MICHAEL HOFFMAN reports on the case of Ursula Haverbeck, an 87-year-old German woman who has been sentenced to ten months in prison for stating that inmates of Aushcwitz were not killed in gas chambers. Haverbeck was fined thousands of dollars in 2009 for offending Charlotte Knobloch, president of the Central Council of Jews.

Tens of thousands of Jews and others unquestionably suffered and died at Auschwitz. But Haverbeck maintains, as do other “revisionists,” that Auschwitz was a labor camp where most died from uncontrolled disease, rather than deliberate extermination in gas chambers. Zyklon B, the famous gas, was used to delouse the clothes of camp inmates to prevent typhus, which killed many thousands. Haverbeck’s opinions are consistent with the evidence. Even the famous “Nazi Hunter” Simon Wiesenthal stated that “there were no extermination camps on German soil.”

European courts do not punish people for challenging any other historical event. According to The Daily Mail:

During her defence she said that the Holocaust of six million Jews ‘was the greatest and longest lived lie in history.’

Judge Björn Jönsson struggled to maintain his temper with the elderly Nazi after she said she shouldn’t be punished for the crime again as she had already been fined twice and given a suspended sentence for previous Holocaust denials.

He said: ‘I do not have to prove the Holocaust to you, same as I do not have to prove that the earth is round.

‘It is futile to discuss facts with people like you. A thief who steals the same thing again and again is punished again and again.’

The prosecutor in the case stormed: ‘It is regrettable that a woman who is still so vivid in her old age wastes her energy trying to spread such a hair-raising bullshit.’

— Comment —

Bill R. writes:

Interesting, but under the circumstances (i.e., lacking anything Western jurisprudence would normally recognize as acceptable evidence) entirely predictable and understandable, that the judge, while self-righteously announcing that the Holocaust did not require proof anymore than did the assertion that the world is round, provides no reason why this is or should be so, nor, even if it was so, why that suddenly becomes a just rationale for imprisoning someone for denying the Holocaust but not for denying the world is round.  Furthermore, the assertion that the world is round most emphatically does require proof.  The difference, of course, is that there has, for centuries, existed an overwhelming abundance of evidence that the world is round; aside from a few “confessions” extracted through torture, and which included demonstrably impossible assertions, there is absolutely none for homicidal gas chambers or any of the rest of the popularly accepted, non-revisionist version of the Holocaust.

The article also points out that in Auschwitz “at least 1.1 million” Jews were murdered.  I wonder how many of your readers are aware that prior to 1990 (i.e., when the camp, along now with every other so-called “extermination camp,” remained conveniently hidden from prying Western eyes behind the Iron Curtain) a plaque stated that “four million” died there, but was changed in that year to read 1.5 million, “a majority of them Jews.”  Curiously, however, the famous figure of “Six Million” has never budged at all.  Furthermore, given that the Holocaust is considered so utterly obvious and incontrovertible a fact as to put it on a par with the fact of the world’s roundness, one wonders why those responsible for changing that plaque have not been arrested and imprisoned for Holocaust denial.  Using the judge’s round world analogy, wouldn’t that be tantamount to claiming half the world was flat?  (Of course, in the case of the Holocaust, it is really more like claiming that, although we now know that at least half the world is flat, it somehow still magically remains as completely round as it was thought to be before.  And that, we are to understand, is the kind of “reasoning” that makes the “Six Million” Holocaust as obvious and undeniable as the roundness of the world.)

The idea, let alone the fact, of imprisoning people merely for expressing an opinion about an historical claim, regardless of the ultimate truth of the matter, cannot but increasingly offend the sensibilities and sense of justice of decent people.  What an ugly stain on all those who stand by the accepted story of the Holocaust!  Do they really want the memory of those who, they are sincerely convinced, so unjustly perished, preserved not only by yet more injustice, but indeed by the very same kind of injustice they claim was practiced by the regime they hold responsible for those murders?  Nazi Germany’s ceremonious burning of books is decried as an expression of ugly hatred, and we are reminded of it as an example of what hateful and oppressive regimes do with opinion they do not like.  For example, in the well-known World War II documentary series narrated by Laurence Olivier called The World at War, we are reminded, in that great actor’s most solemn tone, of the words of warning from the 19th century German Jewish poet Heinrich Heine, that “Where they burn books, they will also burn people.”

And what, I wonder, will they eventually do who not only imprison those who write them, but even those who merely voice agreement with them?

Joe A. writes:

Frau Haverbeck was punished for the reasons O’Brien was punished in Nineteen Eighty Four: it is not enough to comply with Big Brother’s commands.  One must love Big Brother, truly.

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