As the physical evidence for mass exterminations at Nazi camps is missing (see a review of Auschwitz and Treblinka), much credence is placed on "holocaust survivors'" eye witness accounts. This is a mistaken trust: One of the world's most famous Holocaust survivors is the Austrian Jew, Simon Wiesenthal, who, after being interned at the Mauthausen concentration camp during the war, devoted his life to hunting ex-Nazis the world over. Wiesenthal also has an organization, devoted to Jewish interests and promoting the mass extermination propaganda, named after him.

Yet it is a little known fact that Wiesenthal's own personal Holocaust memoirs, entitled "KZ Mauthausen, Bild und Wort" (Concentration Camp Mauthausen - pictures and words) which was published in 1946, contains one of the most blatant forgeries of all Holocaust memoirs.

Wiesenthal illustrated his book with drawings which he allegedly did either while in Mauthausen or from memory thereafter, and one of the more famous pictures from his book is of three Jews, in their striped prisoner outfits, who had been shot at the stake by the Nazis.

      

WIESENTHAL'S DRAWING PLAGIARIZED FROM LIFE MAGAZINE

Although Wiesenthal alleged in his book that the drawing of the three shot Jews occurred in Mauthausen, the truth is that he plagiarized this picture from a series of photographs which appeared in the Life magazine of June 1945.

The series of photographs were of German soldiers, captured during the 'Battle of the Bulge" wearing American uniforms, and executed by firing squad as allowed by the Geneva Convention. Wiesenthal copied his picture of "three shot Jews" from a Life photo essay which showed three Germans being shot by Americans!

Below is the full set of pictures from the Life Magazine of June 1945, along with that magazine's cover. Note the three photographs on the third inside page reproduced below.

 

  

Eye Witness Accounts Collapse Under Judicial Scrutiny

One of the most famous such eye witnesses is one Rudolf Vrba, who in 1985 was an assistant professor at the Canadian University of British Columbia. Vrba's testimony has formed the basis of most, if not all, descriptions of the gas chambers of Auschwitz, as he was interned at that camp during the war.

However, in 1985, during a trial of a holocaust revisionist in Toronto, Vrba testified that his book, "I Cannot Forgive", which contained all his eyewitness accounts was "an artistic picture" and that he himself had in fact never witnessed any gassings. ("Book 'An Artistic Picture' : Survivor never saw actual gassing deaths", Toronto Star, January 24, 1985 )

Pushed to the point, Vrba admitted that he never witnessed anybody being gassed to death and his book about Auschwitz-Birkenau is only "an artistic picture...not a document for a court." (ibid). Vrba told the trial that his written and pictorial descriptions of the Auschwitz crematoria and gas chambers are based on "what I heard it might look like." He said that his 1944 drawings of the "Auschwitz camp layout were inexact." Vrba, who escaped the camp in Poland in 1944, insisted however he had made an accurate ("within 10%") estimates of 1,765,000 mass-murder victims up to that point.