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Originally Posted by ps
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Originally Posted by Roberto Muehlenkamp
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.
Positive claims require positive evidence, extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence. |
The first I agree with, the second is new to me. Any rules or standards of evidence you can quote to support your statement?
Ah, and there’s nothing extraordinary about mass murder, even on the scale we are discussing here. It has often happened throughout history.
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Originally Posted by ps
Just because someone cannot disprove that your divine being/event did not happen doesn't mean it did.
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No, what means that the event happened is that all known positive evidence points to its having happened while no evidence points to its not having happened.
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Originally Posted by ps
As noted by Mattogno there has never been a forensic investigation that produced forensic evidence.
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Sorry, but why are site investigation reports produced by criminal investigators not forensic evidence?
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Originally Posted by ps
I can claim that I have seen a huge dinosaur in my backyard or even get a congregation of people to believe that they saw God (Through psychological effects or special effects) but if you cannot positively prove such a claim then the claim is too weak to be proven on the merits of science.
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Sure, but what we have is not implausible like the dinosaur in your backyard, and it can be proven by evidence of the categories documentary, demographic, eyewitness and physical, all of which converge towards the conclusion that it happened.
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Originally Posted by ps
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How deep are the foundations of a 12-20 floor building, and what "medium excavator" did you have in mind?
12 floors would be about 2 stories down depending on how weighty the materials are. You can certainly build taller if you use light steel.
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Do one side first and then the other, or have two excavators work from either side. What’s the deal supposed to be?
The units used were feet (So I was wrong) . The boom was less than 40 ft with no method for removing the soil and the pit was 80 ft wide.
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I don’t think that answers my question, and I remember I also asked how you arrived at your figure about the boom length. Now I also ask what you mean by "no method for removing the soil".
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Originally Posted by ps
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If one takes into consideration the fact that 3,000 bodies take up a volume of about (3,000×0.045 =) 135 m3, the claim, according to which the shovel of the excavator could be loaded with 3,000 bodies at a time, will evoke only amusement. The length of the grate (100 to 150 m) contradicts the trial documents. According to Arad, the grate was 30 m wide,[434] but this too contradicts the verdict of the Düsseldorf Jury Court, according to which the grate consisted of "5 to 6 train rails of about 25 to 30 m in length." Since emaciated bodies, which easily disintegrated, were burned on both grates, the gap between two rails had to be small and could at most be permitted to amount to 50 to 60 cm, so that one can assume a width of the grate of approximately three meters. The width given by Feig - one meter - is obviously impossible.
This is another measurement, they're really irregular (As always)
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Someone is setting up a straw-man about an eyewitness description that probably was meant to say that the excavator could remove 3,000 bodies in one day or in one work shift, big deal. Then that someone is making a fuss about different data regarding the width of the grate, which are also nothing to write home about considering that no eyewitness is likely to have measured the thing and eyewitnesses tend to be mistaken about measurements and other figures without this meaning they didn’t see the object or event they are describing. I'm unimpressed.
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Originally Posted by ps
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They probably didn’t make the walls straight but sloping to avoid stability problems.
I have been at construction sites and I have never seen it done like you said.
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What, no sloping?
I had the following in mind:
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Mass grave site dimensions are usually given as though they were perfect cubes. In actuality, very large grave sites, like those a Treblinka are more like inverted, truncated pyramids. The deeper the grave, the more it had to be sloped so as to avoid the sides from slumping. This was not likely a safety concern - after all the work Jews who had to fill them or to clamber down inside to arrange the bodies were disposable. The SS would have been concerned that such slumping would make for premature filling and boundary irregularities. At Treblinka the soil was very sandy. This fact made for ease of excavation but troublesome stability. Therefore, one can be certain that the sides of each pit were sloped. It is doubtful that there were soil engineering studies done, so the slope angle must have been a guess on the part of the excavator operators, bolstered by empirical experience as they dug along. Viernik cites a depth of ten meters for the pits. If it is accurate, there is even more reason to believe that the sides had to be sloped. How much they were sloped is a pure guess. Soil engineering textbooks have formulas one can plug into to determine the optimum angle, but they require that the soil mechanics be known and can be used as inputs to the equations. Therefore, we have guessed that at Treblinka, if the pits were dug 10 meters deep, the slope angles were 60 degrees. A pit 50 X 25 X 10 meters would look like that in Figure D10.
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Source:
http://www.holocaust-history.org/Tre...pendixd2.shtml
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Originally Posted by ps
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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 :
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.
Alex Bay did the Vetruvian man calculations wrong, I doubt he could do this right either. |
What’s wrong about the Vetruvian man calculations, and what’s wrong about the calculations of excavation capacity?
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Originally Posted by ps
The boom length and weight is indicated here
http://translate.google.com/translat...3DEJT%26sa%3DN
You could look up a manual for this machine in German , it would be useful.
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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.
Any specific examples? Cite what the building material was, the perimeter size and the soil make up. It's quite different in different places. Where I live to make a skyscraper you need an extra large base. |
Let’s make it "a foundation 7.5 or more meters deep under the most favorable conditions", then. What machines did they have for that in the 1940s?
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Originally Posted by ps
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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.
It's not hard to make something on a cable reach far but its hard to produce a large mechanical advantage and produce a lot of force. That's why you have to have a heavy one which can go through clay.
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Why clay? Was there clay in the subsoil of Treblinka? If so, at that depth?
As to your claim that it takes a "heavy one", let’s have a look at
http://www.seilbaggerarbeiten.de/ , the website of a company that carries out works with cable-operated excavators throughout Germany. There are two rows of three photos each on that side, and the middle photo on the first row is captioned as follows:
"Neun Meter tiefe Ausschachtungs-Arbeiten mit Menck M 60 in Hamburg"
My translation:
"Nine meter deep excavation works with Menck M 60 in Hamburg"
Now let’s look at the specifications of the Menck M 60 excavator, according to
http://www.bagger-und-bahnen.de/bagger-menck/m_60.htm (terms translated from German):
Built from/to: 1954-1972;
Number built: 740;
Weight: 20 t;
Performance: 56-63 HP;
Shovel content: 0.65 m³
Compare with the Ma shown on Kurt Franz’s Treblinka photos, according to
http://www.bagger-und-bahnen.de/bagg...ck/ma_-_md.htm :
Built from/to: 1933-1945;
Number built: 144;
Performance: 70 HP;
Weight: 27 t
Please forgive me if I have some trouble understanding why an excavator weighing 27 tons and having a performance of 70 HP could not have dug a pit 7.5 meters deep when an excavator weighing 20 tons and having a performance of 56-63 HP can obviously dig a pit 9 meters deep.
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Originally Posted by ps
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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?
This was being done next to a river and to be honest that's ridiculous. I have yet to live anywhere that was even a few km within a river/lake that had that deep of a clay layer. In fact I can't recall any place in East Europe that I observed that. A meter or two of soil is usually it.
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Your claim is taken note of, but as you are the one who contends that what becomes apparent from a criminal investigator’s site investigation report would have been impossible and the report was thus manipulated, the burden of proving your allegations is on you, and however much you may know about subsoil and excavations your recollections are no proof. Try to find something about the depth of clay layers in the subsoil of Treblinka, which IIRC consisted of sand or sandy loam. Information about the composition of the subsoil in a nearby area, or in one where one can expect the same subsoil conditions to exist as at Treblinka, will be sufficient.
Ah, and Hamburg lies by the Elbe river, if I’m not mistaken. Wouldn’t the above-mentioned 20-ton M60 have your clay problem there as well?
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Originally Posted by ps
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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.
Artillery isn't fired randomly, it was directed fire from the ground and would be pretty accurate as well. If a bomb/shell landed in Treblinka it was on purpose and it was aimed.
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That would leave the robbery-diggers with their explosive charges from a nearby Soviet airfield alone, which I would have no problem with. But you’re not trying to tell us that all Soviet artillery shells during massive bombardments of given frontline areas landed exactly where they were supposed to land, are you?
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Originally Posted by ps
I see, but what about the case mentioned under http://www.aoc.state.nc.us/www/publi...1/001163-1.htm ?
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?
I don't quite understand why you are comparing this. |
Bullet deflected from the shoulder blade in both cases.
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Originally Posted by ps
The trial court did not err in an assault with a deadly weapon with intent to kill inflicting serious 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 is a serious wound, not a mere ricochet. This man was bleeding.
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Of course he was, as the bullet went through his shoulder from the front before ricocheting from the shoulder blade, and then went out again through body tissue. In Wiernik’s case the shoulder blade was the first thing that the bullet hit, and it may not even have been a direct hit but a grazing hit. So the bullet ricocheted from the shoulder blade before it could do any harm and went where it could cause no harm either.
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Originally Posted by ps
This isn't the same as Wiernik's case where he wasn't hurt at all.
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For the reasons I just explained.
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Originally Posted by ps
This was a case of being lucky.
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Wiernik’s, you mean? Definitely so.
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Originally Posted by ps
It never said anything about the caliber though so it might be smaller.
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Or larger, who knows.
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Originally Posted by ps
A 9x19 would be hitting with a lot of force and its infamous for being a good piercing round (On par with the Tokarev that chewed through a helmet). The case for this man was likely of a smaller round because a 9x19 would have shattered the bone.
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Your claim is taken note of, but as we cannot rule out the possibility that the bullet in the trial case was from a weapon comparable to a 9x19mm parabellum and fired at the same range, I’d like to see something more than your private knowledge of weapons. A documented case where a bullet from 9x19 hit someone on the shoulder blade at its maximum effective range and shattered the bone would be OK. If it was not a direct but a grazing hit, that would be even better.
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Originally Posted by ps
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In the confusion following the breakout from Treblinka, the pistol may also have been taken from an injured comrade.
Id rather chase people with a rifle, the stopping power is better along with the range.
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In a situation like the breakout from Treblinka, you may not have the chance to do what you would rather do, or fail to think of it in the confusion. Especially if you’re an ill-trained Trawniki Ukrainian.
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Originally Posted by ps
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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.
My grandfather was a Ukranian POW and I know this story is bollocks. I have collected a lot of interview evidence that Ukranians and Russians were treated worse than Polaks both by observations from Polacks and Russians.
You can believe it but I wont, this story is bollocks.
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Nazi crimes against non-Jews being my special field of interest, see the RODOH thread under
http://rodohforum.yuku.com/topic/6101 and the links mentioned therein, I am well aware of how badly the Germans treated Soviet POWs, also those from Ukraine, and how they died like flies from starvation or exposure in 1941/42 or were bumped of by their guards or by SD killing squads. But this doesn’t change the fact that a great many Soviet POWs from among the about one million who were released from captivity (see the sources quoted under
http://rodohforum.yuku.com/topic/2452 ) served as auxiliaries in various branches of the German armed forces, including the SS, and some of these served as guards in places like Treblinka.
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Originally Posted by ps
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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.
Soaking them in gasoline wouldn't have done it, look up Goebbel's immolation, he wasn't even nearly completely burned.
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They had the same problem in Treblinka because an essential factor (proper air circulation) was missing until Mr. Floss implemented his grate structure. And Wiernik expressly mentioned that the initial procedure was inadequate. From my article under
http://holocaustcontroversies.blogsp...norant_03.html :
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But actually Wiernik did mention other flammables in his description of the procedure in question. For if we read a little further on in Chapter 9 from the passage pointed out by Bud, we find the following:
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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.
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The text in Bud’s version reads as follows:
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The results were very poor. The male corpses would not burn at all, although they were sprinkled with benzine. The expense was considerable and the results inadequate.
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Not only did Wiernik clearly state that an external flammable – gasoline – was used to burn the corpses, he also pointed out that this procedure was ineffective and very expensive, because "the male corpses simply would not burn" despite the female bodies placed at the bottom of the piles of bodies to be burned and the gasoline that these piles were doused with.
So how come Bud didn’t tell his viewers about this passage, which completely invalidates his claim that Wiernik tried to make believe that women burned «on their own, like wood»? Did he miss it? Hardly so, as we can expect Bud to have read Wiernik’s account very carefully, looking for passages he could make a fuss about. The conclusion is inescapable that our friend Bud simply lied to his viewers, by deliberately omitting a passage that invalidated his claim.
3. The inefficient initial procedure of simply piling up the bodies, drenching them with gasoline and setting them on fire was eventually replaced by an efficient procedure described by Wiernik, Reichman and other eyewitnesses, that of building huge grids made of railroad tracks, placing the bodies on top of these grids and setting them on fire by lighting wood placed underneath the grids.
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Originally Posted by ps
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The space available beneath the grate was (0.76 m × 90 m2 =) 68.4 m3. The weight of a cubic meter of normally stacked firewood lies between 340 and 450 kg. Let us assume the highest value here; then (68.4×450 =) 30,780 kg of wood can fit in the 68.4 m3. Arnulf Neumaier refers to an article, which appeared in the November 27, 1986, Schenectady Gazette, New Delhi, according to which 6,433 tons of wood is required for the daily cremation of 21,000 bodies in India, which corresponds to a wood requirement of 306 kg per body.[437] The author of the present chapter (Carlo Mattogno) has performed cremation experiments with animal flesh, which produced the following results:[438]
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Quantity of wood needed for the cremation of one kilogram of animal flesh: 3.5 kg of seasoned wood (plus 0.1 liter of ethyl alcohol).
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Time required for the incineration of one kilogram of animal flesh: approximately 6 minutes.
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Amount of wood burned per square meter per one hour (until flames extinguish): approximately 80 kg.
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Wood ashes resulting: approximately 8% of the total weight.
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Specific weight of wood ashes: approximately 0.34 g/cm3.
On the basis of this data one can calculate that the cremation of one body of 45 kg requires approximately 160 kg of seasoned wood. Consequently, in order to incinerate 3,500 bodies, (3,500×160=) 560,000 kg of wood is necessary, but there was room for merely 30.780 kg under the grate, therefore seven times less than required. Therefore, no more than (30.780÷3,500=) 8.8 kg of wood would have been allotted to one body, a ridiculously insufficient amount.
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My own calculations under
http://holocaustcontroversies.blogsp...rather_18.html are somewhat different than Mattogno’s and benefited from an excellent source provided by Mattogno himself, the cremation experiments of Dr. Lothes and Dr. Profé mentioned by engineer Heepke, a German cremation expert:
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The Treblinka incineration grids, as we have seen, had probably an area ca. 66 square meters on average. The space underneath the grid available for placing brushwood and other wood, considering both the depth of the pit and the above-ground height of the concrete blocks, was about 112 cubic meters, which corresponds to ca. 30.9 cords of wood. If there were a thousand decomposed bodies on the grid, weighing 25 kg on average (calculations see here), if they were incinerated in a single run, and if the wood used was pinewood, the kind that grew in the Treblinka area and may also have been felled in lumber-working labor camps supplying Treblinka, the wood-to-corpse ratio, taking the data for dry Jeffery pine given on this site, would have been 1.41:1 at maximum (i.e. assuming the higher value of the weight range given for this type of wood). With 1,000 non-decomposed corpses on the grid (average weight 35 kg, according to my calculations) it would have been 1.01:1 at most. With 2,000 corpses it would have been 0.71:1 or 0.50:1, depending on whether the corpses were decomposed or non-decomposed ones. The former rate would be better than the one achieved in trial III of Heepke’s Table I, while the latter would be close to the average result achieved by Dr. Lothes and Dr. Profé in their trials identified as IV, V and VI in Heepke's table. With 3,000 decomposed corpses, the ratio would be 0.47:1, better (considering the heating value conversions for non-wood flammables I made above) than the result achieved in trial I according to Heepke’s table, and almost as good as the result of trial II. The incineration of 3,000 non-decomposed corpses, finally, would mean a ratio of 0.34:1, i.e. an improvement over the most fuel-economic result achieved by Lothes and Profé, that of trial IV. To be sure, this was mass incineration, the corpses (at least the non-decomposed ones) were arranged in a particular manner (corpses with a large fat content at the bottom layer on the grid), the non-decomposed corpses were probably bathed in gasoline in order to help them burn (like at Dresden after the attack on 13/14 February 1945, see above), and the decomposed corpses, as explained here, burned rather easily due to their dehydration and/or the flammable substances generated during the decomposition process. These wood-saving factors were not attributable to the arrangement of the incineration structure, so that it cannot be said that its inventor, SS Oberscharführer or Hauptscharführer [Herbert] Floss, managed to outperform Dr. Lothes and Dr. Profé. Besides, 3,000 non-decomposed corpses on a grid seems unlikely, even assuming that the average deportee to Treblinka occupied only ca. 47.5 ÷ 703 = 0.07 cubic meters, as in Provan’s experiment; the height of the pile of corpses would have to be 3,000 * 0.07 ÷ 66 = 3.18 meters. If the pile of corpses was about 2 meters high, as described by eyewitnesses, the most that could fit on a grid with an area of 66 square meters would be 66 * 2 ÷ 0.07 = 1,886 non-decomposed corpses. The number of decomposed corpses that could be placed on such a grid would be considerably higher if they were already in the advanced stages of decomposition at which, as explained here, the corpse generally dehydrates completely.
Notwithstanding these restrictions, however, it seems fair to conclude that the combination of several factors – a grid arrangement providing for considerable air circulation, the use of adequate amounts of highly flammable accelerants, a large mass of organic matter incinerated at the same time, and the combustion properties of that matter, especially the decomposed, largely dehydrated corpses – made it possible to incinerate hundreds of thousands of corpses at each of the AR camps using relatively modest amounts of wood. It is not improbable that the burning of the corpses at Treblinka made do with ca. 30.9 cords or 35.3 tons of pine wood per grid incineration, which, even assuming 750 grid incinerations with an average of just 1,000 corpses each, would mean no more than 26,475 tons of wood for the whole process – plus, of course, an enormous amount of precious gasoline. Assuming ca. 700,000 decomposed corpses weighing 25 kg on average and 50,000 non-decomposed corpses weighing 35 kg on average, the overall wood weight to corpse weight - ratio would be 26,475,000 kg ÷ 19,250,000 kg = 1.38:1, approaching the lower range of the calculations in section 4.2 of my article Carlo Mattogno on Belzec Archaeological Research.
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The Belzec article addresses in more detail Mattogno’s fallacies, one of which is assuming that the bodies – many of which were of women and children, and the greater part of which had lost much or most of their weight due to dehydration in the advanced stages of decomposition – weighed 45 kg on average. His calculations of the wood-to-corpse ratio, based on some burning experiments he made, are also way above the mark if compared with modern data from cattle burning, and even more so if compared with the data provided by Mattogno’s own source, German cremation expert Heepke.
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Originally Posted by ps
Apparently this wood magically disappeared.
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Who said so? Archaeological investigations of the mass graves at Belzec found that they contained both human and wood ashes, for instance. In section 4.5 of my Belzec article, under
http://holocaustcontroversies.blogsp...belzec_30.html , I demonstrated that, contrary to Mattogno’s claims and according to his own data about the weight and volume of wood and human/animal ash remains, the cremation leftovers occupied but a small part of the mass grave volume.
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Originally Posted by ps
Sprinkling some gas (Already unlikely)
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Why?
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Originally Posted by ps
on the corpses would not have been a proper cremation.
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That’s in line with what Wiernik wrote, see above. But they eventually didn’t just sprinkle gas on the corpses. They put the corpses on grates to provide for good air circulation, wood sprinkled with gasoline in a pit underneath the grate and also gasoline on top of the bodies – more than they did when they burned the bodies on the Dresden
Altmarkt after the bombing attack on 13/14 February 1945, where there was hardly any space for burning material underneath the grid. And unlike at Dresden, many of the corpses were in an advanced state of decomposition, therefore containing little or no water (the evaporation of which is the biggest problem in burning corpses). What is more, substances that come into being during decomposition, like methane and butyric acid, are also flammable, and most of the Treblinka corpses - unlike those at Dresden - were in a more or less advanced state of decomposition.
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Originally Posted by ps
And the method used to crush the bones? (There would be way more than bones left).
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That’s more or less what Ukrainian guard Pavel Vladimirovich Leleko testified to, as quoted under
http://holocaustcontroversies.blogsp...rather_18.html :
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An incinerator from the burning of bodies was situated about 10 meters beyond the large gas chamber building. It had the shape of a cement pit about one meter deep and 20 meters long. A series of furnaces covered on the top with four rows of rails extended along the entire length of one of the walls of the pit. The bodies were laid on the rails, caught fire from the flames burning in the furnaces and burned. About 1000 bodies were burned simultaneously. The burning process lasted up to five hours.[…] The parts of the body that had burned but had preserved their natural shape were put into a special mortar and pounded into flour. This was done in order to hide the traces of the crimes committed. Later on the ashes were buried in deep pits.
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Originally Posted by ps
Simply pathetic.
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How so? Do you think it would not have worked, or was it just not technically "elegant"?
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Originally Posted by ps
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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).
This is it? And where's the evidence that it was "clarified" or "unclarified"?
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I think it’s not for me to provide evidence supporting my assumption, but for you to explain why my assumption is unreasonable. After all you are the one challenging the plausibility of Wiernik’s account.
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Originally Posted by ps
There are libraries of captured documents available, where is the evidence of them trying to hide it?
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Of trying to hide what, the documentary evidence to the killing operations at Belzec, Sobibor and Treblinka? Here you are, translated excerpt from a letter that Globocnik sent to Himmler from Triest on 1/5/1944:
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There is one additional factor to be added to the total accounting of "Reinhardt" which is that the vouchers dealing with it must be destroyed as soon as possible after the data have already been destroyed by all other works concerned in this matter.
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Source:
http://www.death-camps.org/reinhard/arloot.htm
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Originally Posted by ps
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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 .
As I already noted its a large round and I think it would have utterly shattered the shoulder. |
Sorry, but your "noting" something is not enough. If you want to demonstrate that Wiernik’s account is implausible, you must provide evidence.
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Originally Posted by ps
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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.
The failure to fire is usually due to the bullet alignment, if it fires there is physically nothing ruining its accuracy or range since at that point the gasses are propelling it and the barrel is directing it.
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I appreciate your knowledge of the subject, but is there any source (preferably online) where I can look up what you said?
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Originally Posted by ps
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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?
http://www.dimandr.com/fence.jpg
This looks more realistic to me and no I don't think they could have climbed over this fence without getting a lot of attention and being shot at or for that matter being able to handle a gun afterwards. (Imagine how many times you'd cut your hands up if you were doing it as fast as possible, your hands would be mince meat) |
I don’t think a completely desperate person would care much about messing up her hands, and fences on the picture are from Auschwitz-Birkenau, double fences, electrified, with no vegetation covering them. The inner fences of Treblinka looked different. From the judgment at the 1st Düsseldorf Treblinka trial, text available under
http://rodohforum.yuku.com/topic/2503?page=1 , my translation:
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From the women undressing barracks on the reception square a way, frequently referrede to as "tube", "way of no return", "street to heaven" of "heaven alley", led to the upper part of the camp. This way, which was about 80 to 90 meters long and ca. 4.5 to 5 meters wide, first ran for 30 meters in the direction of the camp’s eastern part, then made an almost right-angle turn and ended exactly in front of the central corridor of upper camp’s gas chamber building. It was surrounded by a barbed-wire fence higher than the height of a man, into which again brushwood had been woven so tightly that it was not possible to look in from the outside.
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The evidence on which the court’s findings of fact were based is mentioned in my article under
http://holocaustcontroversies.blogsp...051943077.html .
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Originally Posted by ps
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Assuming he spotted her while climbing over.
There would be numerous people on towers watching this operation happen.
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How many towers were there by the "tube", and how many guards on each tower?
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Originally Posted by ps
She'd be mown down by a machine gun in the middle of the two fences.
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If there were guards towers by the "tube", if the guards there were attentive enough, and what two fences are you talking about?
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Originally Posted by ps
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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.
That's your guessing, do you have any evidence?
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Yes, see the above excerpt from the judgment at the 1st Düsseldorf Treblinka trial. A fence "higher than the height of a man" is more like two meters than three, if you ask me.
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Originally Posted by ps
Id like to at least see a photograph.
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That’s an unreasonable request, as you may understand. First because there are no rules or standards I know of (and I don’t think you can show me any) whereby proof of what the fence looked like would require a photograph let alone "at least" a photograph, and second because, with the prohibition to photograph that the SS staff at Treblinka was subject to, there’s no reason why such photograph should necessarily exist (to be sure, Kurt Franz violated these instructions when photographing his beloved excavators and "nice" aspects of his service, but if he also photographed things like the "tube" these must have been among the photos he had torn out of his album by the time it was found).
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Originally Posted by ps
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Why, she only had to watch gun-toting German guards bolting their rifle when shooting people, for instance during round-ups.
Wiernik said people all died the moment they came and those who didn't (The commandos) would only live 2 weeks.
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That was in the early phases of the camp’s operation, IIRC. Later the SS seem to have realized that it was to their convenience to have a permanent roster of inmates with experience in carrying out the camp’s task.
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Originally Posted by ps
Strange how he lived a year eh?
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As a carpenter, Wiernik was an important asset to the camp’s operation. No wonder they let him live.
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Originally Posted by ps
Well anyways if she was naked she was being led to "The Tunnel" (Dum dum dum) and thus wouldn't have seen anyone shot. Do you have any evidence of executions taking place on site?
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I have, but I was not referring to shootings on site at Treblinka. I was referring to shootings during ghetto roundups, like those mentioned in a report quoted after Mattogno’s Belzec book in my Mattogno-Belzec article under
http://holocaustcontroversies.blogsp...n-belzec.html:
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Each car was loaded with 100 persons. Other Jews were, however, shot: "On September 7, 300 old, infected, frail, or untransportable Jews were executed."
During the days following there were more shootings:
"During the actions in the Kolomea area on September 8, 9, and 10, 1942, about 400 Jews had to be liquidated by shooting for the usual reasons."
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I assume that the shooting was done with rifles, and I don’t think it was done in secrecy.
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Originally Posted by ps
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If you mean Fahrenheit degrees, easily so in the Polish summer.
Water's boiling point is 100 degrees Fahrenheit?! Interesting.
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We are talking about the following description in Wiernik’s
A Year in Treblinka
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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.
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While I don’t think that Wiernik got the cause of the "steam" right, I can imagine that the contrast between the outside temperature on a "scorching hot day" and the cooler temperature underground inside a mass grave can produce "steam", even though the "boiler" thing is probably hyperbolic. If you think that would require an outside temperature of 100 degrees centigrade, please demonstrate that this would be so.
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Originally Posted by ps
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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.
That's if you ignore half of the nonsense he touts and put your own spin on it yeah. I've seen Dinosaurs in my backyard too.
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Contrary to what you’re accusing me of, I’m not cherry-picking. The criterion for accepting some parts of Wiernik’s testimony as accurate and others not is not convenience, as I told you in a previous post. It is a) plausibility and b) corroboration by evidence independent of Wiernik’s testimony.
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Originally Posted by ps
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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.
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 ?
As if they'd specifically remove the chlorine. |
No, it just happened to be mostly covering the bodies they removed from the graves.
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Originally Posted by ps
Chlorine doesn't occur in soil naturally. If it was there it would have come up in huge amounts.
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Why "huge amounts", and why would the excavations conducted in November 1945 necessarily have found them?
If I remember correctly, by the way, Prof. Kola found chlorine in the Belzec mass graves during his 1997-99 archeological investigation, which was rather more detailed than examining judge Lukaszkiewicz’ Treblinka site investigations in 1945. I’ll check.
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Originally Posted by ps
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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.
I live next to a birch forest and catching just one bush on fire is often enough to burn all the grass out.
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I guess whether the same might happen at Treblinka would depend on how fast the fire would propagate among brushwood that seems to have been largely fresh, and on who was around to notice and extinguish the fire.
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Originally Posted by ps
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A few dry branches igniting would not have brought up the temperature the way a burning house does, first of all.
Apparently you haven't ever been camping. Well when you don't have any fuel here is what you do- you grab some paper and stuff it around the wood you want to burn. You set the paper on fire and in most cases the wood begins to burn too. You'd find that catching wood on fire by itself wont work but if you catch the paper on fire first its all well and good.
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I know that and think it supports my point rather than yours.
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Originally Posted by ps
What is happening is a chain reaction - that is more and more energy is being released by the paper thus reaching the point where wood combusts and begins its own chain reaction. This concept is not limited to size (As with houses). Pine burns well because it is oily (Full of various carbon chains that again burn great). The pine branch being burnt in the experiment is approximately how the branches in the camp would be. It wasn't dry at all (It was green so you know that the pigment is still there and the cells are still full of water)
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Still, as I wrote in my article under
http://holocaustcontroversies.blogsp...llshit_20.html ,
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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.
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Originally Posted by ps
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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:
First I highly doubt the maps were even real because as I have already demonstrated in a previous thread 4 pits would not be enough. |
That would depend on the size of the pits, wouldn’t it? What you may reasonably argue is that maps are not wholly accurate (nobody says they are, especially in what concerns the relative sizes and distances of objects in the camp), or that they referred to a phase of the camp’s operation when only a certain number of pits was
already,
still or
again open. Anyway, it is bullshit to estimate distances on the basis of maps that were certainly not drawn to scale, as I pointed out under
http://holocaustcontroversies.blogsp...llshit_20.html
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Originally Posted by ps
Even with the super-efficient 6 people a square meter (Something that was never observed to be done).
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Well, nobody else I know of ever dropped as many bodies into a pit as the SS did at the AR camps, so if it "was never observed to be done" that wouldn’t mean anything. Your 6 bodies per square meter I don’t understand. Assuming that the mass graves had a total area of 12,500 square meters, as I did in my article under
http://holocaustcontroversies.blogsp...treblinka.html, that would be a mere 75,000 bodies buried in them, and if the graves were 7.5 meters deep and thus had a volume of roughly 90,000 cubic meters, this would mean a ratio of just 0.8 bodies per cubic meters, which is as bad a waste of good grave space as I can think of. Actually the ratio was at least 8 bodies per cubic meter, also considered plausible by Mattogno. This would mean 720,000 dead bodies in 90,000 cubic meters (actually "only" 713,555 Jews were deported to Treblinka until the end of 1942, when burial was the or the essential body disposal method), and they were not thrown into the pits all at the same time (meaning that those in the lower layers would have had a considerably reduced volume, due to decomposition and the effects of quicklime, by the time those in the upper layers were added). 720,000 dead bodies in 12,500 square meters of mass graves would mean about 58 bodies per square meter.
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Originally Posted by ps
Second of all it was already noted prisoners smoked. I somehow doubt it would be impossible to find a time and place to set the fence on fire considering that it was huge and bound to have patches of dry branches.
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Time was not the issue. The issue was that the prisoners were not heroes and valued their own lives, which they would have forfeited by an attempt to set fire to the fence. See again my article under
http://holocaustcontroversies.blogsp...llshit_20.html .
You and I may like to believe that we would have behaved more valiantly in such a situation, but how can anyone be certain of that without having been through such an experience?
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Originally Posted by ps
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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.
The only proof is eye witness testimony
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So what? Eyewitness testimony is used as proof by criminal justice throughout the world to this day.
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Originally Posted by ps
and I highly doubt that is reliable as you have already demonstrated that you aren't below cherry-picking.
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There’s hardly a testimony that is 100 % reliable, as any trial judge or defense attorney will tell you. So what investigators, judges and historians do is sift the wheat from the chaff, the wheat being those parts of a testimony that are a) plausible and b) confirmed by other testimonies independent of the one under assessment and/or by other evidence. That’s not cherry-picking, but a reasonable and objective approach.
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Originally Posted by ps
I can pick out quotes from any of my favorite/not favorite TV channels and then pretend they support me even if they didn't. That is why the Romans invented the concept "Everything true, or nothing at all". I am with the Romans .
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You shouldn’t believe what Bradley Smith tells you about the Roman law principle
falsus in uno, falsus in omnibus, because he obviously either didn’t understand it or is lying about what it means. Let’s just look at the Wikipedia definition under
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Id_est#I , I highlight the important terms:
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A Roman legal principle indicating that a witness who willfully falsifies one matter is not credible on any matter. The underlying motive for attorneys to impeach opposing witnesses in court: the principle discredits the rest of their testimony if it is without corroboration.
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So for an eyewitness testimony to be dismissed as unreliable in its entirely two conditions must be present:
a) The eyewitness
willfully falsified one part of the testimony;
b) There is no evidence corroborating the rest of the testimony.
This means that "everything true, or nothing at all" in the sense conveyed by Bradley Smith is bullshit. And realizing this does not even require looking at the definition of the Roman principle, just some common sense. Honestly, do you know of any jury that would completely dismiss an eyewitness account of a traffic accident, even as evidence that the accident happened, just because the eyewitness was mistaken about the speed of the cars involved or some other detail?
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Originally Posted by ps
What really does it for me is that most of the technicalities of Wiernik's map were drawn by someone else
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The answer is simple: Jankiel Wiernik 's expositions of May 1944, because the Soviet investigating judges were in possession of a copy of his text, which is explicitly mentioned in the Soviet report of August 24, 1944. As will be recalled, Wiernik had simply transformed the steam chambers of the report of November 15, 1942, into engine exhaust gas chambers and even copied the drawing of the camp enclosed with that report. On this plan[311] the two alleged killing installations are drawn in, the first with three and the second with ten chambers, whose structure is practically identical with those of the two drawings of Judge Jurowski. But because Wiernik had forgotten to append to the ten gas chambers of his second drawing an eleventh room, in which the engine was installed, Judge Jurowski saw himself forced to draw in the tractor (engine) at the end of the corridor, between chambers 5 and 10. He painstakingly adopted Wiernik 's drawings, yet nonetheless attempted to bring a minimum of order to them and in doing so drew equipment within the installations, which Wiernik had not mentioned. Since the Soviet judge understood significantly more about engineering than that witness, he enhanced the drawing with another element, which would have been indispensable for a hypothetical mass killing with engine exhaust fumes, but of whose necessity Wiernik had not been aware: the openings for the removal of the gas, i.e. of the air-gas mixture. We will come back to this important point in Section 8.
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Is that supposed to be an "important point" discrediting Wiernik’s testimony? The only thing it shows is that Wiernik was not technical enough to properly understand the gassing mechanism (which he never described as having involved anything other than engine exhaust, IIRC), and that the examining judge tried to figure out, when making a drawing based on the witness’s descriptions or drawings, how what the witness had described must by technical logic have looked like. How this would support the conclusion that Wiernik did not see the devices he may have somewhat inaccurately described is beyond me.
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Originally Posted by ps
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I don’t think so, and whatever eyewitness thought that the air was sucked out was obviously mistaken anyway. Why the straw-man?
Alright that's fine that takes out all of these witnesses
Samuel Rajzman, Lucjan Puchała, Marianna Kobus, Stanisław Zdonek, Barbara Zemkiewicz, Józef Pukaszek, Stanisław Kon, Mieczysław Anyszkiewicz, Tadeusz Kann, Franciszek Wesolowski, Max Lewit, and Kazimierz Skarzyński
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It would "take out" these witnesses only in what concerns their descriptions of the killing mechanism, but which of them actually mentioned air being sucked out of the gas chamber?
I’m asking because the description of the gassing process by the Central Commission for Investigation of German Crimes in Poland, available in English under
http://www.ess.uwe.ac.uk/genocide/gcpoltreb1.htm , is the following:
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During the first phase of the camp, from July, 1942 onward 3 gas-chambers were in use. In the early autumn of 1942, however, the construction of a new building, holding 10 chambers, was begun. One of the witnesses brought to Treblinka on October 10, 1942, saw these chambers already functioning.
The aspect of the chambers in which victims were gasssed, according to statements by the witnesses Wiernik, Rajchman and Czechowicz, was as follows: Both buildings had many corridors, within the larger building the entrances to the chambers being on both sides of the corridor, but in the smaller one on one side only. The entrances were small and had tightly closing doors. In the outer wall’s of the chambers were large trap doors which could be raised in order to permit the removal of the corpses. The chambers had tiled floors, sloping towards the outer side. In the ceiling were openings connected by pipes with engines situated in adjoining buildings, which produced the CO gas with which the victims were suffocated.
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Nothing there about air being sucked out, unless I missed something. And the eyewitnesses mentioned in this report are the following:
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Jankiel Wiernik, Henryk Poswolski, Abe Kon, Aron Czechowicz, Oskar Strawczynski, Samuel Reisman, Aleksander Kudlik, Hejnoch Brener, Starislaw Kon, Eugeniusz Turowski, Henryk Reichman, Szyja Warszawsski, and Leon Finkelsztejn.
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At least one of them, Stanislaw or Starislaw Kon, is also mentioned in your list. And I wonder what Marianna Kobus (who, IIRC, was a Polish inhabitant from an adjacent village who never set foot inside the camp and therefore could at best provide rumors she had heard about how the killing was done) is doing in your list. I wonder if the list also includes other Polish villagers who could not possibly have observed the killing mechanism.
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Originally Posted by ps
And we also take Wiernik out as well as his initial report said steam chamber so we cross him out as well.
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Where did Wiernik say something about a steam chamber?
In his book
A Year in Treblinka, according to the translation available under
http://www.zchor.org/treblink/wiernik.htm , one reads the following:
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Each chamber had a door facing Camp No. 2 (1.80 by 2.50 meters), which could be opened only from the outside by lifting it with iron supports and was closed by iron hooks set into the sash frames, and by wooden bolts. The victims were led into the chambers through the doors leading from the corridor, while the remains of the gassed victims were dragged out through the doors facing Camp No. 2. The power plant operated alongside these chambers, supplying Camps 1 and 2 with electric current. A motor taken from a dismantled Soviet tank stood in the power plant. This motor was used to pump the gas, which was let into the chambers by connecting the motor with the inflow pipes. The speed with which death overcame the helpless victims depended on the quantity of combustion gas admitted into the chamber at one time.
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Originally Posted by ps
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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 .
They're not up to scientific standards and as noted by Mattogno are not positive proof. |
If Mattogno says so, then I wonder who the hell Mattogno thinks he is to stipulate what is positive proof and what is not, and what rules and standards of evidence other than his irrelevant own he applied. As to whether or not the Polish site investigation reports were up to whatever it is you mean by "scientific standards", what exactly is that supposed to matter? Independently how good or bad these reports were by "scientific standards", there’s no reason to doubt the accuracy of the descriptions of physical evidence contained therein, and these descriptions contain sufficient data to determine whether or not the physical evidence corroborates the scale of the killing that becomes apparent from the documentary evidence (both categories of evidence match, as I explained under
http://holocaustcontroversies.blogsp...treblinka.html )
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Originally Posted by ps
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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).
Maybe it's because it would have been too easy for him
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“The culmination of years of research… our purpose… to present the historical facts that refute Holocaust denial… To debunk the deniers can’t we just go there and see them for ourselves? The answer, of course, is “yes.”… We can no longer ignore the deniers, calling them names and hoping they will go away… We cannot remain silent anymore. It’s time to respond… Not only is it defensible to respond to the deniers, it is, we believe, our duty… Many of our arguments draw on specialized research into the claims of the deniers that took us… to the Nazi extermination camps themselves… we went to Europe to conduct research at the camps, in particular at… Dachau, Treblinka, Sobibor, Belzec, Mauthausen… We wanted to see for ourselves just what evidence there is at the camps and to take the opportunity to examine firsthand the claims… Much of the research is the type of work professional historians normally do… analyzing ground and aerial photographs… in order to make proper interpretations, we must review the physical evidence… Like criminologists solving a crime, we piece together the myriad bits of evidence until a conclusion emerges from the morass of data… How is it that so much physical evidence can come to be doubted?”
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That’s exactly the crap that Gerdes provided, a meaningless montage from different parts of the book not necessarily related to each other or to the
Aktion Reinhard(t) camps. And it’s not what I asked for, as you must have realized. I want the number(s) of the page(s) in
Denying History where Shermer claimed to have conducted a study of the physical evidence to the killings at Belzec, Sobibor and Treblinka.
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Originally Posted by ps
I have yet to see this report but I await it (Ha ha ha)
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That’s the kind of silliness I would have expected from Gerdes, but not from you. You can do better. Come on, let’s have the page number(s).
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Originally Posted by ps
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I’m also "Goy", by the way. One doesn’t have to be Jewish to dislike "White" or Nazi or "Revisionist" or whatever BS.
I am highly skeptical of that
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Your "skepticism" is as baseless as your "skepticism" in regard to certain proven historical events, sorry.
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Originally Posted by ps
but if you want to call yourself Goy then add Shabbos.
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Sorry, no idea what that’s supposed to mean. Must be because I don't share your apparent obsession with things Jewish.
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Originally Posted by ps
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No, it only seems that some witnesses were better observers than others.
And most are just outright liars?
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Does a non-technical witness’s having misunderstood a technical device or process he or she observed make that witness a liar? I don’t think so. Just like other "Revisionists", you should be careful with that inflationary use of the word "liar", if you want to avoid the "boy cries wolf" effect the day you should be able to demonstrate that a witness actually made a statement against better knowledge (i.e. told a lie).
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Originally Posted by ps
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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.
Id be curious if you could provide a list of these missing people because I am quite amaze in how many of these yids survived.
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A list of the missing people is in preparation. Some interesting facts about it are mentioned under
http://holocaustcontroversies.blogsp...ose-names.html :
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Let's pause for a moment and consider exactly what the Yad Vashem Database contains: the names of victims based on Pages of Testimony submitted by surviving relatives or friends. So far as I can see, it doesn't seem to have factored in all of the many documentary sources of the kind that are found in Arolsen and a zillion other archives around the world. One of the documentary sources that does seem to have been factored in are the transport lists found by the Dutch Red Cross immediately after the war which gave the full names of all 105,000 Dutch Jews deported to Auschwitz, Sobibor, Theresienstadt and Bergen-Belsen.
Oh yeah, the Dutch Jews. Them. Holocaust deniers tend to keep especially quiet about the Dutch Jews, perhaps because they are aware of precisely how detailed the Dutch records are. And indeed, let's see what Yad Vashem have to say about the numbers of names available from individual countries:
The Database contains 1,260,256 million names occurrences of people from Poland; 225,284 from Germany; 198,189 from the former USSR (1938 borders); 163,628 from Romania; 124,591 from Czechoslovakia and 100,000 from the Netherlands.
To recap vis-a-vis the accepted figures for numbers of Jewish victims from each country:
Holland 100,000 names 100,000 victims
Czechoslovakia 124,591 names 143,000 victims
Germany 225,284 names 160,000 victims
Poland 1,260,256 names 2.7 million victims
USSR(1938 borders) 198,189 names 1.1 million victims
So what do we have here? We have a 100% match for Holland, a better than 80% match for Czechoslovakia, and so many German names that one suspects they mean either Germany and Austria put together (Dimensionen des Völkermords: 160,000 + 65,000 = 225,000), or they are including those who died from suicide and natural causes 'during the Holocaust', but not in a camp.
So we have a considerable degree of overlap in the west, and far fewer names for the east. Hardly surprising when entire communities were wiped out across the whole of Eastern Europe, with few survivors and precious few relatives or neighbours left alive to report the death of their friends and family. Also hardly surprising given the taboo nature of the Holocaust in the former Soviet Union, and the fact that most Soviet Jews were extensively assimilated into Russian society and fluency in Hebrew or Yiddish dropped like a stone after 1945. For this reason, Yad Vashem has just installed a Russian-language search and submission form for its database.
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Originally Posted by ps
http://www.giwersworld.org/holo3/holo-survivors.phtml
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In the year 2000 Israel said there were one million holocaust survivors still alive and many are in financial need. That number is corroborated close enough[3] by other Jewish sources. Survivor implies something escapes by the skin of one's teeth and it certainly is terrible that so many are in financial need. Cue the extortion music. [urls to official claims of this number]
As we know the average life expectancy giving a number of people alive in a year is the same as giving the percentage alive in that year to a first order approximation. In giving a number Israel also gave the percent.
The problem is the average life span in 2000 for Europeans was about 75 years.[1] The year 2000 was 55 years after the end of it.[2] So if all ages from newborn to the elderly were among the survivors then 55/75th have died since 1945 and the number alive in 2000 equals 20/75th of the number in 1945, a bit less than 1/3 of them.
Elementary algebra[4] says if there were one million alive in the year 2000 then there were 3.75 million holocaust survivors alive in 1945. That is a huge number.
But wait! There's more! [Cue Popiel slice and dice logo]
If the Nazis killed those unable to work it gets worse. Lets assume 13 years old is old enough to work. So in 1945 the youngest survivor was 13. That means it is as though there were one million survivors in the year 2012. As that is 67 years after it ended then 67/75ths have died and one million represents 8/75ths of the survivors in 1945. That means there were roughly 9.375 million holocaust survivors in 1945.
Pick any unable-to-work age you want down to newborn and still we are left with 3.5 million in 1945 as the minimum number of holocaust survivors. But if we have newborns surviving then we have a good fraction of women taking care of the children and thus not working. That weighs against the trademarked Pure Nazi Evil. Not working everyone to death stains the trademark of Pure Nazi Evil.
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I won’t bother to check Giwer’s arithmetic, as the ignorant charlatan (not a source I would have expected you to quote, I’m sort of disappointed) apparently assumes that all Jews who survived in Europe had been exposed to concentration/extermination camps or mobile killing squads. Actually most of the Jews who survived did so because they emigrated before the killing started, or fled into unoccupied Soviet territory, or lived in countries ruled by German allies like Italy and Romania, which had a more moderate policy regarding Jews (at least those on their own territory – Romanian troops massacred large numbers of Jews on occupied Soviet soil). Case in point, the Soviet Union, see the post after my article under http://holocaustcontroversies.blogspot.com/2006/08/one-might-think-that.html :
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Nolte’s figures for Soviet Jews (page 257) are the following: 5.1 million Jews on Soviet territory on 22 June 1941 (3.1 million in 1939, 1.8 million in the annexed western territories, 200,000 who fled across the Bug from German-occupied Poland), thereof 2.7 million who fell under German rule; of these 100,000 survived, 20,000 as partisans and maybe 80,000 in concentration camps in Germany, and 2.6 million were murdered. About 300,000 Jews fell as soldiers of the Red Army or succumbed to famine behind the front line, and about 100,000 Jewish children were born during the war, so that at the war’s end there were about 2.3 million Jewish survivors in the USSR.
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So 2.3 million out of 5.1 million Soviet Jews survived the war, but of the 2.7 million in Nazi-occupied territory only 100,000 remained alive.
If Giwer thinks 3.5 million Holocaust survivors in 1945 speaks in his favor, or let’s make it 3.75 million, he should read the excerpts from the American Jewish Yearbook quoted under http://www.holocaust-history.org/questions/numbers.shtml :
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Highly accurate demographic estimates of the Jewish people exist and are available to the general public. One publication has been providing these statistics since 1900 in their yearly printing of _The American Jewish Year Book_ Although my own personal collection only dates from 1932, the older volumes are available in any good public library. The yearbook for 1932 states:
"Of the total number of 15,192,218 Jews in the world, 9,418,248 reside in Europe, 538,609 in Africa, 585,791 in Asia, 24,783 in Australasia, and 4,624,787 in America."
These numbers were assembled before the Holocaust, before the Nazis came into power, and before there was any particular threat to the Jews in Europe.
The yearbook for 1947 states:
"Estimates of the world Jewish population have been assembled by the American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee (except for the United States and Canada) and are probably the most authentic available at the present time. [Note: the effective date of this census is May, 1946 - HWM]. The figures reveal that the total Jewish population of the world has decreased by one-third from about 16,600,000 in 1939 to about 11,000,000 in 1946 as the result of the annihilation by the Nazis of more than five and a half million European Jews."
"In Europe only an estimated 3,642,000 remain of the total Jewish pre-war population of approximately 9,740,000. The major part of the present Jewish population -- about 5,176,000 -- lives in the United States and Canada. [...]"
Even with limited skills in the field of statistics it is possible to confirm that a potential growth from 15,192,000 in 1932 to a population of 16,500,000 in 1946 would not have been impossible nor unreasonable. It would have signified a growth of just over 9% in Jewish population in a period of 15 years. This was, of course, not to be. With the murder of 1/3 of the Jews in the world during the period 1940-1945, the world population of Jews has not even reached the levels of 1940.
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Emphasis is mine.
IOW, 3.5 million survivors in 1945, or even 3.75 million, is perfectly compatible with the historical record of the Nazi genocide of the Jews.
In this context, one should also take into account what this one million estimate that Giwer makes a fuss about contains. The following is stated under http://0078f93.netsolhost.com/holocaust_misconceptions.html#Q12 (emphases mine):
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Q12. How many survivors of the Holocaust are alive today?
The exact number of Holocaust survivors that exists in the world today varies. Sergio Della Pergola, a demographer for the Institute of Contemporary Jewry at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, found 1,092,000 survivors worldwide (in a 2003 report). Jacob Ukeles, a policy researcher in Manhattan, found 688,000 (in a 2000 report).
Both demographers relied on the same standard in terms of defining a Holocaust survivor: Any Jew who lived for any period of time in a country that was ruled by the Nazis or their allies is called a Holocaust survivor (by Della Pergola) or a Nazi victim (by Ukeles).
Both surveys found the highest percentage of Jewish survivors are living in Israel. In his updated version (2003 version), Ukeles reported the figure at 265,000, or 38.5 percent of the population of Israel. Della Pergola put the number at 511,000 or 46.8 percent of the population of Israel.
The difference in the studies stems from the fact that Della Pergola included as survivors Jews who lived in Arab countries - Morocco, Tunisia, Libya, Syria, Lebanon and Algeria - that passed anti-Jewish law. Ukeles did not.
Today, rough estimates would put the numbers anywhere for 150,000 to 300,000.
Babmili (Tel Aviv, 2004)
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IOW, DellaPergola also counted as survivors Jews who had not even lived in Europe during World War II, but in Arab countries that passed anti-Jewish legislation, some of which never even came under Nazi rule. Jews living in those countries, needless to say, are not likely to have been included in the 9,740,000 Jews in Europe mentioned in the previous AJYB quote.
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Originally Posted by ps
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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/ :
The issue isn't could but would.
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What do you mean by that?
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Originally Posted by ps
You're going off on another discussion which I think someone else could address better.
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I wonder who that would be, you being the only worthy adversary I have met here so far.
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Originally Posted by ps
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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.
Huh wow people can't tell the difference between a stinky old skeleton and a fresh corpse? Id say they need glasses but then again they'd have their nose to tell the difference.
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The issue is not that they could not tell the difference, but that they were so traumatized by what they had seen and experienced that certain things they witnessed might later have become mixed up in their memories. Did you demonstrate the claimed impossibility, by the way?
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Originally Posted by ps
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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
But how do you know that these belonged to dead people?
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Apart from the direct evidence showing that these people were killed, are we asked to believe that people deprived of their clothing, underclothing and spectacles were going to be sent stark-naked and short-sighted to the occupied Soviet territories?
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Originally Posted by ps
And how do you know they were salvaged?
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Because Globocnik kept detailed records, which you can see under http://www.death-camps.org/reinhard/arloot.htm . Items mentioned in those lists include:
2,324 Spectacles: at RM 3.00 RM 66,972.00
Textiles
462 Wagons of rags: at RM 700.00 RM 323,400.00
261 Wagons of bed feathers: at RM 10,000.00 RM 2,510,000.00
317 Wagons of clothing and underclothing: at RM 33,000.00 RM 10,461,000.00
Total: RM 13,294,400.00
29,391 Spectacles 3.00 88,173.00;
1,901 Wagons of clothing, underclothing, bed feathers and rags to an average value of RM: 26,000,000.00
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Originally Posted by ps
Are there any records of where they went?
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There probably are records about how such objects were recycled or made available to worthy
Volksgenossen in need, but I think Globocnik’s records of what he collected are more telling proof that it was collected.
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Originally Posted by ps
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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.
How do you know this actually happened?
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From coincident eyewitness testimonies corroborated by some official German reports as well as diaries kept by German soldiers who encountered these transports. For instance, a report I quoted after Mattogno under http://holocaustcontroversies.blogspot.com/2006/06/carlo-mattogno-on-belzec.html mentions 2,000 dead bodies on a single transport to Belzec by the time it arrived at its destination:
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"The ever increasing panic among the Jews, caused by the strong heat, overloading of the cars with up to 220 Jews, the smell of corpses – 2,000 dead were counted when the train was unloaded – made the transport nearly impossible."
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One German soldier, Hubert Pfoch, even took pictures of the conditions he witnessed when his troop train bound for the Eastern Front encountered a transport headed for Treblinka:
http://holocaust-info.dk/treblinka/imgs_treblinka/siedlce1.htm
http://holocaust-info.dk/treblinka/imgs_treblinka/siedlce3.htm
http://holocaust-info.dk/treblinka/imgs_treblinka/siedlce2.htm
This is a letter that Pfoch sent to someone who asked him to testify in the defendant’s favor at the Demjanjuk trial:
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Herbert PFOCH
Gallitzinstrasse 77/2
1160 Wien
Vienna, 29 June 84
Dear President Brentar:
I have received your letter of 18 June 1984 and in this connection want to repeat what I already stated by telephone on 24 June of this year. In several respects it appears that you have reached false conclusions based on false information.
In the first place, Treblinka was not a "prisoner camp for Poles", but it was an especially organized Nazi extermination camp, for the liquidation of hundreds of thousands of Jews from many European countries.
Secondly, I never have performed "duty" there and for this reason I am unable to provide any information concerning any member of the camp guards. On the other hand, it is correct that on 22 and 23 August 1943 at Sielce, Poland, as a member of the German Armed Forces (Wehrmacht), on route to the Russian front, I witnessed a transport of Jews en route to Treblinka, who were exposed to atrocities that are hard to describe. At the time, we protested to a responsible SS officer who pointed out to us that if we did not disappear at once we would have an opportunity to see Treblinka from inside.
Ukrainian "auxiliaries" brutally and bestially shot or beat to death women and children, as well as older people unable to get quickly enough into the railroad cars. The four enclosed photographs provide only most inadequate information about the situation at the time and the atrocities that were committed.
With best regards,
s/ Hubert Pfoch
4 Fotos
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Source: http://www.vex.net/~nizkor/hweb/people/p/pfoch-herbert/pfoch-001.html
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Originally Posted by ps
We've already knocked out a big part of the Jewish survivors who were dumb enough to make implosion and steam claims.
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Actually the most you can claim to have "knocked out" is these "dumb" survivors’ descriptions of the killing mechanism, which a non-technical person need not have understood from casual observation.
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Originally Posted by ps
The officer claims are also dubious (As shown by the torture of Hoss).
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Höss also testified when not under torture, and what he wrote in Polish captivity contains statements so damaging to the Poles’ official version of events at Auschwitz-Birkenau (namely the claim that 4 million Jews had been killed there, which figure Höss dismissed as ridiculous and provided estimates adding up to ca. 1.1 million deportees killed at his camp) that he can impossibly have made them under duress. And if one or the other SS officer stated what he did under the influence of torture (Höss’ first interrogation by the British is the only documented case I can think of right now), this doesn’t mean that any other did. It is especially far-fetched to assume that former SS-men testifying before the criminal justice authorities of a constitutional state like the German Federal Republic, such as Franz Stangl, Kurt Franz, Willi Mentz and Heinrich Matthes of Treblinka, were subjected to any form or illegal coercion.
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Originally Posted by ps
We're just talking if, if it happened and again it said specifically that these people suffocated. You're assuming things and since we have no other evidence except what someone said you can't do that.
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Why not? What "someone said" is called eyewitness testimony in judicial practice and historical research where that someone describes what he or she saw or heard, and it’s considered relevant evidence under any legal system and by any historian that I know of.
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Originally Posted by ps
You have no other information to assume from except your assumptions (Based on faulty witnesses)
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If witnesses are "faulty" in regard to certain details, this doesn’t mean they got it all wrong, especially when much else of what they say is not only plausible but also confirmed by witnesses or other evidence independent of the witnesses in question.
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Originally Posted by ps
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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?
Apparently cooperative enough to redraw Wiernik's maps and then avoid asking him any uncomfortable questions.
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That’s not being "cooperative" but trying to make technical sense of an eyewitness’s insufficient descriptions, and it’s not what I was referring to. I was referring to cooperation between Soviet troops and Polish civilian criminal justice authorities.
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Originally Posted by ps
Again I doubt that one couldn't find a metal detector and if one really couldn't then well... Well that means the forensic investigation was so lacking in tools that it could not make any scientific and deductive conclusions. When you don't even have a metal detector you are clearly lacking tools for an investigation.
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OK, let’s assume that the investigation could have produced better results if a metal detector had been used. So what? Does this mean it did not produce the less good results it produced without the use of such device, as described in the site investigation reports? I don’t think so.
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Originally Posted by ps
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Sorry, but by what rules and standards you can show us is forensic evidence considered "superior" to other categories of evidence?
By scientific standards.
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What "scientific standards"? Quote them, please.
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Originally Posted by ps
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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").
The forensic evidence is lacking,
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Why? Are site investigation reports no documentation of forensic evidence found at the site of the crime?
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Originally Posted by ps
it is not positive proof
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Why, by what rules or standards you can show us, are site investigation reports prepared by criminal investigators not positive proof of the physical evidence they describe?
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Originally Posted by ps
it simply happens to say nothing at all
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That’s what Mattogno also seems to have thought. See my article under http://holocaustcontroversies.blogspot.com/2006/07/polish-investigations-of-treblinka.html , where I address the interesting parts he missed.
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Originally Posted by ps
and is doubtable.
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Not at all, on the contrary. Apart from being matched by other evidence independent of it, the report of 13.11.1945 itself contains strong indications (the honest admission that the "Lazarett" and the foundations of the gas chamber building could not be identified) speaking against the notion that it was in any way manipulated.
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Originally Posted by ps
The Polish report said that it was mostly sand meaning that the clay couldn't have been deep meaning that 7.5 meters is implausible.
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I still have to see evidence that there was clay above that depth at Treblinka, and I still have to understand why an excavator weighing 27 tons and having a performance of 70 HP could not have dug a pit 7.5 meters deep when an excavator weighing 20 tons and having a performance of 56-63 HP can obviously dig a pit 9 meters deep.
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Originally Posted by ps
also want a modern report with the right tools (Metal detector , GPR, cough cough) to reaffirm these reports.
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So would I, but this is not about what we want. It’s about whether there are reasons to conclude anything other than mass murder from the available evidence and/or to doubt the essential accuracy of this evidence.
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Originally Posted by ps
Clearly they identified so little that they could barely be called reports at all.
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They identified enough to establish that the physical evidence matches the documentary and eyewitness evidence, as I explained in my article under http://holocaustcontroversies.blogspot.com/2006/07/polish-investigations-of-treblinka.html . More would be better, for sure, but for the purpose of corroborating the documentary and eyewitness proof these reports contain the essential ballpark data.
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Originally Posted by ps
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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?
With a million survivors now, rightttt. Displaced, not dead.
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A million survivors at the time of DellaPergola’s study are not incompatible with the historical record of the Nazi genocide of the Jews, especially as they include Jews living in Arab countries that were not even under direct or indirect Nazi domination or threatened by such, see above.
Now please answer my question.
And don’t be discouraged by the failure of yet another considerable debating effort on your part, which is admirable nevertheless. Keep it up, for you’re the best I have seen of "Revisionism" in this place. If you cut on the more blatant bullshit (like Giwer) and stick to the arguments of more intelligent "Revisionists" like Mattogno, you might even qualify for the RODOH forum.
Now I turn to your more boring and less challenging comrades-in-arms.
June 17th, 2008
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