[Continued]

As if to reinforce his demonstration of ignorance of the very material he purports to understand to the point where he is capable of telling us what is "fact" and what is "physically impossible," Mr. Vicksell repeats his comment, in slightly different terms, the following day. When he is asked how he knew that Goeth never shot anyone from his front porch, he rose, a fish to bait:

Because wartime aerial photographs of the Plaskow camp show clearly that the camp was over the crest of a hill from Goeth's villa. As I've said before, he'd have needed a mortar or a howitzer to knock off inmates in the concentration camp yard. ^[5]

This time, we see Mr. Vicksell reveal the source of his "facts," the selfsame John Ball pamphlet touted a month before by Mr. Gannon, and distributed by Ernst Zündel's publishing arm. Mr. Ball's "wartime aerial photographs" provided Mr. Vicksell with all the proof he needed. Alas, Mr. Vicksell would have been better served had he actually read the very book he so casually dismissed:

The first morning Commandant Goeth stepped out his front door and murdered a prisoner at random, there was a tendency to see this also, like the first execution on Chujowa Go'rka, as a unique event, discrete from what would become the customary life of the camp. In fact, of course, the killings on the hill would soon prove to be habitual, and so would Amon's morning routine.

Wearing a shirt and riding breeches and boots on which his orderly had put a high shine, he would emerge on the steps of his temporary villa. (They were renovating a better place for him down at the other end of the camp perimeter.) As the season wore on he would appear without his shirt, for he loved the sun. But for the moment he stood in the clothes in which he had eaten breakfast, a pair of binoculars in one hand and a sniper's rifle in the other.

He would scan the camp area, the work at the quarry, the prisoners pushing or hauling the quarry trucks on the rails which passed by his door. Those glancing up could see the smoke from the cigarette which he held clamped between his lips, the way a man smokes without hands when he is too busy to put down the tools of his trade. Within the first few days of the camp's life he appeared thus at his front door and shot a prisoner who did not seem to be pushing hard enough at a cart loaded with limestone.

No one knew Amon's precise reason for settling on that prisoner - Amon certainly did not have to document his motives. With one blast form the doorstep, the man was plucked from the group of pushing and pulling captives and hurled sideways in the road. The others stopped pushing, of course, their muscles frozen in expectation of a general slaughter. But Amon waved them on, frowning, as if to say that he was pleased for the moment with the standard of work that he was getting from them." ^[6]

We find it amazing that Holocaust deniers can dig up aerial photographs of the camp, with Goeth's house as it was in 1943, yet completely ignore the most obvious source for the apparent contradiction - the very book on which the movie was based - in order to determine the facts.

Had they done so, the "physically impossible act" would have shriveled up and disappeared long before Mssrs. Gannon and Vicksell embarrassed themselves by touting dubious conclusions from "experts" like Mr. Ball, and his publisher, the notorious Herr Zündel.

Did it never occur to these folks that there was a simple explaination for this seeming contradiction? Did it never occur to Ernst Zündel, or John Ball, or Messrs. Gannon and Vicksell, that a quick reading of the book was in order before they assumed a position built upon such shaky ground? Given the past performance of these staunch propagandists, however, it is likely that at least some of them were well aware of the explaination, and, as is their practice, simply and contemptuously dismissed it, on the (often correct) assumption that few if any of their targets would bother to read the book, or even notice the explaination if they did read the book. As this document shows, time and again, this is not a far-fetched thesis.

[Continued]

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