Deceit & Misrepresentation Schindler's List
Porter:
CLAIM: Crematory ovens burn corpses in a few minutes
The real text:
In the boiler rooms [at Schindler's Brinnlitz factory] were
perfect facilities, industrial furnaces capable almost of
vaporizing a body. 26
The book talks about industrial furnaces, not crematoria. And no
comment on the time involved. Quote out of context coupled with
distortion.
Porter:
<TRUTH: actual time: 1 1/2 - 2 hrs. using gas or electricity,
4-6 hrs. using coal. The ovens must be pre-heated, and then
cooled. They do not smell or emit smoke. >
Where does this come from? Just because Carlos Porter says so?
More unsubstantiated assertion.
Porter:
CLAIM: Corpses can be burnt in pyres by dousing them with
gasoline
The real text: "On blankets and barrows and litters the dead were
brought to the burning site and laid on log frames. So the pyre
was built, layer by layer, and when it reached the height of a
man's shoulder, was doused in fuel and lit."
27 Notice
that there were logs as well - a bit of information omitted by the deniers.
Porter:
<TRUTH: requirement: 200 litres of petrol or 100 kg dry wood per corpse; time: up to 24 hrs.>
More unsubstantiated assertions. 200 litres is over 50 gallons of gasoline - far greater volume than the corpse itself! And logs
were used as well, as is seen above. But even if true, where in
the text does it say that less wood was used? Nowhere.
Porter:
CLAIM: Human ashes are so light in weight that they float through
the air, like pollution
The real text:
The dust of the dead fell in hair and on the clothing hung in
the back garden of the junior officers' villas. Oskar was
bemused to see the way the personnel took the smoke as if the
grit in the air were some sort of honest and inevitable
industrial fallout. And through the fogs, Amon went riding with
Majola, both of them calm in the saddle. Leo John took his
twelve-year-old son off to catch tadpoles in the marshy ground
in the wood. The flames and the stench did not distract them
from their daily lives.28
Porter:
<TRUTH: actual weight: 2-5 kg of bone fragments up to 2 inches
in length, enough to fill a cigar box. >
The distortion: can be seen by anyone who has an urn containing
the ashes of a cremated relative. Skin turns to bone? Muscle
turns to bone?
Porter:
CLAIM: Kurt Gerstein is taken seriously
The real text: see quote above under the "claim" of Zyklon-B
becoming instantly gaseous.
Porter:
<TRUTH: Gerstein was tortured into signing Document PS 1553,
typewritten in French, after which his body mysteriously
disappeared. There are 6 different versions of the document,
one of them a forgery. He claims that 700-900 people could be
crushed into a chamber "25, 45 m2", survive almost 3 hrs, and be
gassed with Diesel exhaust. Diesel exhaust contains almost no
carbon monoxide at idle. >
More unsubstantiated assertion about Gerstein. The honest
historian should certainly willing to listen to any evidence that
any particular document is a forgery, but without such evidence
there is no reason to take the unsubstantiated word of Mr. Porter,
who (it becomes increasingly clear) is no honest historian.
The whole truth: While the numbers Gerstein gave are
improbable, and much higher than any other witness (they center on
a figure between 200-250), other witnesses such as SS hygienist Dr.
Wilhelm Pfannenstiel
and Unterscharführer
Erich Fuchs
substantiate
the gassing story. <6>
And Gerstein told the same story during the war, before there was
any possibility of torture. He told his friends Otto Völckers and
Alexandra Balz. 29 He told Pastor
Mochalski and a member of the Swedish Embassy. 30
The whole truth: Who said anything about idle? And that's with a
well tuned engine which has not been tampered with to produce more
carbon monoxide. Even Holocaust denier Friedrich Paul Berg, an
engineer, admits that it is possible to increase the fuel-air
mixture, and thus the carbon monoxide emission. His only objection
is that it is a) unsafe (though he does not say whether this means
risk of bodily injury, or merely reduced engine life) and b)
difficult.
However, the debate over carbon monoxide is really a red herring.
Testimony from multiple eyewitnesses indicates that the cause of
death was not carbon monoxide, but asphyxiation due to the lack of
oxygen in the exhaust, coupled with other toxic components and the
victims' own oxygen consumption within a small, overcrowded, sealed
chamber. (See "Friedrich Berg & the Diesel
Issue" for a thorough discussion of this topic.)
[Continued]
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The Techniques of Holocaust Denial
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