Is Simon Wiesenthal a War Criminal or Criminal in general

Discussions on the Holocaust and 20th Century War Crimes. Note that Holocaust denial is not allowed. Hosted by David Thompson.
Ostuf Charlemagne
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#16

Post by Ostuf Charlemagne » 22 Sep 2003, 04:33

That's really an INTERESTING topic !!!

Panzermahn,that's a discovery ! I didn't knew about that !!!
Nobody will be ever able to says you are not documented !!!

As far as i'm concerned,i think Mr. Wiesenthal broke most of the law of civilized countries...i am not a lawyer but i think it could be charged with
(what do you says ,Thompson ?) :

- impersonificating authorities.
- kidnapping.
- false testimonies
- incitation to murder (it's illegal to take justice in our own hands,right ?)

But also there is two things who really puzzled me about Wiesenthal :

1.The case of John Demanjuk,who after one year trial demostrated he wasn't Ivan the Terrible. Along the way,the US govt. took away his citizenship....even so he wasn't gived back his citizenship...Now he is a broken man thanks to the mistake of Simon Wiesenthal.... Who will fix that ??

2. Mr.Wiesenthal goes along claiming high and loud he is a ''nazi hunter''
and most countries collaborate with him,he receives honours and the like.
I ask,what would happens if I started a ''commie hunters'' office ?
Don't answer,i'm sure they will send me in a psychiatric hospital !!!

About ''rumors'' saying he was a Kapo,i think i have something in my archives or books...give me couple of days to find that ....

Ostuf Charlemagne
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#17

Post by Ostuf Charlemagne » 22 Sep 2003, 04:55

Me again....Wiesenthal packing guns with nazi permits !!!

...saved by SS doctors !!!! Woooow ! That's a scoop !!!


David Thompson
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#18

Post by David Thompson » 22 Sep 2003, 05:08

Otuf Charlemagne -- I think you'd be doing the world a service by exposing the names and deeds of communist criminals.

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#19

Post by demonio » 22 Sep 2003, 10:51

2. Mr.Wiesenthal goes along claiming high and loud he is a ''nazi hunter''
and most countries collaborate with him,he receives honours and the like.
I ask,what would happens if I started a ''commie hunters'' office ?
Don't answer,i'm sure they will send me in a psychiatric hospital !!!
This sheds a whole new light on the topic and makes sense. I have never looked at it that way.

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Marcus
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#20

Post by Marcus » 22 Sep 2003, 11:40

David Thompson wrote:I think you'd be doing the world a service by exposing the names and deeds of communist criminals.
I agree, I fail to see how a persons ideology can possibly make his crimes any more or any less worth of punishment.
Unfortunately the references to the crimes of communist regimes are often made by those who doesn't want to see the crimes of the nazi/fascist regimes be punished, that can lead to guilt by association for those with pure intentions.

/Marcus

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#21

Post by Hurricane » 22 Sep 2003, 15:41

panzermahn wrote:David, here you are..the author of the article stated all his references

http://64.143.9.197/jhr/v15/v15n4p-8_Weber.html
I would take the "facts" from that web site with a big grain of salt. Browsing through some of the other texts on the site you can see that they have a pretty aggressive revisionist agenda.

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#22

Post by David Thompson » 22 Sep 2003, 16:43

I am familiar with the writer of the Wiesenthal article, Mark Weber, and have read other articles by the fellow. I have little respect for the man's works. The easiest way to get an appreciation of his method is to check him against his sources. For example, here is a paragraph from the Wiesenthal article:
"The irresponsible character of this book is also shown by Wiesenthal's extensive citation therein of the supposed "death bed confession" of Mauthausen Commandant Franz Ziereis, according to which four million were gassed to death with carbon monoxide at the nearby Hartheim satellite camp.18 This claim is totally absurd, and no serious Holocaust historian still accepts it.19 Also according to the Ziereis "confession" cited by Wiesenthal, the Germans supposedly killed another ten million people in Poland, Lithuania and Latvia.20 In fact, this fraudulent "confession" was obtained by torture.21"
I posted Ziereis' statement in this section of the forum some time back. Interested readers can find it at:

The Last Words of Franz Ziereis
http://www.thirdreichforum.com/viewtopic.php?t=14129

If anyone takes the trouble to read it, they will see that Weber's claim "four million were gassed to death with carbon monoxide at the nearby Hartheim satellite camp" does not appear in Ziereis' statement. The number is given as 1-1 1/2 million, and the type of gas is not mentioned.

Weber goes on to say: "Also according to the Ziereis "confession" cited by Wiesenthal, the Germans supposedly killed another ten million people in Poland, Lithuania and Latvia." That statement appears nowhere in Ziereis' confession.

Weber then states: "In fact, this fraudulent "confession" was obtained by torture." Weber's claim has certainly been made repeatedly, but I have yet to see any factual basis for the statements that the confession was "fraudulent" or that it "was obtained by torture."

Weber's paragraph from the Wiesenthal article, quoted above, is only four sentences long. Two of the sentences contain false statements of fact, one has an usupported claim introduced as a fact, and the remaining statement "This claim is totally absurd, and no serious Holocaust historian still accepts it," is irrelevant since the "absurd claim" wasn't made.

I have had this same experience -- finding false statements of fact -- in several other articles written by Weber. For this reason, I'm not inclined to credit his "scholarship."

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chalutzim
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#23

Post by chalutzim » 22 Sep 2003, 17:02

As Weber himself once said, he is only trying to make some fraudulent money, because after years writing honest books that brought him nihil attention and little enough to fill his belly, he found a public among the true believers, the self-proclaimed "revisionists", eagerly disposed to maintain his style of living and stimulate his mythomania.

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#24

Post by Erik » 22 Sep 2003, 22:05

Mr. Thompson wrote:
Weber goes on to say: "Also according to the Ziereis "confession" cited by Wiesenthal, the Germans supposedly killed another ten million people in Poland, Lithuania and Latvia." That statement appears nowhere in Ziereis' confession.


Maybe the statement appears ‘according to the Ziereis “confession”’…”cited by Wiesenthal”?


Here is a quote from M.Weber’s article:
The irresponsible character of this book is also shown by Wiesenthal's extensive citation therein of the supposed "death bed confession" of Mauthausen Commandant Franz Ziereis, according to which four million were gassed to death with carbon monoxide at the nearby Hartheim satellite camp.18 This claim is totally absurd, and no serious Holocaust historian still accepts it.19 Also according to the Ziereis "confession"cited by Wiesenthal, the Germans supposedly killed another ten million people in Poland, Lithuania and Latvia.20 In fact, this fraudulent "confession" was obtained by torture.21
http://64.143.9.197/jhr/v15/v15n4p-8_Weber.html(Emphasis and underlining added.)

To a native English speaker there is maybe no ambiguity in the allusion – i.e., whether Weber alludes to the confession of Ziereis or the Wiesenthal citation thereof – but maybe we can give him the benefit of a doubt, until we know what Weber means by the “irresponsible character of the book”?

Here are the footnotes 18 to 21:
(18): M. Weber and K. Stimely, "The Sleight-of-Hand of Simon Wiesenthal," The Journal of Historical Review, Spring 1984 (Vol. 5, No. 1), pp. 120-122; D. National-Zeitung (Munich), May 21, 1993, p. 3.

(19): S. Wiesenthal, KZ Mauthausen (1946). See also facsimile reprint in: Robert H. Drechsler, Simon Wiesenthal: Dokumentation (Vienna: 1982), pp. 42, 46. This "confession" is a somewhat altered version of Nuremberg document NO-1973; A new edition of Wiesenthal's 1946 book has been published under the title Denn sie Wussten, was sie tun: Zeichnungen und Aufzeichnungen aus dem KZ Mauthausen (Vienna: F. Deuticke, 1995). I am grateful to Robert Faurisson for bringing this to my attention. He points out in a July 1995 essay that Wiesenthal has deleted from this new edition both the "death bed confession" of Ziereis as well as his drawing of the three Mauthausen inmates.

(20): According to the Encyclopaedia Judaica ("Mauthausen,", Vol. 11, p. 1138), a grand total of 206,000 persons were inmates of Mauthausen and its satellite camps (including Hartheim) at one time or another.

(21): S. Wiesenthal, KZ Mauthausen (1946). Facsimile reprint in: R. Drechsler, Simon Wiesenthal: Dokumentation, p. 47.
(Emphasis added.)

According to those footnotes, Weber must be aware of a “somewhat altered version” of another Nuremberg document (NO-1973) than the one you scanned here:
http://www.thirdreichforum.com/viewtopic.php?t=14129

Your link quotes Document 3870-PS, “Affidavit of Hans Marsalek”, quoting the Last Words of Franz Ziereis.

Elsewhere, Weber mentions Ziereis’ confession on three different(?) Nuremberg documents:
Several Nuremberg documents based on the purported "death bed confession" of Mauthausen commandant Franz Ziereis, are demonstrably fraudulent. (Nuremberg documents 1515-PS, 3870-PS, and NO-1973.) These documents supposedly prove systematic killings of hundreds of thousands of people by gassing and other means at Mauthausen and Hartheim. (note 49)
(…)
(Note 49 reads:
M. Weber, "Simon Wiesenthal," Journal of Historical Review, Winter 1989-1990, p. 443.
)
http://www.ihr.org/jhr/v12/v12p167_Webera.html

Here Weber writes “hundreds of thousands” instead of the “four millions” in the article about Simon Wiesenthal that he refers to in his footnote 49 – i.e., his own article!!

Of course, he doesn’t state how many “hundreds of thousands” he alludes to, so it may just as well be 40.

Sloppy scholarship, or a hint at how little anybody knows about those “systematic killings”?

Mr. Thompson wrote:
Weber's paragraph from the Wiesenthal article, quoted above, is only four sentences long. Two of the sentences contain false statements of fact, one has an usupported claim introduced as a fact, and the remaining statement "This claim is totally absurd, and no serious Holocaust historian still accepts it," is irrelevant since the "absurd claim" wasn't made.


The facts are perhaps hard to follow?

And claims easily made (as you have repeatedly pointed out)?

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Egyptian Hieroglyphic Dictionary (Part I, page 15)

#25

Post by chalutzim » 22 Sep 2003, 22:12


Erik
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#26

Post by Erik » 22 Sep 2003, 22:44

Chalutzim wrote:
As Weber himself once said, he is only trying to make some fraudulent money, because after years writing honest books that brought him nihil attention and little enough to fill his belly, he found a public among the true believers, the self-proclaimed "revisionists", eagerly disposed to maintain his style of living and stimulate his mythomania.
And then he posted
Can Egyptology perhaps solve the "allusion problem" above?

Whose belly is meant? Wiesenthal's or Weber's?

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#27

Post by David Thompson » 23 Sep 2003, 02:02

Erik -- Your post suggests that perhaps Weber was only quoting from Wiesenthal, and that perhaps it was Wiesenthal who had exaggerated the claim in Ziereis' statement.
"Maybe the statement appears ‘according to the Ziereis “confession”’…”cited by Wiesenthal”?"
If Wiesenthal actually had distorted the Ziereis confession to change the numbers and add new material, and Weber could show that, he would have effectively discredited Wiesenthal. But that's not what Weber says in his Wiesenthal article, nor does Weber even accuse Wiesenthal of changing Ziereis' words. Weber doesn't even quote the passage from Ziereis to contrast it with Wiesenthal's version and show any supposed inaccuracy. That leaves us with another, more likely possibility -- that Weber is the one who has distorted Ziereis' statement.

You then move on to a completely different article by Weber, in which Weber footnotes an assertion with a reference to his own article on Wiesenthal. You state:
(Note 49 reads: Quote:
M. Weber, "Simon Wiesenthal," Journal of Historical Review, Winter 1989-1990, p. 443.
)
http://www.ihr.org/jhr/v12/v12p167_Webera.html

Here Weber writes “hundreds of thousands” instead of the “four millions” in the article about Simon Wiesenthal that he refers to in his footnote 49 – i.e., his own article!!

Of course, he doesn’t state how many “hundreds of thousands” he alludes to, so it may just as well be 40.

Sloppy scholarship, or a hint at how little anybody knows about those “systematic killings”?
Well, it's certainly sloppy scholarship, and a strong hint as well -- at how little Weber knows about what he himself had written concerning these systematic killings, or how much he wanted to back away from his "four millions" claim in the Wiesenthal article.

You also say:
"Elsewhere, Weber mentions Ziereis’ confession on three different(?) Nuremberg documents:
Several Nuremberg documents based on the purported "death bed confession" of Mauthausen commandant Franz Ziereis, are demonstrably fraudulent. (Nuremberg documents 1515-PS, 3870-PS, and NO-1973.) These documents supposedly prove systematic killings of hundreds of thousands of people by gassing and other means at Mauthausen and Hartheim. (note 49)
If Weber is talking about the International Military Tribunal (IMT) trial of major war criminals at Nuernberg, no exhibit that I found bore the number 1515-PS. The 8-volume Nazi Conspiracy and Aggression series covers all US and UK exhibits introduced in the IMT trial, and lists a very large number of the PS series exhibits. It does not list any IMT exhibit with the designation 1515-PS.

As for exhibit NO-1973, as I recall the NO series was not used to designate exhibits in the IMT trial. If it's an exhibit from some other trial or some other case, Weber certainly hasn't taken the trouble to point out what it is.

If you can track this material down and post it, perhaps you can rehabilitate Weber's "scholarship" on that single paragraph of the Wiesenthal article. Once you've done that, I'll give you a number of other examples of his "scholarship" that you can try to clean up.

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#28

Post by neugierig » 23 Sep 2003, 02:38

To David Thompson:
I feel I own you an explanation, i.e., apology. What I meant to say yesterday was that I have read numerous articles re. the Rosenholz files but never saved one. Consequently, I didn’t know where to find the facts to support my statement. Anyway, here is something, friends again? :)

These are excerpts from an article in “Die Welt” from July 9. 2003:

“...Die "Rosenholz"-Daten waren während der friedlichen Revolution von 1989 unter bislang ungeklärten Umständen in die Hände des Geheimdienstes CIA geraten, der sie auf hunderte von CD-ROMs kopierte. Die Bundesregierung hatte sich über Jahre hinweg um eine Freigabe der Daten bemüht. Vor drei Jahren wurde die erste CD mit 1800 Datensätzen an das Bundeskanzleramt übergeben, die das Material nach Verhandlungen mit dem Verfassungsschutz der Birthler-Behörde übergab....”

“Die "Rosenholz"-Dateien haben ihren Namen von einer gleichnamigen CIA-Aktion im Frühjahr 1990. Damals erbeuteten US-Agenten unter ungeklärten Umständen die brisanten Stasi-Daten und schafften sie nach Washington. Dabei handelt es sich um zwei Karteien mit den Namen F 16 und F 22 sowie Statistikbögen. Die F 16-Kartei ist die Klarnamendatei der Stasi-Hauptverwaltung. Auf den Karteikarten sollen sowohl die Namen von inoffiziellen Mitarbeitern (IM) stehen als auch von Menschen, die bespitzelt wurden oder für die Stasi interessante Persönlichkeiten waren. Die F 22-Kartei sammelte Agentenvorgänge und kann beim Abgleich mit der F 16-Kartei Aufschluss geben, wer als Spion arbeitete....”

My (rough) translation:
"..The “Rosenholz”- files ended up, during the peaceful revolution of 1989, under unexplained circumstances, in the hands of CIA agents who copied them unto hundreds of CD’s. The German government tried for years to have the files released. Three years ago the first CD, containing 1800 records, was handed to the Federal Chancellery, who, after some negotiations, passed it on to the Birthler-Authority. (the Birthler-Authority is in charge of evaluating the Stasi files. Wilf.)..."

"...The “Rosenholz”- files were named after an CIA undertaking, in the spring of 1990, by that name. At that time US agents captured, under mysterious circumstances, those explosive Stasi files and shipped them to Washington. The shipment contained two sets of files called F 16 and F 22, as well as some statistics. F 19, allegedly, is the file containing the real names of Stasi helpers, as well as from people who were watched or considered persons of interest. F 22 collected agent activity and could, when compared with F 16, identify persons who worked as spies..."

Regards
Wilf
No one is free, until we are all free.

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#29

Post by David Thompson » 23 Sep 2003, 02:50

neugierig -- You said:
"Anyway, here is something, friends again? "
It's a deal. Thanks for the explanation.

I was aware that the US had obtained copies of the Stasi files from the German government, but I've never heard that they had taken unique originals without leaving anything for the German government to peruse. For a while a couple of years ago, the Stasi paid informant list was available on the internet. I have to admit that I downloaded it as soon as I saw it. I understand that the opposition to release of the files was an internal German matter, in which a "forgive and forget" faction was in conflict with the "who were those commie snitches" faction. I'm personally glad that the list became public.

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#30

Post by demonio » 23 Sep 2003, 04:13

Does anyone have anymore info addressing the topic re Wiesenthal ?

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