Preserving Auschwitz: Forensic evidence of the Holocaust is the best answer to the deniers.
www.opinionjournal.com/la/?id=110005318
from the Wall Street Journal editorial page
LEISURE & ARTS
BY TIMOTHY RYBACK Wednesday, July 7, 2004 12:01 a.m. EDT
Last month, Jarek Mensfelt, spokesman for the Auschwitz memorial site, announced plans to preserve the ruins of the gas chambers and crematoria in the notorious death camp at Birkenau near the Polish town of Oswiecim. […]
[…]
Of course, the historical and circumstantial evidence of a premeditated Nazi plan to exterminate the Jewish population of Europe is overwhelming. […] The dearth of hard evidence has fueled a growth industry in Holocaust-denial.
The revisionists’ plaint is simple: They demand a proverbial “smoking gun” to prove that the Nazis deliberately and systematically designed an industrial system of extermination. […]
[…]
In the battle against Holocaust deniers, Birkenau’s extermination facilities remain important forensic evidence. […]
Between 1942, when they were first put into operation, and 1944, when they were dynamited, more than a million human beings — mostly Jewish — were fed into these extermination plants, forced into subterranean chambers and gassed, their corpses removed and transported by mechanical conveyance to the crematoria ovens. The chimneys belched smoke into the air. The remnant ash was scattered in the surrounding fields, or dumped in a nearby pond whose muddied bottom, even today, is of a sticky gray viscosity laced with matchstick-size splinters of human bone.
[…]
Mr. Ryback is author of “The Last Survivor: Legacies of Dachau.”
Webmaster note: Other than the observation that crematory buildings 1 and 2 at Birkenau were almost certainly destroyed in 1945, there is no evidence that anyone was forced into the underground (!) rooms said to have functioned as gas chambers. There is no evidence of a “mechanical conveyance” to lift the claimed millions of poison-laden corpses up to the crematory ovens. Crematory ovens are designed NOT to belch smoke (or stench). And there are no known remnants of ash or bone splinters, either in surrounding fields or in any pond: if there were, it could be shown that this ash was human in origin.
