There is not a single mass grave of holohoax victims.

[tsig]

The basic proof of the Holocaust has since 1945 been regarded as the statements of German eyewitnesses and the evidence of captured German documents.

The traditional Holocaust denier explanation for these inconvenient pieces of evidence is to allege a massive campaign of coercion/torture and systematic forgery of documents en masse.

That would mean that those Nazis were really wimps who capitulated under coercion and blamed themselves and others for imaginary deeds.

Hardly the image of a super race.

 

[Nick Terry]

That would mean that those Nazis were really wimps who capitulated under coercion and blamed themselves and others for imaginary deeds.

Hardly the image of a super race.

The plausibility of coercion decreases exponentially with every extra person who had to be coerced (or whatever is being claimed).

If you belonged to an organisation which was being accused of perpetrating mass murder in a variety of contexts, as the SS were in 1945, then you would try your damndest to present evidence to refute these accusations, if they were not true. You would not roll over and beg as the deniers seem to believe these SS officers and NCOs did in 1945. Given the fact that SS men generally fled west in order to avoid falling into Soviet hands, the accusation of coercion is being levelled at the British and Americans, who took the SS men prisoner.

Even if one hypothesises initial arm-twisting in 1945 taking place under Anglo-American captivity, then one would expect as more and more SS men were freed from internment or prison that there would have been a flood of recantations or these men would have offered some form of alibi evidence against what is a monstrous accusation. This was never forthcoming. The SS force involved in perpetrating the Holocaust has never denied it in any systematic fashion, and on the contrary has admitted it time and again, long after they need fear any further repercussions.

The moment when a rebuttal should have been forthcoming, if ever one was going to be forthcoming, was after 1949 (foundation of the Federal Republic) or after 1955 (restoration of renmaining sovereignty in West Germany). Excuse-making about NATO presence or continued US bases ignores the fact that West Germany has been a liberal democracy since its inception, and any monitoring of old SS men or their families would create a vast bureaucracy, itself at risk of producing whistle-blowers, and is simply implausible given the strength of right-wing sentiment in post-1949 West Germany.

Moreover, we know that a substantial number of SS fled to safe havens in Latin America, well out of reach of a systematic persecution, yet no refutation or alibi evidence was forthcoming from there, either. Mossad did not exactly pull out the stops to hunt for Eichmann until 1960, and by then Eichmann had laid down his memoirs in tape recorded interviews to a would-be Holocaust-denying Dutch ex-SS man (who was incidentally, the father of the famous sociologist Saskia Sassen).

Not even the passing of the wartime generation left any deathbed confessions or affidavits 'to be opened in the event of my death'.

Holocaust deniers have fabricated, I think, 3 "statements to the contrary" and one document, none of which stand up to scrutiny or constitute genuine evidence against the testimony of literally 1000s of SS men who were involved in these deeds.

I think all this could be graphed to show the exponential decrease in probability of the impossibly vast conspiracy of silence over time - even if one conceded a hypothetical 90%+ chance in 1945, it has long sunk to next to zero probability.

 

[Saggy]

If you belonged to an organisation which was being accused of perpetrating mass murder in a variety of contexts, as the SS were in 1945, then you would try your damndest to present evidence to refute these accusations, if they were not true. You would not roll over and beg as the deniers seem to believe these SS officers and NCOs did in 1945. Given the fact that SS men generally fled west in order to avoid falling into Soviet hands, the accusation of coercion is being levelled at the British and Americans, who took the SS men prisoner.

The precedent was set at Nuremberg, where the only man charged with the preposterous crimes of the holohoax, Ernst Kaltenbrunner, told the degenerates on the court to stuff the absurd charges up their *****.

Instead the Zionists trotted out Rudolf Hoess, the 'mastermind' of the hoax, the 'murderer' of two million, or three, Jews, as a DEFENSE witness. Hoess's phantasmagoria, dutifully scripted by the World Jewish Congress, and published in reports of the US government, became judicial fact that could not be challenged in subsequent trials.

Kaltenbrunner was hung. Hoess was not charged with any crime at Nuremberg.

These courts were pure theater of the absurd.

 

[Nick Terry]

The precedent was set at Nuremberg, where the only man charged with the preposterous crimes of the holohoax, Ernst Kaltenbrunner, told the degenerates on the court to stuff the absurd charges up their *****.

Instead the Zionists trotted out Rudolf Hoess, the 'mastermind' of the hoax, the 'murderer' of two million, or three, Jews, as a DEFENSE witness. Hoess's phantasmagoria, dutifully scripted by the World Jewish Congress, and published in reports of the US government, became judicial fact that could not be challenged in subsequent trials.

These courts were pure theater of the absurd.

This isn't a response to what I wrote, sorry Saggy.

Kaltenbrunner, in any case, admitted knowledge of extermination at Auschwitz, so he's useless for your silly conspiracy theory.

 

[Saggy]

This isn't a response to what I wrote, sorry Saggy.

You said the Nazis rolled over. No defendant at Nuremberg rolled over. No one admitted anything. Kaltenbrunner testified he learned of the holohoax from allied radio.

 

[Meadmaker]

You said the Nazis rolled over. No defendant at Nuremberg rolled over. No one admitted anything. Kaltenbrunner testified he learned of the holohoax from allied radio.

Ever read Frank's memoirs?

 

[Meadmaker]

Kaltenbrunner was hung.

Prove it.

 

[Gawdzilla Sama]

Seriously, you guys just made up this "Saggy", didn't you?

 

[Nick Terry]

You said the Nazis rolled over. No defendant at Nuremberg rolled over. No one admitted anything. Kaltenbrunner testified he learned of the holohoax from allied radio.

and, doofus, Kaltenbrunner then testified he went to Himmler who confirmed it was true. That was his own testimony.

Do we believe him? No, we don't. He was already involved in organising deportations to Auschwitz immediately after his appointment as head of the RSHA. His HSSPF command received copies of the Einsatzgruppen reports, a fact that did not help Gauleiter Baldur von Schirach. Schirach, incidentally, later testified to learning about Chelmno from Gauleiter Greiser. Kaltenbrunner was delaying his 'initiation' for tactical, legal defense reasons.

He was also the only active-duty SS man on trial at IMT - other branches of the Nazi government had less need-to-know on the gruesome details than did the SS. Nonetheless, aside from Schirach, Frank had to admit knowledge, too. One would neither expect chapter and verse from ministers nor for their protestations of innocence to be entirely believable. They are a red herring to the point I was making, namely that SS officers and NCOs from top to bottom, admitted to participating in genocide.

You may comfort yourself with the thought that at IMT, it was 'only' Ogruf von dem Bach-Zelewski, Ogruf Pohl, Gruf Ohlendorf, Ostubaf Hoess, Hstuf Wisliceny and Stubaf Morgen who were brought to the witness stand to give evidence, while Ostubaf Mildner and Ostubaf Hoettl submitted affidavits.

Alas, IMT was not the only place where SS men were giving evidence, and nor was it the last such place.

In the 1960s, Jochen Peiper, war hero of the Leibstandarte, testified to witnessing a trial gassing in 1939 conducted in Fort VII of Poznan - he was then serving as Himmler's adjutant. (Cue predictable lies about the Malmedy investigation/trial from Saggy, who will ignore the 20 year time lag...)

There were 32 trials in the 1960s and 1970s involving the use of gas vans - hundreds of witnesses spoke of their use.

Whatever idiocy you claim in order to handwave away these statements, it will be (a) unsourced and unsupported by any actual evidence and (b) more and more implausible the more such SS witnesses we add to the pile, requiring an ever greater number of men in black to enforce the diabolical will of your fantasy hoaxters.

 

[JimBenArm]

Seriously, you guys just made up this "Saggy", didn't you?

Yeah, just messin' with ya!

No one is that stupid! Really!

 

[Saggy]

and, doofus, Kaltenbrunner then testified he went to Himmler who confirmed it was true. That was his own testimony.

Edited by LibraryLady: 

Edited for civility.

Here is an excerpt of Kaltenbrunner's testimony, after listening to the interminable lies of the prosecution ...

KALTENBRUNNER: Excuse me, Doctor, but I have to be able to refute every single word.

 

[Gawdzilla Sama]

Yeah, just messin' with ya!

No one is that stupid! Really!

I knew it, I knew it!

 

[Nick Terry]

Edited by LibraryLady: 

Edited for civility.

Here is an excerpt of Kaltenbrunner's testimony, after listening to the interminable lies of the prosecution ...

KALTENBRUNNER: Excuse me, Doctor, but I have to be able to refute every single word.

Nope. April 11th, 1946:

Dr. Kauffmann - One further question to that. When did you hear, for the first time, that the camp at Auschwitz was an extermination camp?
Kaltenbrunner - Himmler told me that in 1944, in February or March. That is, he did not tell me, he admitted it.


As I already said, this testimony is not credible from a mainstream perspective - Kaltenbrunner surely knew much earlier than this what Auschwitz was.

But it puts childish deniers like you in a bind, since you want to enlist him in your crusade, and yet here he is admitting knowledge of Auschwitz as an extermination camp.

Oops!

 

[Saggy]

Nope. April 11th, 1946:

Dr. Kauffmann - One further question to that. When did you hear, for the first time, that the camp at Auschwitz was an extermination camp?
Kaltenbrunner - Himmler told me that in 1944, in February or March. That is, he did not tell me, he admitted it.


As I already said, this testimony is not credible from a mainstream perspective - Kaltenbrunner surely knew much earlier than this what Auschwitz was.

But it puts childish deniers like you in a bind, since you want to enlist him in your crusade, and yet here he is admitting knowledge of Auschwitz as an extermination camp.

Oops!

What a shock ! Kaltenbrunner testified in English. Let's see the original German.

 

[Gawdzilla Sama]

What a shock ! Kaltenbrunner testified in English. Let's see the original German.

The original German was probably a Neanderthal that wondered into the area from southern Europe.

 

[Nick Terry]

What a shock ! Kaltenbrunner testified in English. Let's see the original German.

Sure. Just go to a decent library which holds copies of the German edition of the IMT trials, or order the DVD from amazon.de (Nuernberger Prozess, or something like that). Look up April 11 1946 and look out for 'Vernichtung' and 'Auschwitz'. It'll be the same wording.

While you are at it, you might as well add to your amazon.de order the DVD of the Frankfurter Auschwitz Prozess, which will save a lot of time dealing with ca. 100 more statements from SS men, out of many thousands.

Oh, and you might as well throw in a few decent recent books like, say, Bernward Doerner, Die Deutschen und der Holocaust, and Christian Gerlach, Kalkulierte Morde, which should keep you busy for a while.

 

[Nick Terry]

while we are waiting for the next distraction attempt from Saggy, perhaps people might like to answer this simple questionnaire I devised recently, in order to ascertain what, if anything, they had read on the subject of the Holocaust written by conventional historians.

Things you can find online are in bold (Lipstadt was pirated on a denier site, you can download Hoess's memoirs from archive.org in German).

I look forward to finding out how many of these Saggy has read and testing him on his knowledge if he claims to have read any of them. Denier ad hominems and distraction memes will, however, be ignored.


Have You Read?

Yes

No

Deborah Lipstadt, Denying the Holocaust (1993)





Michael Shermer and Alex Grobman, Denying History (2000)




Richard Evans, Telling Lies about Hitler (2002)




Richard Evans, Report for the Irving Trial (2000)





Norman Finkelstein, The Holocaust Industry (2000)





Peter Novick, The Holocaust in American Life (2000)





Avraham Burg, The Holocaust is Over, We Must Rise from Its Ashes (2009)




IMT ‘Blue Series’ (Main Nuremberg Trial)





NMT ‘Green Series’ (12 successor trials)





Trial of Adolf Eichmann





Donald Bloxham, Genocide on Trial (2000)




Ian Kershaw, Hitler, 2 vols




Adam Tooze, The Wages of Destruction (2006)




Richard Evans, Third Reich trilogy (any)




Gerald Reitlinger, The Final Solution (1953 and many editions)




Raul Hilberg, The Destruction of European Jews (1961, 1985, 2003)




Martin Gilbert, The Holocaust (1986)




Saul Friedländer, The Years of Extermination (2007)




Donald Bloxham, The Final Solution: a Genocide (2009)




Peter Longerich, Holocaust (2010 and 1998)




Peter Longerich, The Unwritten Order




Peter Longerich, Report for the Irving Trial (2000)





Christopher Browning, Report for the Irving Trial (2000)





Christopher Browning, The Origins of the Final Solution (2004)




Hannah Arendt, Eichmann in Jerusalem




David Cesarani, Eichmann




Hans Safrian, Eichmann’s Men (2009, 1993)




Götz Aly and Susanne Heim, Architects of Annihilation (1991)




Götz Aly, Final Solution (1995)




Götz Aly, Hitler’s Beneficiaries




Jeffrey Herf, The Jewish Enemy (2006)





Martin Gilbert, Auschwitz and the Allies (1981)





Walter Laqueur, The Terrible Secret (1981)





Daniel Goldhagen, Hitler’s Willing Executioners (1996)





Christopher Browning, Ordinary Men (1992)





Patrick Desbois, The Holocaust by Bullets (2008)





Ulrich Herbert (ed), National Socialist Extermination Policies (2000)




Wendy Lower and Ray Brandon (ed), The Holocaust in Ukraine





Yitzhak Arad, The Holocaust in the Soviet Union (2009)





Avraham Tory, Surviving the Holocaust (diary)





Herman Kruk, The Last Days of the Jerusalem of Lithuania (diary)





Emanuel Ringelblum, Notes from the Warsaw Ghetto (diary)





Isaiah Trunk, The Lodz Ghetto





Samuel Kassow, Who Will Write Our History? (2008)





Sara Bender, The Jews of Bialystok during World War II (2008)




Shmuel Krakowski, Chelmno: A Small Village in Europe (2009, 2007)




Yitzhak Arad, Belzec Sobibor Treblinka (1987)





Jules Schelvis, Sobibor (2006 in English)





Gitta Sereny, Into that Darkness




Jankiel Wiernik, A Year in Treblinka




Laurence Rees, Auschwitz: the Nazis and the ‘Final Solution’ (2005)





Robert Van Pelt, Report for the Irving Trial (2000)





Robert Van Pelt, The Case for Auschwitz (2002)





Jean-Claude Pressac, Auschwitz: Technique and Operation of the Gas Chambers (1989)





Berenbaum/Gutman (ed), Anatomy of the Auschwitz Death Camp (1994)





Auschwitz 1940-45, 5 volumes (2000)





Rudolf Höss, Commandant of Auschwitz





Filip Müller, Eyewitness Auschwitz





Miklos Nyiszli, Auschwitz

 

[Dogzilla]

Then much of 'Holocaust revisionism' is stupid, since its hare seems to be chasing a Jewish conspiracy to defraud the world. It wouldn't be difficult to line up quotes from Rassinier, Faurisson, Butz etc, or indeed our very own Saggy, who gave a classic example not that many posts above.

Then you don't understand revisionism. The first question is: is there evidence to support the generally accepted holocaust narrative? Asking why people believe the generally accepted holocaust narrative if the evidence does not support it puts the cart before the horse.

I realize it's easier to dismiss revisionism if you see it as pure antisemitism or, my favorite, as a way to rehabilitate Nazism. But if you try to address it as just a particularly virulent form of antisemitism, you'll never address the real reasons behind it. What that means is that the only effective weapon you'll have to combat holocaust revision is passing laws against its propagation.

And alleging torture or forgery is alleging a conspiracy. Please don't play semantic games here and fixate on the Jewish side of the conspiracy. I stated in my previous post that the more sophisticated deniers blame other conspiratorial entities suh as the Soviets. I also stated that some 'revisionists' try to blame the zeitgeist or claim the whole thing was a 'hystory', but all of them sooner or later start having to alleged forgery or torture in the end anyway.

t sounds to me like you're saying that the Jews aren't the only conspiratorial entities that people invoke when they invoke the conspiracy. The Soviets and others could be invoked as part of this conspiracy? And trying to bring in the general milieu or zeitgeist to explain the holocaust is also invoking a conspiracy theory?

How exactly do you define "conspiracy?" Because it's sounding to me like you're saying that calling out the different countries or political entities in Europe and their relationship to each other and to Nazi Germany is invoking a conspiracy. And acknowledging that the conditions in Europe at the time of the holocaust were what they were is bringing in a conspiracy theory. Are you saying that putting the holocaust in any sort of a context is alleging a conspiracy theory?

Now, onto your assertion that "alleging torture or forgery is alleging a conspiracy." I'm going to assume your fingers got ahead of your brain with this becuase this statement is simply crazy-talk. When detainees at Gitmo allege they have been tortured, they're really alleging that there's a conspiracy? When George Bush insisted that the United States doesn't torture, what he was denying is allegations of a conspiracy, Jewish or otherwise?

Torture and forgery and conspiracy are completely different concepts!! Jesus Phuqing Christ!

Indeed, the lack of explanation for the 'hoax' is one of the many reasons why revisionism is regarded as laughable nonsense.

I seriously doubt that anybody thinks revisionism is laughable nonsense because nobody has explained how the hoax developed. For one, development of the hoax has been explained. Number two, people think revisionism is laughable nonsense because everybody has seen those very disturbing and oh so sad photographs. Some of the more advanced folks might be able to tell you that it was proven at Nuremberg as well.

Is it? Please present evidence that a majority of SS men involved in the death camps and shooting squads who carried out the Holocaust were tortured. You do know this is a sceptics' forum and you are required to provide evidence for your assertions, don't you?

I never said that a majority of SS men involved in the death camps and shooting squads who carried out the holocaust were tortured. I said that some Germans were tortured. The treatment of Germans accused in the Malmedy affair and in post war POW camps are just two examples but they don't directly involve the holocaust anyway.

As far as SS men involved in the death camps, Rudolf Hoess is only man I know about who said he was mistreated in British custody and who his British interrogators confirmed was mistreated. If you want to play semantic games and say he wasn't tortured, that's fine. The worthlessness of any of his statements lie in the statements themselves and not the situation in which they were obtained.

As far as the shooting squads, I assume you are talking about the Einsatzgruppen? They don't count because evidently around here the Einsatzgruppens aren't a part of the holocaust. Makes no sense to me either but that's the way it is.

Your blithe assertion that a statement is 'so patently false' is contradicted, as a matter of record, by the decisions of judges and jurors several thousand times over, who convicted Nazis time and again under a variety of legal systems - martial law, common law, continental law - not to mention the assessments of many thousands more historians and journalists, regarding these events.

Um.........Do you really think I don't know the holocaust has been proven by courts around the world and is accepted by just about everybody to be the truth?

This is a skeptics forum. You can't be much of a skeptic if you just go along with what everybody else thinks, can you?

BTW, I liked how you mentioned the judges and jurors, representing a variety of legal traditions, that have proven the holocaust through the convictions of Nazi war criminals several thousand times over and then, almost as an afterthought, you mention the historians and journalists who have agreed. Shows you know where the evidence for the holocaust comes from and where it doesn't.

You also seem to be labouring under the falsus in uno, falsus in omnibus delusion that is, quite literally, medieval thinking. A witness may exaggerate but hyperbole is an inherent part of how human beings express themselves. I have honestly never understood the denier mind when it comes to leaping from exaggeration to 'it didn't happen'. It doesn't seem terribly logical to me.

It is now thoroughly well established - and a matter of common sense - that human memory for dates, distances, durations, colours and numbers is thoroughly imperfect. The proverbial 'witnesses to a car crash' and 'Rashomon' effects sum up the problem perfectly well.

If it sounds to you like deniers use falsus in uno, falsus in omnibus logic, it's because you don't understand the difference between "some of it didn't happen" and "it didn't happen." Saying that there is very little evidence for one small aspect of the holocaust isn't the same as saying that one small aspect of the holocaust didn't happen which is the same as saying that none of it happened. I don't deny the holocaust, you say I deny the holocaust.

As far as your views on hyperbole, no, it is not an inherent part of human communication. Perhaps YOU are prone to hyperbole but not everybody is.

And the fact that some people are prone to hyperbole and everybody's memory is faulty is the reason you should be more critical of eyewitness testimony, not less. When the person providing the testimony has a clear bias it's even more important to corroborate it with eyewitness who are disinterested third parties and with unintentional evidence. When the person providing the testimony makes extraordinary claims, they need to back it up with extraordinary proof.

I wouldn't say it's medieval but it's certainly not modern thinking to accept fantastical statements as the truth because everybody exaggerates and nobody has perfect memory.

You don't know what I mean by forgery? Then you are a disingenuous liar. There are many documents which prove the mass extermination of Jews and other target groups, using explicit language that cannot be explained away. For example, two documents explicitly describe the killing process in gas vans. Every revisionist thinks these were forged.

There isn't a single document, alone or among many, that proves the mass extermination of the Jews. I shouldn't need to explain this but when I say 'document' I'm not talking about the transcripts or verdicts of criminal trials. I mean contemporary German wartime documents. There are no explicit references to extermination anywhere in any of the contemporary German wartime documents.

What two documents explicitly describe the killing process in gas vans? I can't comment without seeing them.

There were never any allegations of 'Jewish soap' presented to war crimes trials,

The International Military Tribunal at Nuremberg wasn't a war crime trial?

there was a claim that at the Danzig Anatomy Institute, German pathologists manufactured soap from human remains of Poles and Germans. It is a discrete claim that coincided with a very widespread wartime rumour that Jews were being 'turned into soap'. My colleague Joachim Neander has investigated the Danzig soap case thoroughly and shown how there was a small fire to the fog of war, but no overt, planned 'soap manufacture' - macerated bodyfat was a by product of anatomical processes The Soviet investigators were guilty of wishful thinking and encouraging witnesses to embellish a true core story. Not to invent it out of thin air.

Oh, well. If all they did was encourage witnesses to lie, I guess it's OK.

The claim that Professor Spanner had 'turned corpses into soap' was then investigated by West German detectives, yet no charges were brought and no further evidence was manufactured. This already stands in stark contrast to evidence for gas chambers, since not only was every single investigating nation in 1945 receiving eyewitness accounts of gas chambers,

and steam chambers and electrical apparatus of some type...

every single nation-state whose police and legal systems investigated thereafter kept on receiving them.

Every single nation-state whose police and legal systems investigate thereafter? Do you mean Poland and the Soviet Union?

By contrast, other than the Danzig Anatomy Institute case, no evidence came to light that 'soap making' was carried out anywhere else.

So there was no evidence of Jewish Fat Soap? But it was believed to be true by the majority of the people at time. And you still get Jewish survivors on the holocaust horrors speaker circuit today telling school children how Jews were cooked into soap. So old Jews are lying to children about their holocaust experience but it's OK because those of us who know what really happened know these old Jews are FOS?

You have just advanced an argument by analogy, which presumes that if "they did it" in x case then they must have done it in y case. The same is true of 'shrunken heads'. That is not genocide and did not concern Jewish concentration camp prisoners. Contrary to the claims of deniers, the shrunken heads appear to be genuine.

I agree that the shrunken heads have nothing to do with the holocaust. The only connection that Buchenwald has to the holocaust is that that was where some of the Jews who weren't holocausted ended up being liberated. But people whose knowledge of the holocaust is limited (and by that I mean almost everybody) very often the say the pictures of the piles of corpses that were found in the Western camps are vidence of the holocaust. You'll also get the shrunken heads, and my favorite, tattoo skin lampshades presented as evidence of the holocaust--not as often as you used to but it still happens.

You and I and anybody who really knows the subject know that all the film and photographs of the conditions in the camps in the west aren't evidence of the holocaust. We know that the concentration camps in Germany proper actually provide anti-evidence for an extermination policy because there were so many Jews alive in those camps at the end of the war. But to the ordinary uninformed man on the street, it's those photos that provide the most compelling evidence of the holocaust.

I'm glad we agree that the photographs of emaciated bodies in mass graves aren't evidence of the holocaust. I wish everybody else would catch a clue so I don't need to listen to idiots tell me that there are "tons of photos" that prove the holocaust.

BTW, deniers don't say the shrunken heads aren't real. They're real. But they're not the head of Polish prisoners who had sex with a German.

But it is quite an inferential leap to go from assuming a fake in this instance, and assuming that the manifold charges relating to all concentration camps are untrue or unfounded. It is in fact about as stupid as the other indirect denier gambit of the Dachau gas chamber. A gas chamber was found at Dachau at the end of the war, but only one witness came forward to claim that it had actually been used. That is pretty much the living definition of the Scottish 'not proven' verdict. The information is too thin to decide either way. What is certain, however, is that if the chamber was used, it was used in the context of Nazi medical experiments which are copiously documented - and which do not speak to the core of the Holocaust.

Nobody claims that because *some* evidence of German atrocities was faked, ALL evidence for German atrocities were faked.

Again, you are a rare bird for understanding that the Dachau "gas chamber" isn't evidence for the holocaust. Despite what you want to believe, however, the Dachau "gas chamber" is offered up as evidence for the holocaust. Again, maybe if more people on your side of the room would stop referring to it as evidence, my people wouldn't need to keep shooting it down.

Unfortunately you need more than remedial knowledge of law to know that continental legal systems do not have US style rules of evidence. Please google 'Grundsatz der freien Beweisfuehrung' and twig that the Germanic legal systems in Germany, Austria and Switzerland have absolutely no such rules of inclusion or exclusion, not even today. It wasn't until 1995 that the Bundesgerichtshof introduced a ruling that laid down greater caution regarding hearsay evidence - evidence which moreover is entirely admissible into common law courts under a multiplicity of exceptions to the hearsay rule.

Relevance? If rules of evidence in Germany, Austria, and Switzerland make their trials a farce, they're still a farce.

Dismissing the Nuremberg Trials, aside from being a transparent act of well poisoning, also ignores the fact that it was not at the trials that the crimes were proven.

You just said that the crimes were not proven at the Nuremberg Trials. So removing the Nuremberg Trials from the body of evidence of the holocaust doesn't weaken the holocaust in anyway. Why would it be well-poisoning? Maybe I'm poisoning somebody elses well but not yours.

So we can agree that the Nuremberg Trials are worthless as evidence of the holocaust and move on.

BTW, I think you tell everybody else in this forum that the Nuremberg Trials don't prove anything about the holocaust and they should stop citing them as a source. It really makes them look really ignorant!

They had been proven just like any other murder before the trials in the course of investigations.

You, of course, have copious examples of the investigations and reports that were published documenting all the murders?

The purpose of trials is to establish the guilt or innocence of individual defendants. The Allies need not have held trials and the Holocaust would still be a matter of historical fact - the evidence would have come out another way.

I assume that when you say the Allies didn't need to have held the Trials to established the holocaust as a historical fact, you're talking about just the Nuremberg Trials? You're repeating yourself because you already said that when you said the Nuremberg Trials weren't necessary as evidence.

Are you saying that if the Allies didn't hold ANY war crimes trials, there would still be substantial evidence to prove the holocaust as a fact of history? That's probably true.

If you're saying, or trying to imply, that the holocaust as a fact of history would still be established if there had never been ANY criminal trials in any country, you're woefully uninformed.

Take away all the evidence about the holocaust that was produced in the context of war crime tribunals held in the individual occupation zones and the criminal trials held by the West and East Germans and the Israelis and you have nothing except the ever growing pile of 'survivor memoirs' And we all know how reliable THAT body of evidence is!!! Dig any diamonds out of your poop lately?

No, the corroboration is far from weak. But let's put your assertion to the test. Please explain to us why an SS captain and a Polish Jewish Sonderkommando would both have named the first gas chambers at Birkenau 'the Bunkers', without invoking a conspiracy or telepathy.

We will go on adding examples thereafter.

Why would two different people call the same place the same thing? That's a tough one. How could that happen? Because there's a place that was called "the bunkers" somewhere in the camp and everybody knew that's what it was called? Because they're both big fans of "All in the Family" and there was a house at the camp that looked like the one Archie lived in?

There's a country in southern Europe that on the map looks like a boot kicking a ball. It sticks down into the Mediterranean Sea. I know what that country is called. I bet you know what it's called as well. Can the only way we both know what it is and what it's called is because of a conspiracy?

I don't know. Which SS captain and which Sondercommando are you talking about?

I got one for you: Why do the descriptions of the gas chambers given by the Sondercommando's who worked in the gas chambers match up so closely with the blueprints for the gas chambers?

Unfortunately 'people' as a collective entity do not reject the Gerstein statement. Deniers reject the Gerstein statement. Everyone else realises that it is a very emotional account of a gassing at Belzec which includes numerous exaggerated numbers -

The numerous exaggerated numbers aren't merely a little bit higher--they are impossibly high. There're how many versions of the statement? Four? Five? And then he "commits suicide?" Because he was so distraught over not being able to stop the holocaust?

If you want evidence that there isn't a "conspiracy" involved with the holocaust, the Gerstein statement is pretty compelling. What conspiracy would be so befuddled that it would allow all the nonsense associated with the Gerstein statements to come to light?

on closer analysis of the evidence, he appears to have been repeating boastful propaganda of the Lublin SS regarding the capacity of the gas chambers - which was substantially corroborated by not only the testimonies of the few Belzec survivors and by the entirely probative evidence of the villagers nearby, but in due course by the testimonies of SS and Ukrainian witnesses, and by the testimonies of other survivors, bystanders, visitors, SS personnel and Ukrainian guards to the other Aktion Reinhard camps, not to mention by a fair number of documents, the documents proving conclusively that the Aktion Reinhard camps of Belzec, Sobibor and Treblinka were a set, thereby making evidence for one camp evidence for all.

And, again, I'm sure you can provide all these corroborating testimonies? I'm especially interested in the "fair number" of documents proving conclusively that the Akton Reinhard camps were a set, thereby proving that if one camp didn't exist, none of them did.

What I don't get is, again, if you have all this other evidence, why even bother with the Gerstein statement? This is problem you Believers have. Why do you keep repeating all this bogus evidence--Gerstein, Hoess, Kremer, etc.-- when you have thousands of other pieces of evidence?

While Gerstein did not describe open-air cremations at Belzec, others did, and post-liberation site inspections at this and the other death camps confirmed this visually.

Post-liberation site inspections, if they were even done, confirmed nothing visually. But they wouldn't be expected to find any evidence because the official story is that the Germans erased all traces of their existence when they bugged out.

In recent decades, archaeological investigations have established the presence of substantial mass graves at these sites -

Archeological investigations at Belzec found evidence of graves but the graves were found to be too shallow or the investigators didn't probe deep enough to find out if the graves went down far enough to have held all the bodies. Their research failed to prove that the graves would have been able to hold all the bodies. The Belzec team also didn't find any evidence of a gas chamber complex on the camp. Because the entire camp has been paved over to prevent any further investigation, we can only conclude that there weren't any gas chambers at the camp and that only a few thousand people at the most died there.

And because you said evidence for one of the camps is evidence for all three, we know that none of the three camps had mass graves large enough to hold all the bodies or gas chambers.

especially at Belzec, Sobibor and Chelmno - and visitors over the decades, even up to the present day, keep on reporting kicking over bone fragments on these sites. Meanwhile, to answer an earlier troll of yours, witnesses describe the removal of human cremains - ash and bones - from the sites during the cremation phase.

So Jews don't have a problem with people trampling all over the bodies of their coreligionists that are scattered all over and under the ground at these death camps?

Nobody cares that these scattered remains of the martyrs who suffered so greatly in life and who were swallowed whole by the maelstrom of unprecedented evil, lie neglected and exposed, assaulted by the wind, rain, and foot steps of a hundred thousand camera toting jackals in human form? Not a single Jew anywhere despairs for a proper burial for their grandparent's remains?

I find this hard to believe. Especially when "religious reasons" are cited for not conducting forensic investigations.

In both law and history, the critical assessment of evidence does not imply that one accepts all statements as conclusive - it is by contrasting sources and converging evidence that lawyers and historians reach their conclusions.

Thus while almost all Auschwitz survivors gave testimony in 1945 providing exaggerated estimates of 4 or even more million deaths there, historians have rejected those parts of the testimonies as understandable exaggerations since there is no corroboration from other sources of deportations to the camp on that scale. The documents and eyewitnesses outside the camp indicate instead a lower number of around 1 million who died there.

Almost all Auschwitz survivors gave testimony in 1945 providing exaggerated estimates of four million or more? But they were all wrong? How can you explain how so many survivors gave testimony that was internally consistent but flat out wrong? Didn't you say that either it's a conspiracy or the evidence matches? Since the evidence doesn't match.....

Do you even know where they got the four million figure to start with?

And again, law before history........

So carry on - let's see how you can argue for no Holocaust/no gas chambers without sooner or later invoking a conspiracy of some kind.

You beat me to it.

 

[Meadmaker]

Now, onto your assertion that "alleging torture or forgery is alleging a conspiracy." I'm going to assume your fingers got ahead of your brain with this becuase this statement is simply crazy-talk. When detainees at Gitmo allege they have been tortured, they're really alleging that there's a conspiracy? When George Bush insisted that the United States doesn't torture, what he was denying is allegations of a conspiracy, Jewish or otherwise?

Yes and yes. Do you not get that?

 

[Saggy]

Sure. Just go to a decent library which holds copies of the German edition of the IMT trials, or order the DVD from amazon.de (Nuernberger Prozess, or something like that). Look up April 11 1946 and look out for 'Vernichtung' and 'Auschwitz'. It'll be the same wording.

The online translation dictionary lists a number of possibilities for vernichtung

death
damnation
extinction
destruction
catastrophe
annihilation
demolishment
obliteration
extermination

so it is ambiguous at the start, with possible translations as 'destruction', 'damnation' and 'catastrophe', 'extinction', 'demolishment', etc.

Hilberg's book, "The Destruction ...." is translated "Vernichtung ....". Destruction, applied to a people, is not synonymous with death or annihilation.

Faurisson notes that 'das Lager def Vernichtung' is a phrase that the Nazis never used and was invented after the war by the allies, and referred to a camp with gas chambers.

So, who knows what Kalenbrunner thought Kaufmann meant when he asked the question, and of course the topic was quickly passed over. Why didn't they question Kaltenbrunner as to what was meant by 'vernichtung', what specifically did Himmler 'admit', how did he 'admit' it, with a shrug?, what specifically did he 'admit', etc. It is purposefully vague, and hence meaningless.


Then the President, in the Yale English transcript says .... "You asked him what he did when he found out that Auschwitz was a concentration camp." So the President of the court did not interpret the question to mean 'death camp' or 'annihilation camp', all phrases invented by the allies, so if the President of the court didn't know what it meant, how in the hell can Kaltenbrunner have known what it meant.