"Care must be taken not to give a platform for deniers... or seek to disprove the deniers' position through normal historical debate and rational argument" -- Guidelines for Teaching about the Holocaust at the Stockholm International Forum, 2000
The first issue with Irene Weisberg Zisblatt is, who is Irene Weisberg Zisblatt? She has used several names throughout her life including Irene Segelstern (Red Cross document), Irene Ziegelstein (Spielberg's Last Days testimony), Chana Seigelstein (autobiography), Channah Sura (Hebrew name), Irene Lewin (passenger manifest when relocating to America), Irene Zeigelfrum (a false name according to the USC Shoah Foundation) and Irene Stein (taken after her husbands death).
More concerning than the name juggling however is her catalog of fantastic claims and the many nontrivial alterations her story has undergone as events are added, withdrawn and altered. Since many of these inconsistencies have already been cataloged by others, i will not bother to reexamine each one of them, but we will critique some of the most glaring discrepancies.
Numerous false claims regarding the holocaust have been debunked long ago and are no longer accepted as fact by any creditable historian, yet many are still regurgitated to this day by the mainstream media and even in holocaust museums. The story of Irene Zisblatt, similar in many ways to the stories of Enric Marco, Binjamin Wilkomirski, Misha Defonseca, Herman Rosenblat and several others before her, is no exception. Such claims charge the Nazis with shrinking the heads of their victims, using human skin to make lamp shades, gloves and other goods, using the fat of Jewish corpses to manufacture soap, oil, fertilizer and sausages, tearing babies in half with their bare hands, frying babies in the fat of their Jewish parents, using the crushed bones of Jews for a variety of purposes, including paving the Autobahn, and a myriad of other invented atrocities. If you can imagine a torture, it isn't unlikely that the Germans have been accused of it. Although some claims regarding the holocaust have roots based in fact, many are fabrications, based upon hearsay, or based upon highly questionable evidence, such as the testimony of a single alleged eyewitness. Others are not new, having surfaced during the First World War after which they were debunked then as well.
Video: Spielberg's Hoax - The Last Days of The Big Lie
Alleged methods of extermination in the camps which are no longer accepted as factual include the use of pneumatic hammers, fire, various forms of electrocution, steam chambers, quicklime, suffocation, poisoning, drowning, forcing prisoners to climb trees which other prisoners were made to cut down, being subjected to ferocious animals, using a manually operated ramrod machine to impale their skulls and many, many others.
One particularly incredible claim put forth by the Soviets suggested that the Germans vaporized 20,000 Jews using a nuclear bomb. Though not a shred of creditable evidence exists to support this claim, it was used to vilify the Nazis at the post-war Nuremberg trials when Justice Robert H. Jackson, the head American prosecutor, questioned Albert Speer about it:
Jackson: Now, I have certain information, which was placed in my hands, of an experiment which was carried out near Auschwitz and I would like to ask you if you heard about it or knew about it. The purpose of the experiment was to find a quick and complete way of destroying people without the delay and trouble of shooting and gassing and burning, as it had been carried out, and this is the experiment, as I am advised. A village, a small village was provisionally erected, with temporary structures, and in it approximately 20,000 Jews were put. By means of this newly invented weapon of destruction, these 20,000 people were eradicated almost instantaneously, and in such a way that there was no trace left of them; that it developed, the explosive developed, temperatures of from 400 degrees to 500 degrees centigrade and destroyed them without leaving any trace at all.
Do you know about that experiment?
Speer: No, and I consider it utterly improbable. If we had had such a weapon under preparation, I should have known about it. But we did not have such a weapon. It is clear that in chemical warfare attempts were made on both sides to carry out research on all the weapons one could think of, because one did not know which party would start chemical warfare first.
Had the nuclear bomb myth been true, one might wonder why the Germans did not use their super-weapon on the enemy instead of wasting a great deal of time and valuable resources constructing a small village only to vaporize it along with their slave labor work force.
Several particularly malicious claims surfaced at the Buchenwald concentration camp which was liberated in part by United States troops on April 11, 1945. It is interesting to note that much of the evidence to support these claims, including the shrunken heads, either mysteriously vanished before the trials at Nuremberg or was not allowed to be entered as evidence. Explanations as to the origin of these claims is offered in the following documentary.
Video: Buchenwald: A Dumb Dumb Portrayal of Evil
In an article titled A Time 'Too Painful' to Remember, which was published in The New York Times in 1988 by the Jew Ari L. Goldman, another incredible claim regarding Buchenwald can be found:
Later, Mr. Hubert was sent to Buchenwald. ''In the camp there was a cage with a bear and an eagle,'' he said. ''Every day, they would throw a Jew in there. The bear would tear him apart and the eagle would pick at his bones.'' ''But that's unbelievable,'' whispered a visitor. ''It is unbelievable,'' said Mr. Hubert, ''but it happened.''
The above fabrication does not exist even within the Buchenwald and Mittelbau-Dora Memorials Foundation website.
Perhaps one of the most prolific claims associated with the holocaust that is no longer accepted as factual by any serious historian, yet is still widely believed by the general public, is that soap was manufactured from the fat of freshly killed Jews. Following is one example, though there are many more on the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum (USHMM) website:
In 1941 the Germans took all of Przemysl. We were lined up with Germans aiming their guns at us. Then an officer ran up: "We need fat Jewish people for soap!" So instead of being shot, we were put on a train.
This testimony would have us believe that 1), apparently all of those that were to be shot were fat Jewish people, 2), that is was necessary to transport live victims to the soap factory rather than shooting them first, 3), that apparently Jews were in such short supply that the shooting needed to be stopped immediately, 4), that the victim who was to become a bar of soap somehow escaped their destiny and lived to tell about it, which seems odd if there was a policy to exterminate Jews and a market for soap, and 5), that shootings like this probably took place on a regular basis.
Ironically, while the people of the world are led to believe such fabrications by official and trusted institutions such as the USHMM and the Auschwitz-Birkenau Memorial Museum, even the Jewish Virtual Library tells us, however awkwardly, that no evidence exists to support that soap was made from human fat:
"It's a general conception that the Nazis manufactured soap," says [Michael] Berenbaum [author of The World Must Know: The History of the Holocaust as Told in the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum], who was project manager for the USHMM before it opened in 1993 and headed the museum's research institute until 1997. "But those of us working in this area have not used it as an example [of Nazi atrocity] in the last 10 to 15 years. We don't have any evidence that the Nazis actually manufactured soap with human bodies ."
When Berenbaum began putting the USHMM exhibit together, even he believed "it was obviously the case" that the Nazis produced soap from fat. "There was a question as to whether we would use soap in the exhibition," he says. But after a thorough search, he adds, "I didn't find any evidence of it . I found evidence for everything else that ... the Nazis did and worse."
Even the ultra-pro-extermination organization Nizkor refutes the soap fallacy:
There was no industrial production, and the pieces of soap inscribed R.I.F. which Jewish victims were told were made of human fat were found to contain ordinary non-organic fats (R.I.F. means Reichsstelle fuer Industrielle Fettversorgung, or State Centre for Supply of Fats, and not Pure Jewish Fat, as the victims were told by the Nazis).
Since the information offered by the USHMM, the Auschwitz-Birkenau Memorial Museum and the Nizkor Project lacks relevant detail, let us learn what the Institute for Historical Review (IHR) has to say regarding the soap claim and its origin:
One of the most lurid and slanderous Holocaust claims is the story that the Germans manufactured soap from the bodies of their victims. Although a similar charge during the First World War was exposed as a hoax almost immediately afterwards, it was nevertheless revived and widely believed during the Second . [1] More important, this accusation was "proved" at the main Nuremberg trial of 1945-1946, and has been authoritatively endorsed by numerous historians in the decades since. In recent years, though, as part of a broad retreat from the most obviously untenable aspects of the "orthodox" extermination story, Holocaust historians have grudgingly conceded that the human soap tale is a wartime propaganda lie. In their retreat, though, these historians have tried to dismiss the soap story as a mere wartime "rumor," neglecting to mention that international Jewish organizations and then Allied governments endorsed and sanctioned this libelous canard .
[...]
More recently, Jewish historian Walter Laqueur "denied established history" by acknowledging in his 1980 book, The Terrible Secret, that the human soap story has no basis in reality. [29] Gitta Sereny, another Jewish historian, noted in her book Into That Darkness: "The universally accepted story that the corpses were used to make soap and fertilizer is finally refuted by the generally very reliable Ludwigsburg Central Authority for Investigation into Nazi Crimes." [30] Deborah Lipstadt, a professor of modern Jewish history, similarly "rewrote history" when she confirmed in 1981: "The fact is that the Nazis never used the bodies of Jews, or for that matter anyone else, for the production of soap." [31]
In April 1990, professor Yehuda Bauer of Israel's Hebrew University, regarded as a leading Holocaust historian, as well as Shmuel Krakowski, archives director of Israel's Yad Vashem Holocaust center, confirmed that the human soap story is not true. Camp inmates "were prepared to believe any horror stories about their persecutors," Bauer said. At the same time, though, he had the chutzpah to blame the legend on "the Nazis." [32]
In fact, blame for the soap story lies rather with individuals such as Simon Wiesenthal and Stephen Wise, organizations like the World Jewish Congress, and the victorious Allied powers, none of whom has ever apologized for promoting this vile falsehood.
I will close the Jewish human fat soap fallacy with the following quote from the Committee for Open Debate on the Holocaust (CODOH) website which provides further detail about the origin of the soap claim:
The history of the allegation can be traced back to September 1942, when Rabbi Stephen Wise (1874-1949) announced that he had received a message from an official of the World Jewish Congress in Europe reporting on the manufacture of soap and artificial fertilizer from Jewish bodies. Naturally, the report was greeted at the time with a certain amount of skepticism, since the Americans and British had already encountered such an allegation during the First World War: an allegation which had turned out to be Allied propaganda. (See Arthur Ponsonby, Falsehood in Wartime, IHR, 1980.)
Returning to Zisblatt's claims, let us learn how she managed to keep her precious diamonds hidden from the Nazis during her internment at Auschwitz and elsewhere:
Zisblatt's entire family was killed in the gas chambers, and those four diamonds were the last mementos of them. The only way Irene could keep the diamonds hidden was to swallow and retrieve them over and over again. She did this for 15 months.
Because it is likely impossible to verify whether Zisblatt's mother actually gave her any diamonds in the context of the war we cannot dismiss the claim, though there is some evidence to suggest it may have been borrowed from another story, as were virtually all of her other claims.
In a video interview we shall see shortly, Zisblatt states that she was once forced to swallow her precious diamonds immediately after retrieving them from her feces without having had a chance to clean them due to the unexpected appearance of an SS guard. She states that on other occasions the only way she could decontaminate her diamonds was to wash them in the mud, or even in the soup the prisoners were given to eat. The readily apparent problem with such claims is the probability of contracting a variety of diseases from ingesting human fecal matter, some of which can be deadly.
Next, Zisblatt repeats one of many claims that is quite popular among alleged Jewish survivors of Auschwitz:
Zisblatt told the audience how, as a young prisoner in the camps, she was a favorite of Dr. Josef Mengele, who performed experiments and surgeries on her and other prisoners without anesthesia.
There is no question that atrocities were committed by all sides, both during and after the war, which is an atrocity in and of itself, nor is it unlikely that some of these abuses consisted of medical experiments. The problem with the popular "i was a favorite of Dr. Mengele" claim is that, in a massive camp which is said to have killed 90% of the Jews whom entered it, there seems to be an unusually large number of alleged survivors who were Jewish and who were favorites of Dr. Josef Mengele and who lived to tell about it and who do not seem to have any obvious physical defects as a result of the alleged experimentation they claim to have undergone.
We are told the infamous Dr. Josef Mengele
, often referred to as the "Angel of Death", was the sadistic butcher of Auschwitz who preformed a wide variety of gruesome medical experiments, often without anesthesia, upon those he did not immediately direct to be suffocated in the gas chamber upon arrival. The real Dr. Mengele however appears to have been far less dramatic, even according to the Josef Mengele page at the Jewish Virtual Library which states:
Being a twin, regardless of age, meant survival in 1944. Some 3,000 children (or about 1,500 sets of twins) were selected for the experiments. They were not terrified of him but rather they were often intimidated by some of what he did. They knew of his temper and his passion for his work. Yet, they were also aware of his role in their survival. "Being on Mengele's list was better than being on no list," said Eva Mozes Kor.
Regarding medical experimentation, the Germans were certainly not the only ones preforming experiments upon human subjects, yet the alleged atrocities preformed by Dr. Mengele seem to be more well known than the many factual atrocities committed by governments and private industries, both of which have long and well documented histories of preforming horrific experiments upon not only individuals, but entire populations. Such experiments were often conducted without the knowledge or consent of the subjects and, in some cases, against their will. This is a widespread, ongoing phenomenon which has included cruelties such as exposure to radiation, pathogens and toxins, as well as mind control, torture and more. Following is a sampling of experiments that are known to have occurred according to a document on the Natural News website:
(1845 - 1849) J. Marion Sims, later hailed as the "father of gynecology," performs medical experiments on enslaved African women without anesthesia. These women would usually die of infection soon after surgery. Based on his belief that the movement of newborns' skull bones during protracted births causes trismus, he also uses a shoemaker's awl, a pointed tool shoemakers use to make holes in leather, to practice moving the skull bones of babies born to enslaved mothers (Brinker).
(1931) Cornelius Rhoads, a pathologist from the Rockefeller Institute for Medical Research, purposely infects human test subjects in Puerto Rico with cancer cells; 13 of them die. Though a Puerto Rican doctor later discovers that Rhoads purposely covered up some of details of his experiment and Rhoads himself gives a written testimony stating he believes that all Puerto Ricans should be killed, he later goes on to establish the U.S. Army Biological Warfare facilities in Maryland, Utah and Panama, and is named to the U.S. Atomic Energy Commission, where he begins a series of radiation exposure experiments on American soldiers and civilian hospital patients (Sharav; Cockburn and St. Clair, eds.).
(1944) As part of the Manhattan Project that would eventually create the atomic bomb, researchers inject 4.7 micrograms of plutonium into soldiers at the Oak Ridge facility, 20 miles west of Knoxville, Tenn. ("Manhattan Project: Oak Ridge").
(1946) Gen. Douglas MacArthur strikes a secret deal with Japanese physician Dr. Shiro Ishii to turn over 10,000 pages of information gathered from human experimentation in exchange for granting Ishii immunity from prosecution for the horrific experiments he performed on Chinese, Russian and American war prisoners, including performing vivisections on live human beings (Goliszek, Sharav).
(1946 - 1947) University of Rochester researchers inject four male and two female human test subjects with uranium-234 and uranium-235 in dosages ranging from 6.4 to 70.7 micrograms per one kilogram of body weight in order to study how much uranium they could tolerate before their kidneys become damaged (Goliszek).
(1946 - 1953) The U.S. Atomic Energy Commission sponsors studies in which researchers from Harvard Medical School, Massachusetts General Hospital and the Boston University School of Medicine feed mentally disabled students at Fernald State School Quaker Oats breakfast cereal spiked with radioactive tracers every morning so that nutritionists can study how preservatives move through the human body and if they block the absorption of vitamins and minerals. Later, MIT researchers conduct the same study at Wrentham State School (Sharav, Goliszek).
(1947) The CIA begins studying LSD's potential as a weapon by using military and civilian test subjects for experiments without their consent or even knowledge. Eventually, these LSD studies will evolve into the MKULTRA program in 1953 (Sharav).
(1948) Based on the secret studies performed on Newburgh, N.Y. residents beginning in 1945, Project F researchers publish a report in the August 1948 edition of the Journal of the American Dental Association, detailing fluoride's health dangers. The U.S. Atomic Energy Commission (AEC) quickly censors it for "national security" reasons (Griffiths and Bryson).
(1950 - 1953) The CIA and later the Office of Scientific Intelligence begin Project Bluebird (renamed Project Artichoke in 1951) in order to find ways to "extract" information from CIA agents, control individuals "through special interrogation techniques," "enhance memory" and use "unconventional techniques, including hypnosis and drugs" for offensive measures (Goliszek).
(1950 - 1953) The U.S. Army releases chemical clouds over six American and Canadian cities. Residents in Winnipeg, Canada, where a highly toxic chemical called cadmium is dropped, subsequently experience high rates of respiratory illnesses (Cockburn and St. Clair, eds.).
(1951) The U.S. Army secretly contaminates the Norfolk Naval Supply Center in Virginia and Washington, D.C.'s National Airport with a strain of bacteria chosen because African-Americans were believed to be more susceptible to it than Caucasians. The experiment causes food poisoning, respiratory problems and blood poisoning (Cockburn and St. Clair, eds.).
(1953 - 1974) CIA Director Allen Dulles authorizes the MKULTRA program to produce and test drugs and biological agents that the CIA could use for mind control and behavior modification. MKULTRA later becomes well known for its pioneering studies on LSD, which are often performed on prisoners or patrons of brothels set up and run by the CIA. The brothel experiments, known as "Operation Midnight Climax," feature two-way mirrors set up in the brothels so that CIA agents can observe LSD's effects on sexual behavior. Ironically, governmental figures sometimes slip LSD into each other's drinks as part of the program, resulting in the LSD psychosis-induced suicide of Dr. Frank Olson indirectly at the hands of MKULTRA's infamous key player Dr. Sidney Gottlieb. Of all the hundreds of human test subjects used during MKULTRA, only 14 are ever notified of the involvement and only one is ever compensated ($15,000). Most of the MKULTRA files are eventually destroyed in 1973 (Elliston; Merritte, et al.; Barker).
(1955 - 1957) In order to learn how cold weather affects human physiology, researchers give a total of 200 doses of iodine-131, a radioactive tracer that concentrates almost immediately in the thyroid gland, to 85 healthy Eskimos and 17 Athapascan Indians living in Alaska. They study the tracer within the body by blood, thyroid tissue, urine and saliva samples from the test subjects. Due to the language barrier, no one tells the test subjects what is being done to them, so there is no informed consent (Goliszek).
(1956 - 1957) U.S. Army covert biological weapons researchers release mosquitoes infected with yellow fever and dengue fever over Savannah, Ga., and Avon Park, Fla., to test the insects' ability to carry disease. After each test, Army agents pose as public health officials to test victims for effects and take pictures of the unwitting test subjects. These experiments result in a high incidence of fevers, respiratory distress, stillbirths, encephalitis and typhoid among the two cities' residents, as well as several deaths (Cockburn and St. Clair, eds.).
(1957 - 1964) As part of MKULTRA, the CIA pays McGill University Department of Psychiatry founder Dr. D. Ewen Cameron $69,000 to perform LSD studies and potentially lethal experiments on Canadians being treated for minor disorders like post-partum depression and anxiety at the Allan Memorial Institute, which houses the Psychiatry Department of the Royal Victoria Hospital in Montreal. The CIA encourages Dr. Cameron to fully explore his "psychic driving" concept of correcting madness through completely erasing one's memory and rewriting the psyche. These "driving" experiments involve putting human test subjects into drug-, electroshock- and sensory deprivation-induced vegetative states for up to three months, and then playing tape loops of noise or simple repetitive statements for weeks or months in order to "rewrite" the "erased" psyche. Dr. Cameron also gives human test subjects paralytic drugs and electroconvulsive therapy 30 to 40 times, as part of his experiments. Most of Dr. Cameron's test subjects suffer permanent damage as a result of his work (Goliszek, "Donald Ewan Cameron").
(1958) The U.S. Atomic Energy Commission (AEC) drops radioactive materials over Point Hope, Alaska, home to the Inupiats, in a field test known under the codename "Project Chariot" (Sharav).
(1963 - 1966) New York University researcher Saul Krugman promises parents with mentally disabled children definite enrollment into the Willowbrook State School in Staten Island, N.Y., a resident mental institution for mentally retarded children, in exchange for their signatures on a consent form for procedures presented as "vaccinations." In reality, the procedures involve deliberately infecting children with viral hepatitis by feeding them an extract made from the feces of infected patients, so that Krugman can study the course of viral hepatitis as well the effectiveness of a hepatitis vaccine (Hammer Breslow).
(1966) U.S. Army scientists drop light bulbs filled with Bacillus subtilis through ventilation gates and into the New York City subway system, exposing more than one million civilians to the bacteria (Goliszek).
(1967) Researchers paralyze 64 prison inmates in California with a neuromuscular compound called succinylcholine, which produces suppressed breathing that feels similar to drowning. When five prisoners refuse to participate in the medical experiment, the prison's special treatment board gives researchers permission to inject the prisoners with the drug against their will (Greger).
(1980) According to blood samples tested years later for HIV, 20 percent of all New York homosexual men who participated in the 1978 hepatitis B vaccine experiment are HIV-positive by this point (Goliszek).
(1980) The CDC continues its 1978 hepatitis B vaccine experiment in Los Angeles, San Francisco, Chicago, St. Louis and Denver, recruiting over 7,000 homosexual men in San Francisco alone (Goliszek).
(1980) The first AIDS case appears in San Francisco (Goliszek).
(1981) The CDC acknowledges that a disease known as AIDS exists and confirms 26 cases of the disease -- all in previously healthy homosexuals living in New York, San Francisco and Los Angeles -- again supporting the speculation that AIDS originated from the hepatitis B experiments from 1978 and 1980 (Goliszek).
(1982) Thirty percent of the test subjects used in the CDC's hepatitis B vaccine experiment are HIV-positive by this point (Goliszek).
(1988) The U.S. Justice Department pays nine Canadian survivors of the CIA and Dr. Cameron's "psychic driving" experiments (1957 - 1964) $750,000 in out-of-court settlements, to avoid any further investigations into MKULTRA (Goliszek).
(1990) The United States sends 1.7 million members of the armed forces, 22 percent of whom are African-American, to the Persian Gulf for the Gulf War ("Desert Storm"). More than 400,000 of these soldiers are ordered to take an experimental nerve agent medication called pyridostigmine, which is later believed to be the cause of Gulf War Syndrome -- symptoms ranging from skin disorders, neurological disorders, incontinence, uncontrollable drooling and vision problems -- affecting Gulf War veterans (Goliszek; Merritte, et al.).
(1990) The CDC and Kaiser Pharmaceuticals of Southern California inject 1,500 six-month-old black and Hispanic babies in Los Angeles with an "experimental" measles vaccine that had never been licensed for use in the United States. Adding to the risk, children less than a year old may not have an adequate amount of myelin around their nerves, possibly resulting in impaired neural development because of the vaccine. The CDC later admits that parents were never informed that the vaccine being injected into their children was experimental (Goliszek).
(1995) In the Mar. 15 President's Advisory Committee on Human Radiation Experiments (ACHRE), former human subjects, including those who were used in experiments as children, give sworn testimonies stating that they were subjected to radiation experiments and/or brainwashed, hypnotized, drugged, psychologically tortured, threatened and even raped during CIA experiments.
(1996) The Department of Defense admits that Gulf War soldiers were exposed to chemical agents; however, 33 percent of all military personnel afflicted with Gulf War Syndrome never left the United States during the war, discrediting the popular mainstream belief that these symptoms are a result of exposure to Iraqi chemical weapons (Merritte, et al.).
(2000) The U.S. Air Force and rocket maker Lockheed Martin sponsor a Loma Linda University study that pays 100 Californians $1,000 to eat a dose of perchlorate -- a toxic component of rocket fuel that causes cancer, damages the thyroid gland and hinders normal development in children and fetuses -- every day for six months. The dose eaten by the test subjects is 83 times the safe dose of perchlorate set by the State of California, which has perchlorate in some of its drinking water. This Loma Linda study is the first large-scale study to use human subjects to test the harmful effects of a water pollutant and is "inherently unethical," according to Environmental Working Group research director Richard Wiles (Goliszek, Envirnomental Working Group).
(2004) In his BBC documentary "Guinea Pig Kids" and BBC News article of the same name, reporter Jamie Doran reveals that children involved in the New York City foster care system were unwitting human subjects in experimental AIDS drug trials from 1988 to, in his belief, present times (Doran).
Video: Army Has Sprayed Citizens with Radioactive Particles!
Considering the above list of experiments inflicted upon human beings by governments and private institutions, one might find cause to reevaluate the significance of the alleged experiments conducted by Dr. Josef Mengele during World War II and question whether he is really worthy of the tile, "The Angel of Death". In a performance evaluation of Dr. Mengele prepared by the Auschwitz SS Physician's Office on 19 Aug., 1944, we read:
Dr. Mengele has an open, honest, solid character. He is absolutely reliable, upright and straightforward. He does not manifest any weakness of character, bad tendencies or cravings. His emotional and physical make-up is outstanding.
During his period of service at the Auschwitz concentration camp, he applied his practical and theoretical knowledge to combating severe epidemics. With prudence and persistent energy, and often under the most difficult conditions, he completed every assigned task to the complete satisfaction of his superiors. He showed himself capable of handling any situation. In addition, he used what little free time he had to ardently further his education as an anthropologist.
His tactful and modest deportment is that of a good soldier. Because of his demeanor, he is especially well liked by his comrades. He treats subordinates with absolute fairness and requisite severity, but is nevertheless exceptionally admired and liked.
In his behavior, work record and attitude, Dr. Mengele shows an absolutely solid and mature outlook on life. He is a Catholic. His speaking manner is spontaneous, uninhibited, convincing and lively.
Three more alleged holocaust survivors, two Jewish sisters and a German woman, all claiming to be victims of Dr. Mengele, are featured in a 1994 episode of The Phil Donahue Show featuring David Cole and his research partner Bradley Smith. Both men are well known historical revisionists who have seriously and credibly challenged the mainstream holocaust narrative and offer substantial evidence to support their theories and conclusions.
Prior to the Donahue show, Cole had produced a documentary film that was quite damaging to supporters of the homicidal gas chamber theory and which drew vicious verbal and physical attacks as well as death threats from the Jewish Defense League.
In his book, Republican Party Animal, David tells of some behind the scene events that the public wasn't privy to, including how Donahue refused to greet him prior to the show. He also tells how Donahue had planned to ambush the two revisionists by contrasting a video of David's investigation of the alleged homicidal gas chamber at Auschwitz with "the real" gas chamber in order to make fools of them both. This turned out to be a doomed effort that couldn't have failed more spectacularly when Donahue presented a clip of the "gas chamber" at Dachau (Dachau never had a homicidal gas chamber).
After returning from a commercial break and introducing my "debating partner" Dr. Michael Shermer (more on him shortly), Donahue announced that he was going to counter my footage with some clips of his own. "Let me show you this film," he solemnly told the audience. Smugly, he crowed, "I'll be curious to know what Mr. Cole feels about this." Donahue rolled his "gotcha" footage.
"Here is the gas chamber," Donahue proclaimed.
Of course, he was showing footage of the phony Dachau "gas chamber," the one that the Dachau museum itself admits was never used. Which led to this exchange:
Me: "They just showed the Dachau gas chamber in that footage. Is that gas chamber ever claimed to have killed people, or not?"
Donahue: "There"s a sign, there's a sign, at the, at Dachau, notifying tourists of that fact."
Me: "That it was not used to kill people."
Donahue (agreeing): "That it was not used."
Me (frustrated): "So why did you just show it in the clip?"
Donahue (looking nervously offstage at his staff): "Oh, I, I, I, I’m not at all sure that was Dachau."
Me (pointing at Donahue animatedly): "Wait a minute, no, wait a minute. You’re not sure that was Dachau? You show a clip on your show, and you’re not sure it was Dachau?"
As they go to commercial, you see Donahue rip off his mic and bolt up from his chair, pointing a finger at me. That’s when he called me "the antichrist."
A clip of Coles' documentary is shown on the Donahue show, though the significance of the evidence it contains is completely overlooked.
Video: The Phil Donahue Show of March 14, 1994, featuring Bradley Smith, David Cole and Michael Shermer
Much of the show focused on attacking the two revisionists rather than considering the compelling evidence and questions they presented. Most members of the audience, driven by decades of Hollywood and educational holocaust programming, a heard mentality, and devoid of critical thought, offer vigorous applause each time the two revisionists are belittled.
Dr. Michael Shermer, founder of Skeptic Magazine, was also on the guest panel of the Donahue Show. Shermer knowingly published false information about Cole which may have led to a brutal physical attack upon David in Culver City, California. Though Shermer is an exterminationist (one who believes homicidal gas chambers were used for mass extermination of the Jews), at least publicly, he did make some critically important admissions which were again ignored by both Donahue and the audience. The reason David walked off the show is explained in great detail in a speech he gave before the Institute for Historical Review in 1994.
Video: David Cole's IHR convention 1994
Also worth mentioning is that three of the alleged holocaust survivors on the show all claimed to have been experimented upon by Dr. Joseph Mengele. This cliche is virtually universal among alleged holocaust survivors who claim to have been at Auschwitz.
A German woman who called in to the show, and who also claimed to be a holocaust survivor, repeats several popular and well debunked cliches associated with the holocaust, including witnessing lampshades made from human skin and soap made from human fat. She also claimed to have witnessed people being sent to the gas chambers to be killed, stating "I saw it all".
David Cole made an earlier appearance in a 1992 episode of the Montel Williams Show along with Mark Weber, another well known Jewish revisionist and current director of the Institute for Historical Review. In contrast to the Donahue show, the debate here is focused a bit more on the evidence presented by the two revisionists and the time a lotted for both sides is divided more equally. The Montel Williams Show, which would later win an Emmy, was canceled in 2008 after Montel openly criticized the media for its failure to focus attention on U.S. military personal being killed in Iraq. The Phil Donahue Show would share a similar fate even though it was one of the top rated programs on the network.
During the show we meet more alleged holocaust survivors who again repeat the typical clichés, including one women who, like Edith Glick, claims to have been quartered near a homicidal gas chamber. Once again the evidence given by the exterminationists to counter that of the revisionists is largely reduced to insults and meaningless one-liners such as "this whole discussion is crazy" and "it's completely untrue":
Video: The Montel Williams Show featuring David Cole and Mark Weber, April 27, 1999
Returning to the Miami Herald article and Irene Zisblatt, we continue with three more alleged experiments preformed by Dr. Mengele upon this incredibly fortunate woman, one of which consisted of experimenting with methods to remove the identification tattoo that was given to prisoners of Auschwitz.
"Mengele injected chemicals into her eyes in an attempt to change their color and forced her to remain in a cold room for days. He injected viruses under Zisblatt's fingernail and surgically experimented on her to find a way to remove the numbers tattooed on her arm. Afterward, he ordered the nurse to administer a lethal injection to both girls, but the nurse worked for the underground and was able to free them, one of many miracles Zisblatt experienced ."
To begin, one might envy not only Zisblatt's formidable immune system capabilities, but also her ability to survive numerous gruesome tortures at the hands of Dr. Mengele without ever having suffered any apparent physical defects. Regarding the more interesting tattoo removal feature, does it not seem odd that a camp doctor would be permitted to remove the only method by which a prisoner could be identified? Zisblatt does in fact conveniently lack this critical piece of physical evidence that could help authenticate at least part of her story. As troublesome as the missing tattoo is the fact that the identification number she claims was issued to her, 61397, was actually issued to Agnieszka Pastuszek, born Lutynia Dolna.
Was Zisblatt ever interned at Auschwitz?
There no results returned by the Auschwitz-Birkenau museum website for any of the names Zisblatt has used, including Chana Seigelstein, or just the family name of Seigelstein, or the alternate spelling, Siegelstein. Although the USHMM website does return a single result for Irene Siegelstein (note the 'i' and the 'e' are reversed), this Irene is not listed as ever having been a prisoner at Auschwitz:
Another oddity regarding Zisblatt's alleged tattoo removal is that seven to ten days of experimentation was required to develop a method to remove tattoos by Dr. Mengele in Auschwitz while Ilse Koch, over at Buchenwald, was apparently mass producing lampshades made from tattooed human skin, or so we are led to believe. One might wonder why Dr. Mengele did not have the foresight to consult with the physicians at Buchenwald rather than reinvent the wheel.
As far as managing to avoid a lethal injection because Mengeles' nurse "worked for the underground", i think i shall withhold comment on this fantasy, as well as the following quote from the Miami Herald article:
[...] although she had been given watery soup filled with chemicals to destroy her reproductive organs, she gave birth to a son and a daughter in the 1960s.
Zisblatt provides us with still more miracles in her video interviews. In the following segment she narrowly avoids being killed in the Auschwitz-Birkenau Krema III gas chamber because it was "too full" and therefore she became "stuck" in the door where she hangs on "for dear life", a detail which she altered in later accounts:
Video: HOLOHOAX - I was sent to the Gas Chamber but it was full!
Another problem with Zisblatt's account in the video above is that, had she been familiar with the building whose eaves she allegedly took refuge under, she might have excluded the part about hiding under them since this was simply not possible due to the height of the roof:
It may also be worth pondering why a mass-murdering SS guard would allow a defiant little 60 lb., four foot tall Jewish girl to interrupt his hectic extermination schedule rather than just shoot her and throw her aside.
After having avoided her appointment with death, Zisblatt tells us that she was then dragged out from under the eaves of the Krema III gas chamber and rescued from the Auschwitz concentration camp by a young Hungarian Jew whose name she cannot recall, even though she had met and talked with him previously. This extraordinarily brave young man was not only kind enough to give her his jacket to cover her naked body (and she does seem to wind up naked a lot), but he risked his own life to help her escape her appointment with the gas chamber by carrying her (apparently she was unable to walk on her own?) a considerable distance to the camp railway where he somehow managed to throw the 60 pound Zisblatt no less than 100 feet in distance over a 10 foot high barbed wire fence onto a train car that happened to be destined for another camp which, luckily for her, was not in the business of gassing Jews.
And thus Zisblatt managed to escape from the notorious Auschwitz "death camp", in broad daylight, without drawing the attention of the Germans. Overlooking the question as to why she would have chosen to remain on the train to the next camp, we might instead question how it is that she managed to gain entry in the new camp without proper documentation.
In this next clip, Zisblatt repeats the long debunked claim of lampshades made from human skin and how she narrowly avoided becoming one herself only because Ilse Koch, the "Bitch of Buchenwald" who wanted to make a lamp shade out of her, failed to show up for some reason in 1944. Apparently Zisblatt failed to realize that Ilse had been in a German prison since 1943 when she fabricated this facet of her story:
Video: HOLOCAUST - "Ilse Koch Wanted My Skin For Lampshades!"
In an article that appeared in the Gettysburg Times on 15 Jan., 1951, after the second trial of Ilse Koch we read:
Unfortunately for Irene Zisblatt and the rest of the advocates of the human skin lampshade nonsense, not a single lampshade made from human skin has ever been found and the lampshades which Ilse Koch left behind when she abandoned her Buchenwald home were found to have been made from goat skin, which is hardly surprising according to the Buchenwald Report where we are told that a nearby factory made leather products from animal skins. Following are a few quotes from General Lucius D. Clay, the interim military governor of the American Zone in Germany, after the conclusion of the first trial of Ilse Koch:
There was no convincing evidence that she had selected inmates for extermination in order to secure tattooed skins, or that she possessed any articles made of human skin.
[...]
"There was absolutely no evidence in the trial transcript, other than she was a rather loathsome creature, that would support the death sentence. I suppose I received more abuse for that than for anything else I did in Germany. Some reporter had called her the "Bitch of Buchenwald," had written that she had lamp shades made of human skin in her house. And that was introduced in court, where it was absolutely proven that the lamp shades were made out of goat skin ."
Later in a 1976 interview Clay stated:
We tried Ilse Koch ... She was sentenced to life imprisonment, and I commuted it to three [four] years. And our press really didn't like that. She had been destroyed by the fact that an enterprising reporter who first went into her house had given her the beautiful name, the "Bitch of Buchenwald," and he had found some white lampshades in there which he wrote up as being made out of human flesh.
Well, it turned out actually that it was goat flesh. But at the trial it was still human flesh. It was almost impossible for her to have gotten a fair trial.
... The Germans picked her up and gave her 12 years for her treatment of her own people. But it wasn't really a war crime in the strict sense of the word.
And those are the kinds of things that we had to deal with all the time.
In this final clip we witness Zisblatt making significant alterations to her story, one regarding prisoners committing suicide by willfully walking into an electrified fence and another regarding the death of her brother:
Video: SPIELBERG LAWSUIT .Irene Weisberg Zisblatt, Caught on Tape Lying About The holocaust
Returning once more to the Miami Herald article, we learn how Zisblatt and her friend Sabka, whom she knows only by her first name, and who is one of only a few people at Auschwitz she is able to attach a name to, managed to survive after they escaped while on a forced march to another camp:
In 1945, Irene and Sabka were part of a group of 5,000 prisoners forced to march in the cold. Every day, weakened prisoners dropped dead around her. After two months, they escaped. Exhausted and covered in lice, they walked through the forest and managed to stay alive by digging up food.
Surviving in the wilderness is not a trivial task, even if only for a few days under favorable conditions. To do so during a Polish winter would require not only warm clothing, food, water and shelter, but also at least a cursory knowledge of what food is safe to eat and how to obtain these necessities. I would think a Polish winter is probably not the best time for a couple of young, starving, lice covered girls to test their survival skills, assuming they had any, yet we are told that the girls, already exhausted from "two months" of walking, somehow managed to escape and survive in these harsh conditions, fortifying themselves by digging up food (in the possibly frozen ground) and knowing what was safe to eat and what was not. Although this formidable feat is not outside the bounds of possibility, i think it must be factored in with the rest of Zisblatt's claims and weighted accordingly.
It is also worth noting that Sabka, like Zisblatt, has no record of being imprisoned at Auschwitz according to the registries i have checked, including the Auschwitz-Birkenau Memorial Museum database where i searched for "Sabka" both as a first name and a family name.
Far more troubling than Zisblatt's and Sabka's whereabouts during during the Second World War is the fact that many of the malicious and false claims previously discussed were used as evidence in a court of law to convict the Nazi "war criminals" during the Nuremberg Tribunals, including the human soap fallacy which was carried over from the First World War.
