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The Giant With Feet of Clay : Raul Hilberg and his Standard Work on the Holocaust (Holocaust Handbooks)

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This book represents a milestone. It documents the first time a so-called holocaust expert has been critically questioned and his claims and documentation thoroughly examined instead of being accepted and believed in unquestioningly which, more often than not, is usually the case.

Witness, for example, the fiasco of the ridiculous 'memoirs' of a French 'survivor' who claimed, with a straight face, that she had been raised and sheltered by, incredibly enough, wolves, only to have her story exposed for the fairytale it was but not before a multi-million dollar book and movie deal.

It is the same, over and over. An 'expert' or an 'eyewitness' comes forth with a book of dubious and poorly documented claims which, as a rule, are always treated as 'truth' beyond question and read with an almost religious reverence. Elie Wiesel is another eloquent example. Critical evaluation of his work, however, reveals much - his claims about witnessing, for example, Jews being thrown, via some sort of strange conveyer belt, into a pit of fire being almost laughable, yet this imposter has received, unbelievably, the Nobel Peace Prize, is treated with nauseating deference on shows like 'Oprah Winfrey' and gets away with his ludicrous (and lucrative) charades year after year.

Raul Hilberg engaged in similar shenanagins.....until now, that is.

Painstakingly, Jurgen Graf picks apart Hilberg's 'research', examines carefully his performance under cross-examination at the Toronto trial of Ernst Zundel and exposes this charlatan for what he is.....a falsifier of history and a liar.

Hilberg obviously learned his lesson, for he refused to return as a prosecution witness at Zundel's re-trial three years later. And not only that! He promptly put out a 'revised' edition of his 'work' The Destruction of the European Jews to plug at least some of the holes exposed in earlier editions. Nice try, Raul, but your book is still a tissue of lies - full of bald assumptions as well as references, quotes and documents that don't check out or are deliberately falsified or taken out of context.

Hats off to Jurgen Graf for his magnificent expose. His 'Giant With Feet of Clay' should be standard reference in any classroom discussion about this so-called 'Holocaust'.

The Giant with Feet of Clay is Raul Hillberg, the acknowledged authority on the Holocaust, and his three volume series, The Destruction of the European Jews, which is often called the "standard work" on the subject. Graf's book is an analysis of that work that especially concentrates on the portion that deals with the evidence for the industrial scale killing by gas, which is at the core of the holocaust myth.

After forthrightly stating that Hillberg's description of the persecution and deportations of the Jews during World War II is generally accepted, historically accurate and based on reliable sources, Graf energetically, and even with unseemly enthusiasm, tears apart the evidence he cites for the mass killings.

One surprising observation that he makes is that out of three volumes of 1351 pages, only 19 deal with the central fixture of the legend, the killings in gas chambers. I found the portion of the book that deals with each of the eyewitnesses cited by Hillberg to be particularly persuasive. He describes what each witness claimed according to Hillberg, and compared it to what else they claimed, not cited by Hillberg, thus utterly destroying their credibility. His general argument against the reliability of eyewitness accounts, is common sense, but usually ignored in matters of theology.

Graf's destruction of Hillberg's treatment of the census data, statistics and demographics is also very persuasive and shows to any reader with even a modicum of discernment that Hillberg is an amateurish mountebank who works backwards from the desired answer to guesses and unreasonable assumptions.

This book is one that Hillberg and other tradesmen will never refute in any way. They cannot afford to bring any attention to it.

A revisionist classic that questions the Holocaust facts in a scholarly and academic and non-hateful and very loving way. Yet the publisher, Germar Rudolf, is in jail in Germany for THOUGHT CRIMES for writing "Lectures on the Holocaust."

In this remarkable, balanced book, the author skillfully reviews and compares traditional and revisionist views on the The Holocaust.

On one side is the traditional, orthodox view -- six million Jewish casualties, gas chambers, cremation ovens, mass graves, and thousands of witnesses. On the other is the view of a small band of skeptical writers and researchers, often unfairly labeled deniers, who contend that the public has been gravely misled about this emotion-laden chapter of history.

The author establishes that the arguments and findings of revisionist scholars are substantive, and deserve serious consideration. He points out, for example, that even the eminent Jewish Holocaust scholar Raul Hilberg acknowledged that there was no budget, plan or order by Hitler for a World War II program to exterminate Europes Jews.

This book is especially relevant right now, as Holocaust deniers are routinely and harshly punished for their blasphemy, and as growing numbers of people regard the standard, Hollywoodized Holocaust narrative with mounting suspicion and distrust.

This is no peripheral debate between arcane views of some obscure aspect of twentieth century history. Instead, this is a clash with profound social-political implications regarding freedom of speech and press, the manipulation of public opinion, how our cultural life is shaped, and how power is wielded in our society.

I have read this book carefully several times, as well as other works by this author (Graf) and his target (Hilberg). Graf's critique is enlightening and devastating: Raul Hilberg set out to write a history of HOW the Nazis killed people in gas chambers without stopping to think about WHETHER they did it. Hilberg is on solid ground for most of his work - the persecution and deportation of European Jewry - but fails at the crucial point, the gas chambers. He has no reliable witnesses to mass gassing, no documents, no evidence. He has never done research in the camps themselves, never examined the remains of the "gas chambers", never allowed himself to doubt their existence. He relies instead on hearsay, speculation, and a parade of transparently bogus "witnesses" like Philip Mueller and Kurt Gerstein. Graf is able to refute every one of Hilberg's "witnesses". I have taken the time to read many of their "eyewitness" accounts myself (including those cited by the first reviewer above), and they are as Graf says, totally unreliable when not demonstrably false. Interestingly, Hilberg's autobiography does not even MENTION Graf's work. He has never rebutted the critiques Graf raises! The Giant (Hilberg) does indeed stand on feet of clay (phony evidence).
I will briefly point out that Graf's tone is, in my opinion, needlessly personal and polemical at times. However, the book is a "must read" for anyone interested in the Holocaust controversy.

Raul Hilberg is the author of a multi-volumed work entitled "The Destruction of European Jewry." It is a great tome reputed to be the final word on the fate of European Jews during WWII. We find, however, upon close and critical examination, that it is not. Jurgen Graf's book, "The Giant with Feet of Clay," reveals stunningly just what this "giant" is, a huge, overwhelmingly impressive colosssus, but unable to stand, because the feet, upon which its enormous weight bestrides the popular holcaust-inspired narrative, cannot support that weight. Hilberg uses largely discretited "eyewitness" to prove to the world that almost 5.1 million Jews were industrially esxterminated by the Nazis. Eyewitness accounts of any event are usually the last source to which competent, trained historians go. Not so with Hilberg. At the top of his pyramid of "evidence" are the so-called holocaust "eyewitnesses." Their testimony shows forth almost exclusively in his book, yet it is based upon an almost total absence of forensic and documentary evidence for the putative grand destruction of the Jews. Hilberg's "standard" work on the holocaust, can not, unfortuately, produce for the reader a sliver of corroborative evidence, such as "gas chambers," "gas vans," "electrocution" devices, "fire pits, incriminating documents" etc. The remains of these, one must think, would exist in abundance, if the wholesale destruction of the Jews was indeed carried out, as Hilberg alleges. There is not among the tens of thousands of Nazi documents, preserved after the war, a single written order from Hitler to carry out the "Final Solution." There are no illustrated diagrams of "gas chamber" facilities, (much less the remains of existing facilities), no written orders for the construction of such killing centers, or any other mass extermination device. The millions of tons of ashes of victims one would expect to have been discovered and dug up by this time are non-existant. There is nothing, nothing! Thus, Hilberg's 'giant,' though it may initially convince, overawe, even terrify, the reader, is found in the end to be a monstous illusion. It is toppled quite easily and quite irrevocably under the pen of Mr. Graf. And the latter manages to accomplish this feat in a little book of only 128 pages.

Raul Hilbergs monumental work "The Destruction of the European Jews" is generally considered the "definitive" version of events pertaining to the putative Jewish Holocaust. Yet it takes Jurgen Graf only 128 pages to show with blinding clarity that Hilberg's "definitive" work should truly be considered one of the great works of fiction of the 20th Century. In order to prove this extraordinary crime, the murder of the population of a city with a population nearly twice that of Berlin, one would expect an extraordinary investigation. As his contribution to that extraordinary effort Raul Hilberg relies almost exclusively on the one form of evidence which is generally considered in courts of law as the weakest and which, without any corroborating documentary or physical evidence, is considered worthless: eyewitness testimony. In many cases the witnesses and participants are unnamed. Often these eyewitnesses fatally contradict each other. And Raul Hilberg uncritically swallows, as Graf puts it, toad after toad; some of the more nasty-tasting are pointed out by Graf who subsequently, using actual documentary evidence in the form of letters and orders issued by Himmler and other top Nazis, shows that the concentration camps were crucial to the German war effort and that the Nazi high command went to great lengths to improve the living conditions of prisoners. No-one is suggesting, or has ever suggested, that no Jews were badly treated during World War 2. However, there is a whole world of difference between forced labour and ghetto-isation, and deliberate extermination; there is lots and lots of evidence of the former, and almost zero for the latter. This despite the fact that large amounts of records fell intact into Soviet hands as they over-ran eastern Europe in 1945.

Those who support the extermination thesis of the Holocaust are often embarrassed at the total lack of documentary evidence for any orders, budget or organisation for the Nazi "death industry" and have resorted to a hedge whereby they basically read into any document exactly what they wish it to say, thus entirely innocuous conversations are twisted around to say things they clearly did not say at all. And whilst there is a total lack of documentation supporting the extermination thesis there IS authentic documentation aplenty which demonstrate clearly the truth, that is, the concentration camps suffered large numbers of casualties, in total probably around 350,000, mostly due to epidemics such as Typhus; a large number of these, maybe as many as 1/3, died in the last 4 months of the war as the German infrastructure crumbled and the Allies gallantly guarded the prisons whilst the starving, diseased prisoners died like flies. On 26th October 1943, at a time when Hilberg tells us 4.3 million Jews had already been exterminated and the extermination of 800,000 more was yet to come, Oswald Pohl sent a general notice to the commanders of 19 concentration camps as the culmination of a long discussion among high-ranking Nazis, fully documented by Graf, in which he stated:

"In the framework of German armaments production, thanks to the improvement efforts that have been undertaken in the past 2 years, the concentration camps have become of decisive importance in the war. From nothing we have built armaments works that are second to none. We now have to redouble our efforts to make sure that the production levels so far achieved are not only maintained, but further improved. That will be possible, as long as the works and factories remain intact, only by maintaining and even improving the labour capacity of the prisoners. In earlier years, given the re-educational policy of the time, it did not matter much whether or not a prisoner could perform useful work. Now, however, the labour capacity of the prisoners is important, and all measures of the commanders, director of the liaison service and medical doctors should be extended to maintaining the health and efficiency of the prisoners. Not from phony sympathy, but because we need them with their arms and their legs, because they must contribute to a great victory for the German people, we must take the well-being of the prisoners to heart. I want this to be the primary goal: no more than 10% of all prisoners should be unable to work due to sickness. All responsible persons should work together to achieve this goal. This will require:
1) proper and fitting nourishment,
2) proper and fitting clothing,
3) utilization of all natural health measures
4) avoidance of all effort not necessary for the performance of work,
5) performance bonuses."

In the absence of any surviving documentary evidence of the quality of the above to support one of the central questions of the Holocaust debate, especially when that question is conclusively answered by the above letter, what does Hilberg resort to? In 1983 he had the effrontery to write: "[...] what began in 1941 was a process of destruction not planned in advance, not organized centrally by any agency. There was no blueprint and there was no budget for destructive measures. They were taken step by step, one step at a time. Thus came not so much a plan being carried out, but an incredible meeting of minds, a consensus-mind reading by a far-flung bureaucracy."

It has been pointed out that the last thing one could ever expect from a bureaucracy was a meeting of minds and telepathy. Difficilis est satiram non scribere -- it is difficult not to write satire. It would be difficult to find any clearer display anywhere than these few sentences of the total bankruptcy of the orthodox historiography of the "Holocaust", together with their figurehead, the Holocaust Pope, the Giant with feet of clay, Raul Hilberg.

I was curious as to why jews go crazy over holocaust "deniers", I was always told that everyone has a right to voice their opinion. It seems that to the jews and left only certain people are allowed to voice theirs. I was curious to see what all the anger was about these books so I bought this one and the book "Dissecting the holocaust". Both read as a study of a crime but from the defense side. The argument that the German witnesses were tortured to get them to admit to gassings and murder struck a cord as my grandfather was with the army unit that interogated many German soldiers and I remember him telling stories about the way they beat "confessions" from them in Scwabishe Hall. How they told them to sign papers or be shot (they actually would do mock executions). So it comes together as a great hoax that only the devil could dream up. On the outside the holocaust story looks like a solid brick wall that can never be torn down, but when you see the wall up close and examine it it's paper thin and full of holes. It's too bad those that oppose this message resort to name calling and out right hatred. It made one person want to search further.

Raul Hilberg's reputation as the leading scholar of the Holocaust will not likley suffer as a result of this book because it is censored out of the mainstream distribution networks and libraries but it should be read by anyone with a serious interest in the subject. I sets forth disturbing arguments about Hilberg's failures to do acceptable research to back up his claims about the destruction of the European Jews by the Nazis. The subject is untouchable in our culture (see some of the comments in other reviews) but revisionists like Graf deserve to be heard on the merits of the arguments, not dismissed with quips and ad hominem slurs.

Plus the stupid phallics symobl that dopey
Germar Rudolf drew on the front cover is
annoying! Rudolf also is a poor artist.
Jurgen, a swiss gentleman has done pretty
good work here but this book is a typical
Thesis and Dissertations Press rush job.
There are so many typos and wrong dates
in here I would almost swear Rudolf, a pal-
igamist (two wives in two countries, he
currently resides in a german jail...)
sabatoged it on purpose. For example,
Graf/Rudolf claims that NBC t.v. put on
a movie in 1980 called 'holacau$t'. Act-
ually it was a MiniSeries, April 1978,
which was rebroadcast in Sept. 1979
called Holocaust, and it was garbage!
This book is good for 13-18 year olds
unaware of the 'holacau$t' lie, much
yet. But for adults, I recommend Rich
Salzer's New World Order expose, and
two books by Art Butz, including The
Hoax of the Twentieth Century.

What in the name of god's good green earth is a "holocaust skeptic"? How is it that Raul Hilberg has "clay feet"? Because he writes about how eleven million people were exterminated in the death camps? Apparently this idiot ie Jurgen Graf believes that there was massive deportation--but no extermination. Maybe Treblinka, Sobibor and Blezec were what? Vacation lagers?

I don't care how "charming" your writing style is--If you think the death camps did not kill people with gas, you are not thinking...Lanzmann's Shoah features interviews with surviving guards from Treblinka, explaining how the gas chambers used an old tank engine to fill the rooms with carbon monoxide. Steiner's "Treblinka" describes how the death camps evolved, why the einsatzgruppen death squads did not work--a more impersonal, quicker means of execution was necessary. In "Architects of Annihilation," Aly and Heim describe how Goering after the "Night of Broken Glass" created an alternative, less disruptive means of removing Jews from German economic life--and then reducing the burden on social services by moving the Jews to "work camps." As these camps became too large, carbon monoxide gas was used, and then the more efficient zyclon-b gas.

This moron (again I mean Graf) is skeptical of eye-witness testimony. Really...How about "eye witnesses" like Rudolf Hoss, kommandant of Auschwitz? His autobiography ("Death Dealer") describes the running of the camps. Or how about Franz Stangl, head of Treblinka? In Sereny's book "Into the Darkness," is based on extensive interviews with him. How about Filip Muller in Eyewitness Auschwitz? He spent three years in the sonderkommandos. Muller describes how eastern europeans came to Auschwitz in such large numbers, the ovens could not burn the bodies fast enough. The SS had the prisoners dig large pits to burn the bodies, with brick "run off" gutters in the bottom. The gutters drained the melted fat from the bodies into cauldrens, where it was poured back on top of the burning bodies--to encourage the flames and save on fuel oil.

Primo Levi, Tadeusz Borowski ("This way for the Gas, Ladies and Gentlemen"), Sara Nomberg-Przuytyk ("Auschwitz: True Tales from a Grotesque Land"), Simon Wiesenthal, Richard Glazar ("Trap with a Green Fence")---You cannot dispute their stories. Even if you don't care for them, what about Adolf Eichmann? See "Eichmann Interrogated," where he denies complicity with deaths--but does keeps the trains running, moving masses of humanity.

I know I am wasting my time. Anyone who is interested in books denying the Shoah is not interested in anything I have to say. But I cannot let this pipsqueak call Hilberg "superficial" and have "clay feet" without saying anything--and I couldn't care less that Graf is very charming and I am not.