Alexander Mayer responds on June 22, 1998 [updated on July 10, 1998]:Dear Mr.

Alexander
Mayer responds on June 22, 1998 [updated on
July 10, 1998]:

Dear Mr. Irving,

I HAVE BEEN a sort of a fan of yours since I read the relevant parts of Hitler’s
War almost two decades ago. Your recent moves toward
Holocaust/Auschwitz Revisionism have dampened my enthusiasm.
However, I always suspected that you genuinely believe what you are saying, and your letter to me tells me that you are an honest man.

I believe that I will accept your offer to post my materials, but I would prefer to “clean up” the text and to add some new materials before I will do that.
Besides, my views have changed in the meantime because I have moved in your direction.

For the record, I have a Master’s Degree in (European)
History, and, before retiring, I have taught as an Adjunct, and subsequently, Assistant Professor at community or county (i.e. two-year) colleges in the U.S., and, during one summer, at a university.

I have recently discovered some interesting materials which I would like to share with you. First of all, in early
1942, the Romanian Secret Service of Information captured
Ilya
Ehrenburg‘s message to the Jews of Poland and
Romania to prepare to engage in anti-Axis activities during the planned spring campaign/ offensive of the Red Army.
[See Gheorghe Buzatu, Romanii in Arhivele
Kremlinului (“The Romanians in the Archives of the
Kremlin”; Bucuresti: Univers

Enciclopedic, 1996), p. 247; also reproduced in another one of Buzatu’s books. The document cited is the S.S.I. (The Secret Service of
Information, i.e., the Romanian secret service) report from from January 22, 1942 (“The appeal addressed to the Jews from Romania and Poland”).

Not all Auschwitz trains went to Auschwitz In connection with the death camps, I would note that some point before reaching Auschwitz (and also Treblinka), the cars of the trains coming from countries such as France, Belgium, and the Netherlands were decoupled.

Some cars went to Auschwitz, and some went to other places in the East, including the German-administered
Ukraine and Transnistria.

According to a document from 1942, 26,200 French,
Belgian, and Dutch Jews were shipped to Transnistria up to some time in the summer (?) of 1942. Most Belgian Jews deported in 1942, allegedly to Auschwitz, apparently reached
Transnistria. Reports from 1943, indicate the arrival of
Jews from Theresienstadt to Transnistria.

These people had been sent to the “model ghetto” from Germany, Austria,
Slovakia, and perhaps Bohemia and Moravia (I do not remember the details, although I have the sources). The reports also indicate the sending of Bulgarian Jews to Transnistria (not all of them went to Treblinka) in 1943, as well as the deportation and execution of Polish Jews by the Germans in
Transnistria.

It has been documented by Christopher
Browning that the discussions between the Germans and the Hungarians also indicated that some high-ranking
Budapest officials were planning to send 100,000 or so Jews from Hungary to Transnistria in 1942. On August 8, 1942 a
German newspaper from Bucharest talked about 185,000
deportees to Transnistria. Romanian documents talk only about 110,033 or something like 125,000 who got there.

The documents concerning the planned deportations of most of the Jews of the parts of (southern) Transylvania (including Banat and Crisana) which were still under
Romanian rule after the Vienna Award of August 30, 1940
clearly show that these movements of population, which were planned for the latter part of 1942, had Transnistria, not the German death camps in Poland, as their destination.
[See the documents published by Dr Felicia (Steigman)
Carmelly (on Behalf of the Transnistria

Survivors
Association, Toronto) in Shattered! 50 Years of Silence:
History and Voices of the Tragedy in Romania and
Transnistria, (Scarborough, Ontario: Abbeyfield
Publishers, 1997), p. 102-107 (both photocopies of the negatives of the documents, and their translation into
English).

I also received the documents which Dr Carmelly or her association received, from an anonymous source. I believe that she is probably some sort of medical doctor; I do not think that she is a historian. The documents are, of course, not properly interpreted in the book. The correct interpretation is mine.

I have heard of a discussion between a by no means intelligent Jewish librarian whose parents had died in
Transnistria who was writing a book on the Holocaust, and who has connections at Yad Vashem. One always needs connections to really get access to documents in Israel. She said that 60,000 Jews were deported to Transnistria in 1942, and she was certainly not smart enough to come up with that on her own. When questioned, she was evasive.

Apparently, because of emotionalism, she had made the mistake of leaking.

Since the Romanians deported only something like 7,000
Jews to Transnistria in 1942, the rest had to come from elsewhere. I have a feeling that almost all the 47
Croatian-speaking Jews (or Jews of “Croatian” nationality, I forgot which one) counted in the 1992 census in Romania have been assumed to have been sent to Auschwitz. I could go on and on, and I would like to document my statements with sources and documents. I already have materials from
Romania, France, Russia, the U.S., etc.

I can provide you with more details, and can cite my sources.

Gheorghe Buzatu also shows that the documents in the archives of the Kremlin talk about the number of prisoners of war taken by the Soviet Union between June 22, 1941 and
September 2, 1945. According to the Soviet data, the Soviets captured 10,173 Jewish prisoners of war. See Buzatu, p. 20-21.

I think that this is an understatement because, for example, Finnish Jews were probably counted as Finns rather than as Jews, and because the number of Gypsies, 383, also seems unusually low. Many Gypsies were probably counted as
Romanians, Hungarians, etc., and a number of Jews might have been also counted as something else.

It is also reasonably clear that the numbers of prisoners who were counted is smaller than the numbers of missing-in-action, and excludes those who died on their way to the camps.

I, of course, believe that there were gas chambers at
Auschwitz, but the burning in open fires of numerous
Hungarian Jews during 1944 indicates that the gas chambers and crematoria at Auschwitz could not “handle” the job.
Moreover, I would like to look at the shipments of coal to
Auschwitz for the crematoria.

Many of the Jews allegedly gassed at Auschwitz were sent to the East, shot by the
Einsatzgruppen, or died in horrible conditions in ghettos (in one place in Transnistria, there was allegedly a 30%
mortality per day, undoubtedly an exaggeration). They have been undoubtedly counted among the dead twice. Some of them were sent to Siberia by the Soviets in 1944-1945.

Moreover, I suspect that a rather small proportion of the
Jews sent to Majdanek died in the gas chambers.
Majdanek was not a death camp, per se, but a work and transit camp. I am neither for the Leuchter
Report, nor against it, because there are so many imponderables, such as the effect of rain on the Zyklon B traces.

However, I have a feeling that the truth is
somewhere in the middle, and that the Holocaust
Revisionists/Deniers have made a mistake in focusing on
Auschwitz rather than on Majdanek.

If other people could document the sending of the Jews supposedly received in Auschwitz to areas other than
Transnistria, that research would be important, as well as painstaking. Perhaps other people could follow in my footsteps. However, this is hard work, and I am not surprised that it has not been done yet.

I would like to take the opportunity to make some comments to your letter below, as well as to note that I am of Jewish origin. I converted to Christianity after being in a Romanian Communist prison in 1962-1963. I was deported to
Transnistria as a Jew from Greater Bukovina in October 1941.
I have written an article on the fate of the deportees to
Transnistria.

Although I can not be labelled a “Holocaust Denier” or an
“anti-Semite”, I am not quite a fan of Israel, and I have received a threat by e-mail from a “Holocaust survivor” (probably affiliated with the J.D.L.) for my views.

Sincerely,

Alexander
Mayer

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