Deny This

The cretins who just had their little class reunion in Tehran to get together and deny the Holocaust will have a bit of trouble explaining all this away. The International Tracing Service, part of the International Red Cross is going to open its archives after more than 50 years. More details of the Nazi system of concentration camps, bordellos where women were forced to work as prostitutes and death camps are already emerging. And the picture is one of a massive death machine run with great enthusiasm and efficiency.

Holocaust historians are only now piecing together the scattered research in many languages to understand the vast scope of the camps, prisons and punishment centers that scarred German-ruled Europe, like a pox on the landscape stretching from Greece to Norway and eastward into Russia.

Collecting and analyzing fragmented reports, researchers at the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum say they have pinpointed some 20,000 places of detention and persecution — three times more than they estimated just six years ago.

And soon they will know much more.

They are about to have their first access to millions of documents locked away for a half century in the sprawling archive of the International Tracing Service, an arm of the International Committee of the Red Cross, in the central German resort town of Bad Arolsen.

The 11 countries governing the ITS have agreed to lift the ban on research that had been imposed to safeguard victims' privacy, though it still will take months until each country ratifies the decision and the doors open.

Recently, The Associated Press was allowed to view ITS documents on condition it did not publish the identities of individuals. Among the yellowed pages and pasted telegrams seen by AP were internal communications, secret orders, and "conduct reports" that determined whether inmates would be freed.

The "pyramid" ranged from death camps such as Auschwitz at the top, to secondary and tertiary detention centers. There were 500 brothels, where foreign women were put at the disposal of German officers, and more than 100 "child care facilities" where women in labor camps were forced to undergo abortions or had their newborns taken away and killed — usually by starvation — so the mothers could quickly return to work.

The earliest prisoners were communists, Social Democrats, Jehovah's Witnesses and other political opponents, as well as homosexuals and common criminals. The Final Solution, which ultimately would claim 6 million Jewish lives, had not yet begun.

But begin they did. There is an unbelievably large amount of very precise records. Not that I think the deniers will be at all troubled by any of that, they haven't been by any of the other proof. They just make up their own versions and pall around with madmen. This is the reason why "Never Again" must mean just that.