I may for once adopt the wrong tone, don’t I?
Well, if someone is asked to write a scholarly thesis in order to obtain a master’s degree, one may expect from him that his thesis meets scholarly standards, correct?
Benjamin Schager
For this very purpose, Benjamin Schager submitted a master thesis in history in 2011 at the University of Vienna, Austria. Since the topic is not historical in nature but purely political-polemical – which results already from the title: “Holocaustleugnung in Österreich. Die Leugner und ihr Umfeld. Eine Analyse” (Holocaust denial in Austria: The deniers and their context. An analysis) – I didn’t even want to deal more thoroughly with this pamphlet. But just at the moment when I clicked the link in an email which conveyed to me the news of this thesis’s existence, my wife stood behind me and stated, well, it is to be expected that my name is mentioned in it. So I searched the PDF file swiftly for my name, et voilà (p. 50):
In the tradition of Fred Leuchter and Germar Rudolf, Lüftl’s „expert report“ focused on the technical feasibility of the mass murder of the European Jews. His abstruse claims have already been refuted beyond doubt by Josef Bailer.212
Cover page of Benjamin Schager’s master thesis
His footnote 212 refers to: “Josef Bailer, Die ‘Revisionisten’ und die Chemie [The revisionists and chemistry], in: Brigitte Bailer-Galanda / Wolfgang Benz / Wolfgang Neugebauer (Hg.), Die Auschitzleugner [sic; The Auschwitz deniers], Wien 1996, S. 131-133”. In his footnote 232 I read furthermore (p. 57):
The American Holocaust denier Fred Leuchter published three pseudo-scientific expert reports about Auschwitz, Mauthausen and Hartheim. The German Holocaust denier Germar Rudolf published a „chemical expert report“ about Auschwitz. The Austrian Walter Lüftl denied the Holocaust with the „Lüftl-Report.“ All claims by the Holocaust deniers were refuted in detail, see Jean-Claude Pressac, Die Krematorien von Auschwitz. Die Technik des Massenmordes [The crematories of Auschwitz. The Technique of the mass murder], München 1994; Günter Morsch / Bertrand Perz, Neue Studien zu Massentötungen durch Giftgas [New studies on mass killings with poison gas], Berlin 2011; Josef Bailer, Die „Revisionisten“ und die Chemie [The “revisionist” and chemistry], in: Brigitte Bailer-Galanda / Wolfgang Benz / Wolfgang Neugebauer (Hg.), Die Auschwitzleugner [The Auschwitz deniers], Berlin 1996
On pages 80f. and 93 he repeats that once again slightly differently:
The Chemist Josef Bailer has dealt with Lüftl’s claims and has proved that none of Lüftl’s assumptions withstand scientific scrutiny.346 Apart from Lüftl’s dilettantish concoction, Bailer also dealt with the „expert reports“ by the Holocaus denier[s] Fred Leuchter and Germar Rudolf. […]
Apart from the usual „scientific“ claims about Zyklon-B, which are essentially based on Fred Leuchter and Germar Rudolf and which have all been refuted by Josef Bailer a long time ago […]
So far, so good. And what is wrong with that? Well, if Schager’s work is scholarly in nature, the expert reports by Leuchter, Rudolf and Lüftl mentioned by Schager should be in his bibliography. But they aren’t. Not even his footnotes have any source reference to them. Admitted, Schager’s master thesis is not about revisionist theories as such. But he continuously makes evaluative statements about the contents of these works and quotes other works that claim to have dealt with revisionist arguments. Schager therefore has to be measured against the scholarly standard that a reader must be able to verify the claims made by giving verifiable sources.
His repeated reference to Bailer’s alleged refutation of Leuchter, Rudolf and Lüftl turns into Schager’s doom, because Bailer’s contribution to the book quoted by Schager is based in a paper by Bailer which had been published two years prior to the publication of the first edition of my expert report (German edition). Hence already this – no longer available – first edition of my expert report of 1993 contains a refutation of Bailer’s outrageous nonsense, about which I elaborated even more in the roughly simultaneously published book Vorlesungen über Zeitgeschichte (Lectures on contemporary history. The English edition of that book, currently in its 2nd edition, has only a brief reference to this on p. 186). In the currently distributed German version of my expert report of 2001 I have extended this devastating critique against Dr. Bailer, who apparently suffers of autism (see here for the 2011 English edition with almost identical wording, pp. 254f.; or the 2003 edition as html), and in the 2005 book Auschwitz-Lügen [Auschwitz lies] I then stoked the fire even a little more for this “Dr.” (obviously a pseudo-scientific degree) (pp. 212-236; this is a revised text of my 1996 book Kardinalfragen zur Zeitgeschichte; Engl.: Cardinal questions about contemporary history).
That Schager really has not the slightest clue about revisionist literatur is highlighted by his bibliography. The most recent work in it from me is the anthology Grundlagen zur Zeitgeschichte (English: Dissecting the Holocaust), which was published in 1994 with me as the editor under the pen name Ernst Gauss and which is mentioned by Schager only in passing in a footnote (p. 56, while the author is apparently clueless that this is me). I mention only in passing here that in this very book I have refuted Dr. Bailer’s mental nonsense (p. 272, p. 365f. in the current 2003 English version). Hardly any trace can be found about the multitude of books written ever since by the “modern” revisionists. Although Schager mentions that during the past years Mattogno has published “a veritable deluge of new, pseudo-scientific studies,” he mentions only two books (p. 68): “Cf. Carlo Mattogno / Jürgen Graf, Treblinka. Vernichtungslager oder Durchgangslager?, Hastings 2002 [Engl.: Treblinka. Extermination Camp or Transit Camp?]; vgl. Auschwitz. Die erste Vergasung. Gerüchte und Wirklichkeit, Hastings 2007 [Engl.: Auschwitz: The First Gassing. Rumor and Reality]” – and that is supposed to be a deluge? What about Carlo’s books on Stutthof, Belzec, Majdanek, Chelmno and Sobibor as well as the six tomes on Auschwitz? This raises the question: on which moon has Schager written his thesis? On Triton, the Neptune moon 4.5 billion kilometers away from earthly realities? And anyway: how does Schager define science? Is it scientific not to quote the works of others or to denigrate them without any proof, as he does? That is pseudo-science!
Besides Bailer, Schager also quotes Pressac and van Pelt in order to refute our expert reports and other equally un-referenced arguments (the latter in footnotes 223, 233, 494, pp. 54, 58, 115, and in the text on pp. 67, 117). Holy mackerel! Pressac was utterly dismantled by us in the German language area already as early as 1995 (and even earlier in other languages), see Auschwitz: Nackte Fakten (Engl.: Auschwitz: Plain Facts). And the uncouth klutz van Pelt we have countered late, but all the more thoroughly with a two volume opus magnum by Carlo Mattogno.
Bertrand Perz
And now I’ll give you three guesses as to the individual who supervised Schager at the University of Vienna… Univ.-Doz. Dr. Bertrand Perz. Have your heard that name before? Well, this bloke has also received a massive broadside from Carlo for his unscientific, systematic ignoring of all facts and publications which run counter to his views: Schiffbruch – Vom Untergang der Holocaust-Orthodoxie. (An English translation is pending publication.)
You know the saying: The apple never falls far from the tree. Hence it cannot surprise that Schager parrots the mental incest of his academic mentor, and as a pseudo-intellectual lightweight subsequently exudes a comparable mental diarrhea.
Amen.
