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Old June 16th, 2008 #75
Roberto Muehlenkamp
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Originally Posted by ps
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Originally Posted by Roberto Muehlenkamp

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.
I have yet to see you provide any solid disproof of what I said.
We’ll get to that when I’m finished here with Gerdes, as I said. Meanwhile, let your missing the judge's reference to "the results of the works carried out on site" be recorded.

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Originally Posted by ps
If a GPR radar is used to collect evidence of the site and it turns up nothing then none of the witnesses in the world will save you. No number of blogs will save you, you can write millions of convincing articles and it wont work. Scientific evidence (Forensic evidence) will always prevail over the easily-influenced witness evidence.
In case of contradiction between the two categories of evidence, that may be so. But we don’t have that just because some incompetent bungler (see under http://www.atheistparents.org/forum/...r=asc&start=25 for a GPR expert’s opinion on Krege’s performance) claims to have found no indications of soil disturbance on a site that not only eyewitness testimonies, but also site investigation reports and photographic illustrations thereof, as well as air photographs, show to have been considerably churned up.

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Originally Posted by ps
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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?
What sky-scrapers would that be? This is a medium excavator and they do not use them to build sky scrapers because a medium excavator cannot dig the foundation required. A medium excavator can at best do a 12-20 floor building and that is pushing it.
How deep are the foundations of a 12-20 floor building, and what "medium excavator" did you have in mind?

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Originally Posted by ps
The only exception is if the clay layer is very deep, then yes it is possible to dig deeper; however, as your article noted this type of excavator wouldn't be able to handle it.
Which article exactly is supposed to have noted that? Quote it, please.

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Originally Posted by ps
The boom length problem isn't hard to understand - it's quite simple, how are you supposed to dig something when you can't reach the length?
Do one side first and then the other, or have two excavators work from either side. What’s the deal supposed to be?

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Originally Posted by ps
If you want to say you'd start from the middle then the problem is obvious there - there would be a collapse if you dug out 7.5 meters across. If you ever as a child went to the beach and dug into the sand and gotten to the clay layer you would understand why.
Don’t dig from the middle but from the sides, first from one and then from the other, or with two excavators from either side. How did you arrive at your boom length estimates, by the way?

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Originally Posted by ps
If they had a well in Treblinka that means there was an aquifer which means that without support the walls would collapse.
They probably didn’t make the walls straight but sloping to avoid stability problems.

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Originally Posted by ps
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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.
These modern excavators are some of the largest in the world, they dwarf the Mb easily. They are absolutely huge (1000 or so tons) and that is why they are used for the job. They are also not clam shell excavators they are dragline excavators with a large bucket. The reason is because dragging produces much greater force. The medium excavator we are talking about (A mere 40 tons) would not be able to dig very deep because the force required for the operation would not be achievable. Horse power is not merely how quickly something is done but if it can be done at all , if you connect a car to a sturdy brick building it wont be able to move it no matter how much you push on the pedal. The Earth becomes much more dense very quickly and if you've ever seen clay being dug (By hydraulics no less) you'd see why it would take an absurd amount of time and not only but once it rained the water would stay in the pit. Thus digging into clay is a stupid idea and no one would have done it that way.
You’re making some interesting claims here, but can you back them up?
The issue is simply the following: there’s a hole 7.5 meters deep, described in a site investigation report, that both the contents of the report and all associated evidence suggest to have been a mass grave. You are claiming that the site investigation report was manipulated. The argument underlying your claim is that the type of excavator shown on Kurt Franz’s photos under http://www.death-camps.org/treblinka/excavators2.html couldn’t have dug pits this deep. Someone else doesn’t share this opinion but writes the following under http://www.holocaust-history.org/Tre...thcampp7.shtml :

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A pit 50 by 25 meters has a volume of 8500 cubic meters [300,186 cubic feet]. (See ( Appendix D) for an analysis of the Treblinka graves and of their capacities). Figure 41 presents a drawing of what such a pit would look like with an excavator for scaling comparison. An excavation of this magnitude would require weeks or months to dig by manual methods using picks, shovels, and wheelbarrows, depending on the number of laborers available. The Menck machines equipped with clam shell excavators had a capacity of .75 to .8 cubic meters [26.5 to 28 cubic feet[, so the time needed to complete these large pits would have been on the order of a two or three weeks. These factors point to the size of the extermination program. We see two, probably three machines whose presence can only be justified by the need to move massive amounts of earth.
If you want to discredit the above calculations and a criminal investigator’s site investigation report, you’ll have to provide something more than your private knowledge about civil construction and excavators. You’ll have to provide evidence that the excavators identified by Alex Bay (see under http://www.holocaust-history.org/Tre...thcampp6.shtml ) as one Menck Ma-1 No. 1, one Menck Ma-1 No. 2 and one Menck Mb-2, could not alone or together have dug pits 7.5 meters deep. Evidence would be the specifications of these machines or of other cable-operated excavators having a performance, shovel capacity and maximum boom length comparable to those of the machines manufactured at the time by Menck & Hambrock of Hamburg Altona.

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Originally Posted by ps
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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.
These are by far larger.
Are they? Please show those colossal cable-operated excavators.
More important, show what excavators this size they had in the 1940s to dig foundations of buildings more than 20 floors high.

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Originally Posted by ps
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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 .

A well is not a building foundation.
The depth that a 30 ton cable-operated excavator like the Sennebogen 630 HD can reach is still five times the depth of the Treblinka pits.

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Originally Posted by ps
Medium excavators are NOT USED for building foundations. As stated before they would strike clay and the operation would become extremely slow. They would likely just stop at 5 meters.
So clay is the problem? If so, what do you know about the soil at Treblinka and the depth at which clay was present? If clay only showed up below 7.5 meters, there would have been no problem, right?

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Originally Posted by ps
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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):
Uhm no, there were no targets in the Treblinka area and bombs don't just land. The high resolution optics would have made it very clear that there is nothing to bomb on the site. It's ridiculous to say that this was merely by accident because Soviets did not carpet bomb, Soviets used high precision bombers that hit very accurately. They were so precise (For that age) that they could even hit specific targets in a city without damaging anything around the target. If they bombed the site that means they were hitting something.
If bombs dropped from the air would have been aimed, that leaves artillery shells that landed in the wrong place during a massive bombardment of nearby areas and, of course, the bombs and shells set off by robbery diggers in order to make big holes in which to search for valuables.

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Originally Posted by ps
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Interesting. At what range?
Unlike what your article believes 9x19 doesn't start slowing down dramatically . The effective range of a Mp-40 is 100 meters and it is chambered for the same caliber. The reason the pistol has 50 meters is because the barrel is shorter and thus is less accurate, at 50 meters a hit would inflict a large wound. The effective range on the pistol signifies its accuracy not its stopping power because its big brother can fire double that distance and still be effective.
I see, but what about the case mentioned under http://www.aoc.state.nc.us/www/publi...1/001163-1.htm ?

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The trial court did not err in an assault with a deadly weapon with intent to kill inflictingserious injury case by concluding that the evidence supports a finding that the victim was seriously injured, because: (1) the record shows a bullet pierced the victim's shoulder, ricocheted off his shoulder blade, and exited his body and created two holes in his upper body; (2) the victim testified that the pain really struck when everything calmed down and he looked at the bullet hole that was in his shoulder; and (3) the victim reported pain at the site of the injury to the emergency medical technicians.
This person was hit from the front, so the bullet pierced tissue before hitting the shoulder blade and ricocheting from it. In Wiernik’s case the bullet hit his shoulder blade from the back, and it may have been a grazing hit but not a direct hit. Is it really so improbable that the bullet deflected from Wiernik’s shoulder blade and caused no further damage?

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Originally Posted by ps
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How long, assuming a badly trained Ukrainian guard knew how to fix the jam?
If he had a pistol he was either a Lieutenant or a squad leader meaning that he was picked out as the cream of the crop.
In the confusion following the breakout from Treblinka, the pistol may also have been taken from an injured comrade.

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Originally Posted by ps
Ukranian Cossacks are infamously good shots and gun handlers. He would be able to take that pistol apart with his eyes closed and put it back together. Wiernik would be dead if that actually happened because the Cossack wouldn't have missed, it would have been a head shot.
Well, the Ukrainian guards at Treblinka were hardly Ukrainian Cossacks. They were POWs taken in the early stages of Barbarossa who had volunteered for serving the Germans in order not to starve to death in captivity. And they are not exactly known to have been rambos. IIRC Kurt Franz mentioned having had to teach them some military discipline at Trawniki before they were apt for guard duty.

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Originally Posted by ps
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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.
Okay ill look at it. Here we go
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2. Bud’s second attempt to cheat his viewers is rather obvious. Bud points out the following passages of Wiernik’s account, which can be found in Chapter 9 of A Year in Treblinka:

It turned out that bodies of women burned more easily than those of men. Accordingly, the bodies of women were used for kindling the fires.

and claims (by asking a rhetorical question) that Wiernik tried to make believe that the women burned «on their own, like wood».
What Wiernik says
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Work was begun to cremate the dead. It turned out that bodies of women burned more easily than those of men. Accordingly, the bodies of women were used for kindling the fires. Since cremation was hard work, rivalry set in between the labor details as to which of them would be able to cremate the largest number of bodies. Bulletin boards were rigged up and daily scores were recorded. Nevertheless, the results were very poor. The corpses were soaked in gasoline. This entailed considerable expense and the results were inadequate; the male corpses simply would not burn. Whenever an airplane was sighted overhead, all work was stopped, the corpses were covered with foliage as camouflage against aerial observation.
Kindling fires, what about kindling fires do you not understand?
The point is that Bud omits the corpses' being soaked in gasoline and makes it look as if they simply held a fire to the women and they started burning. Straw-man.

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Originally Posted by ps
By the way where the fuck are the photographs of this camouflaged operation? It says aerial observation, where are the pictures?
How do you know this was an enemy plane doing reconnaissance? I don’t think either the Soviets or the Western Allies had planes with a range to fly reconnaissance into Poland in 1942/43, and they also wouldn’t have had any interest in doing so. The plane is likelier to have been a Luftwaffe plane, and the puny camouflage efforts (which are mentioned only in connection with the early and not very successful burning experiments, suggesting that they were dropped later when incineration on the grids was in full swing) were probably only meant to avoid questions from a branch of the armed forces that was not necessarily informed about what was going on in Treblinka. Once that had been clarified at higher level, no camouflage was any longer necessary (apart from the fact that it wouldn’t have been possible to camouflage those huge grid fires).

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Originally Posted by ps
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First of all, Wiernik’s pursuer did not fire a rifle, but a pistol, and he fired it from some distance away. It doesn’t take much familiarity with firearms to know that pistols are short-range weapons, ineffective at longer distances. For instance, the Walther P38 pistol used by German armed forces in World War II had an effective range of about 50 meters. A weapon’s effective range is the distance at which a weapon may be expected to fire accurately to inflict damage or casualties. So if Wiernik’s pursuer was carrying a Walther P38 and fired it from a distance of more than 50 meters, it is possible that, when it reached its target, the bullet no longer had sufficient force to go through all of Wiernik’s clothing (for understandable reasons, Wiernik may have been rather thickly clad on that day of his escape, and he mentions in the same chapter that «On that day, however, the men wore their clothes under their overalls. Before escaping, they would have to get rid of the overalls, which would have given them away at once.») and wound him seriously. The extent to which the bullet could still penetrate Wiernik’s body would also depend on what part of the shoulder it hit. If it was the shoulder blade – which is probable, as Wiernik had his back turned towards the shooter – the bullet was less likely to go any further beyond its effective range than it if had hit flesh.
This is wrong and misleading as I have already stated, if the Ukranian scored a hit it would go through. A 9x19 does not slow down significantly at 50 meters, this is simple - it's because the 9x19 bullet used in a Mp40 and a Luger/Walther have the SAME piercing capacity because they have the same amount of grain and the same propellant.
Your opinion is taken note of, but I don’t think it takes care of the possibility that a hit on the shoulder blade, especially a grazing and not direct hit, would be reflected by the bone, also considering the above-quoted case mentioned under http://www.aoc.state.nc.us/www/publi...1/001163-1.htm .

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Originally Posted by ps
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Second, there was obviously something wrong with the gun, as it jammed after the shot that reached Wiernik. Whether the gun’s malfunction may have had an effect on the range or the accuracy of the shot fired I cannot tell, but I also see no reason to exclude this possibility.
That's because you don't understand that the gun itself doesn't actually speed the bullet up physically (Well it does somewhat but it wouldn't be astronomical as you'd have the reader believe) a longer barrel merely means that it will hit the target at longer range.
I’m merely considering a possibility. If you can provide evidence that a gun’s malfunction has no effect on the range or accuracy of the shot fired, that possibility can be ruled out.

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Originally Posted by ps
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Third, the bullet may have penetrated Wiernik’s clothing from a lateral angle, grazed his shoulder and then gone again through his clothing and away. The grazing impact would still have been painful, without however doing any damage, and Wiernik may incorrectly have assumed that the bullet had "stopped" at his shoulder. Actually that was not what Wiernik stated in the original text of A Year in Treblinka, which was written in Polish and which Andrew took the trouble of having a look at.
A Tokarev round was proven to go through the thickest Winter clothing and cause grave wounds.
Did it also hit a shoulder blade at or beyond its maximum effective range?

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Originally Posted by ps
Unbelievable bullshit:
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On one occasion a girl fell out of line. Nude as she was, she leaped over a barbed wire fence three meters high, and tried to escape in our direction. The Ukrainians noticed this and started to pursue her. One of them almost reached her but he was too close to her to shoot, and she wrenched the rifle from his hands. It wasn't easy to open fire since there were guards all around and there was the danger that one of the guards might be hit. But as the girl held the gun, it went off and killed one of the Ukrainians. The Ukrainians were furious. In her fury, the girl struggled with his comrades. She managed to fire another shot, which hit another Ukrainian, whose arm subsequently had to be amputated. At last they seized her. She paid dearly for her courage. She was beaten, bruised, spat upon, kicked and finally killed. She was our nameless' heroine.
If you have seen these fences you'd see why it was physically impossible to do this
I have only seen "these fences" in the film "Escape from Sobibor". This is how the filmmaker thought they looked like: http://static.flickr.com/100/283842941_d47e03c6f3_o.jpg . Are you sure an athletic person could not have climbed up such a fence?

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, and wrenching a gun from a Ukranian? Unbelievable. He would have killed her while she was climbing over
Assuming he spotted her while climbing over.

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(That's right climbing because no one can actually jump 3 meters in the air)
Yep, the leaping instead of climbing may be a mistranslation from the Polish original, and the fence was probably not 3 but just 2 meters high.

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And too close to shoot? Are we talking about the Karabiner? How could she even fire another shot anyways? This was a manual rifle, she'd have to actually manually work the bolt. A girl who never saw a gun in her life (Since she was from a Polish ghetto) wouldn't know this.
Why, she only had to watch gun-toting German guards bolting their rifle when shooting people, for instance during round-ups.

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Within a few days work was begun to empty the remaining 25 per cent of the graves and the bodies were cremated. As I pointed out before, the weather was extremely hot, and as each grave was opened, it gave off a nauseating stench. Once 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. Some of the graves contained corpses which had been thrown into them directly after being gassed. The bodies had had no chance to cool off. They were so tightly packed that, when the graves were opened on a scorching hot day, steam belched forth from them as if from a boiler.
What, it was a 100 degree day?
If you mean Fahrenheit degrees, easily so in the Polish summer.

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Originally Posted by ps
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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
Impossible.
Why so?

That seems to be it regarding Wiernik’s testimony. As you can see, even the supposed whoppers therein are not as outrageously implausible as you would like them to be. And even if they were, would this necessarily mean his whole testimony is unreliable? No, for Wiernik may have perceived or recollected certain details wrongly but other correctly, and he may also have included events he only knew from hearsay (the "leaping girl" episode is a likely candidate) in his account. All this means is that, as I said, Wiernik’s testimony should not be taken at face value in all respects. But there’s no problem with accepting it where it is not only plausible but also confirmed by other evidence independent of Wiernik. Examples of such independent corroboration are pointed out in my article under http://holocaustcontroversies.blogsp...norant_03.html , for instance this one:

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Again, the context of other eyewitness testimonies also shows that absence of wood or other external flammables can hardly have been what Wiernik meant to describe. Besides the above-quoted testimony of Yechiel Reichman, these include depositions of former members of the Treblinka SS staff like that of Heinrich Matthes, quoted on page 174 of Arad’s book (emphases are mine):

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At that time SS Oberscharführer or Hauptscharführer [Herbert] Floss, who, as I assume, was previously in another extermination camp, arrived. He was in charge of the arrangements for cremating the corpses. The cremation took place in such a way that railway lines and concrete blocks were placed together. The corpses were piled on these rails. Brushwood was put under the rails. The wood was doused with petrol. In that way not only the newly accumulated corpses were cremated, but also those taken out from the graves.
Besides contributing to the refutation of Bud’s misinterpretation of Wienik’s account, the above-quoted testimony is of interest in that it identifies as «SS Oberscharführer or Hauptscharführer Floss» the gentleman who Wiernik referred to as follows in his account:

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Then, one day, an Oberscharfuhrer wearing an SS badge arrived at the camp and introduced a veritable inferno. He was about 45 years old, of medium height, with a perpetual smile on his face. His favorite word was "tadellos [perfect]" and that is how he got the by-name Tadellos. His face looked kind and did not show the depraved soul behind it. He got pure pleasure watching the corpses burn; the sight of the flames licking at the bodies was precious to him, and he would literally caress the scene with his eyes.
So here we have two eyewitnesses completely independent of each other – Wiernik and Matthes – who both tell us about a high-ranking SS-man who came to Treblinka and introduced an efficient procedure of burning the corpses on grids made of railway tracks. This independent corroboration of Wiernik’s account shows Wiernik to have been a reliable witness in what concerns the implementation of the corpse incineration procedure at Treblinka.
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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.
It seems everything magically disappears eh? NO!
Nothing magically disappears (except perhaps the Jews that folks like you seem to think were abducted by flying saucers), but something not disappearing doesn’t necessarily mean that anybody spotted it.

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There would be tons of trace chlorine still underground mixed with ashes.
I don’t see why. The chlorine was poured over the bodies and later removed together with the bodies when these were incinerated, except maybe for some traces that remained at the bottom of the graves. What makes you think these traces would necessarily have been made out among ashes and other partial remains during the only excavations of the mass graves that are known to have taken place, the ones mentioned in the report of 13.11.1945 I quoted under http://holocaustcontroversies.blogsp...treblinka.html ?

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If so, someone should sue the webmaster of http://acreage.unl.edu/News/News/Xmastree.htm for dangerous misinformation:
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My name is Dr. Ken Tilt. I am a Professor in the Horticulture Department and work with the Nursery and Christmas Tree Industry in the state. The Fire Safety letter that is sent out every Christmas goes against the research at Auburn University and is based on North Carolina Christmas trees. This annual warning on the dangers of Christmas trees is contradicting the information we are sending out through Extension to the rest of the State. Fraser Firs, spruces, white pines, Scotch pines are more prone to drying out if not handled properly but even those trees have a minor chance of catching on fire. The papers stacked beside lamps have a greater chance of catching on fire. Our Southern Christmas Trees, the Leyland Cypress and the Arizona Cypress do not clog up like the northern trees and if put in water will stay fresh for at least 6 weeks. We did a study looking of the moisture content over time and a burn test on these trees. (Repeated for 2 years). When these trees were put in water after cutting them from a local farm they increased in moisture content and after 37 days they had more moisture than the day they were cut. We put branches of the trees over a Bunsen burner every 4 days for 37 days. We gauged the relative flammability by putting a brown paper bag over the same flame. The bag ignited at 5 seconds. We left the branches over the flame for 20 seconds. We rated the relative response on a 0 to 5 scale where 0 was no response, 1 slightly charred, 2 moderately charred, 3 charred but still no flame, 4 flame but went out and 5 ignited and continued to burn. Results showed after the 37 days while remaining in water, there was less than a 3 rating on the Arizona cypress and the Leyland Cypress (slight to moderate char after 20 seconds over the flame). The Virginia Pine was the only tree to reach a 5 at the end of the 6 weeks. Our red cedar hit a 4. We continue to fight misinformation on the dangers of Christmas Trees. Christmas trees do not catch fire through spontaneous combustion. If there is a fire, it is due to faulty wiring or being exposed to direct flames. This is a hold over from the days when people used candles on trees or we had lights that burned hot. Those days are gone. It is also perpetuated by the artificial tree people. *One of the biggest fires from Christmas trees last year was an artificial tree. These are our Alabama Farmers that are growing these Safe Southern Christmas Trees. We need to offer the facts at the University and not use information from Northern Schools. NC State has a great Christmas tree program but they concentrate on Fraser Firs. We can not grow those trees in Alabama although they are sold here. However, if people would not nail even the firs and spruces to a board and leave them up for 6 weeks, they would have no problem either. Another problem the northern trees have is that if they dry out, they are hard to rewet (sometimes this to late to re-hydrate the tree) without cutting the butt of the tree again.
Sure this supports your argument? Exposure of the Treblinka fences to direct fire was not likely, except maybe during the revolt on 2 August 1943 when, IIRC, the petrol tanks blew up.

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Why do you think a house catches on fire when another house is burning next to it yet if you throw matches at it it wont ever catch fire? SIMPLE. Because once you ignite something dry the temperature rises dramatically. It would have been enough to have a few dry branches to ignite and then the whole fence would have went.
A few dry branches igniting would not have brought up the temperature the way a burning house does, first of all. Second, the roasters were far enough from the fences to keep their fire from setting alight even dry branches (mind that dry branches were regularly substituted by fresh ones), as I explained under http://holocaustcontroversies.blogsp...llshit_20.html . Third, the possibility of the inmates setting fire to the fences was also a reduced one, due to the reasons mentioned in the same article:

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So here we have the main obstacles that the escape initiative Bud fantasizes about would have faced, assuming that the tree branches on the inner fence had caught fire as quickly and intensively as Bud claims they would have. The barbed wire of that fence would of course not have been consumed by the fire, and the poles of that fence, even if made of wood and not of concrete, would not have burned as rapidly as the tree branches. So at least for some time after the fire of the tree branches had subsided, the inmates would have been faced with an inner barbed wire fence not only intact, but probably also hot as hell due to the fire, and therefore somewhat harder to approach and cut through with pliers. During that time, and of course during the time the tree branch fire lasted, they would have been sitting ducks for guards firing at them, especially from the tower in the center of the extermination area after that had been transferred there, the approximate location of which in relation to the workers’ barracks is shown on Peter Laponder’s map. Those of the inmates who eventually managed to cut through the hot wire, or leap over the fence after it had collapsed due to the burning of the poles, would still have had to negotiate the barren ground between the inner and outer fences, followed by the «Spanish horses» wrapped in barbed wire of the outer fence. Even if the guard towers along the fence caught fire, as Bud claims they would have, and were accordingly abandoned by their occupants as one would expect an average human being to do, there would still have been the tower in the center of the extermination camp and the guards from the guard house also shown on Peter Laponder’s map to shoot down the surviving escapees as they tried to cross the outer fence. It seems improbable, in light of these obstacles, that many if any inmates would have survived such an escape attempt.
Now, what about resistance by setting fire to the branch-clad fences, especially those of the «tube»? Bud’s claim that any group of persons of any culture in the Treblinka inmates’ situation would have undertaken this is based on his irrelevant personal opinion alone, against which it can be argued that the primary concern of any individual from any culture is his or her own survival and that an expectably self-sacrificing act of heroism would only have been undertaken, by any inmate in his right mind, if he thought he could achieve more than however severe temporary damage to the camp’s facilities and a bloodbath among arriving deportees and his fellow inmates by guards who would probably have reacted by firing their machine-guns and machine-pistols at anything that moved. Even if the fences had burned as quickly and easily as Bud claims – the small Christmas tree branches he ignited over his sink took a couple of seconds until they burned with a huge flame, which makes it seem unlikely that large sections of four wire fence enclosures 160, 555, 660 and 910 meters long, as Sergey measured here, would have been totally on fire in a matter of minutes, as Bud presumes – the value and effect of such heroic act would have been somewhat dubious.
And fourth, even if the branch-clad fences had represented a high fire risk, the decision to implement them would still have been a matter of weighing risk against benefit. Camouflaging the camp against view from the outside, and even more so camouflaging the "tube" and the "death camp" sector against view from the other camp sectors, was essential to the smooth running of extermination activities, and I don’t see how else than by cladding the outer and inner fences with tree branches they could have done it. If there had been a considerable fire risk, it would have been a risk that had to be borne in order to have the fence camouflage’s essential benefits.

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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.
Yeah and then the air was sucked out and the room imploded.
I don’t think so, and whatever eyewitness thought that the air was sucked out was obviously mistaken anyway. Why the straw-man?

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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.
Yeah keep talking, when the forensic evidence finds that what you're saying is impossible where will you and your witnesses be then?
You are free to dream as much as you like, but what forensic evidence is known from Polish site investigation reports and photographic illustrations thereof does not contradict the eyewitness testimonies, it corroborates them. It also corroborates the scale of the killing that becomes apparent from documentary evidence, as I explained under http://holocaustcontroversies.blogsp...treblinka.html .

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Your friendly Goy Shermer did a study but didn't publish it. Why? You know why. He would have had his balls ripped off for killing the legend.
Hollow speculation seems to be the mother of "Revisionism", and not publishing the results of a study seems to be a cardinal seen when it’s not the likes of Mr. Krege who keep their "studies" to themselves. As to Shermer’s supposed "study" (of physical evidence to the killings at the Aktion Reinhard(t) camps, I presume you mean that), I still have to find the page in Denying History where Shermer claimed to have conducted such study. Could you point out that page, please? I asked your friend Gerdes to do so several times over on Topix, but he always ran away from this question (as he did from all other questions I asked him).

I’m also "Goy", by the way. One doesn’t have to be Jewish to dislike "White" or Nazi or "Revisionist" or whatever BS.

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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.
Yeah it seems that the witnesses just can't decide what lie they are going to say.
No, it only seems that some witnesses were better observers than others.

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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.
And if there is none? Your whole legend dies.
You’d still have to explain the human remains found on site and the fate of the people proven by documentary evidence to have been taken to Treblinka who never left the place alive. But there’s no reason why the gas chamber foundations need absolutely have been identified during the Polish site investigations in November 1945, so there’s as lot more for your faith to deal with.

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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?
Baseless. There was a final territorial solution yes but I have as of yet to see any convincing evidence that Hitler made any such orders.
The issue is not what orders Hitler gave, if he gave any orders at all and did not just authorize his paladins to do what they were eager to do. The issue is how important the "final solution of the Jewish question" was for the Nazi government and for Hitler himself. An idea of how important the "Jewish question" was for Hitler can be gained from his testament, as quoted under http://www.hitler.org/writings/last_testament/ :

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I have left no one in doubt that if the people of Europe are once more treated as mere blocks of shares in the hands of these international money and finance conspirators, then the sole responsibility for the massacre must be borne by the true culprits: the Jews. Nor have I left anyone in doubt that this time millions of European children of Aryan descent will starve to death, millions of men will die in battle, and hundreds of thousands of women and children will be burned or bombed to death in our cities without the true culprits being held to account, albeit more humanely.
And here’s how important Heinrich Himmler, as quoted under http://rodohforum.yuku.com/topic/2462 , considered dealing with the Jews to be:

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All German people apart from some exceptions are also clearly aware that wouldnt have withstood or withstand the bombing war, the hardships of the fourth and maybe the fifth and sixth war year, if we still had this disintegrating plague in our body popular.
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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.
Based on unbelievable eye witnesses who can't decide how they were being killed and saying things like body parts falling off 2 day old corpses or dying of a lack of air in a cattle car.
No, not based on essentially believable witnesses, some of whom may have mistakenly thought the gassing engine was a diesel engine while others may (assuming your are right about the "2 day old corpses") have mixed up in their recollections the dismemberment of decomposed bodies removed from the mass graves with the transportation of bodies from the gas chambers to the mass graves, or at worst indulged in some unnecessary embellishment of what they saw, and still others (assuming you are right about it being impossibly suffocation that had killed people in the cattle cars by the time they arrived at the camps) may have misunderstood the reason why some of the deportees were dead upon arrival.

What I wrote about the Nazis salvaging even spectacles and undergarments is based on the Nazis’ own documentation about the plunder of the people they murdered, some of which you may read under http://www.death-camps.org/reinhard/arloot.htm

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Have you ever heard of a cow dying in one of these cars from a lack of air? I have yet to.
Well, I still have to understand how especially the older and/or weaker ones among the deportees could survive being packed 100-150 or more into cars made to transport 40 soldiers or six horses, without food or water in the summer heat, rather than dying of thirst or heart failure or being suffocated or crushed in the struggle to get to the parts of the car where some air came in, not to mention those prompted by despair to commit suicide on the way.

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The Polish investigation in November 1945 was conducted in conjunction with the Soviets? I didn’t know that. How do you know?
Because there were Russians everywhere, it wouldn't have been hard to just ask for a metal detector, there were tons of unused ones.
I didn’t know the Russians were that cooperative towards Polish criminal justice authorities, especially when the latter were investigating a murder site where Soviet troops had also taken part in robbery-digging. What makes you think they were?

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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.
Forensic evidence is superior and if it proves that these are baseless assertions not even a million eye witnesses will save you.
Sorry, but by what rules and standards you can show us is forensic evidence considered "superior" to other categories of evidence?

I agree that where forensic evidence contradicts what becomes apparent from eyewitness testimony there must be something wrong with the latter, but that’s not what we have here. What documented forensic evidence we have does not contradict the other evidence, but corroborates it (as was, by the way, already stated in the paragraph you quoted – you missed the term "physical evidence").

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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.
Sand and gravel.
You’re not trying to tell us that there’s a crawler excavator that can dig a well 37 meters deep, are you?

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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.
There were a lot of undocumented people during the war because it was impossible to keep track of all the casualties and missing people. Many people had their passports burned in fires or lost altogether and lost their identity.
And they also had no other means of proving who they were and lost their memory as well, I suppose. Millions of cases of amnesia. Try coming up with something less far-fetched and fantastic.

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We cannot jump to conclusions for these people, we merely say that they were lost in action.
How come over 60 % of the pre-war Jewish population of Europe was "lost in action" while even the country hit hardest by the war, the Soviet Union, lost "only" about 14 % of its prewar population?

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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).
Thanks.
You’re welcome, but you’ll have to do better to keep it interesting.