Franz
>>Rudolf Vrba and a certain Alfred Wetzler claimed to have escaped from Auschwitz in April 1944. It was their horrific eye-witness account, edited by Slovak Jewish community leaders, which was released in November 1944 by the War Refugee Board in Washington<<
Book 'An Artistic Picture'
Survivor never saw actual gassing deaths
Dick Chapman
Toronto Sun
January 24, 1985
A concentration camp survivor yesterday admitted he never witnessed anybody being gassed to death and his book about Auschwitz-Birkenau in only "an artistic picture ... not a document for a court."
Rudolf Vrba, now an assistant professor at the University of B.C., told the Ernst Zündel trial that his written and pictorial descriptions of the Auschwitz crematoria and gas chambers are based on "what I heard it might look like."
Zündel is charged with knowingly publishing false information about the Holocaust that harmed or was likely to harm racial or social tolerance.
Defence attorney Doug Christie, of Victoria, challenged Vrba's earlier testimony that he saw a Nazi SS soldier in a gas mask pouring poison gas into a low bunker connected to a Birkenau crematorium.
Vrba yesterday admitted he was never inside that particular bunker, after Christie suggested it was the roof of a mortuary Vrba had seen, not a gas chamber.
Vrba also admitted some of the thousands of women, elderly and children he claimed were marched directly to gas chambers upon arrival might have been going to the camp's bathhouse.
"Yes. Some of them actually went there (bathhouse) and more went to the gas chambers," said Vrba, who claimed many babies were gassed to death.
Vrba said his 1944 drawings of the Auschwitz camp layout were inexect and Christie suggested Vrba didn't even know where the bathhouse was located.
Christie said new arrivals had to march between two crematoria to get to the bathhouse, but Vrba insisted the area ended in a "closed road" and "nobody ever came out of there except smoke."
Vrba, who escaped the camp in Poland in 1944 with a mission to warn one million Hungarian Jews of their impending slaughter, insisted he'd made accurate ["within 10%"] estimates of 1,765,000 mass-murder victims up to that point.
He said some narrative passages in his book I Cannot Forgive are based on accounts from others.
One Vrba acount says it took 90 minutes to burn a corpse, another said it took 20 minutes.
"I also include things I heard from reliable sources," Vrba said, exlaining the changes in his later report.
Vrba's 1961 affadavit quotes a Nuremberg War Crimes Trial document as relating to Auschwitz gas chambers and claims it backs up Vrba's account.
When Christie pointed out that ["Nazi government"] documents say nothing about gas chambers, Vrba replied: "It might be a typing error."
Vrba, whose book states the total Auschwitz death toll was 2.5 million, testified Holocaust historians Raul Hilberg and Gerald Rietlinger were limited by "historical discipline" when they made lower estimates -- 1 million and about 850,000 respectively -- and did not have the benefit of Vrba's eyewitness experiences.
Vrba also said increasing estimates of the Auschwitz death toll in the decades after World War II "just shows that better scholars with better methods are constantly improving the information."
He defended "errors in good faith" in his 1944 Auschwitz accounts, which he made two weeks after escaping, as due to "great urgency" to warn Jews.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Of course, now the death toll at Auschwitz has been reduced to around a million by most historians, with some claiming that the death toll was even lower.
In 1985, in Toronto Canada at a court case against the revisionist Ernst Zündel, Jewish "Gas Chamber" witnesses were faced with a lawyer who cross-examined them mercilessly. Witness for the defense was the famous Dr. Rudolf Vrba. Vrba, a Slovakian Jew who escaped Auschwitz in 1944 and together with his fellow Jew Alfred Wetzler, wrote an account regarding the camp which was published in New York in November of 1944, as part of the report from the War Refugee Board. In his book I Cannot Forgive published in 1964, he describes how in January 1943, to commemorate the visit by SS Reichsführer Heinrich Himmler, the first crematory in Auschwitz-Birkenau was initiated by gassing 3,000 Jews.(1) (Vrba is obviously not bothered by the fact that the first crematory in Birkenau was put into operation in March and not in January of 1943, and that Himmler's last visit was in July of 1942). The following occurred at the Zündel case between Zündel's counsel, Douglas Christie and Vrba:(2)
Christie: I would like to ask you, if you actually saw him arrive in January 1943, or is this only a.....
Vrba: In September 1943 or in January?
Christie: In your book it says January 1943.
Vrba: No, I saw him in July 1943 and then in 1943....
Christie: But here it says January 1943.
Vrba: That must be a mistake.
Christie: A mistake?
Vrba: Yes.
Christie: Well, well. But on this occasion you saw him arrive?
Vrba: The first time, I saw him arrive because he was as close to me as you are now. (...) Out of courtesy he came a step closer.
Christie: Well, well.
Vrba: The second time I saw him in a car, the same one as in the first time.(...) Maybe it was him, maybe it was only his deputy, I don't think it matters. (...)
Christie: You are telling this court, you really saw Heinrich Himmler looking through a peephole into a gas chamber?
Vrba: No, I never claimed I was present when he looked into the gas chamber, only that I put a story together which I have heard many times from numerous people who were present and told me everything. (...)
Christie: But in your book you write, YOU saw everything and you don't mention that you are writing hearsay.
Vrba: In this case, I wrote hearsay.
Vrba finally admitted that he used "Poetic License" when he wrote the book.
1. Rudolf Vrba, I cannot forgive, Bantam, Toronto 1964, p. 10 ff.
2. The transcript of the first Zündel-Trial, Toronto 1985, p. 1244 ff.
Holocaust heavyweight Rudolf Vrba, under cross-examination in a Canadian courtroom, states under oath that 150,000 French Jews were gassed at Auschwitz, in spite of the fact that the entire number of Jews deported from France were only 75,721. Vrba claims he arrived at his count "scientifically" by having listened to the language spoken by the inmates at Auschwitz and examining their luggage (!). The author of "I Cannot Forgive" next confessed that his book was "an artistic picture ... not a document for a court," in spite of the fact that Vrba's testimony was crucial to both the War Refugee Board and the Auschwitz Trials in West Germany. Vrba further admitted that his written and pictorial descriptions of Auschwitz crematoria were a result of guessing, based on "what I heard it might look like."
Compare this to:
The results:>>The existence and implementation of gas chambers for extermination purposes is a matter of special concern to deniers since they symbolize more dramatically than anything else the rational, systematic and impersonal nature of the killing machine. Every Holocaust denier feels compelled to make this issue central the argument. [U.S. historian, Harry Elmer] Barnes' contention was that the gas chambers were post-war inventions. Surely Barnes was aware of the extensive testimony provided to the British as early as 1944 by Auschwitz escapee, Rudolph Vrba (see Martin Gilbert, Auschwitz and the Allies, 1981:190-198).<<
A Brief History of Holocaust Denial
by Ben S. Austin
How come a big revelation like that, passed without a whimper???The Globe and Mail, Saturday, February 6, 1993, D2.
A PBS DOCUMENTARY CLAIMS A BLACK U.S. ARMY UNIT
FREED JEWISH INMATES FROM GERMAN CONCENTRATION
CAMPS. NICE STORY, BUT NOT TRUE, SAY THE SOLDIERS
BY JEFFREY GOLDBERG
THE NEW REPUBLIC
NEW YORK
(Jeffrey Goldberg is New York bureau chief for The Forward.)
****
Comments on the above
Jeffrey Goldberg article
The second-greatest calamity.
And so, the second-greatest calamity to befall the Jewish people during this century — which, after the Holocaust itself, is Jewish misrepresentation of the Holocaust — deepens and broadens as a result of the Liberators film. Another blow is struck at Jewish credibility.
Another burden is placed on the backs of Jews — the burden of being remembered for their leading role during the 20th century as stranglers of information, manipulators of truth, disseminators of disinformation, and corruptors of history. The consequence of numbers of Jews lying about the history of their people must be that whenever any Jew discourses upon history, he may expect to be greeted with heightened skepticism — such is the penalty that all Jews must pay for the sin of harboring fabulists in their midst.
