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Old June 14th, 2008 #60
Roberto Muehlenkamp
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Originally Posted by ps
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Originally Posted by Roberto Muehlenkamp
Wow, looks like someone realized that Gerdes is not doing well and decided to help him.
No it's simply because all of this has been already done before and there is no need to waste time on it.
Then why are you "wasting time" on it?

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Originally Posted by ps
I’m not impressed by what I’ve seen "here", especially your feeble attempts to discredit eyewitness testimony based on errors about measurements and other details (which eyewitnesses could well have observed or recollected mistakenly without this meaning that they lied) and with rather funny arguments (for instance, while drinking urine may dehydrate the body, do you expect someone dying of thirst to know that or care about that if he should know?), and your claim that "this individual found no mass graves and by WITNESS TESTIMONY concluded that they were now ashes" ("mass graves" in this context obviously means "pits full of stinking dead bodies", and you ignored the previously highlighted statement "as is to be concluded from the witness testimonies examined so far and from the results of the works carried out at the site", not to mention the description of abundant human remains found during the "works carried out at the site" earlier in the report). When I’m done here with Gerdes, I guess I’ll have some fun on that thread.

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Originally Posted by ps
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Why would they have been unable to dig pits this deep with their Menck excavators? Excavators like those were what was available in civil construction throughout the world at the time, and I figure that a tall building – especially a sky-scraper – needs a rather deep foundation.
This isn't true, even modern excavators of its class cannot do 7.5 meters even though they have double the horsepower.
http://www.vnnforum.com/showpost.php...&postcount=103
http://www.vnnforum.com/showpost.php...&postcount=112
Interesting, but what does horsepower have to do with how deep an excavator can dig? Horsepower influences the speed at which an excavator can dig and how much soil it can remove within a given time but not the depth it can reach, if you ask me. I also don’t see a point in comparing crawler excavators with cable-operated excavators, and your problem with the boom length is also difficult to understand. The fact is that cable-operated excavators like those shown in Kurt Franz's photographs were what construction had in the 1940s, so if they were not able to dig pit 7.5 meters deep and as long and wide as the pits at Treblinka are reported to have been, one wonders how they managed to dig the foundations of several-story building or even sky-scrapers at that time. Can you explain this?

On the German site http://www.bagger-und-bahnen.de/baumaschinen.htm , as site for excavator fans, you find the following information about cable-operated excavators (my translation):

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At the end of the 19th Century cable-operated excavators introduced an essential phase of the mechanization of construction sites. Their period of glory was only ended with the development of hydraulics in construction machines, through which machines with a higher performance and easier to operate became possible. Cable-operated excavators retained niches in which they stand their ground to this day: excavating sand and gravel, depth foundations and drillings as well as large-scale demolition measures, and since some time ago also dynamic depth sealing.
As you can see, cable-operated excavators are still in use today and seem to be especially suitable for excavating sand (as in Treblinka) and for doing work deep underground. As to how deep one can dig these days with a cable-operated excavator, just look at the Sennebogen product line under http://www.crane-division.com/hp456/Seilbagger.htm . The Sennebogen 630 D cable-operated excavator, presented under http://www.crane-division.com/hp515/630-HD.htm , is currently digging a well 37 meters deep in Münsing/Ammerland near the Starnberger See, according to a press release under http://sennebogen-press.com/hp3013/S...Brunnenbau.htm .

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Sure you aren’t mixing up conclusions regarding the Treblinka I labor camp with conclusions regarding the Treblinka II extermination camp?
No because of a simple conclusion - Treblinka II was bombed. The Polack found uncovered bones and bodies. Treblinka II was bombed, thus the Polack was investigating Treblinka II and concluded that 50,000 died there.[quote]

Let’s look at what Mattogno & Graf wrote in their Treblinka book, page 89:

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On the other hand, Łukaszkiewicz had carelessly written in his report of December 29, 1945, that213 "in this camp [Treblinka I] approximately 50,000 Poles and Jews were killed."
The figure 50,000 clearly refers to the Treblinka I labor camp, not the Treblinka II extermination camp. As to whether Treblinka II was bombed and why explosives were set off on its soil, see below.

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Originally Posted by ps
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How do you know that those train records are "obvious lies", and who is supposed to "avoid" them?
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Actually, Y. Arad - without admitting this - relies upon, more than anything else, the Atlas of the Holocaust by British-Jewish historian Martin Gilbert, first published in London in 1982. This work contains an abundance of numerical data about the deportation of Jews but maintains a total silence regarding the sources. As far as Poland - and, in particular, the deportations to Treblinka - is concerned, the figures of Gilbert are for the most part the product of fantasy: he has done nothing more than assign numbers snatched out of thin air to the individual locations from which real and contrived transports departed; numbers whose total sum came to the figure determined beforehand, of 840,000![256] Even a fleeting glance at the tables shows this incontrovertibly. For example, on table 168 there are approximately sixty locations of the Białystok district, from which transports are supposed to have departed for Treblinka on November 2, 1942. To this endless column of mostly unknown small country towns Gilbert allots extremely exact numbers of deportations.[257] If there had really been precise figures for these small towns, they would naturally have been cited first and foremost by the Polish researchers and historians; but, as we have seen, the latter had to confine themselves to hypothetical enumerations of trains and cars.
How about providing the source of these sweeping claims? The figures given by Arad, see under http://holocaust-info.dk/treblinka/t...portations.htm , are not "extremely exact" figures, but obviously estimates, and there are no figures for every small location in the Bialystok district, so the inference that Arad used Gilbert without "admitting" to his source is bullshit. Arad is very specific about the sources he used, see under http://holocaust-info.dk/statistics/info.htm :

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The Deportation of the Jews from the General Government, Bialystok General District, and Ostland

The exact number of Jews who were deported to the Operation Reinhard death camps is difficult to determine because of the prevailing conditions at the time and the method employed by the Nazi extermination machine in expelling the victims to BeIzec, Sobibor, and Treblinka. The number of Jews who lived in the towns and townships of Poland before the war is known from the population census carried out there in 1931. Some demographic changes took place during the years 1931-1939, but these did not basically alter the number of Jews living there on the eve of the German occupation.
Substantial demographic changes did occur during the war, during the years 1939-1942, until the onset of the deportations to the death camps. In these years, tens of thousands of Jews escaped from one place to seek refuge in another. Hundreds of thousands of Jews were expelled and resettled, sent to labor camps, or concentrated in larger ghettos. Thousands of Jews were murdered in shooting Aktionen in the vicinity of their homes-before, during, and after the deportations to the death camps. Thus, on the eve of the expulsions, there were many small localities in which Jews no longer lived and other localities in which the number of Jews was much higher than before the war.
The deportation method, as carried out by the German authorities in the General Government, was en masse, without lists of names or even exact numbers. Usually ghettos were totally liquidated, and only the killing capacity of the camps and the volume of the trains dictated the number of people who were deported. In places where some Jews were temporarily left behind, the Germans counted the few who remained, while all the others were pushed into the trains.
Documents of the German railway authorities, which were found after the war, provided some data on the number of trains and freight cars. If we take into account that each fully packed freight car carried 100-150 people, we can arrive at an approximate indication of the number of Jews in each transport.
Another source of information was the census of the ghetto inhabitants carried out by the Judenrats in some of these places. A census of this type was usually undertaken by order of the German authorities for purposes of forced-labor requests or in preparation for the deportations. Sometimes the Judenrats also took a census for their own purposes, for example, for food rationing or housing problems.
Documents containing these data and sometimes even the number of Jews who were deported, as collected by the Judenrat, were found after the war. Sometimes they were mentioned in diaries written by ghetto inmates and left behind.
Numerous memoirs written by survivors, as well as the memorial books (Yizkor books), contain important data about the deportations, including, dates and the number of deported. Testimonies by survivors, statements by local people who witnessed the deportations, and evidence given by members of the German administration at the war-crimes trials serve as significant sources of information.
Together, all these documents and sources enable us to arrive at an estimation that comes very close to the actual figures and dates of the deportations to the Operation Reinhard death camps.

An extremely valuable research study undertaken to establish the timetable and number of deported Jews from the General Government and to which death camp they were sent was carried out by Tatiana Berenstein and published in Poland in the Biuletyn Zydowskiego Instytutu Historycznego (Bulletin of the Jewish Historical Institute), Warsaw, No. 3/1952, No. 21/1957, No. 3/1959, No. 59/1966, No. 61/1967. Another source is the "Luach Hashoa (Holocaust Calendar) of Polish Jewry" prepared by Rabbi Israel Schepansky and published by "Or Harnizrach," New York, 1974. A most important and more up-to-date source is the Pinkas Hakehillot (Encyclopedia of Jewish Communities), Poland, Vol. 11, Eastern Galicia, and Vol. III, Western Galicia, published by Yad Vashem, Jerusalem, in 1980 and 1984. The following tables of the deportations are based on all the aforementioned primary sources and research studies.
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Originally Posted by ps
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But you get points for at least trying to address the documentary evidence, something your friend Gerdes never dared to do. Maybe you can answer the question I asked Gerdes about the documents quoted in my posts nos. 295 to 300 of our Topix discussion. You find these posts under http://www.topix.com/forum/history/T...T8PL8H7P8C/p15 .

Ill look at it.
Looking forward to your reply, then.

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Originally Posted by ps
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Who is supposed to have bombed it, and what evidence is there that such bombing too place? Whoever is supposed to have bombed the place "to remove evidence of it not being a death camp" must have been dumb as a door, for what he achieved instead was to bring to the surface death camp evidence (ashes, bones, skulls) that the SS had carefully hidden underground and planted vegetation on.
Uhm no, it was bombed after the Soviet Union advanced on it and took it, the only remaining buildings were not later found by the Polak.
Some bombs or shells may have landed in the Treblinka area during fighting between Soviet and German forces in 1944, but the craters mentioned in the Polish site investigation reports seem to be mainly the work of robbery diggers. From my blog article Gold Rush in Treblinka under http://holocaustcontroversies.blogsp...treblinka.html (quotes inside the quote are pointed out in the following by italics):

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Shameful pilfering of the Treblinka mass graves – what Auerbach appropriately described as the behavior of “jackals and hyenas in human shape” – was not restricted to Polish civilians, however. Soviet troops also took part in it:

In the autumn of 1944 Ukrainian and Russian guards appeared again, but this time in Stalin's service. With their arrival the peasant digging became an enterprise. From Ceranów airport, 10 km away, the Soviets brought along mines and blind bombs. The explosive charge was lowered into a mass grave, a Soviet fellow detonated it, and the Jewish corpses flew through the air.

When three years later representatives of the Main Commission for Investigation of Nazi Crimes showed up, the disgraceful hustle and bustle was in full swing. Commission member Rachela Auerbach noted: "With spades and other tools pilferers and marauders dig, search, rummage ... they carry unexploded artillery shells and bombs here - jackals and hyenas in human shape. They drill holes into the blood-drenched earth mixed with the ashes of burned Jews ..."

Bearing censorship in mind, Auerbach of course couldn't say that the Soviets organized and supervised the shameful activity. She didn't make clear who the "marauders" were.


The vivid image of Jewish corpses flying through the air is somewhat inaccurate insofar as most of what flew through the air when explosives were detonated in the Treblinka mass graves must have been the ashes and bone fragments to which the greater part of the victims’ corpses had been reduced by incineration. On the other hand, the above-quoted passage confirms an assumption I stated in my article Polish investigations of the Treblinka killing site were a complete failure … , when I wrote the following:

One also wonders why Mattogno didn’t consider the much likelier possibility that these bomb craters resulted from the activity of robbery diggers, who may, for instance, have obtained such devices from a corrupt Soviet commander’s stock or even included members of Soviet artillery or engineer units who themselves took part in the "Treblinka gold rush", equipped with the necessary hardware to make big holes and thus facilitate the search for valuables presumed to have been left behind by the victims of Treblinka.

A certain reluctance to mention the involvement of Soviet troops in the Treblinka “gold rush” seems to be present to this day, for whatever reason. At least this suspicion is raised by the explanation given by camp museum director Kopówka to the Gazeta Wyborcza journalists for the slots in the ground presently found in the Treblinka area:

"When we went around the memorial we found slots in the area," we say when bidding farewell to the director. "Judging by the trees growing inside them they must be several dozen years old. Are these pits from the diggings?" - "No ... those are from artillery shells. In 1944 the front line was here for some weeks."

Alex Bay’s research about military operations around Treblinka in 1944 doesn’t point to there having necessarily been any fighting in the Treblinka area, and the Luftwaffe air photo of September 1944, included in Bay’s Reconstruction of Treblinka, does not show the presence of craters made by artillery shells and bombs that would correspond to Kopówka’s claim. Explosions producing such craters must therefore have occurred after the September 1944 photograph.

Martyna Rusiniak, whose book about The extermination camp Treblinka II in collective memory is mentioned in the Gazeta Wyborcza article as due to appear the following month, disagrees with Kopówka in that she attributes a part of the pits in the Treblinka woods to the “hyenas”, especially to their “loud” excavations involving the use of explosives.
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Originally Posted by ps
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What exactly is that supposed to mean?
Exactly what you read - it's not clear how many of the remains are even Jewish.
Not from physical examination, maybe – but what evidence is there that any of the hundreds of thousands deported to Treblinka, apart from a couple of thousand Gypsies, were not Jewish?

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Originally Posted by ps
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What are you trying to tell us, that no part of an eyewitness account can be used if the eyewitness got one or the other detail wrong? If criminal investigators went by that reasoning, they’d probably never find an eyewitness testimony they can use to solve a case, for what eyewitness ever gets every detail right?
No I am saying that the eye witness testimony is for most of the Holocaust false.
I take note of this baseless assertion.

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Originally Posted by ps
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I take you’re referring to Wiernik, the only eyewitness I know who mentioned such an occurrence – except the bullet was not from an infantry carbine but from a pistol, which jammed after the shot. This is discussed in my article Historiography as seen by an ignorant charlatan … under http://holocaustcontroversies.blogsp...norant_03.html .

This is what a 7.62x25 mm bullet will do to a helmet
Interesting. At what range?

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Originally Posted by ps
If it's true that Wiernik was shot from 50 meters then the soldier would have plenty of time to fix the jam.
How long, assuming a badly trained Ukrainian guard knew how to fix the jam?

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Originally Posted by ps
If someone had shot Wiernik with a gun he would have been wounded.
Would he? From my article under http://holocaustcontroversies.blogsp...norant_03.html :

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The original Polish text of the passage in question is the following:
Kula mnie nie zraniła o, dziwo! Przebiła wszystko na mnie i odbiła się o łopatkę, pozostawiając znak.
This was translated as follows by our Polish reader Roman Werpachowski:
The bullet did not hurt me - very strange! It pierced everything on me and reflected from my shoulder blade, leaving a mark.
A bullet ricocheting from a shoulder blade is something different from a bullet "stopping" at the shoulder, and it has also happened on at least one other occasion, the one referred to here.
"Here" = http://www.aoc.state.nc.us/www/publi...1/001163-1.htm

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Originally Posted by ps
Anyways, you're right that I somewhat picked out bad examples
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What evidence of any kind is there for the existence of Treblinka, Sobibor, or Belzec? Yitzhak Arad testifies that there is only survivor testimony. But when we read that survivor testimony for ourselves, we find that it lacks credibility. To restrict our attention to the most prominent and most relied-upon Treblinka survivor - Jankiel Wiernik- and to a very few of the particulars of his story that lack credibility, we might mention the following: Wiernik stated that while escaping from Treblinka, he was shot in the shoulder by a pursuing guard who was just behind him, and that the bullet penetrated all his clothing, but stopped at his skin "leaving only a scratch." Wiernik stated that he saw a naked Jewish girl leap over a three-meter high barbed wire fence, then wrench the rifle out of the hands of a pursuing guard, and then shoot two other guards before she was overpowered. Wiernik stated that when gassing victims were buried without being given a chance to cool off first, "when the graves were opened on a scorchingly hot day, steam belched forth from them as if from a boiler." Wiernik stated that "the Germans threw some burning object into one of the opened graves just to see what would happen. Clouds of black smoke began to pour out at once and the fire thus started glimmered all day long." Wiernik stated that arms and legs would fall off bodies being dragged from gas chambers to burial pits if the dragging was delayed by a few days. Wiernik stated that whenever an airplane was heard overhead, the thousands of victims being piled up for cremation were concealed from view by covering them with foliage. Unfortunately for the Treblinka story, removing Wiernik from the list of credible survivors leaves no one of comparable stature to take his place.
Better ones.
I’d say the "better ones" have been dealt with in my article under http://holocaustcontroversies.blogsp...norant_03.html , where I also pointed out parts of Wiernik’s testimony that are matched by evidence independent thereof and the reliability of which is thus confirmed. But feel free to point out any of the "better ones" that you think I did not address and would require revising my assessment. I agree that one should not take everything that Wiernik wrote at face value, but dismissing his entire testimony on account of one or the other inaccuracy, or even one or the other implausibility, is like throwing out the baby with the bath water.

The author of the above quote comes across as somewhat ignorant in what concerns the body of eyewitness testimony to the Treblinka mass killings, by the way. If he had read Arad’s book, where the author also quotes or refers to depositions by perpetrators on trial before West German courts as well as documentary evidence, he might not have written this nonsense about Arad having stated that "there is only survivor testimony". It also isn't doesn't show proper research to make a fuss about what one historian is supposed to have stated when there are also other historians, like Prof. Browning with his report on the documentary and eyewitness evidence to the implementation of the "Final Solution" including the camps of Aktion Reinhard(t), see under http://www.holocaustdenialontrial.co...ense/browning/ .

Browning identified five categories of eyewitness testimony:
- German visitors of the camps
- Germans who were stationed at Belzec, Sobibor, and Treblinka
- Ukrainian guards
- Poles in the villages around these camps
- Jewish survivors

He also mentions documentary evidence to what was going on at these camps, such as the following:

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Moreover, the fate of the Bialystok Jews in the fall of 1942 was clearly stated in Himmler's report to Hitler of December 31, 1942. The Jews of Bialystok were among the 363,211 "Jews executed." The fate of the Jews sent to Treblinka is also reflected in a report noted in the October 10, 1942, entry to the War Diary of the Oberquartiermeister of the military commander in Poland.
OK Ostrow reports that the Jews in Treblinka are not adequately buried and as a result an unbearable smell of cadavers pollutes the air.118
Ostrow, it should be noted, was some 20 kilometers from Treblinka.
This makes someone who claims that the only evidence "of any kind" that there is "for the existence of Treblinka, Sobibor, or Belzec" consists of "survivor testimony" look like an incompetent bungler at best, don’t you think so?

Please provide that incompetent bungler’s name and the link to his writing.

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Originally Posted by ps
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What’s the deal supposed to be? Read the article Well. Well? Well! under http://holocaustcontroversies.blogsp...well-well.html .

Simple disproof of this - no has ever found chlorine in the soil and thus this is speculation and again jumping to conclusions. If chlorine is not found then the water well was contaminated. It's doubtful there will be any chlorine found because if there was any there it would have been found a long time ago. (It would probably leak into the Bug River)
Assuming chlorine is the only relevant factor – there are also other factors mentioned in the article, IIRC – how do you know that none was "found"? Assuming chlorine remained in place after the bodies were exhumed and burned (what makes you think it did?), who is known to have searched for traces of chlorine in the soil of Treblinka? Assuming the chlorine necessarily leaked into the Bug river (you seem to consider this a mere probability), would this necessarily have been reported? And would such reports necessarily have become known outside the adjacent Polish villages and towns, from which, as the Polish newspaper article about the Gold Rush in Treblinka that I translated shows, little is known outside and even inside Poland to these days? I don’t think so.

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Originally Posted by ps
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The problem with the fence being that it would have easily caught fire, you mean? Except that the dry pinewood was regularly replaced by fresh pinewood in order to keep up the camouflage function of the camp's interior and exterior fences. See the discussion of this issue in my article «B» as in «Bullshit» under http://holocaustcontroversies.blogsp...llshit_20.html .

You can change the branches all you like but its a long known fact that pines burn extremely well. Look at the experiment
http://www.onethirdoftheholocaust.co...es/25_mov.html

The branch isn't even dried out yet.

Even fresh branches burn great
If so, someone should sue the webmaster of http://acreage.unl.edu/News/News/Xmastree.htm for dangerous misinformation:

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Freshness is key in preventing fire hazards. A natural Christmas tree with moisture in its branches and needles is no more flammable than a fresh flower. A well-cared for Christmas tree can stay fresh and green for months. However, a neglected tree can dry out, drop needles and become a potential fire hazard in as little as a week. At least starting out, locally grown Christmas trees are much fresher than those cut and shipped from western and northern states, often months in advance of Christmas.
Also consider the other arguments against a high fence-fire risk in my article under http://holocaustcontroversies.blogsp...llshit_20.html .

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Originally Posted by ps
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I don’t see what’s supposed to have been "atrocious" about the gas chamber design that can be reconstructed based on various eyewitness testimonies. It rather looks quite simple and effective to me. And if some eyewitnesses got details wrong there, big deal – any eyewitness other than the gas chamber’s operators could have been mistaken about one or the other part of what he occasionally and briefly saw.
Short hallway where a guard had to always line up against the wall just to let people through. Why not just have double doors and no hallway? Obvious.
This is discussed in my article It’s hard to believe … under http://holocaustcontroversies.blogsp...elieve_12.html , where I explain why the arrangement you propose would have been the "atrocious" one. Excerpt:

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If, as the above sources show, it was advantageous to the SS to have more and smaller gas chambers in the AR camps’ gas chamber buildings rather than fewer and larger ones, then the logical arrangement of the former was the one that the evidence shows to have been applied, i.e. a corridor with the gas chambers on either side. An arrangement without a corridor and interconnecting partitions would have required the same number of doors and made for a more cumbersome and difficult to control process of filling the gas chambers with people. Bud’s objection to this arrangement is that guards positioned by the gas chamber doors in the corridor arrangement would have had to make room for the incoming victims. This objection is pointless, however, not only because the corridor was wide enough (see the already mentioned CAD reconstruction of the Treblinka gas chambers) but also and especially because there was no reason to post guards by the gas chamber doors, which were locked as soon as the victims had been urged and chased into the gas chambers. There is also no evidence, to my knowledge, of guards having been posted by the gas chamber doors. From the perspective of the victims’ psychology, which as we have seen was an important consideration, the corridor arrangement was also arguably more favorable to the intended impression of a bath house than an arrangement without a corridor and with interconnecting partitions would have been.
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Originally Posted by ps
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The same goes for the "Diesel" thing – eyewitnesses who spoke of diesel may just have mixed up the gasoline gassing engine with some diesel engine used for other purposes in the camp. The folks at other camps who operated the engines or were otherwise familiar with them all mentioned gasoline engines, as pointed out under http://holocaustcontroversies.blogsp...rrelevant.html , and there’s no reason why gasoline exhaust should not have been used in Treblinka as well.
Theories, theories, theories mean absolutely nothing.
Hardly an argument if these "theories" are based on the depositions of the folks who operated the gassing engines or were otherwise familiar with them. They must have known what they were talking about, don’t you think so?
Casual witnesses who only got close to the gas chamber building on occasion if at all, on the other hand, may have been mistaken about a lot of details.

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Originally Posted by ps
There have been stories of air being pumped out of the room, water vapor death, Diesel and now gas?
There are also two Treblinka eyewitnesses who mention a gasoline engine, Ivan Shevchenko and Oskar Strawczynski, see under http://rodohforum.yuku.com/topic/246...l-Gassing.html . And they are the only ones who probably got it right, judging by the testimonies of eyewitnesses "in the know" from Belzec, Sobibor, Chelmno and the Einsatzgruppen operations, who mention gasoline engines. Witnesses who spoke about air pumped out, vapor or diesel simply misunderstood what they casually saw or were told about, or indulged in speculations about the mechanism and devices involved. Big deal.

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Originally Posted by ps
… including members of the camp’s former SS-staff testifying before West German courts, and also according to document showing that hundreds of thousands of people were taken to a place from which only a handful are known to have emerged alive, and from where such a stench of corpses emanated in October 1942 that the Wehrmacht local commander of a town 20 kilometers away complained about it. I don’t see what is wrong with eyewitness and documentary evidence as proof of a crime or other historical event. Aren't mass crimes and other historical events usually proven also if not mainly or solely on the basis of these categories of evidence? Can you show us one large-scale massacre that was reconstructed solely or mainly on the basis of physical evidence?
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What conclusions exactly am I supposed to be "jumping" to? If the foundations of the gas chamber building were not found, this means that either the Poles looked for them in the wrong place of they had been removed by the SS, who had plenty of time to do so. And the admission in the Polish site investigation report of 13.11.1945 that the foundations of the gas chamber building had not been found is another argument (besides the matching by evidence, unknown to the investigators, of their findings on site) against the idea that there was any manipulation involved in the investigation. If the report had been "cooked", why didn’t it's authors just make up their having identified the foundations of the gas chamber building?
The soil would still suggest the disturbance of having a solid structure there.
The likeliest explanation then being that the Poles dug for the foundations at the wrong place, assuming the "disturbance of having a solid structure there" could necessarily have been made out after all the soil-churning that this area had been through during and after the dismantlement of the camp.

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Originally Posted by ps
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What, you consider something as vital to the benefit of mankind and the contemporary German war effort as getting rid of those subversive and parasitical Jews a waste of resources? I’m surprised!
Germany valued gasoline, to them gasoline was extremely precious as they always had a shortage of it.
That may have been so, but getting rid of the Jews was also an extremely important project, on a par with or even considered an essential part of the war effort. So why not allocate important resources to such an important project?

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Originally Posted by ps
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Of course the Germans were concerned about salvaging resources. Why else would they have bothered to collect and keep account of all objects they took away from the Jews before killing them? You may view records of the plunder under http://www.death-camps.org/reinhard/arloot.htm .

Neither can I, but this wasn’t battle. This was bumping off helpless human beings one by one with a shot in the neck at a segregated place, the killers having all the time and leisure in the world to pick up what cartridges were lying around.
If they were truly concerned they would be picking cartridges up in their own encampment/trench after the battle was done. The cartridges being spent on the front was enormous. Treblinka's 50,000 cartridges wouldn't last any significant amount of time when machine guns are spitting out 1300 bullets a minute.
That may be so, but the troops at the front don't seem to have had the salvaging mania that characterized the operation of Himmler’s concentration and extermination camps, where even spectacles and undergarments were salvaged. Besides, there was no reason for the SS to leave murder evidence like cartridges lying around when it could be easily collected.

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Originally Posted by ps
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I wouldn’t be surprised if Polish investigators had been short of such hardware shortly after the end of the war, actually.
Metal detectors were an extremely ubiquitous piece of equipment in the Soviet Army and given that this investigation was done in conjunction with the soviets it's doubtable that would have been difficult.
The Polish investigation in November 1945 was conducted in conjunction with the Soviets? I didn’t know that. How do you know?

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Originally Posted by ps
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Besides, there was much metallic mess lying around on the Treblinka site, and I doubt a metal detector would have been able to tell the difference. Last but not least, how do you know what bullets were used for the shooting?
They could have just found all these metallic objects and identified them.
Yeah, they could have picked up every single metallic object found and identified it, piece by piece. They obviously didn’t consider the effort worth the expectable results. Why should they have, after they had reasonably concluded that the key to reconstructing the Treblinka mass murder was documentary and eyewitness evidence rather than what physical evidence the killers had left behind?

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Originally Posted by ps
I know that the bullets were iron core because Germany only used that type of bullet during the war because it saved them money.
Source?

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Originally Posted by ps
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Anyway, thanks for bringing some new arguments into the discussion, which Mr. Gerdes’ repetitive "recaps" and "just one" demands have made rather boring.
It's a rather good argument that I have not seen a single Jew answer.
Assuming you’re not just trying to be nice to your buddy, maybe you can do what Gerdes has been repeatedly requested to do but not even attempted: explain the relevance of Gerdes' "just one this-and-that" demands to proving the mass murder at Treblinka considering the documentary, eyewitness and physical evidence that is known, all of which points to an extermination camp while there is not a shred of evidence that would support the "transit camp" theory. What reasons are there to doubt the accuracy of this evidence, and why would one have to identify "just one" whatever in order to "prove" or help "prove" what can be and has been proven by the evidence that has been examined by historians and criminal investigators?

I’m looking forward to your demonstration that Gerdes’ "just one" stuff is not just a cheap publicity trick for suckers. Gerdes doesn’t seem able to provide that demonstration.

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Originally Posted by ps
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Cute girl in your avatar, by the way.
Thank ya.

My issue isn't to white wash Germany (Because I don't do that) but I have never seen the methodology recorded of what the Germans did and as you admitted eye witness accounts are faulty.
I’m not admitting anything, just pointing out something that any trial judge is familiar with: eyewitnesses may be mistaken about many details, even fantasize or lie about one or the other detail, but rarely if ever does this mean that the eyewitnesses are wrong about the essence of the event they describe or made up all of their account. And if several eyewitnesses from several categories describe essentially the same thing independently of each other, at different times and places and before different entities, there is no room for reasonable doubt that the eyewitness testimonies are essentially correct, how ever many discrepancies or errors in certain details they may contain. This applies especially when, as in the case of Treblinka, what becomes apparent from the body of eyewitness testimony is also what the documentary evidence, demographic data and the physical evidence point to, and there's not a single indication that the place was anything other than what becomes apparent from all this evidence, an extermination camp.

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Originally Posted by ps
Judging the techniques by modern equipment (Such as what was done with the excavator) seems unreasonable.
Well, that seems to be exactly what you are doing when arguing about the possible pit depth on hand of data about modern crawler excavators, instead of looking at data about cable-operated excavators for this purpose.

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Originally Posted by ps
Until I see a forensic investigation of better quality I will not be convinced
The issue is not what you are personally "convinced" of and what it would take to "convince" you; that’s your problem alone. The issue is whether and how you can explain away the body of documentary, eyewitness and physical evidence, all of which converges towards the conclusion that Treblinka was an extermination camp where hundred of thousands of people were murdered, and provide a plausible and evidence-backed alternative explanation for this evidence and for what happened to the deportees.

Anyway, please keep up the discussion. Talking to you is far more interesting than talking to Gerdes, the repetitive bore (whose latest posts I will address later, just so as not to offend the poor fellow by ignoring them).