and be believed by the Jewish populations who were threatened
>> to death. My understanding of Jewish customs concerning death do not
>> include burning the body or turning the remains into soap.
>
>As argued elsewhere, Mike Stein and I believe it was the other way around.
> Except that I think the Soviets faked it, while Mike Stein seems to think
>it gave Immune-from-Prosecution-Spanner ideas.
>

What about Danzig and the experiment?

>> > _if not_ in terms of the victors' justice and
>> >_ex post facto_ laws. In other words, the case can certainly be made
>the
>> >Allies -- and in particular the Soviets -- were also guilty of some of
>the
>> >things that the Germans were accused of. But that's not the point.
>So
>> >there was a mixture of justice and injustice to the Trials.
>> >
>>
>> Good lord, Ehrlich606, every trial I know of meets the conditions of
>> the last statement.
>
>You seem awfully complacent about it.
>

There is nothing I can do about it!

>>
>> >The concept -- which I accept -- that exaggerations and deliberate
>hoaxes
>> >and/or forgeries were part of the IMT -- I cannot attest to their
>explicit
>> >legal status in those proceedings
>>
>> I think I have suggested in the past that you look into this.
>
>You want to send me the transcripts?
>

This is your ball game. I could care less. Inter-library loan works.
Trust me.

>>
>> > -- does not invalidate the Trials
>> >altogether nor does it excuse the Germans of gratuitous killings and
>> >maltreatment that no one can deny. If you want to talk about bad
>things
>> >the Allies (and particular, the Soviets) did, save it for another
>time.
>> >That at least is my view.
>> >
>>
>> Doesn't that fence post your sitting on really hurt? :-)
>
>Attempting to arrive at a consensus garners one no rewards. :)
>
>

Consensus about what?

posted/emailed

[Richard Schultz]

Greg Raven (ihr...@kaiwan.com) wrote:

: The reason I keep asking for persons such as yourself to show me or draw

: me a Nazi gas chamber is precisely because your answer always seems to
: be along the lines of "This morgue was a gas chamber"! If all it takes
: to make a building gas chamber is your say-so, then what's the point of
: history?

German records show that on the order of a million people were shipped
to Auschwitz. Where did they go?

-----
Richard Schultz sch...@ashur.cc.biu.ac.il
Department of Chemistry tel: 972-3-531-8065
Bar-Ilan University, Ramat-Gan, Israel fax: 972-3-535-1250
-----
"You don't even have a clue as to which clue you're missing." -- Miss Manners

[General Bullmoose]

On {Mon, 10 Feb 1997 22:03:52 GMT}, {dke...@world.std.com (Daniel Keren)} wrote
in {alt.revisionism}:
[AG the goose]

Al Bundy is a real American, unlike you holohuggers.

=====

What's good for General Bullmoose is good for the USA.

[Mike Curtis]

Greg Raven <ihr...@kaiwan.com> wrote:

Mr. Raven, the dismantling of your Hoess article is on the table and
has been since you posted it. You accused me of changing the subject.
Funny, I don't see it that way. What is on the table is the subject
_you_ are ignoring. So why are you trying to change the subject to
this insignificant soap thing when the Hoess material is claimed by
you, to be so important?

>John Morris wrote:
>>
>> In <32FE5A...@ibm.net>, Gord McFee <gmc...@ibm.net> wrote:
>>
>> >Mike Curtis wrote:
>>
>> >> Greg Raven <ihr...@kaiwan.com> wrote:
>>
>> >> Before I deal with the soap article, you should feel inclined to
>> >> defend your Hoess article first.
>>
>> >I hate to break it to you, but it ain't gonna happen. If you any
>> >response at all, it will be one of (a) what Hoess article?; (b) I
>> >haven't got the time or (c) a repost of the Hoess article.
>>
>> Or "show me or draw me a Nazi gas chamber." And when you do, the
>> inevitable "That ain't a Nazi gas chamber. It's a _______."
>>
>> The blank can be filled with a morgue, a bomb shelter, a gigantic
>> delousing chamber, a coal gasification plant, or a coke carburetion
>> plant. Any one of which is actually in another building than the one
>> shown in the photograph.
>
>
>Your response implies that you know of a Nazi gas chamber that is so
>called on some contemporaneous German document. I would be most grateful
>if you could produce this document, and tell us to which Nazi gas
>chamber it refers.
>

>The reason I keep asking for persons such as yourself to show me or draw
>me a Nazi gas chamber is precisely because your answer always seems to
>be along the lines of "This morgue was a gas chamber"! If all it takes
>to make a building gas chamber is your say-so, then what's the point of
>history?
>

>--
>Greg Raven (ihr...@kaiwan.com)
>PO Box 10545, Costa Mesa, CA 92627
>http://www.kaiwan.com/~ihrgreg

Mike Curtis

[Michael P. Stein]

In article <3302c343...@news.inetport.com>,
Mike Curtis <mcu...@inetport.com> wrote:
>ehrli...@aol.com wrote:

[...]

>>> As for soap evidence, I'm still confused about the Danzig stuff that
>>> is being discussed in another thread. If it was true and that a small
>>> rumor of the experiment got out, I can see how such a rumor could
>>> spread and be believed by the Jewish populations who were threatened
>>> to death. My understanding of Jewish customs concerning death do not
>>> include burning the body or turning the remains into soap.
>>
>>As argued elsewhere, Mike Stein and I believe it was the other way around.
>> Except that I think the Soviets faked it, while Mike Stein seems to think
>>it gave Immune-from-Prosecution-Spanner ideas.

This is not a completely accurate description of my position. I
pointed out that given the chronology - the RIF soap rumors preceded the
date given by Mazur for the Danzig experiment by at least two years, and
were fairly widespread - it was _possible_ that the rumors provided the
seed for the idea to do the experiment. I have no evidence that it
happened that way; I merely observed that it would be grimly ironic IF it
happened that way. The rumors were widespread enough that there would
have been a very good chance of Spanner having heard them. Nevertheless
it's an idle speculation based on reasonable possibilities, not a firm
conclusion based on hard evidence.

>What about Danzig and the experiment?

Mazur gave the date of the experiment as 1944; the rumors were already
abroad in 1942. Thus the experiment could not possibly have been the
source for the rumors; _if_ there was any cause-and-effect, it would (as
Ehrlich606 noted) have been the other way around.

Posted/emailed to Mike Curtis.
--
Mike Stein The above represents the Absolute Truth.
POB 10420 Therefore it cannot possibly be the official
Arlington, VA 22210 position of my employer.

[Mark Van Alstine]

In article <3302c343...@news.inetport.com>, mcu...@inetport.com wrote:

> ehrli...@aol.com wrote:
>
> [snip]
>
> >> I'm only familiar with two of her books. _Beyond Belief_ and _Denying
> >> the Holocaust_. What writing has this change of thought been in?
> >
> >There are three references specifically to *Jewish cadavers* in Lipstadt's
> >book *Denying ... * I know of no others.

The interesting thing here, of course, is in two of the three mentions of
"Jewish cadavers" by Lipstadt, the context was clearly in regard to _the
production of soap_. The third mention, that "it is also accurate that
scholars have long written that despite wartime rumors to the contrary,
the Nazis apparantly did not use Jewish cadavers for soap" is also
arguably, in the current case, in the context of _the production of
soap_.

Now, as I have illustrated in a prior article of this thread, Hilberg, as
early as 1961, showed that the wartime _rumors_ that Jews were killed and
their cadavers used in _the production of soap_ were unfounded. (A rumor,
btw, also spread by the Poles when they thought it was _their_ turn to be
turned into soap.) (cf. Hilberg, _The Destruction of the Euopean Jews_,
pp. 331,470,624.)

Again, Lipstadt on "soap rumors:"

<begin quote>

...Much of the confusion centered around the idea that there was a
functioning homicidal gas chamber in Dachau. This was what historians were
trying to clarify in 1962, when Professor Martin Brozat, who served for
many years as the director of Munich's Institute for Contemporary History,
wrote to the newspaper _Die Zeit_ to "hammer home, once more, the
persisitantly ignored or denied difference between concentration and
extermination camps." Contrary to deniers' claims, he said, his letter did
not constitute and "admission" on his part but an effort to the "set the
record straight." This remians a consistant tactic of the deniers. Every
time historians who study the Holocaust correc t a mistake in the record,
deniers immediately claim that they do so because their previous lies were
about to be exposed.*

*This is what they have done in relation to the charge that Nazis used
Jewish cadavers for the production of soap. When scholars of the Holocaust
corrected this notion, the deniers were quick to charge they did so in
order to avoid being exposed as willful liars. (See Chapter 10.)

<end quote>

Source: Lipstadt, _Denying the Holocaust_, p.78,78fn.

It well worth remembering that the Institut Fuer Zeitgeschicthe,
(Institute for Contemporary History) in Munich, Germany, has since
modified its position on the presence of a functional homicidal gas
chamber at Dachau from its 1962 position. This fact, that the IFZ now
concludes that a homicidal gas chamber at Dachau did exist, and that " a
few experimental gassings were undertaken, as more recent research has
confirmed," is something that denier are loathe to acknowledge.

See: http://www.nizkor.org/ftp.cgi?orgs/german/ifz/ifz.report

<begin quote>

The [Bradley Smith] ad contended that denial was forcing "mainline
Holocaust historians" to admit the "more blatant examples" of Holocaust
falsehoods. It was the deniers who had forced them to revise the
"orthodox" Holocaust story. They had had to admit the number of Jews
killed at Auschwitz was far smaller than origionally claimed, and had been
made to confess that the Nazis did not use Jewish cadavers for the
production of soap. It is correct that in recent years newly revealed
documentation has allowed scholars to assess more precisely the number of
Jews thought to have been murdered at Auschwitz. It is also accurate that
scholars have long written that despite wartime rumors to the contrary,
the Nazis apparantly did not use Jewish cadavers for soap. There has been
a wide array of other "revelations" by Holocaust historians, all part of
the attempt to uncover the full details of one of the most horrifying acts
of human destruction. Smith suggested to his readers that scholars and
others whoi work in this field, all of whom vigorously repudiate Holocuast
denial, have been compelled to admit the truth of deniers' claims: "We are
told that it is 'anti-Jewish' to question orthodox assertions about German
criminality. Yet we find that it is Jews themselves like Mayer, Bauer,
Hier, Hilberg, Lipstadt and others who beginning [sic] to challenge the
established Holocaust story." This notion- that deniers have exposed the
truth and mainline are scrambling to admit it -remains a linchpin of the
deniers' strategy. It has two objectives: to make it appear that Jewish
scholars are responding to the pressures of the deniers' findings and to
create the impression that Holocaust deniers' "questions" re themnselves
part of a continuum of respectable scholorship. If establishment scholars,
particularly those who are Jews, can question previously accepted truths,
why is it wrong when Bradley Smith does the same?

<end quote>

Source: Lipstadt, _Denying the Holocaust_, pp. 188-189.

<begin quote>

In the spring of 1992 Smith began to circulate a second ad that was
essentially a reprint of an article from the _Journal of Historical
Review_ by Mark Weber. The article, entitled "Jewish Soap," blamed the
postwar spread of the rumor that the Nazis made Jews into soap on Simon
Wiesenthal and Stephen Wise- a claim that has no relationship to reality.
Echoing the first ad, it charged that historians of the Holocaust have
"officially abandon[ed] the soap story" in order to "save what's left of
the sinking Holocaust ship by throwing overboard the most obvious
falsehoods." The point of this second effort, Smith acknowledged, was to
submit a piece that was thouroughly "referenced." The ad was submitted
with a cover letter that claimed that the origional as had been rejected
by a number of papers becuase it was not "sourced." In contrast, every
"significant claim" in the second ad was backed up by sources. Entitled
"Falsus in Uno, Falsus in Omnibus [False in one thing, false in all]
...The 'Human Soap' Holocaust Myth," the essay on soap was preceded by a
statement citing Roman law: if a witnessz could not be "believed on one
thing, he should not be believed in anything."

<end quote>

Source: Lipstadt, _Denying the Holocaust_, p.201.

> Then there doesn't seem to be anything NEW from her.

Nope. I would also argue that of Lipstadt's commentary, in passing,
touches on the soap _rumors_ in the cointext of _soap production_ and not
specifically on the Danzig _experiments_.

The _primary_ focus of her commentary is, of course, on the intellectual
dishonesty of the deniers, specifically in this case, on Bradley Smith and
Mark Weber of CODOH.

[snip]

And mine, of course, is on Mr. Kennady's....

[Mark Van Alstine]

Before Mr. Raven beats this dead denier horse of his once more, I suggest
that Mr. Raven address the issues and objections made in regard to his
claims about Ho"ss _first_. Otherwise one might come to the conclusion
that Mr. Raven, not being interested in defending his claims in a
respobsible manner befitting "free and open debate," simply pops in now
and then to drop another smelly load of denier propaganda in a.r. before
he scampers off to hide under whatever rock he came from.

For a compendium of Mr. Raven's scurrilous Nazi apologia and lies, please
peruse DejaNews and visit the Nizkor Project at:

http://www.dejanews.com/
http://www.nizkor.org/ftp.cgi?people/r/raven.greg

[John Morris]

In <32FFE5...@kaiwan.com>, Greg Raven <ihr...@kaiwan.com> wrote:

>John Morris wrote:

>> In <32FE5A...@ibm.net>, Gord McFee <gmc...@ibm.net> wrote:

>> >Mike Curtis wrote:

>> >> Greg Raven <ihr...@kaiwan.com> wrote:

>> >> Before I deal with the soap article, you should feel inclined to
>> >> defend your Hoess article first.

>> >I hate to break it to you, but it ain't gonna happen. If you any
>> >response at all, it will be one of (a) what Hoess article?; (b) I
>> >haven't got the time or (c) a repost of the Hoess article.

>> Or "show me or draw me a Nazi gas chamber." And when you do, the
>> inevitable "That ain't a Nazi gas chamber. It's a _______."

>> The blank can be filled with a morgue, a bomb shelter, a gigantic
>> delousing chamber, a coal gasification plant, or a coke carburetion
>> plant. Any one of which is actually in another building than the one
>> shown in the photograph.

>Your response implies that you know of a Nazi gas chamber that is so
>called on some contemporaneous German document.

I do. And so do you.

> I would be most grateful
>if you could produce this document, and tell us to which Nazi gas
>chamber it refers.

In the years that I have been following this newsgroup, compelling
evidence has been offered to you repeatedly.

You have just given your invariable response.

>The reason I keep asking for persons such as yourself to show me or draw

The reason you keep asking "to show me or draw me a Nazi gas chamber"
is because you are a vulgar know-nothing who chooses to chant
Faurisson's mantra rather than exercise his critical faculties.

Given that your thinking on this matter has not changed by one iota
since Stephanie Brumlik chewed you up and spit you out, one suspects
that you have no critical faculties to exercise.

http://s1.ccnis.net/~miasaura/stephanie.htm
http://ftp.nizkor.org/ftp.cgi?people/b/brumlik.stephanie

So long as the IHR's money holds out, you will chant the mantra you
are told to chant.

>me a Nazi gas chamber is precisely because your answer always seems to
>be along the lines of "This morgue was a gas chamber"! If all it takes
>to make a building gas chamber is your say-so, then what's the point of
>history?

If all it takes is an airy wave of your hand (and a little chanting)
to discount inconvenient evidence, what is the point of pretending
that we are discussing history?

Posted and e-mailed.

[Dene Bebbington]

Gord McFee <gmc...@ibm.net> wrote:
>Matt Giwer, posting as General Bullmoose wrote:
>
>Gee Matt, these names are getting more juvenile every day. Really lost
>it, haven't you?
>

>> On {Mon, 10 Feb 1997 07:56:31 GMT}, {dke...@world.std.com (Daniel Keren)}
>wrote
>> in {alt.revisionism}:
>

>[deleted]
>
>> And in this you reveal that you are both a rational person and that
>you
>> deliberately and willfully equate anyone disagreeing with your absurd and
>lying
>> opinions on the holocaust (e.g. your refusal to note the deaths of the animals
>> in the diesel engine experiments took 1 1/2 to 2 hours.)
>>
>> Thing Keren you are a liar from the getgo. You are another blot upon
>the
>> reputation of British Columbia via OBE.
>
>Pretty feeble Matt. We expected a lot better.

Oh come on Gord, surely you didn't really expect better from Mr Giwer,
did you?!

--
Dene Bebbington

"I mean, who would have noticed | "It is impossible to enjoy idling
another madman around here?!" | thoroughly unless one has plenty
- Blackadder | of work to do." - Jerome K Jerome

[Laura Finsten]

On 11 Feb 1997, Fafner13 wrote:

> According to some of the Nizkor supporters, a few documents relating to
> the installation of shower heads were really designed to deceive the
> incoming transports, and that they were never connected to piping of any
> kind. Thus, they choose to assume that a nefarious plan to murder by
> treachery was underfoot. However, as is clear by reading the book,
> Auschwitz: Anatomy of a Death camp, in particular the essay by Van Pelt,
> the sewage system at Auschwitz was deplorable and every effort to improve
> the situation seemed doomed to failure. The fact seems to be that the
> Germans had every intention of using these few shower heads as showers,
> and not to "trick" the "duped" arrivals. The shower heads were so few
> that they could scarcely have served to "trick" hundreds of people being
> told they were to be used for showers. If a hundred such shower heads had
> been installed, I might have fought their arguments more compelling, but
> as it stands, their contentions seem absurd.

I'm not a plumber, but wouldn't one want install the plumbing - you know,
pipes to carry the water, from the source to the showerhead - *before*
putting the showerhead in place? If one did it the other way around, as
you are suggesting, wouldn't one then have to remove the showerheads to
put the pipes in and connect the showerhead to them? Isn't that kind of,
well, dumb?

Dumb or not, you still don't explain why there are showerheads on the
architectural drawings but no plumbing. No pipes to carry the water.
That there was never any intention to install plumbing is not only the
most parsimonious explanation, but the one consistent with other lines of
evidence.

[drob...@ycvax.york.cuny.edu]

In Article <19970210023...@ladder01.news.aol.com>

ehrli...@aol.com writes:
>I don't think this is a smashing at all: on the previous page, p. 313,
>footnote, Taylor specifically mentions that Smirnov's presentation is
>based on over 57,000 claimed deponents for which no witnesses were called.

Since several people, over the past few days, have questioned
the Soviet case at Nuremberg and have implied that they forged
Mazur's statements, I refer you to:

http://www.nizkor.org/features/denial-of-science/soap-05.html

which reads:

[begin quotation]
Although it was a Russian (L. N. Smirnov) who brought up the soap
allegations at the IMT, the Soviets had no control over the British
statements. Both Neely and Witton gave their depositions to the _British_
Judge Advocate General's Office -- in fact, both USSR-264 and USSR-272
clearly bear the designation MD/JAG/FS/22/609(4a) across the top.

What about Mazur's depositions? Were they just communist propaganda, or can
his statements to the Soviets (USSR-197) be corroborated by anyone else?
Before speaking to the Soviets and giving his depositions, Mazur was
interviewed by the Glowna Komisja Badania Zbrodni Niemieckich w Polsce
("Committee for the Investigation of German Crimes in Poland"). This
Committee, which was comprised of several prominent Poles (journalists,
doctors, lawyers) as well as some representatives of the Red Army, entered
the Danzig Institute on May 5, 1945. Mazur gave his formal deposition to
the Committee on May 12, sixteen days before he gave his first deposition
to the Soviets.

Zofia Nalkowska, a prominent novelist, was a member of the Committee and
discussed Mazur, Spanner, and the Danzig Institute in her 1946 non-fiction
book, _Medaliony_. The relevant portion was translated into English in
_Introduction to Modern Polish Literature_, ed. Adam Gillon and Ludwik
Krzyzanowski. Nalkowksa quotes extensively from Mazur, and what he said to
the Committee was in substance exactly what he later said to the Soviets.
Nalkowska in no way can be considered a communist tool.

Stanislaw Strabski, another member of the Committee, was a Polish
journalist and published a 1946 book called _Mydlo z ludzkiego tluszczu_, a
preliminary translaton of which shows that he also discusses Spanner,
Mazur, and the Institute. So it is disingenuous to merely dismiss the
testimony at the IMT regarding the soap as communist propaganda: two of the
three affidavits were provided by the British JAG, and Mazur's statements
to the Soviets are consistent with what he told the Committee earlier in
May 1945.
[end quotation]

So, I would argue that Smirnov and the Soviets had very little
control over the affidavits regarding the soap allegations.

John Drobnicki
Reference Librarian
York College/CUNY
"I speak for no one but myself."

[Richard J. Green]

In article <19970208180...@ladder01.news.aol.com>,
DvdThomas <dvdt...@aol.com> wrote:
>>I know, of course, that you, Mr. Ehrlich, are too smart to play that
>>game, but do you understand why people begin to think that you may be a
>>denier?
>>
>>Regards,
>>
>>Rich Green
>
>If they do, it will be primarily because of unwarranted and repeat use of
>what is intended to be an epithet, such as you illustrate in the
>preceding. The man asked a simple question, and minds oriented to the
>devious turn it into a philosophy that would have to be based on a
>pronounced level of stupidity or the mindset of a fanatic. Ehrlich
>exhibits neither of these traits, and your remarks are far off base.
>
>Best,
>David Thomas

On the contrary, the man pretended to have knowlege that there was some
problem with Mazur's recipe when he had, in fact, no such knowlege.
As a denier, I suppose Mr. Thomas is familiar with this technique.

By the way, your implication that I am stupid or a fanatic is equivalent
to the name-calling that you supposedly abhor, in my opinion.

Best Regards,

Rich Green
--
------------------------------------------------------------------
Richard J. Green Dept. of Chemistry
r...@lyman.Stanford.EDU Stanford University
http://www-leland.Stanford.EDU/~redcloud Stanford, CA 94305-5080

Quantum materiae materietur marmota monax si marmota monax materiam
possit materiari?

[Richard J. Green]

In article <01bc156b$36b0c650$307213cc@server>,
Anthony Sabatini <anth...@infobahnos.com> wrote:

>[formula snipped]
>
>Mr. Green, this is all very well and good, but what does this all prove?

It proves that Mazur's recipe is not more unreasonable than using ashes.

>There are "recipes" for making bombs in most home encyclopedias, but does
>this mean the owners actually constructed these devices?

No.

>> PS Yes, we all know the RIF story is untrue. No informed person in this
>> group has said otherwise. The evidence for an experiment seems
>> rather strong, however, don't you think?
>
>Then how do you explain Mr. Stein's insistence on arguing the point? Are
>you claiming that Mr. Stein is "[un]informed"?

Mr. Stein argues that the RIF story is untrue. I suggest that you might
want to examine your ability to read.

>If the Nazis conducted "experiments" on how to make "human soap", and they
>even succeeded in creating a working formula (according to you as per
>above), then why did they not go into mass production mode, so to speak?

Perhaps they were not happy with the results of the experiment.
Perhaps, Himmler ordered them _not_ to do it [hint].

>I mean, why go through all the trouble or research, finally achieve success,
>and then just scrap the whole idea? You have to admit that it sounds pretty
>silly...

Mr. Sabatini, I don't know whether they achieved success. If you have
evidence to suggest that they did or didn't please present it.

[Jamie McCarthy]

D. Thomas -- out of curiosity, are you still working on your reply
to the diesel article of early January? On 1/10, you wrote me:

> You present lengthy refutations to those which I will try to address,
> but not in the same scope as your large post. Some points I'm going
> to be able to reply to quickly, others will require some research, and
> this will determine the order of address.

To date, I'm not aware of your replying to any of the points (except
the side-issue I raised on another topic altogether). My newsfeed
may have missed them, though.

Posted; not emailed by your request.
--
Jamie McCarthy http://www.absence.prismatix.com/jamie/
ja...@voyager.net Co-Webmaster of http://www.nizkor.org/

[Gord McFee]

Dene Bebbington wrote:
>
> Gord McFee <gmc...@ibm.net> wrote:
> >Matt Giwer, posting as General Bullmoose wrote:
> >
> >Gee Matt, these names are getting more juvenile every day. Really lost
> >it, haven't you?
> >
> >> On {Mon, 10 Feb 1997 07:56:31 GMT}, {dke...@world.std.com (Daniel Keren)}
> >wrote
> >> in {alt.revisionism}:
> >
> >[deleted]
> >
> >> And in this you reveal that you are both a rational person and that
> >you
> >> deliberately and willfully equate anyone disagreeing with your absurd and
> >lying
> >> opinions on the holocaust (e.g. your refusal to note the deaths of the animals
> >> in the diesel engine experiments took 1 1/2 to 2 hours.)
> >>
> >> Thing Keren you are a liar from the getgo. You are another blot upon
> >the
> >> reputation of British Columbia via OBE.
> >
> >Pretty feeble Matt. We expected a lot better.
>
> Oh come on Gord, surely you didn't really expect better from Mr Giwer,
> did you?!

Oh, but I did. Remember, we are talking here about the self-proclaimed
"controller" of this newsgroup. The erstwhile self-appointed
moderator. The man who knows more about history, biology, chemistry,
linguistics, German, mathematics, Usenet, computer science and a host of
other disciplines than everyone else in the newsgroup combined. The man
of the 163 IQ (and that was the *lowest* he ever scored). Yes, I
expected much more.

[Ken Lewis]

And then there is Mr. Bellinger's trick of throwing out the reference to Van
Pelt's article in Anatomy and the discussion about sanitary facilities which
are in no way connected to the issue of shower heads. One assumes that in
his appeal to authority Mr. Bellinger is trying to give his article a
legitimacy that it otherwise does not have.

[General Bullmoose]

On {8 Feb 1997 15:30:36 -0800}, {r...@d31rz0.Stanford.EDU (Richard J. Green)}

wrote in {alt.revisionism}:
[AG the goose]

>In article <19970207194...@ladder01.news.aol.com>,
> <ehrli...@aol.com> wrote:
>
>>No one from Nizkor has comparable credentials, although Mssrs. Green and
>>Schultz are clearly talented chemists. I hope they know that they would
>>earn the gratitude and the adulation of millions, if not the Nobel Prize,
>>for writing the report that would refute Rudolf and affirm the traditional
>>story. But so far they have not. So then we are left with the
>>magisterial musings of volunteers who have no credentials and no context
>>for their claims, and who have nothing to lose by expounding on chemistry,
>>engineering, crematoria, and execution chamber design because they have no
>>stature in these fields and they do not earn their bread by claiming and
>>_having_ social and peer recognized expertise in these fields. And behind
>>them we have a pharmacist with no professional training in any of these
>>fields, no professional context, no peers, and -- apparently -- no book
>>distributors, because the *ultimate refutation of revisionism* is
>>impossible to find. So tell me again about who the real *kooks* are.
>
>No, neither I nor Mr. Schultz were involved in the work that refutes
>Rudolf:
>
>
>The Crackow team has demonstrated that HCN was present in the homicidal
>gas chambers at levels above background. Deniers have no explanation for
>the presence of HCN in a facility built after the typhoid epidemic at
>levels above background.

If you will make a scan of Dejanews you will find that it has already
been discussed. There was a delousing chamber in the building and that is typed
as opposed to the handwritten note about a gas-tight door.

You really should keep current on what is posted here.