Response

The little blog has been my way of putting some of father's story down, admittedly as a way for me to work through my own angst over his death and our complete lack of relationship.

And, the responses have run in the hundreds of emails to me!  The majority are from historical revisionists claiming that the Holocaust never occurred.  The one I would like to have gotten would have been from Martha, outside of Hamburg, my unknown half sister.  Yes, I hope in vain to at least ease lack of memory should she have thought others knew her father and perhaps connect her with father's family in Switzerland.

I find the entire historical revisionist movement disturbing.  First, there is some truth to what they claim.  Yes, 6.5 million Jews did die, however the evidence of their systematic execution is weak.  Much of the photograph material we have of executions were actually Ukrainian peasants - whom had the Germans treated decently would have joined forced against the Russians!  Rather shortsighted there Hitler.  Much of the evidence concerning the Holocaust comes from the Russians and it has been scientifically proven they manufactured evidences for the Nuremberg Trials.  Building were modified at Auschwitz to fit their story line, again proven.  However, there is the question of the 55,000 Hungarian Jews, whose end were documented ad nauseum by the Germans: from their capture through to their execution in Poland a week later.  Every step, every detail, all photographed step by step.

So, a revisionist may argue against all systematic arguments against the Holocaust, but you are stuck with the 55,000 Hungarians.  And if you want to argue that it was an anomaly, fine, but it is still genocide.  You lose.

Okay, so the next series - when I have time - I will be posting is the Holocaust from Germany's own documentation made at the time by the Nazi's.  None of this is from Russian sources, it is all Western German captured paperwork.  Then I will publish the Hungarian photos.

I have also deleted this blog at least four times, this is a memory I do not cherish.  However, again response has been overwhelming to have it restored each time, over 900 this last time!  So what you have read to this point is restoration 4!  For some reason there is a strong interest in stories of the war, from a first person perspective.  Admittedly, I find enjoyment that my father was at the Dresden Firebombing and lived to tell the tale of the US fighters strafing the fleeing civilians.  Why?  Because that story was told at the time and no one believed it then, the pilots all denied it.  And yet, even the Russians filed the same complaint - whose forward observers had been strafed as well!  So, the Russians testified to this, the Germans testified to this, my own father could back it up with the damage down to the family estate outside of Dresden where he had run across a balcony and the terracotta shot up by the fighters as they wheeled around to fly across Dresden again.  And western history says this did not happen.  So whom are you going to believe?  Witnesses?  Victims? Or the pilots whom would have faced charges were it found to be true at the time?  And that is what makes eyewitness accounts so inconvenient - it contradicts the testimony of the victors.

Like the Holocaust, the further we move from that time period, the harder some facts become to be believed, while others completely become reasonable.