Once and For All

You wouldn't think that discovering the blueprints for Auschwitz would fill anyone with optimism. But that seems to be precisely the effect it had on the German newspaper Bild:

"The documents refute once and for all claims by those who deny the Holocaust even took place," it added.

About time, too!

The problem with Bild's argument -- one of them, anyway -- is that it implies that until now, Holocaust denial was comparatively respectable. It's only pathological now that we've found blueprints.

In reality, or what passes for it, Holocaust deniers have always been and will always be insane. If that sad event were conclusively disproved tomorrow, they'd still be crazy...just as Fred Phelps would be crazy even if God actually hated fags, and Joe McCarthy would be crazy even if the US State Department had actually been an outpost of the Kremlin.

That's a minor point, though. The more serious issue is that the blueprints do not, in fact, prove that the Holocaust happened. And once you've taken the radical step of denying the Holocaust, casting doubt on the authenticity of "genuine" blueprints that were "found" in an "apartment" is child's play: it's a simple matter of throwing a few scare quotes around. If anything, the fact that the Jews felt a need to foist these documents off on the public demonstrates that they're getting more desperate as more people catch on to the Myth of the Six Million. As such, it actually strengthens the denialists' case, as does pretty much everything else on God's green earth.

Unfortunately, this problem is likely to be exacerbated by the fact that the documents are old news:

Historian Robert Jan van Pelt, an expert on Auschwitz, said he had checked the "so-called 'new' material" on the Web site of Bild, a high-circulation daily, and found that "the drawings that are on their site are all old material, perfectly known" and published by himself and others in the 1990s....

Van Pelt expressed dismay that the Bild's claim of a new discovery had been picked up by newspapers around the world.

"Everyone is repeating the same nonsense, and the deniers are having great fun because it shows how people are gullible," he told JTA.

All of which just goes to show that those who remember the past are condemned to repeat it.