Recently while doing some research into the myth that the Germans used the bodies of jews as material for soap manufacture among others thing – including grease/industrial lubricant – I came across an attempted intellectual handwaving exercise by the ‘Holocaust’ historian Joachim Neander – not to be confused with the seventeenth century German Protestant theologian of the same name – regarding the issue of what I’d call ‘Holocaust Nonsense’ and whether it alone debunks the ‘Holocaust’.
Neander writes that:
‘On the Web site of the “Institute for Historical Research,” Mark Weber, a leading “Revisionist,” gets to the point:
Easily demonstrable falsehoods like the soap story [...] raise doubts about the entire Holocaust legend [...] and [...] the credibility of the [Nuremberg] Tribunal and other supposedly trustworthy authorities in establishing other, more fundamental aspects of the Holocaust story.
The illogic of this reasoning is obvious: a well-documented historical event such as the Holocaust cannot be discredited by disproving a marginal topic like the alleged manufacture of soap from the victims’ bodies.’ (1)
The problem with Neander’s argument here is that he is (deliberately?) mischaracterizing Weber’s argument on this point here in that what Weber is pointing out is that if you have a historical theory – in this case the ‘Holocaust’ – whose main justification and source of evidence is a trial where claims such as ‘human soap production’ were not only taken seriously but claimed to be proven as true.
Therefore it throws doubt on the rest of the claims made from the text of that trial – aka the ‘Holocaust’ because nearly all contemporary ‘evidence’ for the ‘Holocaust’ dates back to the Nuremberg Trials – in that they require sceptical revalidation because they were first produced and ‘validated’ in a series of trials that also produced and ‘validated’ known falsehoods that Neander also rightly admits were such.
This then means that unless you can validate the truth of the documentation claimed to have been found by the Western Allies and the Soviet Union and produced as ‘evidence’ for the ‘Holocaust’ at Nuremberg – and it isn’t just the human soap issue we have numerous instances of known absolute nonsense being claimed and ‘validated’ as true at Nuremberg – (2) then any ‘evidence’ or claims produced and ‘validated’ at Nuremberg cannot be taken as ipso facto true unless they have been independently re-validated and/or have additional accepted evidence for their truth.
As Neander was – and is – no doubt very well aware this rules out most of what ‘evidence’ there is for the ‘Holocaust’ and what shouldn’t be an issue – historians review and re-validate evidence all the time and which process is normally referred to quite correctly as ‘revisionism’ – is made a very great inconvenience by Neander – and he is not alone in this hand-waving as Deborah Lipstadt and Richard Evans for example have both engaged in the same silly exercise – when in fact it is just the normal scholarly process in history.
The reason Neander and co are not keen on having to do this is because they are at least somewhat aware that in reviewing all the ‘validated evidence’ from the Nuremberg Trial will not only be embarrassing but also result in the fact that most of the key ‘evidence’ for the ‘Holocaust’ itself – as well as other key documents for the traditional ‘Hitler was the aggressor’ narrative such as the Hossbach Memorandum from November 1937 – will be found to be unverified and need re-validation which would in turn quite possibly end up with their being declared frauds or at least unreliable that in turn would mean Hitler and the Third Reich were not guilty of much of what has alleged about them.
A good example of how this works is found in your standard European witch trial because while we are quite prepared to believe that some of the men and women being tried for witchcraft may have sincerely believed they were witches; it doesn’t follow that they actually did anything alleged about them because we know it either didn’t actually happen or it simply completely unproven.
Take the Pendle Witch Trial of 1612 in England for example which was triggered by the meeting of the later accused witch Alizon Device and the pedlar John Law near Pendle Hill in Lancashire on 21st March 1612; where Device asked to buy some pins from Law and Law refused – for what exact reason we don’t know – leading to Device loudly cursing him as he walked away only for Law to stumble and fall having had a possible stroke resulting in Device sincerely believing her ‘magic’ had hurt Law and Law’s later allegations against Device which led to the Pendle Witch Trial and the execution of 11 of the 10 accused (the other accused having died in prison).
Now if we follow Neander’s logic; we should believe the Pendle Witch Trial narrative because while it is implausible by any stretch it is ‘well-documented to be true’ therefore it is true and the fact that Device later claimed to have met the devil himself in person fairly regularly in relation to Law’s likely stroke shouldn’t be held as evidence that Device didn’t attempt to murder Law with her (non-existent) magic.
That is the problem with ‘Holocaust’ historians: they are desperate to avoid both looking at their own evidence and the necessary logical results of their own arguments to not review and re-validate that same evidence and thus have to revise their own historical conclusions!
References
(1) Joachim Neander, 2006, ‘The Danzig Soap Case: Facts and Legends around “Professor Spanner” and the Danzig Anatomic Institute 1944-1945’, German Studies Review, Vol. 29, No. 1, p. 64
(2) On this see for example see Carlos Porter’s ‘Not Guilty at Nuremberg: The German Defence Case’ and ‘Made in Russia: The Holocaust’.