Carlo Mattogno: Bungled: “The Destruction of the European Jews” – Raul Hilberg’s Failure to Prove National-Socialist “Killing Centers.” His Misrepresented Sources and Flawed Methods
Uckfield: Castle Hill Publishers, 2021
Language: English
Description
What is the best way to demonstrate that the orthodox narrative about the “extermination of the European Jews by the Nazis” during World War II is fundamentally wrong? We think the best way is to take what the orthodoxy thinks is “arguably the single most-important book about the Holocaust” (Prof. Gutman, Hebrew University, Jerusalem), written by the most-renowned mainstream expert on the topic, and show paragraph by paragraph, sentence by sentence, even word by word, that this specialist got most of it fundamentally wrong.
This mainstream expert is the late Prof. Dr. Raul Hilberg, and the book in our sights is his three-volume work The Destruction of the European Jews, which most consider the gold standard of mainstream Holocaust writings. When it comes to documenting the National-Socialist persecution of Jews, this work certainly does a formidable job. But when it comes to proving that the Nazis planned and carried out a policy of systematic mass annihilation, Hilberg’s opus magnum proves highly deficient.
The present study demonstrates that, when it comes to the Nazis’ alleged planning of the “Holocaust”, Hilberg systematically misrepresents what the documents say about it by ignoring crucial documents, by ripping documents out of their historical context and thus distorting their meaning, and even by outright lying about their contents.
When it comes to substantiating his claims about the actual implementation of the alleged mass murder, Hilberg resorts to even-more-devious methods: he ignores reams of documents and relies almost exclusively on witness testimony, but with a highly mendacious approach: He cherry-picks only those witnesses who fit his preconceived notion, then picks out only those parts of their testimony that support his assertions, while systematically hiding from his readers that all of these testimonies contradict each other on essential points, conflict with the documented historical record, and are riddled with absurdities, anachronisms as well as historical and technical impossibilities. Hilberg moreover states his “judgment” that, if just one witness makes any kind of claim that fits his agenda, it must be true, and if several witnesses make the same claim, it must be even more true. Using the same logic, witches ride on broomsticks through the air and have sex with the devil, because thousands of witnesses have said so.
Apart from these blatantly unscholarly methods, the most-shocking revelation of the present study is that Hilberg never bothered going ad fontes: He categorically refused to ever investigate any of the claimed crime locations, and never set foot into any archive at these locations, let alone try to study their contents.
Why did anyone ever take this imbecilic imposter seriously? Mainstream scholars do, perhaps because they all employ markedly similar methods.
304 pages, paperback, illustrated, bibl., index (Holocaust Handbooks, Volume 3)