(Guest Post)
There’s some debate online whether Gen Baugher is or isn’t a Holocaust denier. To recap for those who don’t know what I’m talking about, Generose Bogler Baugher is a California woman who takes a lot of photos. She’s visited a number of concentration camps and Holocaust related sites and her photos get sourced to a lot of other websites and on Wikipedia. Baugher formerly worked as an executive recruiter but she’s retired now and that gives her more time to run her Scrapbookpages.com site.
The name Scrapbookpages is innocuous and Gen Baugher’s initial descriptions seem impartial at first glance. When she takes issue with technical details, she does it in an unemotional voice. The juicier stuff appears in her blog which she runs as Further Glory where Holocaust deniers get quoted and in the comments she makes it clearer what she’s about.
Unlike most Holocaust deniers, Gen Baugher doesn’t openly present herself as a skeptic. Baugher poses as a source of information, including photos and her own commentary, where the denial comes in. Baugher doesn’t take a flat “Holocaust never happened” approach, instead she chips away at detail after detail, focusing on whether Jews were actually being killed as part of an extermination program or were just there as a compulsory labor force. Mixed in is a lot of commiseration about the plight of German civilians.
Is Gen Baugher a bigot? That’s harder to say. Holocaust denial attracts two types, bigots and kooks. There’s the David Duke types and the David Icke types. People who make a habit of being amateur skeptics and subscribing to conspiracy theories treat Holocaust denial as one more conspiracy by the man to pull the wool over their eyes.
Gen Baugher’s alternative health interests are an argument for kookery and she’s controversial in those circles too. But she also has a background in internet trolling on the alt.fan.oj-simpson newsgroup for the predictable reason and used racial slurs there and she was being accused of denying the Holocaust then back in 1996. Baugher’s MO then was the same. A detached impersonal voice that lent authority to her dubious claims cherry picked from even more dubious sources. And then the mask comes off.
Baugher also participated on alt.politics.nationalism.white and alt.politics.white-power. Most of it is gone now so there’s no way to know what Gen Baugher commented on “How to spot a Jew”. But what does survive has that same cagily creepy odor to it. There’s some German nationalism, some thinly disguised racism and anti-semitism. After her obsession with the Simpson case and a few other sensational crime cases, her focus has stayed with the Holocaust. Who knows why.
Baugher is German-American, but her parents were Americans, not Nazis, though their sympathies during the war are unknown, and they identified with their German heritage. She doesn’t like most minorities, is ill and has a lot of time on her hands. She might have gone into JFK conspiracy theories, instead she plays with Holocaust denial.
That’s her business, and it’s a free country, but the way she goes about it is dishonest. Someone like Toben is open about what he is but Baugher puts on a reasonable front that makes it easier to fly under the radar and embed her agenda. She’s a bigot and a kook, but her initial approach is innocuous enough that many sites don’t notice and treat her content as legitimate.
The internet is full of things, good and bad. The only real crime is misrepresenting your agenda. Gen Baugher is a denier pretending to be an amateur period historian.
This has been a Guest Post
Samurai Mohel 
excellent
I Googled her name and the first page that came up had a photo of her visiting the Eagle’s Nest in Germany, Hitler’s 50th birthday present from some other a****le. Does she have any credibility anyway? Is she anyone that is taken seriously by others? The “mainstream” acceptability of denying the Shoah that one sees in the Middle East is probably a bigger concern than when it takes place here. Here it’s usually a bunch of underachieving bong users who aren’t well-informed enough to have any perspective and blame Jews for their own failures. You are right in pointing out that she’s an idiot.
Oh …and where you been for a year?
Thank you for posting this. At first I was impressed with scrapbookpages and then I started to read the associated blog. That’s when I realized what it was really all about and I was appalled.
Thank you for this exposé. In a month students in my Holocaust class sift through the nonsensical world of Holocaust denial and I am glad your thorough assessment of this head case is out there for them to read.
I agree with your assessment of Gen Baugher. When I found the site I thought it would be a great resource for all factual things about the Holocaust, but when reading her comments, I became aware of the doubts she throws in about historical events when she expresses her opinions.
Here’s an example: http://www.eliewieseltattoo.com/tag/scrapbookpages-blog/
This is a very important post, because the author of the blog has put together one of the most insidious websites I’ve ever seen. This post confirms my suspicions, and it’s critical that people know that this sort of seemingly authoritative material is very well-disguised Holocaust denial.
I still think the kinds of people that would take the time to read the blog are probably intelligent enough to ask questions like:
– what sort of person is so obsessed by the Holocaust that she has an entire blog about it, yet tosses in little doubts here and there?
– what kind of person calls her blog about the Holocaust “Further Glory?”
Still, it’s pretty appalling stuff.
This blog appeared as a result on a Google search for “what does zyklon b feel like” — I had never considered those awful moments in the gas chamber and wanted to know more about how it might have felt, and how long the victims would have suffered.
The first hint I had about the real agenda of the site was where she starts questioning why the scratches in the gas chambers that Jews had made on the walls weren’t there when she visited the camp. A second hint was when she commented that she doubted it had been the Germans who destroyed the crematoria, and felt it must have been the Russians. A very odd thing to cast doubt upon. A third hint came in a post complaining about Israel making Holocaust denial a crime, no matter where the denial took place.
There’s a lot more: questions about the number of people killed at Auschwitz, and the nail in her coffin — a post called “Controversial photo from the Warsaw Ghetto” where she says: “If the photo was taken in the Warsaw Ghetto and if Nussbaum is the boy in the photo and he wasn’t killed, then this means that the Nazis had no “common plan” to commit the war crime of genocide of the Jews. If Nussbaum is the boy in the photo, regardless of where it was taken, and he survived, then there was no “common plan” to kill all the Jews.”
A special place in hell is reserved for people like the author of this nasty bit of Holocaust denial.
She is a denier. She plainly admits that she wasn’t and then has a change of … “heart”.
See the comment here: https://furtherglory.wordpress.com/2016/01/08/elie-wiesel-admits-that-he-has-no-concentration-camp-tattoo/#comment-55057
“I started my website in 1998 before I was a Holocaust denier. … Now that I am no longer a Holocaust believer, I have not changed every single word on my website.”
[…] worse, I discovered Further Glory is the sister site to Scrapbook Pages, a historical website I’ve used as a resource a number of times over the years. There were a […]
This is truly sad to hear. The other day I was having an argument with a holocaust denier and he quoted a mainstream historian having said “nobody was gassed in the Reich”. This is of course a very crude paraphrase, as the author of the quote (Martin Broszat) once said that most of the jewish extermination took place in the East, in Poland, rather than in the Reich.
In any case, I wanted to prove him wrong by showing him photos of the intact (and not post-war rebuilt) gas chamber of Mauthausen in Austria (which I consider to have been part of the Reich during WW2) where more than a thousand people were gassed.
I found the scrapbookpages blog, and a detailed walkthrough of the entire complex, especially the gas chamber, morgue room, autopsy table, crematory ovens and so on, all nicely photographed and with orientation descriptions as well (i.e. “it is to the left of; behind the hallway that leads to, etc.)
Why can’t mainstream holocaust historians provide sites like these? On their sites they tend to only focus on the victims, the psychological aspects, the survivor stories and so on, leaving the field to denier filth to make “guided tours” over the actual premises themselves….ugh.
[…] I’ll be sharing more details about how I do my historical research on the Shoah in Friday’s post, such as reference books and how to get the best results with the Visual History Archive. It also bears reiterating, stay far away from Scrapbookpages! It’s a well-disguised Holocaust denial site. […]