The Giant With Feet of Clay : Raul Hilberg and his Standard Work on the Holocaust

Rating:
Summary: disgusting
Review: I grew up with many Holocaust survivors and their children. I have been told as well as read that some prisoners were forced to see their naked loved ones on line to the gas chambers. And if you say gas wasn't used then why did the nazi's have so much
Zyklon-B gas available and why at the Nurenberg trails did some Nazi's go into much detail about the gas chambers and associated
ovens? It is this author, who has his feet made of clay. To show Hilberg may have not proven much in the form of a mathematical theorem
has no bearing on what happened at the death camps. What happened happened! And I am sure this "charming" author has an enormous amount of pleasure in arguing for the sake of arguing. He is a self-serving attention seeker who doesn't deserve any attention at all.

Rating:
Summary: The title is apt; the critique, devastating
Review: I have read this book carefully several times, as well as other works by this author (Graf) and his target (Hilberg). Graf's critique is enlightening and devastating: Raul Hilberg set out to write a history of HOW the Nazis killed people in gas chambers without stopping to think about WHETHER they did it. Hilberg is on solid ground for most of his work - the persecution and deportation of European Jewry - but fails at the crucial point, the gas chambers. He has no reliable witnesses to mass gassing, no documents, no evidence. He has never done research in the camps themselves, never examined the remains of the "gas chambers", never allowed himself to doubt their existence. He relies instead on hearsay, speculation, and a parade of transparently bogus "witnesses" like Philip Mueller and Kurt Gerstein. Graf is able to refute every one of Hilberg's "witnesses". I have taken the time to read many of their "eyewitness" accounts myself (including those cited by the first reviewer above), and they are as Graf says, totally unreliable when not demonstrably false. Interestingly, Hilberg's autobiography does not even MENTION Graf's work. He has never rebutted the critiques Graf raises! The Giant (Hilberg) does indeed stand on feet of clay (phony evidence).
I will briefly point out that Graf's tone is, in my opinion, needlessly personal and polemical at times. However, the book is a "must read" for anyone interested in the Holocaust controversy.

Rating:
Summary: Very bad action
Review: It's the most abject book I know about the subject

Rating:
Summary: Very bad action
Review: The manner of presentation is so objective that you will finish the book almost without realizing that it is perhaps the most effective indictment of how unkosher the Holocaust story is.

Rating:
Summary: Charming? Charming? You have got to be kidding me.......
Review: What in the name of god's good green earth is a "holocaust skeptic"? How is it that Raul Hilberg has "clay feet"? Because he writes about how eleven million people were exterminated in the death camps? Apparently this idiot ie Jurgen Graf believes that there was massive deportation--but no extermination. Maybe Treblinka, Sobibor and Blezec were what? Vacation lagers?

I don't care how "charming" your writing style is--If you think the death camps did not kill people with gas, you are not thinking...Lanzmann's Shoah features interviews with surviving guards from Treblinka, explaining how the gas chambers used an old tank engine to fill the rooms with carbon monoxide. Steiner's "Treblinka" describes how the death camps evolved, why the einsatzgruppen death squads did not work--a more impersonal, quicker means of execution was necessary. In "Architects of Annihilation," Aly and Heim describe how Goering after the "Night of Broken Glass" created an alternative, less disruptive means of removing Jews from German economic life--and then reducing the burden on social services by moving the Jews to "work camps." As these camps became too large, carbon monoxide gas was used, and then the more efficient zyclon-b gas.

This moron (again I mean Graf) is skeptical of eye-witness testimony. Really...How about "eye witnesses" like Rudolf Hoss, kommandant of Auschwitz? His autobiography ("Death Dealer") describes the running of the camps. Or how about Franz Stangl, head of Treblinka? In Sereny's book "Into the Darkness," is based on extensive interviews with him. How about Filip Muller in Eyewitness Auschwitz? He spent three years in the sonderkommandos. Muller describes how eastern europeans came to Auschwitz in such large numbers, the ovens could not burn the bodies fast enough. The SS had the prisoners dig large pits to burn the bodies, with brick "run off" gutters in the bottom. The gutters drained the melted fat from the bodies into cauldrens, where it was poured back on top of the burning bodies--to encourage the flames and save on fuel oil.

Primo Levi, Tadeusz Borowski ("This way for the Gas, Ladies and Gentlemen"), Sara Nomberg-Przuytyk ("Auschwitz: True Tales from a Grotesque Land"), Simon Wiesenthal, Richard Glazar ("Trap with a Green Fence")---You cannot dispute their stories. Even if you don't care for them, what about Adolf Eichmann? See "Eichmann Interrogated," where he denies complicity with deaths--but does keeps the trains running, moving masses of humanity.

I know I am wasting my time. Anyone who is interested in books denying the Shoah is not interested in anything I have to say. But I cannot let this pipsqueak call Hilberg "superficial" and have "clay feet" without saying anything--and I couldn't care less that Graf is very charming and I am not.

Rating:
Summary: The title is apt; the critique, devastating
Review: What in the name of god's good green earth is a "holocaust skeptic"? How is it that Raul Hilberg has "clay feet"? Because he writes about how eleven million people were exterminated in the death camps? Apparently this idiot ie Jurgen Graf believes that there was massive deportation--but no extermination. Maybe Treblinka, Sobibor and Blezec were what? Vacation lagers?

I don't care how "charming" your writing style is--If you think the death camps did not kill people with gas, you are not thinking...Lanzmann's Shoah features interviews with surviving guards from Treblinka, explaining how the gas chambers used an old tank engine to fill the rooms with carbon monoxide. Steiner's "Treblinka" describes how the death camps evolved, why the einsatzgruppen death squads did not work--a more impersonal, quicker means of execution was necessary. In "Architects of Annihilation," Aly and Heim describe how Goering after the "Night of Broken Glass" created an alternative, less disruptive means of removing Jews from German economic life--and then reducing the burden on social services by moving the Jews to "work camps." As these camps became too large, carbon monoxide gas was used, and then the more efficient zyclon-b gas.

This moron (again I mean Graf) is skeptical of eye-witness testimony. Really...How about "eye witnesses" like Rudolf Hoss, kommandant of Auschwitz? His autobiography ("Death Dealer") describes the running of the camps. Or how about Franz Stangl, head of Treblinka? In Sereny's book "Into the Darkness," is based on extensive interviews with him. How about Filip Muller in Eyewitness Auschwitz? He spent three years in the sonderkommandos. Muller describes how eastern europeans came to Auschwitz in such large numbers, the ovens could not burn the bodies fast enough. The SS had the prisoners dig large pits to burn the bodies, with brick "run off" gutters in the bottom. The gutters drained the melted fat from the bodies into cauldrens, where it was poured back on top of the burning bodies--to encourage the flames and save on fuel oil.

Primo Levi, Tadeusz Borowski ("This way for the Gas, Ladies and Gentlemen"), Sara Nomberg-Przuytyk ("Auschwitz: True Tales from a Grotesque Land"), Simon Wiesenthal, Richard Glazar ("Trap with a Green Fence")---You cannot dispute their stories. Even if you don't care for them, what about Adolf Eichmann? See "Eichmann Interrogated," where he denies complicity with deaths--but does keeps the trains running, moving masses of humanity.

I know I am wasting my time. Anyone who is interested in books denying the Shoah is not interested in anything I have to say. But I cannot let this pipsqueak call Hilberg "superficial" and have "clay feet" without saying anything--and I couldn't care less that Graf is very charming and I am not.