Jürgen Graf

22 July 2011

The moral and intellectual bankruptcy of a scholar: Dr. Christian Lindtner and Holocaust Revisionism

When I visited Copenhagen in 1997 and 1998, I had several lengthy discussions with Danish revisionist Dr. Christian Lindtner, a Sanscrit scholar and expert in the history of Buddhism. Lindtner impressed me with his extraordinary knowledge of classical languages, and he seemed to be thoroughly familiar with the revisionist arguments. Therefore I was very glad when I learned in December 2006, during the Holocaust Conference in Tehran, that he had been chosen as a member of the committee for the promotion of revisionist research. (Later this committee turned out to be completely useless, as it did strictly nothing.)

In the meantime, Lindtner has come, or pretends to have come, to the conclusion that Holocaust Revisionism is „a moral and intellectual aberration“ and „chutzpah“. On 20 July 2011, he stated in an e-mail to Dr. Frederick Toben.

„I hope that you will find the time to study the two huge books about the German Ordnungspolizei by Wolfgang Curilla (2006 & 2011). His admirable research is based on original German sources. It can no longer be denied that more than four million Jews were murdered by various units of German police etc. Hence the time has come to face the fact that Holocaust revisionism, or denial, is simply irresponsible CHUTZPAH“.

I a second e-mail to Toben, dated July 21, Lindtner raised the ante:

„I have now studied these [Curilla’s] and other books by the best German scholars for several years, and of course I am certain that one can rely on their research. As a classical philologist, I recognize traditional German scholarship when it is at its best. The claim that Leichenkeller 1 in Krema II was not a gas chamber is also a case of chutzpah. As you are aware, Bischoff wrote to Kammler 29 January 1943 that it was a Vergasungskeller, and the two engineers from Topf &Söhne (Karl Schultze and Fritz Sander, 17 February 1943) called it a Gaskeller. […] The lacking holes can also easily be explained. When Leichenkeller 1 was blown up, the holes, i. e. the edges of the holes, would have been the first to be blown away by the enormous pressure seeking to’escape’.  The evidence for gas vans is also convincingly established. It is also chutzpah to say: ‚No holes, no holocaust’ – as if the shooting of millions of Jews had nothing to do with the Endlösung! So, for these and many other reasons, it is now my firm conviction that Holocaust Revisionism is a moral and intellectual aberration. […] My claim is serious: Denial is chutzpah. […] Now we understand why Himmler said to the generals in Sonthofen, 21 June 1944: ‚Es ist gut, dass wir die Härte hatten, die Juden in unserem Bereich auszurotten.’ [It is good that we were tough enough to exterminate the Jews in our sphere of influence.] He goes on to say that the Weiber and Kinder [women and children] were also murdered. […] Himmler was honest, and we have to be honest as well.“

I will now analyze Lindtner’s arguments point after point.

1) Wolfgang Curilla and the German Ordnungspolizei

First of all, I readily acknowledge that I have not read the two books by Wolfgang Curilla. Together with two other revisionists, I plan to write a study on the Einsatzgruppen question; if this project materializes (which is far from certain because it would require considerable funds we are still lacking), we will undoubtedly have to read these books. Now let us have a look at what the website buecher.de says about the first of them, Die deutsche Ordnungspolizei und der Holocaust im Baltikum und in Weissrussland 1941-1944 (Schöningh, 2006):

„Die Ordnungspolizisten waren für die Deportation oder Ermordung der über zwei Millionen jüdischen Opfer in der Sowjetunion mitverantwortlich. W. Curilla beschreibt den Einsatz der Ordnungspolizei erstmals flächendeckend für das Baltikum und Weissrussland. Als Quellen dienten ihm neben der zeitgenössischen Überlieferung eine Fülle von grossenteils bisher unveröffentlichten Dokumenten und Zeugenaussagen aus weit über 100 Strafverfahren gegen NS-Täter in der Bundesrepublik, in Österreich und der damaligen DDR.“ (The members of the Ordnungspolizei were jointly responsible for the deportation or murder of the more than two million Jewish victims in the Soviet Union. W. Curilla gives a comprehensive description of the activities of the Ordnungspolizei in the Baltic states and White Russian. In addition to contemporary documents, his sources were hitherto largely unpublished documents and eyewitness reports from far more than 100 trials of National Socialist perpetrators in the Federal Republic, Austria and the former German Democratic Republic.)

So Curilla’s sources were contemporary documents such as the „Ereignismeldungen“ of the Einsatzgruppen, plus post-war trials against „National Socialist perpetrators“. This is indeed the kind of evidence the Holocaust historians routinely adduce. Raul Hilberg does the same thing in his three-volume classic The Destruction of the European Jews. We will soon see what these sources are worth.

2) The lack of forensic evidence for the alleged mass murders

Let us assume that the Holocaust historians are right and that the Germans indeed killed more than two million Jews in the Soviet Union. If this were the case, there would be a huge amount of material evidence. When the Germans discovered the bodies of 4,143 Polish officers shot by the Soviets at Katyn, they flew in an international commission, consisting of physicians from no fewer than 12 countries, to inspect the site of the crime and to carry out autopsies. They then published a detailled forensic report about the massacre.[1] Some months later, the Germans did the same thing after finding the bodies of 9,432 Ukrainians murdered by the NKVD at Vinnitsa before the war, inviting no fewer than eight local and six foreign commisions to verify the facts.[2] The National Socialist propagandists used the grisly discoveries for a very successful anti-Bolshevist campaign.

Now according to the Holocaust historians and the august Sanscrit scholar Dr. Christian Lindtner, the German murdered more than two million Jews in the Soviet Union alone. This figure is about 140 times higher than the combined toll for Katyn and Winnitza. Surely the Soviets followed the German example and flew in international commissions to repay their adversaries for the shame of Katyn and Winnitza with interest and compounded interest? Surely at the Nuremberg trial they showed films about the exhumation of hundreds of thousands of bodies? No, they did not.

This did not mean that the Soviets had not dug up any mass graves containing the bodies of victims of the Germans, or that they had not carried out any autopsies. Such investigations had indeed taken place, however their results were not widely publicized because they belied the phantastic exaggerations of Soviet propaganda. The following three examples will amply suffice to illustrate this point:

1)   In August 1944, three graves containing a total of 305 bodies were detected by the Red Army near the former labour camp Treblinka I, about 2 kilometers from the alleged “extermination camp” Treblinka II.[3]

2)   In January 1945, after the liberation of Auschwitz, the Soviets found a masse grave containing 536 bodes.[4]

3)   On the site of the former concentration camp Salaspils in Latvia the Soviets discovered 564 bodies.[5] This did not prevent their propagandists from brazenly claiming that no fewer than 101.000 people had been murdered at Salaspils.[6] Today’s Holocaust historians, such as the Latvian Hinrichs Strods and the Germans A. Angrik and P. Klein, put the Salaspils death toll at 2.000-3000.[7] If the higher of these two figures is correct, the Soviets had exaggerated the number of victims by more than 30 times – just as they did at Auschwitz (4 million[8] versus the real figure of about 135.500[9]), Majdanek (1,5 million[10] versus the real figure of between 42.200 and 50.000[11]) and Sachsenhausen (840.000[12] versus the real figure of slightly over 20.000[13]).

In other words, the Soviet forensic investigations only proved that many people (Jews and non-Jews) had indeed died in German capitvity, and that the German had indeed carried out executions – something no serious revisionist has ever disputed. They did not produce a shred of evidence for the large-scale massacres claimed by Soviet propagandists, Jewish and German Holocaust historians and Danish Sanscrit scholars.

3) The “Aktion 1005”

According to Holocaust lore, in June 1942 Heinrich Himmler ordered SS-Sturmbannführer Paul Blobel to erase the traces of the massacres in the East. Being his master’s obedient servant, Blobel formed a special kommando with the code denomination 1005. This Kommando had to dig up the mass graves and to remove the corpses. Blobel and his men travelled to all occupied territories to fulfill their ghastly task.

The Encyclopedia of the Holocaust shows a map with the most important locations where these activities are supposed to have transpired. This is a huge area which extends from north to south across approximately 1,500 kilometers and from west to east across some 1,300 kilometers.[14] On this gigantic territory, Blobel and his team are supposed to have dug up many hundreds of graves and to removed the bodies of the victims without leaving the slightest documentary or material traces! One really has to be a Holocaust historian or a Sanscrit scholar to believe such a rubbish.

One example will suffice to show the overwhelming absurdity of this fairy tale. In late 1941, the Germans are supposed to have shot and buried 27.800 Jews in the outskirts of Riga. Blobel and his Kommando could not possibly have erased the traces of the mass grave, because such graves, whether full or empty, are easily discernible on air photographs owing to the altered configuration of the territory. (This method has been sucessfully applied in Bosnia and other places.) Could Blobel’s men at least have removed the corpses? Theoretically yes, but this would have been a very difficult task indeed:

-         They would have had to remove millions of bones and bone fragments;

-         They would had to remove (27,800 x 30 =) 834,000 teeth (we assume that each of the hypothetical victims had two teeth lacking);

-         Thdey would have had to remove (27,800 x 2,5 =) 69,500 kilograms of body ashes (we assume that the victims had an average weight of 50 kg; the ashes left after cremation correspond to 5% of the body weight) plus a much bigger amount of wood ashes.

Of course, the 27.800 Jews allegedly murdered near Riga represented only 1,3% , or less, of the alleged total of at least two million Jewish victims! Even if the Blobel boys had been supermen, they could never ever have accomplished such a task.

It goes without saying that the splendid German scholars whose works Lindtner has studied so diligently and who, in his distinguished opinion, embody “traditional German scholarship at its best” never give a thought to such irksome facts. Like Lindtner himself, they are “paper historians” (an apt term coined by Robert Faurisson) who are living far from the physical reality of things in their world of documents and books.

It suffices to read Jens Hoffmann’s book about the “Action 1005”[15] to realize that the whole tale is exclusively based on “eyewitness evidence”, “confessions” and post-war trials where such “eyewitness evidence” and “confessions” formed the sole basis of the accusation.

4) “Eywitness evidence” and “confessions”

The Holocaust scholars will object that in American custody Blobel himself confessed having erased the traces of the massacres. He indeed did so[16], but such confessions were not worth the paper they were written upon. As an American commission reported in 1949, confessions had frequently been extorted by barbarous torture.[17] A well-known case is Rudolf Höss, who after three days of merciless beating by a British torture team lead by the Jew Bernard Clark confessed to having gassed 2,5 million Jews up to November 1943.[18]

Not all defendants made their declarations under duress; there were more refined methods as well. Erich von dem Bach-Zelewski, former SS-Obergruppenführer and Höherer SS- und Polizeiführer Russland-Mitte, stated at the Nuremberg trial that in early 1941, Heinrich Himmler had said at the Wewelsburg that the purpose of the coming campaign in Russia would be the reduction of the Slavic population by 30 million.[19] Now let us take a look at von dem Bach-Zelewski’s fate.[20] According to the official “holocaust” story, he was one of the worst criminals. He is said to have ordered the aforementioned murder of 27,800 Jews near Riga and the massacre of tens of thousands of Soviet civilians. Under these circumstances, one would assume that he was certainly put on trial and sentenced to hang after the war, but precisely this did not happen. In Nuremberg he was used as a witness for the prosecution and then released. Obviously this lenient treatment was the reward for having made statements as the one quoted above, which allowed the allies to accuse the Germans of having planned not only the total extermination of the Jews, but also a horrific genocide of tens of millions of Slavs. It is true that von dem Bach-Zelewski was later tried by the West German justice, but not for his alleged role in the “holocaust” or the slaughter of Soviet citizens. He was tried for two murders he – really or allegedly - had committed in 1934.

Even more important than the allied post-war trials were the court proceedings against “Nazi war criminals” in the Federal Republic of Germany. As we have seen, W. Curilla bases his accusations against the Ordnungspolizei primarily on the documentation of these trials. As a matter of fact, it is hardly an exaggeration to say that most of the “evidence” for the holocaust was fabricated by the West German justice. To prove this, we only have to point to the fact that in his chapter about the “killing centers”, Raul Hilberg’s most important source is Adalbert Rückerl’s Nationalsozialistische Vernichtungslager im Spiegel deutscher Strafprozesse (National Socialist extermination camps in the mirror of German court proceedings); Hilberg quotes this book, which exclusively relies on eyewitness evidence and confessions, no fewer than 41 times.[21]

It goes without saying that torture was not used in West Germany. The courts of the puppet state basically pursued the same strategy as the Allied had done in the case of von dem Bach-Zelewski. Those defendants who admitted the alleged mass murders were often meted out a lenient treatment, while those who “stubbornly denied” the crime could not hope for mercy. At the Sobibor trial in Hagen (1965/1966) four defendants “convicted” of aiding and abetting with others the murder of between 15,000 and 79,000 persons got surprisingly mild sentences of three and four years imprisonment respectively.[22] The defendants Schütt and Unverhau, who had been “convicted” of aiding and abetting with others the murder of 86,000 and 72,000 persons respectively, were even acquitted.[23] This proves that these trials were primarily seen as an instrument to establish the judicial notoriety of the alleged mass murders.

It is true that some defendants were sentenced to life imprisonment (after all, the Jews wanted their pound of flesh!), but if they feigned repentence, most of them could hope for pardon. Karl Frenzel, who at the Hagen trial had got a life term for aiding and abetting with others the murder of at least 150,000 persons and for the murder of nine persons, was released on appeal in 1981.[24] Although his life sentence was later confirmed, Frenzel did not have to return to prison, the reason almost certainly being that in 1984 he had admitted the alleged mass murders at Sobibor in a conversation with former Sobibor detainee Toivi Blatt.[25]

As we see, it was quite easy for the courts of “democratic” West Germany to obtain the desired confessions. For the communist regime of East Germany, this was certainly not difficult either. So much for the “scientific basis” of the “German scholarship” Dr. Lindtner so fervently admires!

5) The Einsatzgruppen reports

As proof for the alleged huge slaughter in the occupied Eastern territories, first and foremost are cited the so-called “Ereignismeldungen” (event reports) of the four Einsatzgruppen. These documents fall in the period from June 1941 to May 1942 and mention numerous massacres, with victims occasionally numbering in five digit figures. The “Ereignismeldungen” were supposedly found by the Allies in the Berlin RSHA. That the Germans let this sort of incriminating material fall into the hands of their enemies is strikingly odd.

The alleged slaughter of 33,711 Ukrainian Jews at Babi Yar near Kiev is the most notorious massacre ascribed to the Germans on the Eastern Front. This figure appears in an Einsatzgruppen report from 7 October 1941.[26] According to the established version of the facts, these 33,711 Jews were shot and their bodies thrown into the ravine of Babij Yar on 29 September 1941. But the first witnesses told completely different stories: The massacre was perpetrated on a graveyard, or near a graveyard, or in a forest, or in the very city of Kiev, or on the shores of the Dnepr. As to the murder weapon, the early witnesses spoke of rifles, or machine guns, or submachine guns, or hand grenades, or bayonets, or knives; some witnesses claimed that the victims had been put to death via lethal injections whereas others asserted that they had been drowned in the Dnepr, or buried alive, or killed by means of electric current, or squashed by tanks, or driven into minefields, or that their skulls had been crushed with rocks, or that they had been murdered in gas vans.[27] Now that is what we call good, solid evidence, is it not, Dr. Lindtner?

When the Red Army approached Kiev, the Germans allegedly dug up the mass graves and burnt the bodies. This work was reportedly finished on 28 September. But two days before, on 26 September, Babi Yar was photgraphed by a German reconnaissance aircraft. The air photo shows no fires, no open graves and no traces of human activity.[28]  After the Soviets had reconquered Kiev, a commission inspected Babi Yar and made a couple of photographs. The only discernible things on them are a pair of old shoes and some rags.[29] Irrefutable proof for the murder of 33,711 Jews, is it not, Dr. Lindtner?

So the report from 7 October 1941, which mentions an imaginary slaughter, is a fraud. This means that all other Einsatzgruppen reports are equally suspect from the beginning.

6) Documentary evidence that there was no extermination policy in the East either

Had the Germans planned the physical extermination of the Jewish population, they would of course have killed children and old people first; able-bodied adults would perhaps have been temporarily spared, because they could have been used as slave-laborers. As a matter of fact, solid documentary evidence shows that Jewish children and old people were not exterminated. The following four examples will illustrate this:

 - On 5 June 1942 there were about 9,000 Jews living in the ghetto of Brest (White Russia). Among them there were 932 old people over 65 (the oldest one was 92) and more than 500 children under 16.[30]

-         In an unknown month of the year 1943, 225 children under the age of 16, plus some old people of up to 86 years of age, were living in the ghetto of Minsk (White Russia).[31]

-         At the end of May 1942 there were many old people living in the ghetto of Vilnius (Lithuania); the oldest one, a woman by the name of Chana Stamleriene, had been born in 1852. There were also 3,693 children under 16.[32] The angel of death was not hovering over these Jewish children: As we learn from an “Anthology of holocaust literature,” more than 20 schools were founded in the first year of the existence of the ghetto. In October 1942 between 1,500 and 1,800 children were studying at these schools, and in April 1943 school attendance became compulsory.[33]

-         In the summer and autumn of 1944 many Jews of various nationalities (also Hungarian Jews who had been previously deported to Lithuania and Latvia to work for the German army) were transferred from Riga and Kaunas to the Stutthof concentration camp, east of Danzig. On 26 July 1944 1,983 Jews, most of them Lithuanian ones, arrived at Stutthof. 850 of them were under 15 years old[34] which means that the oldest ones had been 12 when the Germans conquered Lithuania in the summer of 1941.

All this proves that the shootings committed by the Einsatzgruppen, the Ordnungspolizei and the SS in no way possessed the scope ascribed to them by the court historians.

7) The “Vergasungskeller” letter

Basically it is quite possible to reject the “western half” of the Holocaust story (“Shoa by gas”) and to accept the “eastern half” (“Shoa by bullets”). This is precisely what a clever person wishing to save at least a part of the myth would do: While the revisionists have pointed out numerous impossibilities in the gassing story, there is nothing technically impossible about a mass shooting. But for the Jews this kind of semi-revisionism is totally inacceptable because the gas chambers are an absolutely central element of the legend. For this very reason Lindtner, who fully identifies with the Jewish version of the events and even uses Jewish newspeak (he calls revisionism “denial”!), defends not only the myth of the “millions of Jews shot in the East”, but the Auschwitz gas chamber myth as well. This is an unspeakably foolish thing to do, because together with Majdanek, Auschwitz is the most untenable part of the lie, its Achilles heel if there ever was one. In order do demonstrate the historical reality of the alleged gassings, Lindtner quotes a well-know document, the “Vergasungskeller” letter. On 29 January 1943 the chief of the Central Construction Office of Auschwitz, Karl Bischoff, stated in a letter to SS-Brigadeführer Hans Kammler:

“Das Krematorium II wurde unter Einsatz aller verfügbaren Kräfte trotz unsagbarer Schwierigkeiten und Frostwetter bei Tag- und Nachtbetrieb bis auf bauliche Kleinigkeiten fertiggestellt. Die Öfen wurden im Beisein des Herrn Oberingenieur Prüfer der ausführenden Firma, Firma Topf u. Söhne, Erfurt, angefeuert und funktionieren tadellos. Die Eisenbetondecke des Leichenkellers konnte infolge Frosteinwirkung noch nicht ausgeschalt werden. Dies ist jedoch unbedeutend, da der Vergasungskeller hierfür benützt werden kann.”[35] (Crematorium II has been completed, by using all available manpower, in spite of extreme difficulties and severe frost and by running day and night shifts. The ovens were fired up in the presence of senior engineer Prüfer of the contracting firm, Messr. Topf & Söhne, and function perfectly. The planking of the reinforced concrete ceiling of the corpse cellar could not yet be stripped because of the effect of the frost. This is, however, of no importance, because the gassing cellar can be used for this intent.)

For the Holocaust historians, this letter proves that Leichenkeller 1 of Krematorium II in Birkenau was used as a homicidal gas chamber.

This thesis was severely criticized by Jean-Claude Pressac; in Auschwitz: Technique and Operation of the Gas Chambers he wrote:

“The affirmation, solely based on the letter of 29 January 1942, that the term ‘Vergasungskeller’ referred to a homicidal gas chamber installed in the Leichenkeller 1 (corpse cellar) of Krematorium II, was irresponsible, for even if ‘gas chamber’ were correct, there was no evidence that it was a ‘homicidal’ one.”[36]

So even Pressac concedes that this letter does not prove the existence of a homicidal gas chamber in Krematorium II. Carlo Mattogno explains the letter in the context of the epidemic of spotted fever which was the main cause of the frighteningly high mortality in Auschwitz. Quoting numerous documents, Mattogno argues that the SS planned to install a provisional Zyklon B delousing chamber in the Leichenkeller 1 of Krematorium II.[37] This project never materialized.

8) The missing holes

A key argument against the alleged homicidal gassings in the corpse cellar of Krematorium II is the fact that the four round holes in the ceiling, through which the Zyklon B was reportedly introduced into the “gas chamber”, do not exist. To this argument, Lindtner objects:

„The lacking holes can also easily be explained. When Leichenkeller 1 was blown up, the holes, i. e. the edges of the holes, would have been the first to be blown away by the enormous pressure seeking to’escape’.“

This is ridiculous. The roof of Leichenkeller 1 survived the demolition of the crematory relatively well; the two irregularly shaped holes, one of which was not even cleared from the steel reinforcement rods, which were simply bent backwards, were not „blown away“ at all. So how could four big round holes in the very same ceiling simply disappear?

9) The gas vans

Lindtner has the audacity to claim:

„The evidence for gas vans is also convincingly established.“

The problem is that no such van has ever been found. Nobody has ever seen a blueprint, or a photograph, of these mythical vehicles.[38] The Holocaust historians regularly refer to two documents allegedly proving the use of homicidal gas vans, the „Just document“[39] and the Becker document“[40], but as French revisionist Pierre Marais has irrefutably demonstrated in his vitally important study about the subject[41], these documents are grotesque forgeries. But perhaps Dr. Lindtner has not found the time to read this book because he was too busy studying the „German scholars“!

10) Himmler’s alleged speech to his generals in Sonthofen on 21 June 1944

On 21 June 1944, Heinrich Himmler reportedly told his generals in Sonthofen that the SS had done well to exterminate the Jews, including the women and the children. For Lindtner, this alleged speech corroborates the exterminationist position.

As a matter of fact, the European Jews had not been exterminated. In France, 75% of the Jewish population, and 90% of the Jews which French passports, were not deported at all.[42] In most other countries under German control, the percentage of deportees was considerably higher, but countless documents prove that, while large numbers of Jewish concentration camps inmates died as a result of the conditions in the camps, there was no extermination policy. On 27 July 1944 the administration of Auschwitz compiled a statistics about the prisoners “temporarily quartered in the camp of the Hungarian Jews.” The document shows that until that date 3,138 Hungarian Jews had received medical treatment at the camp hospital. 1,426 of them had undergone surgical operations.[43] (According to the Holocaust story, a huge number of Hungarian Jews were gassed at Auschwitz between 15 May and 9 July 1944. While not a single of these alleged gas chamber murders is confirmed by a German document, the medical treatment of 3,138 Hungarian Jews at Auschwitz until 27 July is indeed documented.) As Polish historian Henry Świebocki reports, no fewer than 11,246 prisoners underwent surgery at Auschwitz between 10 September 1942 and 23 February 1944.[44] A very strange “extermination camp” indeed, is it not, Dr. Lindtner?

In its English language edition, the Israeli newspaper Ha’aretz reported on 18 April 2004 that there were still 687.000 “Holocaust survivors“ around – which means that there must have been several millions in 1945. How does this fact square with an extermination policy, Dr. Lindtner?

11) The moral and intellectual bankruptcy of a scholar

The arguments adduced here are not new. All of them can be found in revisionist books and journals Lindtner cannot possibly pretend not to know. These books and journals are available in English and German, two languages Lindtner reads as fluently as his Danish mother tongue. But in order to justify his about-face, Lindtner prefers to ignore this literature and to rely on the works of dogmatic and bigotted court historians who, in their burning hatred of the National Socialist system, violate every principle of scientific historiography and gladly endorse any rubbish as long as it incriminates Adolf Hitler and the evil Nazis.

In the past I felt respect for Christian Lindtner, in spite of the fact that I by no means shared his views about the origins of Christianity. Now I feel nothing but contempt for him.