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Subject: Letter to Michael Shermer
Date: Wed, 15 Mar 2000 10:34:15 +0200
Dr. Michael Shermer Dear Dr. Shermer, I received a copy of the questions which you sent via Russ Granata*s e-mail of 12 March to Germar Rudolf. Since I have been intending to write to for some time, this seems an appropriate occasion to do so. 1. Regarding the video of you debating with Mark Weber, allow me to say I thoroughly agree with one point which you made. This was about *the baggage* which holocaust revisionists have to bear, namely their tendency to associate with political extremists, even with unabashed admirers of Adolf Hitler. This is unfortunate since it makes it difficult for establishment historians to take the revisionists seriously. 2. I met you personally at the IHR-organized meeting held during the evening of the 28th of March 1998 when I gave a talk on Germar Rudolf (mentioned in passing in Skeptic volume 6, no.1, 1998). During the interval you expressed scepticism about the blue patches on a wall of a Birkenau delousing chamber shown on a slide, doubting whether the blue was really due to cyanide. My response was simple and direct: *Why don*t you conduct your own experiments to ascertain whether this is the case or not - or engage competent scientists to investigate the whole issue?* Surely such a basic challenge could have been mentioned in your Skeptic article. After all, we have been waiting for over half a century for an internationally sponsored forensic examination of the *Auschwitz gas chambers*! 3. As with any experiment, the results of Germar Rudolf must be reproducible - which I believe they are. Only when they have been confirmed by other specialists in the field will the scientific community regard them as indisputable *facts*. A sine qua non for this to happen is for Rudolf*s methodology be taken seriously and discussed thoroughly. If, in the main, his approach conforms to standard procedure, then I can see no reason why his findings (much like those of pioneer Fred Leuchter) will not prevail. It is for this reason that I feel my challenge to you is important. 4. I attach a letter written in 1996 to members of the Jan Sehn Forensic Institute in Krakow, Poland. Like yourself, these gentlemen also expressed reservations about the *blue dye*, as they called it. So, on their own admission, they deliberately chose a chemical method which cannot pick up stable compounds of cyanide such as Prussian Blue. In a letter to them, Rudolf argued against this procedure - as he has in published articles -, but he never received a reply. The reason for sending my letter to you is in order to apply the following principle: If a thousand people challenge the Jan Sehn Institute*s methodology, and none of them receive a reply, this is more significant than if only one person writes an unanswered letter. 5. Paul Grubach of 1228 Haverston Road Lyndhurst, OH 44124 wrote a more-or-less open letter to you dated December 22, 1999. In it he takes you to task for what you wrote in Why People Believe Weird Things. Although many of Grubach's criticisms appear to be valid, I do believe that you sincerely wish to engage the revisionists in serious and open debate. If you are not happy with Rudolf*s response to you, why not take it further? Yours sincerely, C. Zaverdinos South Africa 3209 Copies sent to G Rudolf, M Weber, R Granata |