RIP Holocaust news section

 For many years, we could subscribe to news feeds from Google, which we defined and customized as a nice addition to these websites. Unfortunately, these feeds are no longer available, so we had to delete them.

Sorry for any inconvenience.

The new CODOH Foundation

 CODOH — Committee for Open Debate on the Holocaust — was one of the many brain-children of the late Bradley Smith. In the years since his death, the CODOH Foundation fell into disrepair, to the point where it was no longer able to serve the functions for which it had been imagined.

Last week, friends and supporters of Bradley Smith created a new version: The CODOH Charitable Foundation Trust or 2024.

The CODOH Charitable Foundation Trust of 2024 is registered with the IRS as a 501(c)(3) corporation, which means that donations to it are both tax-deductible and support CODOH activities.

Contributors are welcome to send their support to CODOH at PO Box 2355, Healdsburg, CA 95448.

For full disclosure, we are on the board of The CODOH Charitable Foundation Trust of 2024, but neither take nor receive any funds from it.

Holocaust Encyclopedia

 We started adding a mirror of the Holocaust Encyclopedia site here, and wound up spending four weeks rewriting the code and shuffling everything around. It is an amazing resource, though, and it is worth the effort.

You can see our version here.

Recent improvements

The transition from Movable Type to WordPress was not as bad as it could have been, but the devil is in the details. It was the details that took awhile to get ironed out.

For the longest time, the Clippings section (formerly generated by Movable Type — now by WordPress) was in a sub-directory of the main site. This was unwieldy from the beginning, and every attempt to streamline various aspects failed to provide a satisfactory outcome.

Eventually, we had to sacrifice the site-wide search that this arrangement afforded visitors, moving the Clippings section off to its own domain (.org instead of .com). This in turn required a bunch of URL jiggling, but now that it is done has become a much better way of managing all the assets ... both static and dynamic.

Of course, one of the main issues with any WordPress site is the speed at which the server dishes out pages to visitors. Yeah, we tried all the big-name caching programs — but without success (and they can be a pain just to set up). We tried paying more for hosting, but saw no improvement in terms of site speed.

Finally, we gave Digital Ocean a shot. Whoa! Talk about speed, and when was the last time the least expensive option turned out to be clearly superior to the much more expensive alternatives? The Clippings section seems to load more quickly off of Digital Ocean than any of our sites on WP Engine, and WP Engine is a great managed WordPress hosting system.

We then embellished WordPress with Autoptimize, Cloudflare, Jetpack, and Simple Cache, and for a couple bucks a month we have a fast, reliable, secure WordPress installation. Saints be praised!

Recently we upgraded to HTTPS secure connections thanks to Let’s Encrypt and Server Pilot. We might have lost a couple milliseconds in response time to HTTPS, but nothing made-man is without compromise, and security is better than wishful thinking, right?

On the static side, we have revamped the war crimes trials documentation extensively. There is more work to be done there, but it is already much more useable than it was.

We also added a lot of material that was generated by the late William Lindsey. His headlines from The New York Times are a great way of stepping back into that time period.

There are also a couple of new videos, including two by Mark Dice.

We have moved a few files to normalize the internal structure of the site, meaning visitors from search engines may wind up in a dead end once in awhile, but the pages are all still there. With the site structure normalized, we were better able to implement breadcrumb navigation.

Finally, we have even found the time to add a few important items to the Clippings section — some old and some new.

Onward and upward!

The big switch ...

... from Movable Type to WordPress.

The spine of the Holocaust Historiography Project site consists of "static" HTML files, which are maintained by hand.

However, there is also the large and growing "Clippings" section, which until today was handled by Movable Type. Movable Type is a "blogging" platform that -- when set up correctly -- combines the best of a dynamic site with the best of a static site.

Unfortunately, a couple of years ago Movable Type discontinued its free version, and for a modest site such as ours the price of admission to the paid version was out of the question.

This lack of a free ("community") version of Movable Type left us high and dry. Without a continuing stream of updates, we were at risk of security holes in the older version we were using. However, WordPress at that time did not accept entry dates prior to 1970, due to its reliance on the UNIX date scheme.

As luck would have it, though, the current version of WordPress contains a built-in work-around for the UNIX date limitation. This meant that, with a bit of work converting items from Movable Type to WordPress, we could finally transition to a modern blogging platform.

There are still some rough edges, but most of the content is still there. Now we just have to fix the broken links, massage the formatting, and generally integrate the new Clippings section with the old static pages.

Video section now done

Each of the pages / files in the Video section should now be updated with the new format.

Also, videos are no longer in Flash format, in favor of MP4 files. With the newly implemented JW Player, this should allow any visitor to view the video files on any device. Verified to work on desktop Macintoshes running OS X, as well as iPhone and iPad. If you have a problem viewing the videos, let me know.

Still under construction

Yep, just like the folks doing the website for healthcare.gov, we've had plenty of time to work on everything, and yet there are still a lot of rough edges. Maybe if we'd had a $600+ million budget, we'd be almost done.

It's taking so long that Bootstrap 3 is taking the place of Bootstrap 2. Video is being converted over to JW Player, which is not only easy to use but provides responsive video sizes, the perfect complement to Bootstrap's responsive features.

Meanwhile, as we're slogging along in the trenches just to get the old stuff to look better (forget about new stuff ... with the possible exception of Mark Dice's great video on the Holocaust celebration petition), Bradley Smith over at CODOH is celebrating the publication of the 200th edition of his Smith's Report. Wow.

Construction zone

Done a bunch of work the last couple of days cleaning up stuff that probably no one else cares about, doing a bit of reformatting, etc. The long-term goal is to migrate to HTML5 and Twitter Bootstrap as a framework, but with thousands and thousands of files, it's a tough slog. The most obvious changes along these lines are the sans-serif typeface, new table formatting, new formatting for quotes, cool gray gradients on the jump menus, etc.

Speaking of lots of files, the entries from the Iran Holocaust cartoon contest are all now on one page, rather than being spread out over a couple dozen. There are still changes to be made, but they're relatively minor, and in the meantime access to the cartoons themselves is much improved.

Another thing that's (mostly) fixed now is our version of Richard Harwood's Did Six Million Really Die? Somewhere along the line, it got pretty badly mangled, but all the missing text is now back, along with a new piece at the end about Harwood himself that apparently never made it to the site in the first place. Still have to designate pages and paginate it so it's not all in one file. See Der Giftpilz for an example of the direction we're taking.

Viewer mail

Over the years we've received an interesting assortment of e-mail messages, so why not put them online? That's just what we've done. You can read the results here. (Warning: Some of these messages are R rated for bad language.) Along the way, we made some other site updates that should help to keep the site running smoothly for the foreseeable future.

Sarah Silverman on the Holocaust

We've posted a video of Jewish comedienne Sarah Silverman's unusual take on the Holocaust.

New library section

Instead of a listing of books in our collection, we've now got a dump from the software we use to keep track of our books. The link to the new section is in the same location as our dry, old listing, but in case you haven't been there recently, you can find it here.

Upcoming site changes

Over the next month, we're going to be making some big behind-the-scenes changes to the site. Although we're retaining all the content we have now, as well as the "look and feel," you may run into some dead ends and bad links. Please bear with us through this transition. Thanks.

Send us your contest entries

The deadline is approaching for the 5th Annual David McCalden Most Macabre Halloween Holocaust Tale Challenge. Send in your entries ASAP. We already have some great submissions ... why not send yours today?

Video archive updated

After YouTube pulled the plug on the video series, One Third of the Holocaust, our video archive page has not worthy of its name. Now, we have a new video archive, with each of the three videos from One Third of the Holocaust: One Third of the Holocaust, Buchenwald, and Nazi Shrunken Heads.

See our video mirror here.

Zundel sentenced to five years

A court in Mannheim, Germany today sentenced Holocaust revisionist Ernst Zundel to five years in prison on 14 counts of thought crimes. Zundel has already been in custody for more than two years, first in the U.S., then in Canada, and -- since March 2005 -- in Germany. As in the U.S. and Canada, the German judge sentenced Zundel on the pretext that he is a threat to national and international security. In other words, the security of every nation on the planet is based on a hoax; revelations about this hoax through freedom of speech and thought will destroy that security and presumably lead to bloodshed and destruction of the world as we know it.

If this is true, how safe can any of us be? Each of us walks a thin line: On one hand, we too might be adjudged to be a threat to international security and jailed. On the other hand, our security is guaranteed only by continued lies -- any truth might result in our destruction.

News reports about the Tehran Conference

Les Revues Revisionnistes (www.revurevi.net) has posted an Adobe PDF file containing news reports of the revisionist conference in Tehran. The file contains copies of printed accounts in five languages, including English.

Letters to the Webmaster: 'You are to be ashamed for twisting the facts'

My name is Eva Mozes Kor, the subject of your ridicule. How sad that you are a sick mined individual, as is your group to twist the facts. I was injected with 15 injection a week, I was between life and death, but I willed myself to survive. When I didn't die Miriam was taken back to the lab injected with something to stop the growth of her kidneys. After the war she always had kidney infections, by 1987 her kidneys failed, I donated my left kidney, a few years lated she developed cancer of the bladder that killed her in 1993. Her Kidney problems started because of the Auschwitz experiments.

I wonder what kind of twisted mind, and twisted agenda would create an e-mail like your's?

Since you don't believe that what happened to us happened, I wish your whole family to end up in Auschwitz like mine, and your brother and sister have the same kidney problems like mine did.

Even though I wish you my destiny, I FORGIVE YOU, because you don't know what you are talking about.

Eva Mozes Kor

Newly-released document supports revisionist position

A newly-released document from J.A. Topf & Söhne supports the revisionist position that the morgues in the Birkenau crematories were not Nazi gas chambers. The existence of the document, dated February 1943, has long been known, but only now is it being made available to researchers. The full details can be found on the CODOH site.

Letters to the Webmaster: 'holacost details'

Dear Sir

My wifes great uncle was one of the soldiers that liberated bergen belsen and his photographs of the many thousands of dead bodies have been on show as part of the official photographs of the attrocities committed there

I am pleased to tell you that he always admitted that after finding the bodies and getting over the shock they collected together all the SS and local nazi soldiers and had some fun with them

For the SS they used to shoot them in the gut and lay bets on how long they could scream. If they went quite they would cover some or all of them in petrol a set them a light. They then had further fun seeing how far these human torches could run. sometimes they would set fire t o a number of men if they wanted to get a good display going.

For the nazi soldiers they had them did a large hole and climb in after which they covered them using a buldozer. It took several hours for the mound to stop crying. During this time they sat round eating and laughing

My wifes uncle only regret was that the army would not send over more prisoners for him to dispose of

I hope this helps you relise that your publication is utter rubbish and am pleased to say why not to many from belson were ever tried for criimes they committed

Tom James
tominbrack@yahoo.co.uk

Irving released from prison

Vienna's highest court has ruled that controversial British author David Irving can be released from jail. The court granted the historian's appeal against his three-year sentence and ruled that he could serve out the remainder of his term on probation. The court rejected calls by the prosecution that his sentence be increased. Instead it reduced his sentence from three to two years, with one of those years to be served on probation. As he has been in jail since his arrest in November 2005, the ruling means he can be released from prison immediately.