Bishop Richard Williamson: ‘I will review the evidence’

While apparently unwilling to resolve the situation in the manner the Vatican would like, Holocaust-denying Bishop Richard Williamson has told Germany’s Der Spiegel that he would correct himself if satisfied by the evidence, but stated that finding it will “take time”.

No surprise then, that a senior figure of the Catholic church in Germany has labelled that “almost ridiculous”. Exactly how Bishop Williamson finds himself in a position to adjudicate to historians whether the crimes committed by the Third Reich happened or not is certainly beyond me.

At any rate, he hasn’t yet updated us as to how his self-assigned history homework is going, but as both complement and compliment to the resources Deborah Lipstadt has provided, I will touch upon some of the items she mentions and draw attention to some that she doesn’t in this commentary. This is of course, not presented in a debatative context (because there is no debate), but to expose the Bishop’s error regarding the comments he made in the interview given to Swedish television, the video of which is available here in this previous Counterknowledge.com post.

Williamson bases his belief on the Leuchter report, a document commissioned by and in the defence of Ernst Zündel at his second trial. The science behind it (or lack thereof) has been completely dismantled by Richard J. Green and Jamie McCarthy of The Holocaust History Project. Nonetheless, a dead horse is still a horse, and deniers are seemingly still willing to flog it regardless of how long ago it died.

On the aftermath of a gassing, Williamson states:

…if they’re wearing any clothes, it’s very dangerous to go in and pull out the corpses. because one whiff of gas that’s trapped in the clothing, any space of the clothing, will kill.

Not applicable - victims undressed before they were gassed. The two crematoria either side of the railway line at Auschwitz-Birkenau (numbers II and III) both had large underground undressing rooms - each of which was lined with benches and hooks like these to maintain the ruse that these were benign sanitation installations.

Goods stolen from victims were shipped to Germany, and it’s fair to say that these undressing cellars can be related to the 836,525 women’s and 348,820 men’s outfits found by the Soviet Army when they liberated the camp.

The Bishop continues:

Once you have gassed people you got to evacuate the gas to be able to get into the chamber again and use it. To evacuate the gas you need a high chimney. If it is a low chimney the gas goes to the pavement and kills anybody walking by. You need a high chimney, I forget how high he (Leuchter) says it must be. If there was a high chimney then the shadow most of the day would have fallen on the ground and the allied aerial photographers that flew over the camp would have picked the shadows of these chimneys. There were never any such shadows, there was no such chimney.

Irrelevant rumination. Crematoria II and III (and V as of May 1944) were equipped with ventilation systems for this purpose that expelled the gas chamber’s soiled air out of a vent in the roof of the main building. The collective chimney for this vent and others is visible in this photo of Crematorium III, as is explained here. Gas masks were also available where ventilation wasn’t used and/or as a precautionary measure upon reentrance.

Some of the items that the ruins of the gas chambers yield give an eerie reference to the points above. It would be fascinating to hear Bishop Williamson explain why the SS considered it necessary to install showerheads in a room completely devoid of the necessary plumbing, and why permanent contemporaneous records made by those in closest proximity to the extermination process were unearthed in the grounds around the crematoria after the war: the writings of the Sonderkommando (prisoners forced to empty gas chambers and load ovens), some of whose members clandestinely wrote down their experiences and buried the papers, contained in jars and flasks.

The Bishop on Leuchter’s door analysis:

He (Leuchter) looks at the doors. The doors have to be absolutely airtight. Otherwise again, the gas escapes and kills the people outside. The doors of the gas chambers that they show to the tourists at Auschwitz are absolutely not airtight, absolutely not.

A little history lesson: the morgue of Crematorium I was used as a gas chamber until the Autumn of 1942, according to page 160 of Anatomy of the Auschwitz Death Camp, and according to the previous page, the facility ceased to be used for cremation in 1943 when the new crematoria at Birkenau came into operation in the Spring of that year. In 1944, the SS converted the building into an air-raid shelter.

Note the layout of the building as of 1941, how it was converted in 1944, and a 1985 drawing of how it stands today. Another point of entry/exit to the building was added to the newly installed air lock (Schleuse) in 1944, and when the museum authorities restored the building after the war in accordance with its homicidal usage, they did not restore the wall between the gas chamber and the washroom.

What do these two points mean? It’s quite simple: the doors that Leuchter saw in 1988 and tourists see today were never part of the room that was the gas chamber, and thus it is fallacious to maintain that they should have been gas-tight. (See this page again for a door most probably used as part of a homicidal gas chamber - note the hemispherical grid on the inside to stop the peephole from being tampered with.)

So, after having lost his position as head of an Argentine seminary, Bishop Williamson will have plenty of time to read Auschwitz: Technique and Operation of the Gas Chambers, the 500 page study of said installations by Jean-Claude Pressac that he says he has ordered. One inevitably asks one’s self how much has Williamson’s desire to calm the storm contributed to him proposing a possible recantation, but this is nevertheless an intriguing crossroad: the evidence is there and it will be interesting to see if he acknowledges it.

Or perhaps more pertinently, whether he chooses to.