The Giant With Feet of Clay : Raul Hilberg and his Standard Work on the Holocaust (Holocaust Handbooks)
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. --Albert DoyleRaul 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. --SmokeNMirrorsThe 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 Customer