Holocaust denial after Irving imploded

And let's not forget Otto Frank was being treated in this "death camp's" infirmary.

That was a great "extermination" policy - we treat you in our infirmaries and then we gas you.

Ridiculous!

A look at the timeline might help.

The Frank family was rounded up in August, 1944, the same month Paris was liberated. The General's Plot against Hitler had been the previous month, as had been the fall of the Nazi death camp at Majdenek. With the capture of Majdenek went any hope that the Nazis might be able to pull off their intended cover-up of the Jewish genocide; now it was all about trying to minimize the scale of the crime, because they could no longer deny that the genocide had happened. Auschwitz III (i.e. the factory at Monowitz, not the camp where the Jews were) also got its first dose of Allied bombing the same month the Franks were arrested.

Auschwitz was both a slave labor camp and a death camp; the "selection" process was simply choosing those healthy enough to work for at least a little, versus those too young, too old, or too ill to work, who were killed immediately. The nominal cut-off age was 14; she was 15, so she was deemed fit for slave labor -- that is, to be worked to death.

Sensing that the Nazi grip on the camps -- and Europe itself -- was fast falling apart, in October there was at Auschwitz a sonderkommando uprising which destroyed Krema IV. In November, the remaining Kremas at Auschwitz II (i.e. Birkenau, the site of Jewish extermination) were ordered, probably by Himmler, to be shut down and destroyed. And November (mid October at the earliest) is when the surviving Franks were transported to a camp inside German territory, Bergen-Belsen. Auschwitz itself the Nazis abandoned in mid-January, so the Franks were shipped out of Auschwitz in the panicked last dozen weeks of one of the largest of all KL camps.

Why weren't the prisoners at Auschwitz killed? Why where they transported instead? Several reasons. The Germans still wanted slave labor. The transportation process in many cases was in its own way a form of extermination, a death march in the dead of winter (although those who went to Bergen-Belsen did so by cattle car). And Himmler was also planning for the end game.

From the USHMM site https://www.ushmm.org/wlc/en/article.php?ModuleId=10007407:

After the failure of the July 20, 1944, putsch, Himmler toyed with the idea of negotiating a separate peace with the western Allies while continuing to fight the Soviet Union. During the winter of 1944-1945, he considered using concentration camp prisoners as a bargaining chip to initiate such negotiations. In April 1945, Himmler met with the representative of the World Jewish Congress in Stockholm, Sweden, Hilel Storch, to discuss openings for negotiations. In part because the Allies would not negotiate with a man so implicated in Nazi crimes and in part because Himmler could not quite separate himself from Hitler or the belief that somehow the Germans would win the war, his half-hearted feelers came to nothing.

It's good news and bad news. The good news is that, despite the concentrated efforts over decades of wackbird anti-Semites like Weber and McCalden and Carto -- and yes, David Irving too -- Holocaust denial turned out to be a very ineffective way to attack the Jews, because you've got to be an absolute moron to think there's anything to it. The bad news is that people like Weber have found rhetorically easier way to attack Jews.

There's another interesting aspect to Weber's declaration that the Holocaust denial movement has been a failure.

The whole point of going through the exercise in the late 70's of creating a false front "institute" as a way to promulgate Holocaust denial was to gild the crap -- to paint over the obvious anti-Semitism of Holocaust denial, and give it a veneer of faux scholarship -- was that the movement knew its affiliation with the Jew-hating blackshirts of the National Front, National Alliance (Weber), British National Party (IHR co-founder McCalden) was a clear bar to their ever getting mainstreamed.

So out came the bag of pseudonyms, and out came the "Institute of Historical Review" -- which asserted that it was not anti-Jewish, oh no, no not that, no never, not anti-Jewish at all, no sir no sir, and which tactically drilled its members to pre-emptively read a cue card saying "How come if you question the Holocaust even a little they call you an anti-Semite" ... a cue card we've heard rehearsed on this board quite a few times. The whole purpose of the organization was to try to separate, in the public mind, the issues of Holocaust denial and anti-Semitism.

They failed. They failed from day one. Crash-bang-boom level failure. Holocaust denial and anti-Semitism are Siamese twins joined at the hip, and the IHR couldn't convincingly pretend otherwise.

Then, in 2009, Weber finally accepts reality: the Holocaust denial movement is a batting zero. Nobody's buying the idea that Holocaust denial is legit, rather than anti-Semitic crap posing as legit. "Almost no support in academic circles or society at large." Hitler is not going to be rehabilitated. The crime is not going to be erased. The Irving verdict was a hammer blow. "Over the past ten years [i.e. since about the time of the Irving verdict], sales of IHR books, discs, flyers and other items about Holocaust history have steadily declined, along with inquiries about Holocaust history and requests for interviews on this subject."

So in the same statement he announces the pivot: the IHR will now devote more energy to The Jew Per Se. "Jewish-Zionist power is a palpable reality with harmful consequences for America, the Middle East, and the entire global community. In my view, and as I have repeatedly emphasized, the task of exposing and countering this power is a crucially important one. In that effort, Holocaust revisionism cannot play a central role."

In doing so, he also comes out of the closet in terms of what the organization really intended all along: to attack the Jews. And his statement says basically, attacking the Jews indirectly didn't work, so let's do it directly.

It's an admission that the IHR had failed, and failed completely, decade after decade. in their central purpose: to mask the fundamental role of anti-Semitism in the creation and promulgation of Holocaust denial. They just couldn't keep the friendly-face "we don't hate Jews" mask from slipping, again and again and again, decade after decade. They couldn't separate the Siamese twins, and decided it was time to not only acknowledge the twin they were trying to keep hidden all along, the anti-Semitic one, but to let him take the lead hoping he will succeed where the other one failed.

And, again, this is not a few oddballs at the fringe; this is the IHR, the most important organization in the history of the Holocaust denial movement, worth a chapter of its own in Lipstadt's "Denying the Holocaust."