TBR News December 10, 2019

The Voice of the White House
Washington, D.C. December 10, 2019:“Working in the White House as a junior staffer is an interesting experience.
When I was younger, I worked as a summer-time job in a clinic for people who had moderate to severe mental problems and the current work closely, at times, echos the earlier one.
I am not an intimate of the President but I have encountered him from time to time and I daily see manifestations of his growing psychological problems.
He insults people, uses foul language, is frantic to see his name mentioned on main-line television and pays absolutely no attention to any advice from his staff that runs counter to his strange ideas.
He lies like a rug to everyone, eats like a hog, makes lewd remarks to female staffers and flies into rages if anyone dares to contradict him.
It is becoming more and more evident to even the least intelligent American voter that Trump is vicious, corrupt and amoral. He has stated often that even if he loses the election in 2020, he will not leave the White House. I have news for Donald but this is not the place to discuss it.
Commentary for December 10: ” It appears that Shiite Iran, being harassed by Sunni Saudi Arabia and the Trump creatures, has been shipping Russian-made missiles to southern Iraq where they are well within the range of the Gulf’s oil refining facilities. The serious side of the Beltway is quietly concerned lest Fat Donald gets a wild hair up his ass and starts in tormenting the Iranians again. The refineries will be flattened and the price of gas in the US will be so high that no one will drive a car any more.”

The Table of Contents
• U.S. Democrats unveil impeachment charges against Trump
• U.S. Sanctions Are Driving Iran to Tighten Its Grip on Iraq
• The Numbers Game: An Analysis of Demographics in Holocaust Literature
• The Season of Evil

U.S. Democrats unveil impeachment charges against Trump
December 10, 2019
by Richard Cowan and Susan Cornwell
Reuters
WASHINGTON (Reuters) – Democrats in the House of Representatives announced formal charges against President Donald Trump on Tuesday that accuse him of abusing power and obstructing Congress, making him only the fourth U.S. president in history to face impeachment.
The full Democratic-controlled House is expected to vote on the charges, or articles of impeachment, next week. It is almost certain to vote to impeach the Republican president, setting the stage for a dramatic trial in the Republican-controlled Senate, likely to begin in January.
House Judiciary Committee Chairman Jerrold Nadler told reporters that Democrats had to take action because Trump had endangered the U.S. Constitution, undermined the integrity of the 2020 election and jeopardized national security.
“No one, not even the president, is above the law,” Nadler said at a news conference that included House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and Democratic leaders of committees involved in the impeachment probe.
“Our elections are a cornerstone of democracy … the integrity of our next election is at risk from a president who has already sought foreign interference in the 2016 and 2020 elections,” Nadler said.
Trump has denied wrongdoing and calls the inquiry a hoax. The White House has refused to participate in the hearings in the House because it says the process is unfair.
Trump attacked the impeachment effort in a Twitter post early on Tuesday, saying to impeach a president when the country has such a strong economy “and most importantly, who has done NOTHING wrong, is sheer Political Madness!”
Democrats have moved rapidly in their impeachment inquiry since launching an investigation on Sept. 24 into allegations that Trump pressured Ukraine to investigate a Democratic political rival, former Vice President Joe Biden, in the 2020 elections.
They accuse Trump of abusing power by withholding aid to Ukraine, a vulnerable U.S. ally facing Russian aggression, as well as dangling a possible White House meeting to get Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy to launch the investigation.
Republicans say Democrats are seeking to overturn the results of the 2016 election with a “witch hunt” against Trump, who denies he did anything wrong.
“Americans don’t agree with this rank partisanship, but Democrats are putting on this political theater because they don’t have a viable candidate for 2020 and they know it,” Brad Parscale, Trump’s 2020 re-election campaign manager, said in a statement.
WHISTLEBLOWER COMPLAINT
Trump is unlikely to be convicted in the Senate, given it is controlled by his party, but his impeachment may yet have an impact on the campaign trail as Democrats seek to retake control of the White House.
The House Judiciary panel could vote this week on whether to send the formal charges to the full House.
Pelosi launched the impeachment probe after a whistleblower reported concerns over a July 25 telephone call in which Trump sought help from Zelenskiy to investigate Biden, a leading contender in the Democratic race to challenge Trump in next November’s election.
That led to weeks of investigation and hearings in the House. Committee leaders met with Pelosi following the last scheduled impeachment hearing on Monday evening.
Democrats say their investigation shows Trump withheld $391 million in military aid and the White House meeting to get Zelenskiy to investigate Biden and his son Hunter Biden, as well as a debunked theory that Ukraine, not Russia, interfered in the 2016 U.S. election.
Republicans argue Trump did nothing improper in his call with Zelenskiy and say there is no direct evidence he withheld aid or a White House meeting in exchange for a favor.
The Judiciary Committee would need to give 24 hours’ notice before meeting to vote on whether to forward the articles to the full House for a final impeachment vote by the chamber.
Reporting by Susan Cornwell, Richard Cowan, David Morgan and Susan Heavey; Writing by Doina Chiacu and Paul Simao; Editing by Ross Colvin and Jonathan Oatis

U.S. Sanctions Are Driving Iran to Tighten Its Grip on Iraq
by James Risen
December 10, 2019
The Intercept
Massive, sustained protests in Baghdad and Tehran that have been met with violent responses from security forces throughout the fall and winter have rapidly altered the political dynamics in both Iraq and Iran. But it is still uncertain whether the grassroots anger that has erupted will lead to significant change in either country — or whether the United States will play a role in shaping the outcome.
In Iraq, the political establishment has been shaken since protests in Baghdad and other cities began in October, when Iraqis took to the streets in anger over systemic corruption, a lack of basic services, and Iranian domination of Iraq’s government. Iraqi security forces have violently cracked down on protestors. In late November, demonstrators brought down the Iranian flag and put up an Iraqi national flag on Iran’s consulate in Najaf before setting the building on fire.
Iraq’s leaders initially balked at the protesters demands for reform. But as the demonstrations continued, Prime Minister Adil Abdul-Mahdi finally submitted his resignation on Nov. 30.
Abdul-Mahdi had wavered and nearly quit a month earlier, but in late October, Iranian Major General Qassem Suleimani, the powerful head of the elite Quds Force, an arm of Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps that operates with impunity throughout Iraq, intervened to bolster Abdul-Mahdi and keep him in power.
Suleimani’s intervention came just before The Intercept and the New York Times reported on leaked Iranian intelligence cables that publicly documented Iran’s perspective on its deep influence in Iraq for the first time. The leaked cables, sent by Iran’s Ministry of Intelligence and Security between 2013 to 2015, revealed that many of Iraq’s top political, military, and security officials have had close relationships with Tehran for years. One leaked cable from 2014 identified Abdul-Mahdi, then serving as Iraq’s oil minister, as having a “special relationship with IRI” — the Islamic Republic of Iran.
By the end of November, the pressure on Abdul-Mahdi was so intense that Iran could not protect him any longer. Iraq’s parliament quickly accepted his resignation without any clear successor in sight.
Washington was happy to see Abdul-Mahdi go. After initially viewing him as an acceptable compromise candidate when he was named prime minister in 2018, senior U.S. officials say they quickly realized he was unable to stand up to Iran.
“We have had to be extremely cautious about sharing [information and technology] with Iraq, because it could go to Iran,” said one senior U.S. official.
Abdul-Mahdi’s lack of interest in engaging with Donald Trump or his White House didn’t help. One senior U.S. official said that Abdul-Mahdi declined an invitation to meet with Trump when the president visited Iraq last Christmas, opting for a telephone conversation instead. Abdul-Mahdi also declined to meet with Vice President Mike Pence when he traveled to Iraq in November, the official added, again speaking to him by phone. By contrast, the senior official said, Abdul-Mahdi has traveled regularly to Tehran to meet with Iranian officials as prime minister.
But while the Trump administration’s influence has ebbed in Baghdad, Iran is now also facing serious problems at home that could interfere with its Iraq policy. Beginning in November after a big spike in gas prices, large-scale protests have erupted in Tehran and other Iranian cities. Protesters quickly moved beyond demands for economic relief to call for the ouster of the Iranian government.
The demonstrations have been met with murderous fire by Iranian security forces. Accurate figures aren’t available, but a State Department official said in a briefing last week that 1,000 or more protestors have been killed, while at least 7,000 have been arrested.
In Iraq, meanwhile, at least 350 people have been killed in the demonstrations so far, many of them protesters shot dead by security forces. The Iraqi government’s violent efforts to suppress the demonstrations appear to have been aided by pro-Iranian militia units, according to some reports. Last week, protestors were stabbed in Baghdad’s Tahrir Square, the hub of the anti-government demonstrations, after large groups of men arrived in the square flying the insignia of an Iranian-backed militia. Protesters were suspicious of the pro-Iranian group, but it couldn’t be conclusively determined whether those militia members were responsible for the stabbings.
Iran’s dominant position in Iraq and influence over the country’s political leadership may not be well understood by many Americans, but it is the direct result of the 2003 U.S. invasion of Iraq that toppled Saddam Hussein. The invasion was justified by the George W. Bush administration on the grounds of specious claims of ties between Saddam and Al Qaeda and the supposed existence of Iraqi weapons of mass destruction.
There was another historically false claim made by the neoconservative ideologues backing the Iraq invasion as well: that ousting Saddam would not benefit Iran. In fact, the neoconservatives argued that one of the benefits of the Iraq invasion would be to curb Iran’s influence in the Middle East. That turned out to be one of the greatest miscalculations in the history of American foreign policy. Rather, Iran was the great beneficiary of the U.S. invasion, which eliminated Iran’s greatest regional adversary by getting rid of Saddam and his Baathist, Sunni-dominated regime. That created the opportunity for Iraq’s Shia majority to gain power in Baghdad.
Suddenly, Iran, which had long been the only major Shia power in the region, had a Shia-dominated neighbor. What’s more, many of the Shia leaders who came to power in Iraq after the U.S. invasion had spent years of exile in Iran.
John Maguire, who was deputy chief of the CIA’s Iraq Operations Group at the time of the 2003 invasion, says that the Bush administration’s decision to disband the Iraqi Army, coupled with a draconian purge of Baath Party members from Iraqi government service, triggered chaos and eventually an insurgency that gave the Iranians an opportunity. “The ensuing anger, resentment and violence opened the door for Iran, led by General Suleimani and his Quds force, to exploit the situation and run circles around” the Americans, Maguire says.
Grappling with a bloody post-invasion insurgency and seeking a short-term fix to stabilize Iraq, the Bush administration brokered a new electoral system for Iraq that made sure that political representation was along sectarian lines. That guaranteed a permanent state of tension between Sunni and Shia; the persecution of the Sunni minority by the Shia-dominated government in Baghdad helped lead to the rise of ISIS in Iraq.
Meanwhile, the Trump administration’s efforts to squeeze Iran by imposing more economic sanctions have had an unintended consequence — the sanctions have led Iran to try to tighten its grip on Iraq. Kenneth Pollack, a former CIA analyst now at the American Enterprise Institute, believes that the Iranians have reacted so forcefully to the protests in Baghdad because Iraq is a valuable economic outlet that helps Iran skirt the sanctions. “Iraq’s economy is critical to Iran for things like currency manipulation and smuggling, dealing with the sanctions,” said Pollack.
Trump administration officials agree. “Iran has become increasingly dependent on Iraq and Lebanon as economic release valves,” one senior U.S. official said. But the administration seems to think that’s a good thing — a sign that sanctions are having an impact on Iran. The fact that U.S. sanctions policy has led Iran to intensify its efforts to maintain its influence in Baghdad doesn’t appear to have merited much discussion in Washington.

The Numbers Game: An Analysis of Demographics in Holocaust Literature

AUSCHWITZ: (Polish: Oswiecim)
Located approximately 60km (37mi) west of Krakow, in Eastern Upper Silesia, which was annexed to Germany following the defeat of Poland, in September, 1939
The first camp was built shortly after Poland’s defeat, in a suburb of Oswiecim (Zasole), at the site of a former Imperial Austrian Army Artillery barracks complex and initially held about 10,000 prisoners, mostly Polish prisoners of war.
The second site, known as Auschwitz II, or Birkenau, was built 3km from the original camp, in March of 1941
All of the satellite camps, such as Auschwitz II, were under the control of the main Auschwitz camp commander’s headquarters. The Auschwitz monthly camp statistics that were sent to KL Headquarters outside Berlin reflected all of the auxiliary camps as well as the main camp.
In the years intervening since the end of the Second World War, there has built up a legend about the planned murder by the Germans of European Jewry. A program of euthanasia, it is said, was later developed into a wide-spread program of mass gassings of Jews in several of the German prisons called Concentration Camps.
The motivator behind these mass killings was, the legend states, Adolf Hitler whose personal hatred of Jews drove him to order his dread Gestapo and SS to round up and kill every Jew they could lay their hands on.
Initially, the camp at Dachau, outside of Munich, was stated to be the center of the murder machine but as it became evident that this camp did not gas large numbers of Jews, or anyone else, the center was arbitrarily moved to the east, to the town of Auschwitz located on several rivers in Upper Silesia.
Here, it is said, a vast death camp was built to house tens of thousands of Jews awaiting their turn in the enormous gas chambers, and a second camp, Auschwitz II or Birkenau was also built for the sole purpose of slaughtering the Jews who made up almost the entire population of this murder central.
Jewish victims, it has been written, poured into Auschwitz from all over conquered Europe. They arrived, jammed into cattle cars, were dragged out of their transport, lined up and immediately forced into the huge gas chambers. Later, after they were dead, their stiffened corpses were dragged out by other camp inmates and shoved into equally gigantic crematoria and burned to ashes.
In recent years, bits and pieces of evidence that would tend to bring some of this into question has resulted in a further shift to the east. Supporters of the mass murder theories now postulate that the SS Einsatzgruppen or Combat Units, composed of Sicherheitsdienst (SD) and German police units, who were operating behind the German front lines in Russia, were the true murders of millions of Jews. In the savage anti-Partisan wars, the Einsatzgruppen were stated to have slaughtered millions of Russian, and some Polish, Jews.
Opposing an enormous body of literature and media productions, a number of dissatisfied historians began to question the validity of the allegations of an immense German murder plot aimed primarily at Jews but also expanded to include Gypsies. Any attempts to bring these allegations into question were met immediately by loud outcries from their proponents and needless to say, no major publishing house anywhere in the world would dare to publish even the most moderate and meticulously researched revisionistic work.
The enormous death toll, it is firmly said by proponents of the murder machine theory, is immutable; these figures are well and permanently established in history and questioning them is the work of anti-Semites, neo-Nazis and professional, unbalanced hate-mongers.
It is the actual figures, however, upon which the legend of the Holocaust stands or falls. Are there such figures? Are they reliable? Surely in the enormous official German records, captured by both the Soviets and Americans, there have to be specific confirmations of the awful death tolls.
In fact such records do exist; some in Moscow and some in Washington, DC, but these original documents are generally not available to what Holocaust supporters state are prevaricators, liars and anti-Semites. They can be found today in official state archives, some difficult to find because they have been misfiled and others because pressure groups who fear their publication have pressured the archives to keep them hidden.
In this study, we have explored these forbidden or obscured documents, collated them and are presenting the results in an effort to achieve some balance for a subject that heretofore has been the private playground of individuals and organizations who have a vested financial and political motive in preventing any erosion of what they see is their own territory.
As huge sums of money have resulted from the maintenance and careful nurturing of what has proven to be an extraordinarily successful cash cow, the desperation of its creators can easily be understood.
Truth, however, is mighty and shall prevail.
“How many people died at Auschwitz?
“…Foner’s Spotlight article made assertions regarding the number of people killed at the Auschwitz camp:
Most Americans have been instructed in the “irrefutable fact” that homicidal gassings had taken place at Auschwitz. The number of those so executed – also declared irrefutable – was 4.1 million.
Then came the Leuchter Report in 1988. This was followed by a “re-evaluation” of the total deaths at Auschwitz (down to 1.1 million).
Previous to 1992, anyone who publicly doubted the 4.1 million “gassing” deaths at Auschwitz was labeled an anti-Semite, neo-nazi skinhead (at the very least). Quietly, because of revisionist findings, the official figure was lowered to 1.1 million. No mention of that missing 3 million.
Foner’s assertions are simply not true; although it is correct to note that the Polish Communist government did claim that four million people were exterminated at Auschwitz, historians (Feig, Reitlinger, Hilberg, et al.) have never supported that figure. Consider the estimates provided by Buszko at the end of his article on Auschwitz, which appeared in the Encyclopedia of the Holocaust:
• Of the 405,000 registered prisoners, 65,000 survived
• Of the 16,000 Soviet POW’s, 96 survived
• Various estimates suggest 1.6 million were murdered
Buszko’s article, and the above estimates, appeared in the 1990 edition of the
Encyclopedia, which clearly puts the lie to Foner’s comment that “anyone who publicly doubted the 4.1 million .. ” figure “previous to 1992…” was “…labeled an anti-Semite…”. Buszko is not only a Jewish historian, but Polish as well.
Leon Poliakov, the author of the well-documented “Harvest of Hate,” which was, we note, first published in 1956, provides the following information, which clearly demonstrates that Foner’s contention, cited above, is an outright lie:
After some thirty months of intense activity, the Auschwitz balance sheet showed close to two million immediate exterminations (this figure can never be fixed exactly), (8) to which one must add the deaths of some 300,000 registered prisoners – Jews for the most part, but not entirely – for whom the gas chamber was only one of any number of ways by which they might have perished. (Poliakov, 202)
In his affidavits, Hoess spoke of two and a half million, ‘a figure set officially,’ he wrote, under the signature of [Eichmann], in a report to Himmler. This figure has been accepted by several authors, and it appears in the verdict at the trial of the major war criminals. However, there is no reason for accepting without question the statistics attributed to Eichmann, which may err on either side.
Adding the number of victims to those deported from different countries gives a lower figure, although we have little data, for example, on the number of Polish Jews sent to Auschwitz. An approximate figure in the neighborhood of two million seems closer to the truth.” (Ibid.)
Feig also provides evidence of the false nature of Foner’s comment when she notes that:
Höss testified that the Tesch directors could not help but know of the use for their product because they sold him enough to annihilate two million people.’
Feig’s book was published in 1981
According to Snyder, Adolf Eichmann reported to Himmler, in 1944, that four million had been killed in the camps, and another million had been shot or killed by mobile units. (Encyclopedia of the Third Reich. 1989) Eichmann’s report, which referenced all the camps (most of which were in Nazi-occupied Poland), may have been the source of the Polish Communist government’s figures. (Snyder is a Professor of History at the City College and the City University of New York.)
During the war crimes trials, Höss was asked if it was true that he had no exact numbers because he had been forbidden to compile them, and he agreed. He also agreed that Adolf Eichmann had told him that that more than two million people had been exterminated there. (von Lang, 120)
The Institut Für Zeitgeschichte, Munich, provided the following capsulated paragraph about Auschwitz in a March, 1992, letter of inquiry.
The extermination camp in Birkenau, established in the second half of 1941, was joined to the concentration camp Auschwitz, existing since May 1940. From January 1942 on in five gas chambers and from the end of June 1943 in four additional large gassing-rooms gassings with Zyklon B have been undertaken. Up until November 1944 more than one million Jews and at least 4000 gypsies have been murdered by gas. (IFZ)
While it is admittedly difficult to compile exact figures, (emphasis added) since the Nazis did not maintain registration records for those who were to be exterminated immediately upon arrival at Auschwitz, it seems accurate to assert that the number of Jews killed fell somewhere between one and one-point-six million.
According to figures provided by the Auschwitz-Birkenau State Museum, the overall number of victims of Auschwitz in the years 1940-1945 is estimated at between 1,100,000 and 1,500,000 people. The majority of them, and above all the mass transports of Jews who arrived beginning in 1942, died in the gas chambers. (Waclaw Dlugoborski and Franciszek Piper, Eds. Auschwitz 1940-1945. Central Issues in the History of the Camp. The Auschwitz-Birkenau State Museum, 2000, 5 vols., 1799 pp., ISBN 83-85047-87-5)
Jews were not the only victims of this Nazi German killing machine – historians estimate that among the people sent to Auschwitz there were at least 1,100,000 Jews from all the countries of occupied Europe, over 140,000 Poles (mostly political prisoners), approximately 20,000 Gypsies from several European countries, over 10,000 Soviet prisoners of war, and over 10,000 prisoners of other nationalities.
The Leuchter Report, which Foner alludes to extensively in his Spotlight article, has been thoroughly refuted. For detailed information about the report, see the Leuchter FAQ.
Two German firms, Tesch/Stabenow and Degesch, produced Cyclone B gas after they acquired the patent from Farben. Tesch supplied two tons a month, and Degesch three quarters of a ton. The firms that produced the gas already had extensive experience in fumigation.”
This overview is entirely typical of the death camp argument. It is not based on official figures obtained from various archives but solely upon the personal opinions of individuals who are obviously writing to an idea. Such phrases as “absolutely established”, “irrefutable facts” and “thoroughly refuted” are the easily-recognized hallmarks of the propagandist, not the historian. In point of fact, writers attempting to confirm the allegations of astronomical death tolls for European Jews are not writing from any kind of an objective historical point of view but from thoroughly skewed and propagandistic one.
Truth is the first casualty of the propagandist.
The argument is made that since it is “clearly evident” that six million European Jews were slaughtered by the Nazis under Hitler, the fact that nowhere in the through and extensive files of the Third Reich can be found any specific reference to such acts, the answer to this absence is also clearly evident; there are special and secret lists made of Jews who were not entered onto the rolls of the camps but who were immediately executed.
However, if there are no existing Third Reich documents proving the mass murders, neither are there any of the secret lists to be found.
The “secret list” theory is one of desperation, not a clever invention.
When the Glücks files emerged in Moscow, the archivists at the Central Archives stated that Jewish groups were well aware of these documents and had repeatedly insisted that the Russians not release them to “outsiders” who were “not able to properly understand them.”
What obviously was meant is that these extensive, and complete, files clearly did not support the murder of six millions of European Jews and their release would merely complicate the fundraising efforts of the proponents of the planned extermination theories.
As an historical footnote to this commentary, the following officially recorded conversation of Hitler’s is set forth. The first part of it has been widely quoted in a number of books but the second part, for obvious reasons, has not.
On Saturday, October 25, 1941, Hitler received Count Ciano, Italian Foreign Minister at his East Prussian military headquarters for a conference. Present were a number of senior government officials. Following the conference, Hitler held a small, private dinner for several of these personages. One of them was Heinrich Himmler, Chief of the SS and the other was (SS-Obergruppenführer) Reinhard Heydrich, head of the Main State Security Office (Reichssicherheitshauptamt-RSHA) which controlled the Gestapo and the SD. During the course of the dinner, Hitler said:
“From the rostrum of the Reichstag I prophesized to Jewry that, in the event of war’s proving inevitable, the Jew would disappear from Europe. That race of criminals has on its conscience the two million dead of the First World War, and now already hundreds of thousands more.”
At this point, historians generally comment on Hitler’s obvious intention to slaughter all the Jews he could lay his hands on. The balance of the conversation conveys a rather different meaning.
“Let nobody tell me that all the same we can’t park them in the marshy parts of Russia! Who’s worrying about our troops? It’s not a bad idea, by the way, that public rumor attributes to us a plan to exterminate the Jews. Terror is a salutary thing.”1
The question of the number of persons who died in Auschwitz has been addressed in a publication entitled Anatomy of the Auschwitz Death Camp.2 A chapter by Franciszek Piper entitled “The Number of Victims” addresses the issues discussed here and sections of it deserve to be quoted and enlarged upon.
“In erasing traces of the crimes perpetrated in Auschwitz-Birkenau, the Nazis destroyed documents that could serve as the basis for determining how many people died there. When the Soviet soldiers liberated the camp in January 1945, they found documents that confirmed only 100,000 deaths. Yet surviving prisoners maintained that millions had perished at Auchwitz.
Faced with this disparity, officials of the Soviet Extraordinary State Commission, the organization entrusted with investigating the crimes committed at Auschwitz, conducted an in-depth study. Based on witness testimonies regarding the capacity of the camp and the length of time that its machinery for mass murder was operative, (emphasis added) the commission concluded that no fewer than four million (emphasis added) persons were put to death at the camp…Four million…is the number recorded in Polish literature, as well as in publications of other countries.”
In The Final Solution, one of the first books to deal with the Holocaust, published in 1953, the figure of four million was radically reevaluated. English art historian Gerald Reitlinger estimated the number of victims at Auschwitz to be roughly 800,000 to 900,000, (emphasis added) based on an analysis of the losses of Jews reported by specific countries…
The destruction by the Nazis of most Auschwitz records is the most important cause of divergent estimates…researchers had to rely on discrepant and imprecise data from testimonies and depositions of witnesses, former prisoners and Nazi functionaries and on court decisions and fragmentary and incomplete records of camp registries, archives, (sic) and other institutions. (Emphasis added).”
The question of the destruction of Auschwitz records has been raised over the years to support the claims that large numbers of people died in the camp but were not recorded. If the SS camp administration did destroy or remove official records from Auschwitz before the complex was overrun by the Soviets in early 1945, they did not and could not touch the records that had been sent to the headquarters of the camp system outside of Berlin, or any other copies sent to different agencies. According to the author of the article, the Soviets did find records indicating 100,000 deaths.
Reliance on anything originating from Stalin’s agents is totally unrealistic. The Soviets had no problem continuously rewriting their own history and obviously would have had no problem rewriting the history of other nations. The concurrence of the Poles in Soviet findings has no validity whatsoever.
Poland was under complete control of the Soviets at the time of their reports and any official commission would do precisely as it was told by its masters.
It was only after the implosion of the Soviet Empire that their state archives became available to outside researchers, at least on a limited basis. As has been noted before, it was the standard policy of the Soviet government to denigrate and attack the government of West Germany, not support it. The microfilms released by the Russian archives in the early 1990s were copies of documents found at the SS camp headquarters in 1945 and had these supported the theory of extensive extermination programs, they certainly would have been released years before.
There is another argument used to explain the lack of documentation supporting the thesis of a million or more dead at Auschwitz. This argument claims that endless transports of Jews were delivered to the camp, not recorded anywhere and immediately executed. This, it is claimed, explains why there is such a disparity between official German figures and those proposed by others.
This argument has some fleeting validity but the question arises that if these transports were unrecorded in German records, how could anyone use them as references other than by supposition and speculation? It is very difficult to have one’s cake and eat it too.
The question of transport also needs to be addressed. When the German Reichsbahn scheduled rail transportation to Auschwitz, it was listed officially as special trains (Sonderzug) which indicated that the transports were privately contracted…in this case by the SS. If these transports were of an official, State nature, they would be listed as regular traffic, paid for by the government. While in the beginning of the forced Jewish emigration prior to the war, the Jewish community in Germany and overseas was compelled to pay for the emigration out of their own pockets, such accommodations were not operational during the war except in rare cases.
It should also be noted that transport from Auschwitz taking manufactured products to various points in Europe were also listed as Special Trains. Auschwitz was part of the SS economic empire and as such, was run by the SS and not the German government. The Armed SS (Waffen-SS) was not an official part of the Wehrmacht and its operating expenses, as were the operating expenses for the entire SS, had to be paid for by the SS itself.
This in itself would cast considerable doubt on the thesis that a vast extermination program had been ordered by Hitler officially as State policy. When the SS ran out of operating capital, the transports stopped running.
The use of prisoner labor was certainly addressed in the numerous trials held after the war.
Another thesis often expressed is that the victims at Auschwitz were nearly all Jewish. Reports from the camp break down the exact number of inmates by groups, to include Jews. At Auschwitz, by far the largest group were those held in protective custody or as political prisoners.
With former Soviet archival material now available, a greater balance should be much easier to obtain. It was only their stubborn refusal to release these records that allowed inflated figures, supported only with anecdotal and unsupported material, to flourish and, like ivy, expand and cover every aspect of the building beneath.
This archival material has, in fact, been available on microfilm since 1989 but is rarely discussed.
An article in the New York ‘Times’ of March 3, 1991 quotes the Soviet sources with considerable accuracy. Forty-six camps are covered with a total death toll of more than 400,000. Auschwitz records contain approximately 70,000 death certificates and in addition the death totals of 130,000 among the forced laborers in all camps and 200,000 additional names of various classes of prisoners in all camps to include Buchenwald, Sachsenhausen and Gross Rosen. When queried about this article and the numbers reflected in it, Red Cross officials in Washington, DC agreed that they were indeed the figures contained in the microfilms they had received from Soviet sources but that “special secret lists” existed that boosted the death toll far higher. Further questioning elicited that no one had seen these “secret lists” but that they must certainly exist and that quoting from the official records was “misleading” and should not be done.
The records of the concentration camp system discovered by the Soviets at the system headquarters outside of Berlin in 1945 are complete. From a chronological point of view, there are no gaps. Many of the records found by the Soviets at Auschwitz are not complete but the headquarters files contain copies of all the Auschwitz records
The arrest, deportation and forced labor of a large number of people, including Jews, was repugnant and on a parallel with the British concentration camps (from whence the name came) instituted during the Boer War in which over 20,000 Boer women and children died in conditions of disease, filth and squalor, and is not possible to ignore or justify.3
Aside from the records of the camp headquarters siezed by the Soviets in 1945 from Oranienburg, another source exists that deals with the monthly population reports made by the individual camps to headquarters. These consisted of radio reports sent in to Oranienburg on a monthly basis. From early 1942 through February of 1943, British intelligence was monitoring these reports and in their official history of the British intelligence system, stated that,
“The returns from Auschwitz, the largest of the camps with 20,000 prisoners, mentioned illness as the main cause of death, but included references to shootings and hangings. There were no references in the decrypts to gassing.” (emphasis added) 4
Given inaccurate demographics about the post-war Jewish population, there is still a considerable gap in the number of Jews, mostly Polish Jews, who were living in Poland in 1939 and unaccounted for in 1945. The assumption was made, and is still being made, that these differences were clearly explained by the extermination theory.
The former Soviet Union maintained a rigid control over its files until its collapse, and it has only been since this point in time that a much clearer picture of events has become evident.
In 1995, Russian author Arkady Vaksberg, a Jewish writer, attorney, and investigative journalist, published a book entitled Stalin Against The Jews, the basic theme of which is the persecution of Soviet Jews by Stalin after he had used them against his enemies.
Vaksberg goes into some detail about the Polish Jews who, in September of 1939, fled the German advance into Poland and went into the Soviet Union. Vaksberg states that these Polish Jews were seized by Stalin’s agencies and put into prison camps.
The author states that exact figures of these prisoners are not presently available but speaks of “hundreds of thousands.” He also mentions that Soviet border police shot down many escaping Jews before they crossed the border into Communist territory.
Survival in Soviet Gulags was very poor; of the 80,000 German prisoners of war captured at Stalingrad, only 6,000 were alive in 1955 to return to Germany. How many of these hundreds of thousands of Polish Jews survived the war is not known, but perhaps former Soviet archives hold the final answer to this issue, an issue that has persisted for half a century.5
After the breakup of the Yugoslav state in the 1990s, the “ethnic cleansing” by the winsome Serbs of anyone they disliked, including Catholics and Jews, was greeted with a chorus of dismay from other nations…but nothing more.

1. “Hitler’s Secret Conversations, 1941-1945,” New York, 1953, p 72, Protocol 52.
2. “Anatomy of the Auschwitz Death Camp,” ed. Yisrael Gutman and Michael Berenbaum, 1994, Indiana University Press. pps 61 et seq.
3. Amery, vol.5, 252, 253, 601; vol. 6, 24-25
4. “British Intelligence in the Second World War,” Hinsley et al, London, 1980, vol. 11, p 673.
5. “Stalin Against the Jews,” Vaksberg, New York, 1995, pp 103-107.

The Season of Evil
by Gregory Douglas

Preface
This is in essence a work of fiction, but the usual disclaimers notwithstanding, many of the horrific incidents related herein are based entirely on factual occurrences.
None of the characters or the events in this telling are invented and at the same time, none are real. And certainly, none of the participants could be considered by any stretch of the imagination to be either noble, self-sacrificing, honest, pure of motive or in any way socially acceptable to anything other than a hungry crocodile, a professional politician or a tax collector.
In fact, the main characters are complex, very often unpleasant, destructive and occasionally, very entertaining.
To those who would say that the majority of humanity has nothing in common with the characters depicted herein, the response is that mirrors only depict the ugly, evil and deformed things that peer into them
There are no heroes here, only different shapes and degrees of villains and if there is a moral to this tale it might well be found in a sentence by Jonathan Swift, a brilliant and misanthropic Irish cleric who wrote in his ‘Gulliver’s Travels,”
“I cannot but conclude the bulk of your natives to be the most odious race of little pernicious vermin that Nature ever suffered to crawl upon the surface of the earth.”
Swift was often unkind in his observations but certainly not inaccurate.

Frienze, Italy
July 2018-August 2019

Chapter 23

It was now getting late and the possibility of anyone discovering the late aunt was becoming decidedly remote. They finished the entire bottle of wine and there was the warm, comfortable and slightly blurred ambiance that comes from moderate drinking.
Chuck looked at his watch.
“I’m going to have to get to bed in a few minutes. I took the sign off the pool gate and I am sure that what with the heat wave we’ve been having, some fortunate person will discover what the Easter Bunny left in the pool very early in the morning.”
The remark about the rabbit caused general merriment.
“Chuck, where do you keep the sheets?”
“Hall closet, right next to the door to your room. Why? Hasn’t Lars changed the sheets yet? My God, you’ll have to carry them out the door sideways.”
“I’m going to sleep on the couch tonight.”
“Poor Lars.”
“He snores something terrible. And it does smell in there.”
Chuck blinked.
“The couch. You can do that if you want. It’s leather and you might stick to it if you aren’t careful.”
“Not without Lars around I won’t. I could sleep in your bed if you like.”
“And where would I sleep? On the couch?”
“Why it’s your bed, Chuck. You can sleep in it if you want.”
“I see.”
He did, very clearly and he remembered a Latin phrase, In vino veritas.
Truth and rarely clarity of thought but then there comes a time when one thinks with something other than the brain.
“You are suggesting that you and I cheat on poor Lars who is now dead to the world on his smelly sheets? Is that honest, dear?”
“No, I guess not Chuck but it might be fun.”
“It might at that. Who am I to force a nice young woman, almost of legal age, to sleep on a leather couch when she can sleep in my bed and keep me warm? Or is that for fat women in winter? I don’t know at this hour. Be my guest…”
And he pointed elegantly towards the door to his room.
He closed the door behind him and turned on the lights.
The girl was standing by the bed, her hands on her hips and her head tilted at an angle.
“Chuck.”
He kicked off his shoes.
“Yes. What?”
“Chuck, take off your clothes for me.”
“You know what I look like.”
“Not naked I don’t.”
“Want to compare me with Lars? Comparisons are odious love. I can’t match up to his anatomy.”
“Shit, just strip, OK?”
While he was trying to take off his briefs he lost his balance, staggered around and fell on the floor. Gwen began to laugh at him as he struggled to get up.
“That is not funny, Goddam it! Now, are you happy?”
He flexed like a weightlifter at a contest and nearly fell over again.
“You’re not bad. I think we’re both drunk, don’t you? Do you think you can make me happy? I know I can make you happy.”
“Goddam wine. Heightens the desire and robs of the performance. Shakespeare. Macbeth,” he said as she tossed the last of her clothes on the floor.
When they got into bed, she was staring at his face.
“Now what? Is there a zit on my forehead? The mark of Cain?”
“You look like an eagle.”
“Stupid bird. Turn off the light…it’s on your side.”
“I like to watch what’s going on. OK?”
“A fucking eagle? Hey, you know, I don’t like people making fun of my Goddam nose. Jesus I’m plastered, really plastered. Eagle?”
She was propped up on one elbow watching him with a smile.
“You look like an eagle. Your eyes are really pointy and your nose looks like an eagle’s nose.”
“Goddam it, turn off the light! Goddam exhibitionist! You’re making fun of my nose. I like my nose. That’s aquiline, sweetie. I’m very proud of my nose. It’s an aristocratic nose.”
“Well,” Gwen said, putting her hand under the covers, “what’s this then?”
“That,” Chuck said, ” is Rupert, the One-Eyed Trouser Snake.”
And in the dark, they both laughed so hard that it was some time before they could take their bodies seriously.

Chuck was sleeping heavily and enjoying unspecific but pleasant erotic dreams when something intruded on his consciousness and brought him into the land of the living.
It was Gwen, nudging him in the ribs. He opened one reddened eye and then closed it again. Then he heard a familiar masculine voice and he opened both eyes.
It was Lars, standing naked at the foot of the bed.
“What? Hey, Lars, welcome back. Why don’t you let me sleep some more?”
Lars cleared his throat.
“Hey, Chuck, there’s some fat broad screaming out by the pool. I thought I ought to let you know.”
Chuck sat up suddenly, his head pounding.
“Oh, Jesus, my head is about to explode. Yeah, the freaks in the pool. Christ, now I’ll have to go out and act stupid. And right now I feel stupid.”
Gwen slid out of bed and went into the bathroom.
“Why don’t you guys go out and take care of Connie while I take a shower.”
Left alone with the cuckolded Lars, Chuck blinked at him.
“Sorry about her, buddy, but you know how it is. I could say it was her fault but it takes two to tango as they say. Jesus, do you have to walk around nude all the time? Let me get up and go outside. Go take a shower and the two of you stay inside until I come back.”
He forced himself to get up and Lars began laughing.
“What the fuck are you laughing at, piss head?”
Lars pointed at Chuck’s crotch.
“You better wait until that goes down before you go outside and make everyone laugh.”
Chuck looked down at his erection.
“Don’t worry about that. It’ll go down by the time I’m outside. Go take a shower and for Christ’s sake, wash the sheets. Gwen says it smells like a pigsty in there. Go, go, let me get dressed.”
Getting dressed consisted of pulling on a pair of swimming briefs, putting on a pair of wraparound dark glasses and sticking his feet into a pair of sandals.
Outside, the glare of the risen sun made his headache worse and the beginning heat of the early morning made him long for a hot shower and an air-conditioned, dark bedroom.
The screaming came from a fat woman wearing a bright yellow one-piece swimming suit and a yellow rubber hat with fake daisies wreathing it.
She was standing at the side of the pool, surrounded by the clothing of the pool occupants, pointing at the depths and wailing like a stuck steam whistle.
Oddly enough, Chuck noted, there was no one else in sight and she must have been ululating for five minutes at least. Just as he quickened his pace and opened the gate to the pool, he saw an old man with a metal walker moving at a snail’s pace towards them on the walkway.
“What’s going on here? What’s the matter?” he said as he took her by a soft arm.
“There! Oh God, in the pool! There’s someone in the pool! There!”
And she continued to wail but in a lower tone now that she had attracted aid.
Chuck looked down through the water and was rewarded with a moderately distorted vision of Connie staring up at him with blind eyes. Her breasts had flattened out until they looked like water-filled balloons, her mouth was open, tongue protruding and one arm was reaching up towards the surface of the pool with clawed fingers.
Across her feet, face down, was the famous author and all one could see of him was his back. One leg was cocked as if he was preparing to kick a soccer goal and his hairpiece had come off and was lying across Connie’s flabby stomach like a black sea urchin.
It was not a pleasant sight, even though Chuck knew perfectly well what he was looking at. Just then, the old man clattered up the steps into the pool area, dragging his walker up each step with great effort.
“What’s going on, Marla? What are you shouting about? What are you looking at?”
It was obviously his wife and she began to shriek at him, blasting Chuck in his right ear.
“Myron! There’s a dead person down there! Call the doctors! A dead person in the pool, Myron!”
Chuck wanted desperately to leave the scene but he stayed while a Medivac unit arrived followed by a uniformed police officer. They all stood at the edge of the pool and debated what to do. Marla had shut up by now and Myron, who had summoned assistance with his cell phone, was now calling the newspapers.
The officer, who was young, stocky and red-haired, was shaking his head.
“Jesus, we ought to get them out of there. Can’t you guys go in and pull them out?”
The ambulance attendants were not going into the water. It was probably full of germs and anyway, they weren’t dressed for it. Finally, the fire department arrived and brought a diver in a wet suit and facemask and eventually, the pair were brought to the surface, one by one. Tolliver had lain face down for several days and the stagnant blood had settled into his face and chest, giving him the overall complexion of an eggplant.
Connie had fared better but it was obvious that the temperature of the water had been hastening decomposition and she was a good deal fatter than when she went in.
By now there was a considerable crowd of tenants, all staring at the grotesque scene. The corpses were shoved into rubber body bags and their distended limbs made strange shapes when the bags were zippered shut.
Marla the Screamer was being interviewed by another police officer who had arrived with the firemen and Chuck talked with the first man.
“I really can’t recognize the woman, officer. She’s sort of a mess. I think I may have seen her around but I’m not certain. It could be the manager but someone told me she had gone to Mexico a few days ago.”
The corpses had been removed and another officer was putting their clothes into a plastic bag. There was some good-humored joking about the handcuffs and whip and it was generally felt that the pair had been involved in some kind of kinky sex and drowned.
One of the officers had an interesting idea.
“You know, we got a guy one time that liked to sort of hang himself and get a hardon. One time he went too far and they found him dead. Maybe it was something like that.”
A police photographer was taking a picture of the pool gate after recording the grotesque and bloated bodies and Chuck said to the officer,
“I live over there,” he gestured to his apartment unit, “and I was wondering if you guys need to talk to me at all. I mean I have a job interview in Texas next week and I was thinking about flying down tomorrow. Would that be OK?”
The cop put his notebook back in his pocket.
“Jesus, man, I can’t imagine why you couldn’t. I mean, did you hear anything out here?”
“Not a thing, officer. This place is full of people two days older than God and they all have a shot of laxative, their warm milk and go to bed when the sun goes down.”
The other man laughed, glancing at the crowd of very senior citizens crowded around an excited Marla.
“Yeah, you must have a lot of fun in here. Well, no, I can’t see any reason why you can’t go off. Listen, the detectives will have to investigate this and we’ll have to wait for the path report but if you want to stick around for a few days, let me give you my card and you can give me a call.”
Chuck took the card and stuck it in the front of his briefs.
“Well thanks. I guess I won’t do any swimming here now.”
“I wouldn’t if it were me. Well, thanks for your help.”
And Chuck walked back to his apartment with mixed emotions. At this point, it looked as if Call me Connie and the Famous Author had been engaging in some kind of weird sex and drowned. This was California and things like that happened every day on a surprisingly large scale.
First, he planned to take a very long shower, then take something for his headache and lock himself in his bedroom and sleep until he woke up. Gwen, a distant but pleasant memory, would have to amuse herself with someone else.
When he came into the house, he reveled in the cool air and went into his bedroom. There were fresh sheets on the bed and it was neatly made and turned down.
“Ah, bless the woman,” he said as he fumbled around in the medicine cabinet in the bathroom. Two extra strength painkillers later, he was about to go to sleep when the door opened and his housemates appeared. Amazingly, they were both dressed.
“What? Let me sleep.”
“What happened?” Gwen said as Lars nodded.
“Oh, they found auntie and the freak just like I thought. The cops think they were doing bad things in the pool and we should probably hang around here until they have finished their reports.”
“Were they a mess, Chuck?” Lars, or perhaps Eric, said.
“Yes, buddy, they were a mess. Another day or so and they would be a real mess. Can I sleep now, Osvald?”
“I did all the laundry, Chuck,” Gwen said, “and now Lars and…Osvald? Who’s Osvald?”
Chuck pointed to Lars.
“He’s Eric on Fridays and Mondays and Lars the rest of the time. Why don’t you tell her your real name?”
“Now you stop that shit, Chuck! I don’t like my name and I have asked you not to use it. Do you want me to call you Cyril?”
And with that, they left the sufferer alone. As the door closed, Chuck could hear Gwen saying,
“What’s this Osvald crap? What is your name, really?”
Chuck shouted,
“Osvald!” but the door was shut and no one heard him.
He appeared in the living room at three in the afternoon. His headache was gone and he was no longer light sensitive but very hungry

(Continued)

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