From holman@elo.helsinki.fi Tue Jan 28 17:43:27 PST 1997
Article: 94897 of alt.revisionism
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From: holman@elo.helsinki.fi (Eugene Holman)
Newsgroups: alt.revisionism,alt.politics.white-power,alt.politics.nationalism.white
Subject: Clemens August von Galen (was Re: The Exact Evididence, Please
Date: 27 Jan 1997 19:27:06 GMT
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In article ,
holman@elo.helsinki.fi (Eugene Holman) wrote:

> In article <5c8nhb$7h2@orion.cybercom.net>, amatthews@cybercom.net (Allan
> Matthews) wrote:
> 
> > >
> > >        You don't get do you? He's the one who seems to be asking
> > >questions he has answers to. Now he's involved in actually answering
> > >his own questions in a series of announcements, offering absolutely no
> > >proof to verify anything he is saying. We can wait to see what he has
> > >to say. 
> > >

Disclaimer and statement of purpose:
  I have no claim to being an expert on German history. 
  As a teenager I attended the Bronx High School of Science, more than 95%
of the students at which were Jewish (I am not Jewish myself), in New York
City between the years 1958 and 1962. Many of my classmates were of German
or eastern European Jewish background who, born mostly between 1944 and
1946, had lost virtually all of their relatives in the Holocaust. Several
were born in displaced persons camps and one was even born in the Warsaw
Ghetto, and sent with his mother to Auschwitz, had miraculously escaped
death there.
  I majored in German language and literature at Cornell University, and
have spent a total of a year in Germany, both working (for Lufthansa at
the Rhein-main airport during the summer of 1964) and doing research in
linguistics at Georg-August University, Göttingen from February to August,
1966. I have visited Germany on several occasions as a tourist and in
professional capacities. I have also visited and/or worked in Poland, the
former USSR, Estonia, the former Czechoslovakia, Lithuania, and Ukraine,
and when in these countries have made it a point to visit such
Holocaust-related sites as the Warsaw Ghetto, Dachau, Auschwitz, Lidice,
Babi-Yar, and the Vilnius Ghetto.
  I have had occasion to speak with numerous individuals who were interred
at German-run destruction camps, I have seen tattooed arms and war-ravaged
bodies. I have witnessed the incomparable horror of the destroyed souls of
people who, unable to forget these traumatic events, curse their fate that
they were doomed to carry memories of them around in their heads for the
rest of their lives rather than perish.
  I do not approach this discussion frivolously. I consider Holocaust
denial to be the ultimate obscenity, and I will make every contribution to
a rational discussion that I can to support my confiction that the
Holocaust took place in approximately the same form mainstream historians
claim it to have had. I do this out of respect for my former schoolmates
and teachers who never know what it was like to have grandparents, aunts,
or uncles, and the first years of whose lives were unadulterated hell.
  
  I claim and intend to verify the following beyond reasonable doubt: The
Holocaust took place in the form and within the timespan I have defined in
another thread. Proof of its existence can be found by referring to
documents and other materials which were printed and widely circulated
throughout the Nazi period, and which can also serve as proof that a
considerable part of the German public was fully aware of what was taking
place.

  I will begin by making reference to a crucial but often overlooked
figure in Nazi Germany: Bishop, later Cardinal, Clemens August von Galen
(1878-1946).

Background: The Nazis had carried out numerous experiments aimed at the
mass extermination of the elderly, the feeble-minded, and retarded
children. They practiced such euthanasia using a variety of methods,
including poison gas, lethal injections, and 'benign neglect' (= denying
food and care) between the onset of a state of war in September 1939 and
the summer of 1941. Estimates as to the number of people who perished as a
result of these measures range from 70,000 to 100,000 (see Robert PROCTOR,
1988, *Racial Hygiene medicine under the Nazis*, Harvard University Press,
and the primary sources mentioned therein). 
  There was no public announcement of such a policy, but the number of
people who perished as a result was large enough to generate unrest among
the general population as to what was going on.

  One figure who had access to inside information (being a Catholic
priest, he had to listen to the confessions of health workers who were
involved in carrying out euthanasia), was Clemens August von Galen, bishop
of Münster in Westphalia. In three sermons delivered during July and
August of 1941 and widely circulated thereafter, Clemens graphically
depicted what was going on in insane asylums, hospitals, and homes for the
elderly. The original German texts of the sermons are in the archives at
the University of Notre Dame as documents no. 1941/0713, 1941/0720,
1941/0803). These sermons caused enough of a controversy that the killing
of the unproductive and elderly was stopped for a while, even while the
Nazis made secret plans to silence the bishop by liquidating him. 

  Documents pertaining to Clemens von Galen have been collected and
published by H. Portmann in *Dokumente um den Bischof von Münster*, 1948.
The German text of the sermons, as well as an account of their
publication, circulation, and short and longer-term impact within Nazi
German society is given in Heinrich PORTMANN 1957, *Kardinal von Galen:
mit einem Anhang: Die drei weltberühmten Predigten [Cardinal von Galen:
with an appendix: The three world-renowned sermons]. 368 pgs. Münster. The
role played by the Catholic Church as a force opposed to the general
principles of the deliberate killing of human beings considered
unproductive or undesirable which came to characterize Nazi society more
and more as the war progressed may be found in Heinz HÜRTEN 1985,
*Selbstbehauptung und Widerstand der Katholischen Kirche. Der Widerstand
gegen den National-Sozialismus [Self-assertion and the resistance of the
Catholic Church. The reisistance of gainst National Socialism]*. Piper,
Munich.  

 These sermons, comments about which can be found in the German press of
the time, make it abundantly clear that a considerable segment of the
German public was aware as early as the late summer of 1941 that the
systematic, industrially organized killing of specific strata of the
German population was being carried out as a part of national policy.

Regards,
Eugene Holman

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