There is not a single mass grave of holohoax victims.

[MG1962]

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.

Well there's an authority

 

[Matthew Ellard]

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.

You quoted Richard Butler from his book. Bernard Clarke never said anything. Richard Butler, after Clarke's death wrote in a book that Bernard Clarke described how he and five other British soldiers tortured the former commandant " However, Richard Butler forgot that Hoess was photographed two days after this and forgot that other people were in the room with Bernard Clarke. Here is a direct quote from Private Ken Jones, of the fifth Royal Horse Artillery.....
We sat in the cell with him, night and day, armed with axe handles. Our job was to prod him every time he fell asleep to help break down his resistance," said Mr. Jones. When Höss was taken out for exercise, he was made to wear only jeans and a thin cotton shirt in the bitter cold. After three days and nights without sleep, Höss finally broke down and made a full confession to the authorities

Here is a photo of Hoess during the three days of interrogation.
http://www.cwporter.com/SCAN 40/beeld-15.jpg

Here is a photo of Hoess at the IMT.
http://www.cwporter.com/hoess.jpg
Can you explain why there are no marks on his face if he was beaten around the head with axe-handles?

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.

Holocaust Deniers don't read evidence and pretend that Hoess was simultaneously beaten with axe-handles and given figures by the British concerning the number of victims. That's because they don't read the IMT transcripts where the court queries the figures. Read this.

DR. KAUTFFMANN: Is it true that you, yourself, have made no exact notes regarding the figures of the number of those victims because you were forbidden to make them?
HOESS: Yes, that is correct.
DR. KAUFFMANN: Is it furthermore correct that exclusively one man by the name of Eichmann had notes about this, the man who had the task of organizing and assembling these people?
HOESS: Yes.
DR. KAUFFMANN: Is it furthermore true that Eichmann stated to you that in Auschwitz a total sum of more than 2 million Jews had been destroyed?
HOESS: Yes.

There isn't a single document, alone or among many, that proves the mass extermination of the Jews. When I say 'document' I'm not talking about the transcripts or verdicts of criminal trials. I mean contemporary German wartime documents.

Lets us look at German documents from the period concerning Treblinka.
1) Hofle Telegram "713,500 sent to Treblinka" by Dec 1942.
2) 1945 Polish Report into Treblinka "human tissue, ash found"
3) SS internal document "330,000mens overcoats" ( 800,000 people's clothing were shipped from Treblinka to Warsaw after their execution)
4) SS Internal document on gold from teeth ( 18 to 36kilos each month.)

You have previously stated that the Hofle Telegram does not mention "extermination" however you have missed the text in the telegram that states "for Operation Reinhard". Please read what Operation Reinhard is on this link. http://www.holocaust-history.org/operation-reinhard/

Why do you think the Holfe Telegram states 1,274,166 people have arrived at the Operation Reinhard camps as at 30Dec42? Where do you think the 713,000 people sent to Treblinka went next?

So there was no evidence of Jewish Fat Soap?

Yes there is hard evidence of the Nazis making soap from humans. ( Russian prisoners). However only a couple blocks were made and it was never intended to move towards industrial manufacture. Here is a photo
http://furtherglory.files.wordpress.com/2010/02/soap.jpg?w=527&h=288
You can see the IMT evidence number on the top of each container. Little Grey Rabbit, an Australian Holocaust denier states the evidence was faked by the Russians however Warsaw Agricultural University has re tested the soap recently and it is made from humans.

You would be correct in saying it was not made from Jews and it was never intended for industrial production and really is just a Nazi, Dr Spanner, making soap from humans as a low key general experiment. For this reason is is not really part of the holocaust.

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.

The Soviets didn't wait for the Germans to hide the evidence as they were destroying Army Group Centre before the winter set in. The Germans ran out of time. Here is a photo of Treblinka as "liberated"
http://www.ovimagazine.com/images/treble01_400.jpg
Would you please please please quote holocaust denier, Richard Krege's report into Treblinka proving otherwise?

 

[bruto]

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

Of course, his loathsomeness must be proof of something sinister, and what could be more sinister than the international zionist conspiracy, so......he's obviously a front for the zionist conspiracy, designed to make them look benign by contrast. Very tricky, eh?

 

[JoeTheJuggler]

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

What a nonsensical reply. Are you suggesting the English transcripts are mistranslations? If so, the burden of proof is on you. What do you have?

 

[Nick Terry]

It's bedtime where I am but before I turn in for the night I'll correct two of the manifold misrepresentations from Dogzilla above

There are no explicit references to extermination anywhere in any of the contemporary German wartime documents.

This is flat-out incorrect. A leading Nazi (Reichsleiter, Gauleiter or Hitler himself) uttered the words Vernichtung and/or Ausrottung on average once a week during 1942-43 in public statements appearing in the German press, in specific relation to the Jews, often accompanied by further invective that added phrases like 'root and branch' (Kind und Kegel) and 'death sentence'.

See: Bernward Doerner, Die Deutschen und der Holocaust, as well as Peter Longerich, 'Davon haben wir nichts gewusst!' for multiple examples

These speeches were understood by contemporaries, both inside Nazi controlled Europe (we have the diary entries of Germans, Jews and others recording their reactions to the speeches), as well as outside Europe (in Switzerland and Britain, and other place) as meaning extermination in the literal sense.

The Nazi reaction to the UN Declaration of December 1942, which charged Germany with exterminating the Jews, was first to change the subject and witter on about alleged British atrocities, and then from the start of 1943 onwards, to ramp up the exterminatory rhetoric.

Behind closed doors, Nazi leaders repeatedly referred to the extermination or liquidation of the Jews, not least in the Government-General, whose governor, Hans Frank, kept on speaking in these terms through 1941-43 while the whole process was going on. Himmler and Hitler gave a number of speeches to the senior leadership from October 1943 to May/June 1944 which were entirely explicit, and were also understood as such - judging by the reactions in the Goebbels diaries and the recorded reactions of German generals who had the misfortune to hear Uncle Heinrich explain why he had given the order to kill the children as well.

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.

This is just one of innumerable strawmen and misrepresentations of what people 'around here' might think - as far as I can see only you in this thread have tried to minimise what you so lamely call 'the Einsatzgruppen' (when you need to consider multiple regiments of police, Gendarmerie and Schutzpolizei units, Waffen-SS brigades of the Kommandostab Reichsfuehrer SS, collaborator policemen in the Schutzmannschaften, as well as ordinary Army units, not to mention Romanian military and police forces).

50% of the Holocaust took place on Soviet territory, measured by the borders of 22 June 1941, killing approximately 2.6 million Jews, of whom less than half a million were deported westwards into the death camps, the remainder barring a small proportion who starved to death in ghettos were shot on the spot in mass executions by German, Romanian and collaborator forces. Contrary to a misconception that seems to prevail among deniers, the Germans were unable to erase all the traces of these crimes and could only incinerate a part of the bodies, usually in the larger cities, leaving hundreds of mass graves to be uncovered after the Soviets liberated the smaller towns. The graves can be easily relocated today using 1940s reports, and have been, both by local and international investigators.

The Holocaust in the Soviet Union formed about 10% of total Soviet population losses in WWII. It wiped out 95%+ of the Jews who were caught up by the Axis occupation. Only a tiny number were able to escape the ghettos set up in 100s of cities and towns across the occupied territories. This genocide - a 95% slaughter cannot be anything but - was witnessed by literally 100s of 1000s of people, not only Russian, Ukrainian, Belorussian, Lithuanian, Latvian and Polish civilians but also many thousands of German soldiers and civil administrators on garrison duty. These witnesses recorded their impressions in contemporary diaries and letters, as well as in postwar testimonies given under many different circumstances. The German units responsible for the slaughter - and also the Romanian forces - recorded the actions in copious contemporary documents, although the records of many perpetrating units do not survive, to the tune of being able to use Axis statistics for around 70%, maybe now 80%, of the death toll.

In comparison to any other mass extinction in the 20th Century, that is about as good as it gets (few megacides are perfectly documented, and very few have received significant forensic or archaeological attention.)

I can recommend a couple of years' worth of reading for you on this subject, depending on your language abilities. The literature in German is particularly substantial, and is all but unknown to 'revisionists' who prefer to avoid the subject as much as possible.


The genocide in the Soviet Union poses some serious problems for 'revisionism', firstly because it makes little sense that the Nazis would wipe out 95% of Soviet Jews yet not harm a hair on the head of Western or Central European Jews - even though 'Jewish Bolshevism' was a prominent target of Nazi propaganda, the majority of Nazi antisemitic propaganda attacked 'the Jews' as a whole, and all the recorded statements mentioned above do so.

Secondly, because shootings en masse preceded gassings. So, in chronological and logical terms, did deportations. The evidence for the mass deportation of Jews is irrefutable. I have seen the occasional straw-clutcher of a denier try to dispute the numbers, but only because of their wilful ignorance of the source material. Well over two and a half million Jews from Western, Central and South Eastern Europe as well as Poland were deported. The documentation allows us to say with a fair degree of certainty that they were overwhelmingly (but not exclusively) deported to places like Auschwitz and Treblinka, where the trains stop, the paper trail stops and the witness statements stop.

The denier claim - when they bother to answer the question 'what happened to the Jews?' - is that the trains didn't stop, and went to the occupied Soviet territories. Unfortunately, this claim makes absolutely no sense if Soviet Jews were being exterminated to the tune of 95%. It also violates the principle that every contact leaves a trace, since there is no credible evidence that this mass 'resettlement' to the Soviet Union took place, and a great deal of evidence against this claim - the non-recording of the mass transports in contemporary German documents that would have to have acknowledged the mass transports if they had happened, the many thousands of Soviet and German witnesses who would have seen the transports arrive are all silent, a number that rises to several million German soldiers when the retreat begins in earnest during 1943. Not to mention the logistical impossibility of moving more than 2.5 million people into a famine zone, an occupied territory where Jews were officially prescribed half of the ration that was killing off 10s of thousands of Ukrainian city-dwellers from hunger, and expecting more than a fraction to stay alive. Had the Germans 'resettled' the Jews as deniers claim, then there would have been 50 Belsens by the spring of 1943 on Soviet soil. And the deported Jews would be just as dead, and just as exterminated, as if they had been killed as is known from the evidence from the death camps.

 

[Matthew Ellard]

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.

OK. That wipes me out of further conversation. Thank you Nick. It seems I need to do a lot of catching up to do, one book at a time!

 

[SpitfireIX]

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

DR. KAUFFMANN: Eine andere Frage dazu. Wann haben Sie erstmalig davon gehört, daß das Lager Auschwitz ein Vernichtungslager sei?

KALTENBRUNNER: Das hat mir Himmler im Jahre 1944, Februar oder März, gesagt, das heißt, er hat es mir nicht gesagt, sondern er hat es zugegeben.

(source)

 

[Saggy]

(source)

Baloney.

There is one word used in an ambiguous phrase never used by the Nazis, that is subject to various interpretations.

The President of the court interpreted the question to mean concentration camp as shown by the immediately following comment:

THE PRESIDENT: This is not an answer to your question. You asked him what he did when he found out that Auschwitz was a concentration camp.

Kaltenbrunner was charged with directing the 'annihilation', he was not supposed to be an observer. Here is what he testified ...

COL. BROOKHART: Witness after witness, by testimony and affidavit, has said that the gas chamber killings were done on general or specific orders of Kaltenbrunner.

KALTENBRUNNER: Show me one of those men or any of those orders. It is utterly impossible.

COL. BROOKHART: Practically all of the orders came through Kaltenbrunner.

KALTENBRUNNER: Entirely impossible.

Then Kaltenbrunner testified that he heard of the holohoax on allied radio. What did he hear? What did he tell Himmler? The court is not interested enough to ask.

Then Kaltenbrunner testifies that he is responsible for ending the 'persecution' of the Jews ...

DR. KAUFFMANN: When did the Jewish persecution end?

KALTENBRUNNER: October 1944.

DR. KAUFFMANN: Do you want to say that this was due to your intervention?

KALTENBRUNNER: I am firmly convinced that this is chiefly due to my intervention,

Note that Kaufmann uses the word 'persecution'. And Kaltenbrunner claims responsibility for stopping it.

The only person charged with participating in the killing of Jews testified that it is 'utterly impossible' and 'entirely impossible' and challenged the prosecution to produce any witness or document that shows otherwise.

Then he testified that he personally was responsible for ending the persecution of the Jews.

It is pure theater of the absurd.

 

[Saggy]

These speeches were understood by contemporaries, both inside Nazi controlled Europe (we have the diary entries of Germans, Jews and others recording their reactions to the speeches), as well as outside Europe (in Switzerland and Britain, and other place) as meaning extermination in the literal sense.

What absolute crap. Not only did not anyone in Germany believe that the Nazis were exterminating Jews, no one in the US government, save the Zionist dominated War Refugee Board, believed it.

The Jewish World Congress submitted 'documents' claiming that the Jews were being exterminated to the US govt. starting in 42',43', and these documents ended up in the State Department where they were routinely ignored because they were recognized as pure tripe. That changed when Henry Morgenthau created the WRB and began publishing the documents as findings of the US govt.

The rest on the government continued on as before, ignoring the propaganda. When the Soviet army approached Auschwitz the Zionists raised a hue and cry that the Nazis were going to exterminate the prisoners they had thus far neglected to exterminate. The state department investigated this charge by communicating with the German high command, you can see the telegram here .... http://www.holohoax101.com/201/ The Nazis replied that the rumors were without foundation. And, of course, they were.

No one in Germany or the US, save the World Jewish Congress, believe that the Jews were being exterminated. Even the Jews in Auschwitz knew that they were not about to be exterminated, despite completely idiotic propaganda, witness this photo from Yad Vashem, the reality,... and the caption below, the idiotic propaganda ....

Jews who were classified as "not fit for work" waiting in a grove outside Crematorium IV before they were to be gassed. At this point, the Jews were exhausted and in a state of shock from the horrors of the journey and the selection process that they had just endured. The vast majority had no idea what fate awaited them.

Can it get any more absurd.

 

[Harpo]

blah...blah...nazi crap...blah

Can it get any more absurd.

I'm guessing it will with your next post.

 

[SanityGap]

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.

From Google translator

destruction
annihilation
extermination
death
extinction
obliteration

Which one of these is NOT synonymous with death or annihilation? Apart from the two that are identical

 

[catsmate]

Just FYI, I am a citizen of Ireland.

As am I.

If they had girlfriends would it put an end to this denial nonsense?

Well in the decades since my first gf I haven't denied the Holocaust once. Though I didn't deny it previously either......

 

[Wildy]

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.

I don't know which online translation dictionary you used, but the LEO Deutsch-Englisches Wörtebuch provides synonyms when it translates "Vernichtung". Their entry for the English word destruction lists a whole load of German words that are valid translations of "destruction", all of them synonyms.

Does that mean that you can't translate the word "destruction" into German?

Hilberg's book, "The Destruction ...." is translated "Vernichtung ....".

Because "Vernichtung" is a valid translation of "destruction". And as far as I can tell it's a more accurate translation the using any of the other synonyms given for "destruction".

Destruction, applied to a people, is not synonymous with death or annihilation.

Could you elaborate on this? Do you mean "people" as "a bunch of human beings"? Or as a "community"? Or as a "cultural/religious/ethnic group"?

For someone complaining about the ambiguities of translating into foreign languages, you are quite vague.

Faurisson notes that 'das Lager de[r] 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.

And?

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.

Are you suggesting that Kaltenbrunner didn't know the definition of "Vernichtung", a word in his own language?

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.

The President of the court was, I believe, Lord Justice Lawrence, who would have been using a word that was familiar to him.

Baloney.

So what is wrong with the source provided?

There is one word used in an ambiguous phrase never used by the Nazis, that is subject to various interpretations.

It's only subject to various interpretations because you want it to be.

 

[Gawdzilla Sama]

Then you don't understand revisionism.

Advisory: If you find yourself actually understanding revisionism, seek professional help immediately. Your mental health depends on prompt intervention . . . and lots of drugs.

 

[Saggy]

I

It's only subject to various interpretations because you want it to be.

It is subject to various interpretations because it was a phrase invented by the Allies to describe events that never happened.

It is subject to various interpretations because it is preposterous to begin with. It is a phrase that the Nazis never used.

It is preposterous in context because the alleged director of the extermination was being asked, by his own attorney, if he had ever heard of it. And, he replied he heard of it on allied radio.

It is preposterous because K's attorney was leading Kaltenbrunner to claim that he personally ended the persecution of the Jews.

It is preposterous because the President of the court didn't know what it meant.

The whole thing is completely absurd. The 2nd in command of the SS (?) was being asked if he ever heard of the holohoax. He says he heard of it on allied radio. The whole place should have erupted in laughter, but the absurd was the order of the day at Nuremberg.

 

[Gawdzilla Sama]

It is subject to various interpretations because it was a phrase invented by the Allies to describe events that never happened

Living GIGO.

 

[Nick Terry]

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.

It seems you are jumping ahead and replying to later statements in my post, or earlier ones. Your reply quoted me as saying:

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.

To which your reply above is a non-sequitur.

Let's quote Faurisson from one of his programmatic statements at the time of his affaire:

3.The alleged “gas chambers” and the alleged “genocide” are one and the same lie.
4.This lie, which is largely of Zionist origin, has made an enormous political and financial fraud possible, whose principal beneficiary is the state of Israel.

There are many more such quotes from prominent revisionists.

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.

Revisionists dismiss themselves because of their antisemitism. As a movement in historical terms, it is inextricably linked with neo-Nazism and antisemitism. Virtually all of the prominent German deniers had links to far right political parties. The French scene consisted of an uneasy alliance between the far right and a far left tendency which moved from anti-imperialism and thus anti-Zionism into fairly blatant antisemitism. The website of French revisionism, AAARGH, offers well over 100 pure-antisemitic tracts alongside Holocaust revisionism and other conspiracy theories. The IHR was for just over two decades the flagship of revisionism and was founded by Willis Carto of Liberty Lobby. This is a historical fact. Mark Weber's recent abandonment of revisionism was in order to concentrate on 'anti-Zionism', which in his version can be equated fairly straightforwardly with gussied-up antisemitism (many anti-Zionists cannot be so regarded, however).

There are exceptions to this rule, maybe 5-10% of all deniers online or in print might not tick the boxes straight away, but whatever the professed 'conversion story' offered by a particular denier, sooner or later they usually show their true colours.

What that means is that the only effective weapon you'll have to combat holocaust revision is passing laws against its propagation.

Actually there is relatively little need to "combat holocaust revision" since it has been woefully ineffective in the past 30 years since it went public after the Faurisson affair in convincing anyone but a tiny minority of cranks. Revisionism does not pass muster as scholarship, it cannot produce coherent texts. It is therefore unsurprising that with vanishingly few exceptions, academia has rejected revisionism.

It 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?

No, I am summarising the views of print deniers - revisionist authors. A revisionist author like Mattogno usually blames the Poles and the Soviets but also blames the British and sometimes the Americans. He occasionally accuses Jewish organisations of fabricating part of the 'hoax', but they are not raised to the level of instigators as they are in the writings of Butz and Faurisson.

Unfortunately, Mattogno's circumspection regarding how the alleged hoax came into being is his undoing, since one of the main turn-ons for him is evidently attacking Jewish eyewitnesses, who are assaulted before he might turn to SS testimonies, by and large, and far more space is given over to attacking the Jewish witnesses than the non-Jewish ones. One of his standard lines is that the story underwent a 'literary evolution', but nowhere does he prove that witness x read previous statement or report y.

The 'zeitgeist' or 'hystory' variant is peddled by Samuel Crowell, who claims that the alleged hoax grew organically from psychocultural phobias of Polish Jews and spread by rumour. It is popular with the slightly more sophisticated deniers who are deeply embarrassed by the frequent allegations of conspiracy by some of their dumber brethren, and is advanced in order to avoid the accusation that the erstwhile revisionist is a conspiraloon. Yet as I stated above, even Crowell starts alleging coercion and torture after 1945 when it is unavoidable.

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?

I'm not interested in the dialogue you are evidently having with the demons in your head.

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.

No, it's not.

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!

You are not doing a very good job with your strawmen, I'm afraid. Alleging torture of SS witnesses and the forgery of German documents - which is what revisionists have done, over and over again - is to advance a conspiracy theory whereby the core evidence for the Holocaust was fabricated by secretive entities (who left no trace of their passage detectible by anyone other than... revisionists!).

Alleging the forgery of documents that are then placed carefully into war crimes trials exhibit folders or into archival files, most certainly is alleging a conspiracy. Alleging torture is also advancing a conspiracy theory if the implication is that the information which was conveyed by the SS witnesses did not come from the SS but from the interrogators.

I already gave the example of SS Captain Aumeier mentioning the Bunkers in Norway to British interrogators in 1945. Irving's instinctive reaction to the Aumeier file when he first read it was to presume torture as Aumeier became 'more forthcoming' (whereas it is to be expected that repeated interrogations tease out more details, without using torture), while Mattogno claimed that the British got on the phone with the Poles who told them what a Polish Jewish Sonderkommando said. Both are classic examples of conspiracy allegations which require coordination of some kind. There is in fact no proof that the British and Poles were in contact in the manner claimed by Mattogno in the summer of 1945. So it's a baseless conspiracy theory.

If you are throwing out 'torture' without the implication that interrogators fed an SS witness their lines, then it is merely well-poisoning since there are only a negligible number of allegations of torture, and the most prominent allegation (Malmedy) was disproven.

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.

In the estimation of Robert Van Pelt, one of the expert witnesses for the defense in the Irving-Lipstadt libel trial, revisionism had failed to produce a coherent explanation of how the alleged hoax developed. He highlighted Crowell as one of the few who even tried to advance a semblance of a narrative to explain the development of the alleged hoax but judged it a failure, as have many others approaching this debate who decide to read some of the gurus' texts.

Online, I've seen ordinary history buffs ask 'who created the Hoax' to an assembled gaggle of deniers, and watched as the answers ended up descending into madness and incoherence. I have asked the same question of 'revisionists' and never yet received a coherent answer that explains all of the evidence of wartime reports or the immediate postwar investigations. The chief problem is that none of the revisionists, whether gurus or chimps, have examined all of this evidence so they don't know what to say except autorepeat the same hoary old blather.

This is but one of many reasons why revisionism is regarded as laughable nonsense. If revisionism had found credible evidence of a conspiracy then it would surely appeal to a much greater number of academics than it has done hitherto.

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.

I'm not 'people'. In my estimation, the failure of revisionism is because

1) it hasn't provided a coherent explanation of how the alleged hoax or myth came into being.

2) it has not explained the fate of the Jews in Axis occupied Europe (what happened to them)

3) it systematically misrepresents the extent of the evidence for the Holocaust, pretending that there are no documents/no witnesses/no mass graves etc when these things are available

4) the core 'critiques' and claims have been refuted over and over again

5) there are serious contradictions among revisionists over how to interpret basic sources, i.e. whether to claim that Wannsee was a forgery (ever popular with Germans and some Americans) or to claim that the Wannsee protocol doesn't prove extermination, or to advance both explanations and hope that nobody notices

6) most revisionists seem to think they are exempt from normal strictures of providing evidence to back up their claims or that they need not advance any positive claims - they need only negate evidence, ignoring the fact that history doesn't just go poof! on the say-so of cranks

7) when revisionists do make a positive claim (this is how the evidence was faked, this is what happened to these Jews) the proof advanced is laughably weak, the credulity of the revisionists shoots through the stratosphere, and thus creates a blatant evidentiary double standard.

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.

Let me spell it out for you. There were vastly more SS witnesses than just Hoess. In 1945 dozens of SS officers who had served at Auschwitz were captured by the British and Americans, and gave details of the extermination process at Auschwitz. Many more were able to slip through the net and kept quiet about their exact wartime whereabouts, but were eventually relocated by the 1960s. Significantly more than 1,000 SS men who served at Auschwitz gave some form of testimony about the camp. The Frankfurt Auschwitz Trial of 1963-1965 involved 113 SS men as either defendants or witnesses, and there were more who gave evidence in the pretrial investigation; this was hardly the only such investigation either then or dating back to the 1940s. A number gave interviews from the 1970s to 2000s, after the trials were essentially over, repeating their statements.

The same observation can be repeated for the other death camps, where the numbers who served inside the camps was far fewer, yet we have not only their statements but also those of SS and policemen who served in commands in the same districts, who either visited or knew about the camps, as well as other German observers - civil servants, soldiers, civilians. There were at least 32 trials where gas vans were brought up.

Perpetrator testimonies have to be treated like any other statement, with caution, because there are powerful motives to say 'I don't remember' or to obfuscate. Both Eichmann and Hoess portrayed themselves as slavish recipients of orders, and this meant that it was in their interests to date things often earlier than was the actual case because thereby acts undertaken on their own initiative could be downplayed. This wasn't even necessarily a defense strategy as much as an appeal to posterity. Their autobiographies contain many cloying remarks which bear this out. Hoess in addition is obviously terrible with dates, even regarding entirely uncontentious issues, so his dates are not to be trusted without corroboration.

In the case of Ohlendorf, chief of Einsatzgruppe D, we can prove a definite conspiracy to orchestrate testimony among his fellow Einsatzgruppen officers to claim that before Barbarossa, a general extermination order had been given. By claiming this, they could plead the defense of superior orders, and there the intent was entirely deliberate.

Taking some of these statements at face value misled many historians writing in the first decades after the war; in the past 3 decades this is not the case because of the extensive research done on the subject and a genuine revision of interpretations, coupled with bringing more evidence to bear.

Hoess, who is evidently a bee in your bonnet, was captured in March 1946 and according to the arrest report was interrogated vigorously for the whereabouts of other members of the WVHA. The arresting officer explicitly stated he was not questioned about his own activities on the first night. By Hoess' own account, he was treated roughly on the first night. His own account does not mention violent treatment when he was transferred to Minden the next day, which is when the systematic interrogation began. I don't find the sensationalist account of Rupert Butler credible and do not see how this first statement (NO-1210) could have been generated by coercion or torture, it is too extensive to be explicable as the work of anyone dictating things to him. His problem with dates surfaces fairly obviously in the statement as he misdates a number of things which are documented and thus cannot be contentious.

There are however a few places where one can discern questions he was surely asked where he might have 'given way' to pacify his captors. In March 1946 it was widely believed that Auschwitz had killed millions, because many survivors of the camp offered exaggerated estimates to the authorities, and because it had been endorsed by the Soviets. The identity of the millions, as befits the mentality of the era, was not important. That Jews were the majority of Auschwitz's victims could not be assimilated into the worldviews of western liberal democracies or East bloc communist states. That is ultimately why the not very philosemitic East Bloc submerged the distinctiveness of the Jewish fate at Auschwitz by raising the overall number and keeping it raised even after Western historians had determined the total couldn't have been much more than 1 million Jews.

We know from other interrogations protocolled as q&a's that Auschwitz SS men were asked, 'but Auschwitz killed 4 million people', and the SS man in question (Wirths, the chief camp doctor) responded with, that is impossible, I know from the official capacities of the crematoria that it could not have been more than 2 million on technical grounds, and it was likely less, I don't know the exact number but no way 4 million. Wirths had already written an apologia minimising his own role but acknowledging the true nature of the camp, and committed suicide, something which follows on from the evident psychological strain recorded in his wartime letters to his parents. He would have been a brilliant witness at Nuremberg had he not killed himself, because of his senior position. So there is no reason to advance any silly conspiracy theory that he was bumped off.

Hoess was quite likely asked the same thing, 'but we know it was 4 million'. In his initial statement, he gave 2.5 million as a figure he thought he had heard from Eichmann. Yet in the same statement, he enumerated the major deportations to the camp and the numbers add up to 1.1 million or so. By his own testimony to the court in Poland in 1947, he was badgered about the total and offered 2.5 million to pacify his captors.

The British didn't keep Hoess forever. Within a couple of weeks, he was transferred to Nuremberg, where he was interrogated again on repeated occasions - several of the interrogations are online and formatted as q&a protocols. By his own account, he was treated much better in Nuremberg than the British had treated him. In addition to being interrogated formally, a psychologist and a psychiatrist also spoke at length with Hoess, and he spoke freely. To one he indicated that he had had his shoes taken away in British captivity and was suffering some trouble with his feet as a result. To the other, he recanted on his statement that 2.5 million had died and repeated the figures he had already given to the British for individual country totals. To both, he elaborated at some length on things he had already discussed with previous interrogators.

To his formal interrogators, he gave more detail as well. In one instance the interrogators did not believe one of his datings - he stated that Slovakian Jews had arrived in 1941, whereas Wisliceny, also held at Nuremberg at the same time, had been involved in organising the deportations and had said 1942. So they checked with Wisliceny and he told them no, Hoess is wrong. Yet the matter was dropped and the interrogators missed the opportunity to tease out the evident confusions in Hoess's dates. They are generally, but not always, about six months too early for events in 1941-43. By his own admission, Hoess had been in a car accident after the end of the war and claimed this had affected his memory.

In another aspect - his claim of a very early Himmler order and his confused portrayal of which camps were active when - Hoess was undoubtedly lying to make himself look more obedient and minimise the degree of his initiative. In other statements he claimed to have visited Treblinka in the spring of 1943, not in 1941 or 1942. Were it not for the accident of experimenting with Zyklon B to kill Soviet POWs, then quite possibly Hoess might not have been lumbered with the task of exterminating the Jews. It was important for him to portray himself as lagging behind others, even though he was actually one of the pioneers.

After Nuremberg, Hoess was extradited to Poland and interrogated at length while being encouraged to write free-form statements, which became his autobiography. As already mentioned, Hoess reiterated the lower death toll both in statements and in court cross-examination. The Poles ignored his estimate and pegged the total higher in their judgement, yet could not elicit any corroboration from him of the desired higher figure. This speaks directly against any possible coercion in Polish captivity.

By his own account, Hoess said he was very well treated at Nuremberg and in Poland, much better than he had expected.

The essential descriptive element of all of his statements regarding the procedures involved in the Final Solution at Auschwitz are far from worthless. On the contrary, they are corroborated a hundred times over by other witnesses, SS and prisoner, and by extensive documentation. While there are mistakes and dubious claims these do not add up to more than a fraction of the total number of individual assertions.

Deniers haven't exactly excelled themselves in offering an honest exegesis of Hoess's statements - they invent contradictions where none exist, misread sentences for dramatic effect (the Sonderkommandos 'smoking and eating', a distortion that goes back to Rassinier), and much else that does not stand up to scrutiny.

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.

I already dealt with this above in a previous post.

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?

Your claim was "If I reject a statement it's because the statement is so patently false that only a moron would believe it."

Apparently, you reject statements that have been accepted by lawyers and historians as perfectly decent evidence. Therefore you are declaring the judges, jurors and lawyers in past court proceedings, as well as historians, journalists and ordinary readers of history books, to be morons.

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?

I wouldn't be much of a sceptic if I thought, as you apparently do, that all past efforts to comprehend the eyewitness testimony of the Holocaust were the product of morons and were 'worthless'.

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.

No, I mentioned the judges and jurors from a variety of legal traditions contradicting your claim that a statement might be regarded as so patently false that only a moron might believe it. Courts often got a crack at witnesses before historians did, especially when it came to SS perpetrators.

In actual fact, historians organised the gathering of one of the largest collections of postwar eyewitness testimonies - the 7000 accounts compiled by the Central Jewish Historical Commission in Poland from early 1945 onwards (Poland being part-liberated already in the autumn of 1944). Many of these statements were submitted freehand, but many were also the products of a robust survey questionnaire drawn up by historians with a view to prompt a good range of details from interview subjects. It is quite certain that more testimonies of Polish Jewish survivors were collected by historians than by courts in occupied Germany.

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.

Deniers use falsus in uno to reject entire statements sometimes because of a single error, sometimes for a collection of errors. This appears to be what you're doing. In most systems of assessment of witness testimony, then there is little expectation that a witness will state everything correctly or that they can convey the full detail of an event or an object. This is a scientific fact - psychologists have run enough experiments to prove that human memory is a far from perfect recording device.

At the same time, it is a matter of informal expertise for lawyers and others such as historians or journalists who engage with witness testimony-like statements as their bread and buttter, to distinguish between parts of a statement that are rubbish, exaggerated or outright lies, and parts that are true. Jury instructions in many US states are worded in precisely this manner.

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.

I would say that listening to children babbling about 'millions and millions' proves you dead wrong there. Hyperbole is a noted feature of language, and is recognised for what it is, much like metaphor, metonymy and other linguistic tropes. Failure to recognise it and to take certain statements absolutely literally is the hallmark of a crank.

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.

You appear to be using critical as a synonym for rejection or dismissal. Those who deal day-to-day with witness testimonies are perfectly critical of witness statements because they are aware of the linguistic and psychological issues involved. This is why they will reject parts of a statement in the light of other evidence. If one witness estimates a crowd of 400, one of 300 and another of 200 then rather than dismissing all of them because they cannot agree on something that is inherently difficult to gauge, a sensible observer will compare the statements with other evidence (for example, a document that counted a crowd), or average them out, aware that if there are only witness statements to rely on - which is the epistemological norm for almost all human history - then it may not be as certain as if there were other forms of evidence available.

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.

But this is exactly what has been done with the Holocaust, over and over again. A Jewish prisoner of Auschwitz might have a bias to portray their experiences as especially awful. But if Polish prisoners of Auschwitz say, the Jews were treated like animals, then there is already corroboration from another party. If the SS guards and staff say the Jews were so treated, then there is even more corroboration.

If all three groups (Jewish, non-Jewish and SS/German non-prisoner witnesses) all say that the Jews were exterminated en masse at Auschwitz, then there is virtually no possibility of bias left, and we can compare and contrast different cohorts of witnesses to establish bias, and thereby correct for it - rather than throwing out entire cohorts of witnesses because of presumed bias.

If moreover the witnesses say, the Jews were exterminated in gas chambers in the basements of crematoria, and then documents are uncovered labelling the relevant room a Vergasungskeller, and saying how the crematorium will be set up for Sonderbehandlung, a known Nazi euphemism for execution, and stating that the rooms were equipped with gastight doors, ventilation systems, and wire mesh columns, as described by the witnesses, and photos survive showing the insertion ports at ground level, and air photos come to light which on examination using modern techniques show columns of people entering into the crematorium, and the ruins are searched for traces and plates from the ventilation system are found which on forensic examination reveal traces of cyanide, and then years later some loonies decide to test the ruins and... find cyanide traces, and then the tests are repeated by non-loonies who also find cyanide traces, then....

...just where is there room for doubt that the witnesses are not telling the essential, basic truth?

When the person providing the testimony makes extraordinary claims, they need to back it up with extraordinary proof.

This has been provided. Interpretations claiming that the evidence, which I summarised in sketch form above for Auschwitz, does not add up to this claim, inevitably result in their own extraordinary claims, which in turn bear their own extraordinary proof. For example, the claim, explicit or implicit, that all SS witnesses testifying to gas chambers must be lying in every detail or must be coerced, and the logically consequent claim that 100s of 1000s of people who can be proven as arriving at Auschwitz went somewhere else, if they did not die there.

On the principle of inference to the best explanation, as well as Occam's Razor, the existing consensus account wins, and the revisionist one loses.

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.

But the supposedly fantastical statements are critically examined and contrasted with other evidence, both other witnesses as well as whatever documentation is available, to arrive at a more plausible account. Throwing the baby out with the bathwater, which is what you evidently want to do, is neither plausible - it results in too many new contradictions - nor common practice.

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.

I already refuted this above in a previous post.

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

If you are unaware of which two documents, then you really haven't done much reading into either revisionism or mainstream historiography. One is 501-PS, submitted at IMT, the other is usually known as '97,000 processed' and is online at the Holocaust History Project website. There are nearly 20 more documents relating to gas vans, some using euphemisms that can then be decoded by references to the same license plate numbers in other documents which are more explicit.

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

And no charge of manufacturing Jewish soap was levelled there. The DAI case did not concern Jews.

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

The witnesses at the DAI reported, correctly, that human fat was macerated and this macerated fat was used as a cleaning product in the morgues, i.e on floors and surfaces. So yes, at the Danzig Anatomy Institute, the fat from corpses was misused for purposes which should horrify anyone. I sincerely hope no morgue in the world today would resort to such a practice.

Joachim Neander's work shows that when the Soviet investigators asked former British POWs working at the institute for more statements, some seem to have embellished their original stories. It strikes me as more of a case of telling investigators what they want to hear than an outright invention, and as such means it is entirely irrelevant to assessing the core issue of did witnesses correctly report on gas chambers.

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

No direct eyeball eyewitness accounts of steam chambers or electrical chambers exist. Sorry, all of those are hearsay distortions via the quite well understood process of Chinese whispers.

Moreover, the fact that these distorted hearsay accounts persisted for so long makes it measurably less likely that any coordination could have existed between the various investigating agencies in 1945. Cock-up, not conspiracy.

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

I am mainly referring to West Germany, which was a liberal democracy from 1949 onwards, but you can also add the Netherlands, whose Red Cross began a systematic missing persons investigation relating to all deportees in 1946-47 and produced extensive reports on the deportations and their subsequent fate, and also conducted a number of its own war crimes trials - in some instances through to the 1970s. One might also add recent US, British and Australian war crimes proceedings which have been conducted sporadically since the 1970s.

The West German case however is the critical one for this point.

So there was no evidence of Jewish Fat Soap? But it was believed to be true by the majority of the people at time.

Indeed it was, because the rumour was incredibly widespread and circulated among Germans, Poles and Jews alike in the 1940s, 'sticking' fairly firmly among Poles, where after 1945 'human soap' became a major component of the collective memory of the Nazi occupation of Poland, due to its portrayal in literary accounts which are still standard reading for Polish schoolchildren. Poles, not Jews, are probably the chief advocates of 'human soap', which is why the IPN made a fuss a few years back about a supposed bar of such soap it had uncovered. This under the ultra-nationalist Kaczynski brothers.

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?

No, it's not OK, but there is little that can be done about it from the internet, except to reiterate over and over again that 'Jewish soap' is a myth.

I doubt you can quantify exactly what percentage of Holocaust survivors speaking to schoolkids repeat such a story. Judging by unpublished and published testimonies/memoirs of camp survivors, the percentage must be fairly small. There are very few repetitions of 'soap' in memoirs or unpublished testimonies.

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.

If you wish to be taken seriously, don't use such garbage language as 'holocausted'.

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.

But this is incorrect. Films and photographs of KZs upon liberation in 1945 most certainly are evidence of the Holocaust, which encompassed the internment of Jews en masse in concentration camps for forced labour and their demise by starvation and disease, as well as encompassing extermination by mass shootings and by gassing. More than half a million Jews died in camps and ghettos from starvation and disease, their internment in these camps and ghettos, and the restrictions on their feeding, was entirely the product of Nazi policy, inspired by Nazi antisemitism, and the direct fault of the Nazi regime, amounting to 2nd degree murder.

If you mean to say, film and photographs of the conditions in the campos in the west aren't evidence for gassing or the shootings in the USSR, then you might have a point. But even there, the evidence uncovered at Belsen bears indirectly on extermination policy as a whole.

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.

You are offering up a classic denier strawman of 100% extermination coupled with a gross ignorance of chronology and context.

It is perfectly well established that Nazi policy was to select the able bodied for a slower demise through forced labour and to exterminate the unfit wherever possible. This was understood already in 1942 in contemporary assessments and has been confirmed over and over and over again in all subsequent findings. There are as is inevitable exceptions to this rule, which do not refute the general trend towards preserving a minority as labourers (rarely, for other reasons such as medical experiments or as 'exchange' hostages) and killing the rest, while on the other hand many perfectly able bodied Jews were killed because they were deemed a security threat or out of sadism. The medium or long term goal of the Final Solution was to eliminate the Jewish race biologically, as the Wannsee protocol clearly spells out, and as subsequent discussions around sterilisation of Mischlinge and other privileged groups substantiates. Therefore, any survivors left after a Nazi victory would have been eliminated when they were surplus to requirements.

However, by 1945 there was no prospect of Nazi victory, and thus the SS, especially Himmler, began to pursue a contradictory stratagy of 'saving' some Jews while killing or causing to die a large number of other Jews. Himmler in particular thought that he could offer up some Jews and KZ prisoners as proof of his good faith while trying to negotiate a separate peace with the western Allies. By then, after all, the camps in central Poland had been liberated and the cat was out of the bag.

The survivors liberated in 1945 in KZs across the Reich were the remnant of a much larger number who had often been through several selection hoops. Due to the exigiencies of the war economy and the loss of their forced labourer reservoirs in Ukraine plus increased resistance in countries like France, the Nazis were forced to backtrack on their plan to make the core Reich judenfrei, and began to transfer a proportion of especially the Hungarian Jews to KZs in Germany, as part of a general expansion of the slave labour system, related often to the construction of underground factories. About 25% of the Hungarian Jews deported to Auschwitz in 1944 were selected for labour, the rest killed.

That these valuable labourers were so manifestly ill-treated in cases such as Belsen - simply dumped there when they were too exhausted to continue working in factories, in many cases - is still indirect evidence of Nazi policy towards Jews as a whole.

Belsen does make Auschwitz more plausible, simply by virtue of showing what the Nazis were capable of misorganising. The mass extinction of more than 2.5 million Soviet POWs through starvation likewise makes Auschwitz more plausible, since it shows that the Nazis were capable of presiding over a megacide. The euthanasia program using gas chambers in T4 centres also makes gassing more plausible, because it shows that the Nazis were willing to exterminate 'life unworthy of life' using gas. Since it is known and undeniable that the Nazis regarded the Jews as sub-human or non-humans, then it does not come as much of a surprise that they might decide to exterminate Jews, too. The mass shootings in the USSR, of course, also make gassing more plausible, because they show that the Nazis were willing to carry out genocide, full stop.

Gassing in the course of the Final Solution occurred at really only 8 sites (add Semlin in Serbia and Maly Trostinets to the usual list of death camps, each killing 1000s of Jews in gas vans) if one excludes the peripatetic use of gas vans. One does not expect as much evidence to survive from 8 sites as from 80, yet an awful lot does.

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.

Please don't put words in my mouth. Photographs of emaciated bodies in mass graves are evidence of the Holocaust and evidence of Nazi policy as a whole. They are not direct evidence of extermination in gas chambers at Auschwitz from 1942-44. They are however indirect evidence.

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.

Whatever. Others disagree.

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

Could have fooled me. Deniers insinuate that all the time. I haven't encountered any denier who can enumerate the actual atrocities committed by the Nazis without equivocation, usually they throw in a crass tu quoque or five and obfuscate it all into 'bad stuff happens in wars'.

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.

Actually it's generally deniers who bring up Dachau before non-deniers. It is a classic entry on the Denier Bull**** Bingo card.

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

The relevance of my little excursion into GAS law is to explain why IMT did not prescribe rules of evidence. Only US law had fixed rules of evidence in the 1940s, British common law had a certain number of principles (such as the hearsay rule) but no firm rules of evidence to compare with American law. Continental law - French, Russian or German - simply had no rules of evidence, and in the case of GAS law, still doesn't.

A German, Austrian or Swiss court is expected to evaluate all of the evidence and is free to decide how it weighs individual pieces. In Germany, a judgement must be written out in full explaining the Beweise for the verdict, which is not the case in the common law jury system for criminal cases. Civil proceedings usually produce written verdicts in the common law system, and thereby become part of case law along with appeal court judgements. German law can draw on the record of the verdicts of lower courts as well as the judgements of appeal courts all the way to their supreme court.

In both common law and continental law, witnesses are the primary unit of evidence. Common law, in fact, considers witness testimony to be direct evidence whereas forensics are circumstantial evidence. This is something not widely understood by the CSI-indoctrinated media and popular imagination today (even though the CSI investigators seem to spend half their time interrogating and questioning witnesses...)

You may certainly try and handwave away German or Austrian trials as a farce, but only by labelling their entire legal systems as farces. This strikes me as Anglocentric arrogance. The common-law system is pretty good but has its flaws just like the continental inquisitorial model. Both have plenty of working experience under their collective belts and produce generally similar results. One might actually say that the US system produces more false acquittals than others, because its rules of evidence are so ludicrously defendant-friendly. At least, that's what some legal scholars have argued.

You just said that the crimes were not proven at the Nuremberg Trials.

Because crimes are established before trials during the course of police/legal investigations. A murder trial might acquit a particular defendant but the victim remains murdered, unless it is proven that the death was suicide or misadventure, whereas previously it had been thought to be a case of murder.

When the Allies and Soviets liberated formerly Nazi controlled territory, they established war crimes commissions which sought to ascertain the facts of what had transpired in different territories and camps. They were imperfect bodies, yet they were the organisations that gathered evidence relating to specific camps or scenes of crimes, documenting them as far as was possible given the available resources.

Soviet authorities produced 55,000 investigative reports (akty) regarding specific crimes committed on their own territory, generally boiling down to county or even village level, or multiple reports per city - one for the POW camp, one for the ghetto, etc. At Nuremberg (MT), they presented 20 executive summaries relating to entire provinces and to a couple of major camps.

The choice to hold war crimes trials reflected European values of the era. We have seen since the 1940s that many countries recovering from eras of repression where mass atrocities occurred will opt for Truth & Reconciliation Commissions, while in the past 2 decade, historians' commissions have been created in many countries to 'determine the facts' of a particular wrongdoing, eg the joint German-Czech historians' commission on the expulsion of ethnic and Sudeten Germans from Czechoslovakia, or the Polish-Russian joint historical commissions on Katyn and on the deportations from eastern Poland in 1939-41.

Point being, you do not need trials to prove something happened. Most events in human history are not subjected to trials, and most mass atrocities have never been prosecuted. Most haven't even been the subject of semi-systematic investigative commissions.

Therefore, conflating legal proof of guilt or innocence with historical or factual proof, is a serious mistake.

So removing the Nuremberg Trials from the body of evidence of the holocaust doesn't weaken the holocaust in anyway.

Very little was stated in the proceedings that was not already stated in pretrial interrogations or already uncovered by document research teams identifying possible exhibits. The Allies need not have conducted the IMT, and could have presented all the evidence in a different format.

The Polish commission into Auschwitz published a summary of its results in 1946, for example, and published an expanded version later on, which segued fairly naturally into the historical research conducted by the Auschwitz museum from the 1950s onwards. The Poles also conducted trials of Auschwitz SS men, and those transcripts are just one source, not even the most useful one, the more useful sources are the results of the pre-trial investigations.

Why would it be well-poisoning? Maybe I'm poisoning somebody elses well but not yours.

Your dismissal of Nuremberg is well poisoning because you seem to think that all of the evidence comes from trials, or even only certain trials, rather than from investigations.

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

Once again, stop putting words into my mouth. I do not agree that the Nuremberg trials (IMT plus 12 NMT trials) are 'worthless as evidence'. They are simply the tip of the iceberg of evidence that was available by 1946-49 when they took place.

They presented some of the evidence that was available then. This is perfectly easy to establish. The US government published a series entitled Nazi Conspiracy and Aggression consisting of documents which were coded for potential use at IMT, but not all of the documents in NCA were entered into evidence at IMT. This was because the judges took a 'yes, yes, please get on with it' attitude to the presentation of evidence and thus the prosecutors curtailed their presentations, while some documents were not immediately relevant to specific defendants. There were also unpublished documents in the PS- and other series of IMT documents, which were then made available to historians by being copied to multiple archives, who used them together with the NMT series (NO, NG, NOKW) as a shortcut to writing the first histories of the Nazi regime.

This was no different to other historians using published diplomatic papers as the basis for their work; indeed, the Blue, Red and Green series of Nuremberg volumes are not essentially that different to things like Foreign Relations of the United States. Fairly rapidly, historians used other sources - raw archival files - as is typical for most historians, and located precisely where a particular trial coded document was to be found in its original pagination. They also found many more documents that were never used in trials.

Other countries also published documents captured from the Germans in their respective territories, some had been part of the Nuremberg series and many not. France, for example, made available quite a large number of documents in the 1940s through journals and edited collections, while institutes in Poland published many multi-volume collections, eg the Instytut Zachodni's Documenta Occupationis series, and the Jewish Historical Institute of Warsaw's Dokumenty i Materialy series. Some of these sources were then reused in later war crimes trials, but they were first published outside such proceedings.

The same might also be said for investigations. The Polish Main Commission published summary versions of its investigations into the major camps in 1946 and 1947, by 1947 it published expanded versions of its investigations into Treblinka, Belzec, Sobibor, Chelmno and Auschwitz, presenting and describing a variety of evidence types from reproducing entire witness statements to publishing specific documents to recapitulating the results of site inspections or forensic examinations. The Dutch Red Cross investigations were all summarised and published from around 1947, including excerpts from specific testimonies and the findings of documentary research.

When it comes to a camp like Auschwitz, then its international character meant that something like a dozen nation-states were conducting their own investigations, either under the auspices of war crimes, missing persons or displaced persons enquiries. Belgium's summary report on its deportees (all of Belgium's Jews went to Auschwitz) was published by the postwar Ministry of Refugee Affairs.

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!

People can still point to the Nuremberg trials as proof of the Holocaust, since the evidence contained in the 42 volumes of the IMT Blue series, as well as the Red and Green series, is sufficient to establish the basic facts. The mistake you are making is believing the drivel on denier websites and in denier books that only the IMT matters, and ignoring the full extent of the evidence that was being gathered at the same time as IMT was taking place, or beforehand.

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

I've mentioned some examples above. Not all of the material was published right away; the Soviet Extraordinary Commission's 55,000 reports dribbled out in a few 1945 publications offering a small selection, and in many subsequent documentary collections published through to the 1980s on the occupation of specific provinces or republics. They were copied en masse to West Germany and Israel (Yad Vashem) in the 1970s, and to the USHMM in the 1990s, so that today, they form an invaluable source base to go alongside other source bases such as the captured German records in the archives, and the records of West German war crimes investigations.

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.

I wasn't repeating myself in the previous post to which you were responding. I am in danger of doing so now, so will repeat what I did write so you don't strawman me any further.

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

Clear?

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.

It's completely 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.

No, this is a misrepresentation of my point. If there had been no criminal trials, then the evidence would have come out in some other form. That there were criminal trials meant that some of the evidence came out via trials.

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?

But there is no reason to take away all the evidence that was used in trials, except to satisfy the obvious desire of a Holocaust denier to throw out as much evidence as possible. Other methods of investigation could have been used, and have been used in comparable examples of crimes against humanity.

The advantage of trials is that the adversarial model can home in on specific truths with a certain degree of efficiency. A trial can 'get at the truth' by cross-examination. Indeed, some of the most revealing and interesting remarks by Auschwitz eyewitnesses I have read came when a defense lawyer asked a follow-up question which had not been asked before, triggering a more precise description. It is also the case that the war crimes trials, in particular the Nuremberg trials (IMT plus NMT), established who had not been involved as much as who was involved. It is now a truism that the Third Reich was a chaotic, polycratic system with innumerable rivalries between power blocs. This can be proven handsomely from the paper trail left behind by the Nazi bureaucracy; it was first argued by defendants at Nuremberg, who thereby conveyed something of the reality of the Third Reich. The trials, after all, touched on far more than just the Holocaust.

By now, in 2010, then it is fairly certain that significantly more documents have been uncovered by the guild of historians that were used at war crimes trials. I see no reason to throw out the documents that were used at war crimes trials, however, we have the files from which they came and can easily reconstruct the documentary context for Nazi Jewish policy and mass murder. Only a handful of documents regarding Auschwitz made it into the records of the Nuremberg trials, largely during the NMT trial of the WVHA leadership, but now we can survey the entire archive of the Central Construction Office and reconstruct the evolution of the crematoria and gas chambers in minute detail, which was done over 20 years ago, much to the chagrin of deniers, who have been attacking Pressac like lemmings ever since.

As I already pointed out above, there were substantial testimony-gathering efforts already in the 1940s, which remain rather underexploited sources by many western historians since they tend to be in funny East European languages. Aside from the 7000 statements gathered in Poland, a commission in Hungary took about 4000 statements and one in Romania another 1000 statements (from Jews who had come under wartime Hungary in Transylvania), while virtually every Dutch survivor was interviewed or gave a lengthy account (some are the size of books), which would be circa another 1000 statements. Just from the 1940s, outside of trials.

Unless you are going to apply a totally irrational yardstick by which all testimonies are to be discounted entirely as sources of knowledge or the racist standard of dismissing all Jewish testimonies out of hand, then these are perfectly good source bases, to be treated with the same caution as any other source base.

Your invocation of Zisblatt is yet more cliched denier well-poisoning. A number of 'late' memoirs written by survivors who were very young at the time are manifestly gibberish, or in rare cases outright frauds - the same can be said for Vietnam veterans, though, there are many more frauds among them jumping on a well defined gravy train. However, I don't think you can identify more than a dozen where we might agree that so-and-so is an entirely useless or fraudulent source.

There are probably something like 1,000 published memoirs of Auschwitz survivors, and one would expect a small proportion to be entirely deranged, just as a matter of course. Let me know when you have established the exact total of memoirs and can find any revisionist who has critiqued a sufficient number to prove that all are on a par with Zisblatt. Until then, STFU.

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 already gave their names up-thread, Aumeier and Dragon. Your handwave fails to explain why both would name the gas chambers in peasant houses established in 1942 at Birkenau, the Bunkers.

I'm not aware that anyone has claimed that the whole of Italy is a gas chamber, by the way.

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?

Actually, the descriptions range from very confused about dimensions to very precise, and many statements from Sonderkommandos were given before any blueprints were discovered or before any blueprints were published. No blueprints were transmitted from east to west in 1945. Yet witnesses - SS and prisoner, Sonderkommando and demolition squad - were able to offer details of the gas chambers and crematoria that can be corroborated by the documents in the exclusive possession of the Soviet and Polish commissions.

The major discrepancies in testimonies regarding dimensions match entirely typical discrepancies in witness testimonies regarding dimensions. Aside from a select bunch of lunatics who believe that there were no crematoria at all at Auschwitz (so called Krema Deniers, the equivalent of no-planers among 9/11 Truthers), all revisionists accept that there were crematoria and that the blueprints are accurate as to the dimensions, which can be compared with the ruins today.

Revisionists like to make a huge fuss about the swimming pool in Auschwitz main camp, which was constructed as a fire-fighting reservoir in the summer of 1944 and rigged out so it could function as a swimming pool for prisoner functionaries - Kapos and Block seniors - as well as other privileged prisoners, as far as we know almost entirely non-Jewish - who were interned in the main camp, and not Birkenau, where the crematoria were located and where the majority of Jewish inmates interned as slave labourers were held. What fun - a swimming pool! The fact that all the evidence indicates it was only completed in about August 1944 and cannot have served as a swimming pool for much more than a month and a bit (it wasn't heated, and was outdoors) is ignored. What is not appreciated is that witnesses describing the digging of the pit for the swimming pool give entirely the wrong dimensions. The swimming pool exists today and can be inspected and measured.

Common-sense conclusion: someone mentioning inaccurate dimensions is entirely normal, as is spelled out in German judicial handbooks and is also the subject of a certain amount of psychological research.

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?

By putting inverted commas around "commits suicide" are you seriously alleging that Gerstein was bumped off by the French or the Americans? For god's sake why? You know full well that the Gerstein report was submitted repeatedly in war crimes trials and has been published in numerous books and document collections. He would have been a very important eyewitness at the trials.

A conspiracy would have memory-holed as many of his statements as they could find and coached him on a neater testimony. His interrogations by French police show that they queried him on some of the specific bones of contention such as the number of people who could be fitted into a single gas chamber.

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?

Indeed, no conspiracy. That's a big problem because without at least some conspiracy, the matching details given by independent witnesses must refer to the same core reality.

And, again, I'm sure you can provide all these corroborating testimonies?

Look them up on deathcamps.org or in Arad or Schelvis.

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.

Hoefle telegram, for starters. There are many others. Again, see deathcamps.org, Arad, Schelvis or the Bogdan Musial collection on Aktion Reinhard.

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?

Because Gerstein and Hoess are not bogus evidence. They have their flaws, but that is typical of nearly all witness testimony. Kremer is hardly bogus evidence - the only thing that is bogus are denier attempts to rewrite his diary.

In any case, as far as I can make out you were the one who brought up the Gerstein statement in this thread. It is denier repetition that so-and-so is bogus that keeps the discussion so limited. Anyone with a modicum of patience and ability can go through Arad and Schelvis to work out that the number of witness statements relating to Belzec, Sobibor and Treblinka is greater than one.

Anyone who reads a decent book on Auschwitz can see that there are many more SS witnesses than just Hoess. They are still discussed in recent literature because they were given prominence by the presentation of their testimonies in various war crimes trials, eg at the Eichmann trial or in the 1960s.

But anyone with a modicum of honesty and observational skill will notice that at the Eichmann trial, the prosecution also presented lengthy statements by Dieter Wisliceny on the evolution of the Final Solution, and heard the evidence of numerous other witnesses, while also discussing quite a substantial number of exhibits (more than 1400, which subtracting photos and affidavits amounts to probably ca 1000 distinct German documents).

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.

OH RLY? The Polish 1945 site survey of Treblinka reported finding 'two hectares of ash and bones' on the site, brought to the surface by grave-robbers who went digging for 'Jewish gold', something that occurred at every death camp site including Auschwitz, and which thus left quite a paper trail in the files of local government and law enforcement in postwar Poland. The 'Treblinka gold rush' is one of those embarrassing episodes in Polish history to which they have only recently owned up in full.

At Treblinka, the grave robbers had used bombs and explosives to excavate the graves, rendering it all but impossible to establish the precise contours of the graves. The commission nonetheless dug anyway, and could ascertain an approximate depth, but not other dimensions. The two hectares of ash and remains which were on the surface, however, gave a pretty powerful indication of the extent of the graves.

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.

Your rendition of Kola's Belzec investigation is inaccurate. Graves were established in sufficient number and dimension to have accomodated the bodies that would have been interred there. Ditto at Sobibor and Chelmno.

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?

Visitors to these camps have been reporting coming across bone fragments since the 1940s. Most of the sites were left without much of a memorial or museum for quite some time. Treblinka was probably the first to be cleaned up, relatively speaking, in the early 1960s, yet visitors in the 1980s found not much of a museum or commmemoration on the site, other than the monuments, and still kicked over bones fairly easily. A friend of mine visited Sobibor not long ago, and was able to find bone fragments with no great difficulty.

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.

You find a lot of things hard to believe - selectively so, when it comes to the Holocaust. The fact is that whatever efforts were made to clean up the sites from their 1945 wreckage, and whatever efforts have been made to create clean memorials, some of the contents of the mass graves made their way to the surface, and have been found over the past few decades, even within the past few years.

I trust my friend (and his photos) more than I trust your incredulity.

Religious reasons - which can be demonstrated for many other cases, this is not something specific to the Holocaust for Judaism - determined that the 1990s and 2000s excavations used probing methods, in the view of all but deniers a perfectly adequate method of determining the approximate size of the graves without the horror of literally digging up all of the ashes. Even the probe method earned the wrath of orthodox rabbis.

These are, after all, sites that were identified as mass graves in the 1940s. It seems only natural to respect the dead by not digging them up continually just to satisfy some cranks.

Treblinka was partially covered with memorial stones in the early 1960s, when there was as good as no revisionist movement and none in Eastern Bloc Poland. It was identified as a gravesite in the 1940s and was then treated as such by the erection of memorials. That, I think you'll find, is generally what human cultures do with the dead, even the incinerated dead of Jews, who unless you are a Saggy or a 9/11-investigator, are considered human beings, too.

Since then, a small movement of pseudosceptics has decided to doubt that the site ever could have contained mass graves. These pseudosceptics never once doubt that there really might be that many bodies buried at Shiloh or Gettysburg and don't fake GPR surveys on those sites, as denier Richard Krege did with Treblinka. One might have thought that a certain amount of respect for the dead would dictate that these pseudosceptics refrain from demanding 'new investigations' when they have yet to establish any genuine reasons to doubt the older ones. But no, chimps insist on yapping about the graves until everyone is bored silly, in order to cover up their total failure to produce a shred of evidence that the deportees to Treblinka went anywhere else.

The condition of the sites is such that no method can determine an absolutely precise number of dead there. The most that can be established is that the graves are of a size that they could accomodate the number of bodies that is indicated from other sources, i.e. documents of the deportations. If there were hard evidence showing that 200,000 of the 713,555 deportees to Treblinka in 1942 had in fact landed up in Minsk, then the death toll for Treblinka would be reduced to 513,555 for 1942. No other method is going to fly or be generally accepted, so fussing over the graves is entirely a waste of time, and serves only to satisfy the fantasies of metaphorical grave desecrators, many of whom seem to get a psychological kick out of demanding that 'Jews' be dug up and paraded to satisfy their crank curiosity.

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?

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

The convergence between witness estimates indicates that figures like 4 million were circulating among the prisoners before the liberation of the camp. No prisoner could hope to know the true number. Many of the same statements give a more specific figure for the number of Hungarian Jews who had been deported to Auschwitz in 1944, some of these are exaggerated by a factor of 2-3 and some are very accurate. Again, no prisoner could know the true number except that it was 'a lot'.

Didn't you say that either it's a conspiracy or the evidence matches? Since the evidence doesn't match.....

Exaggerated numbers are not unknown in other 1940s cases. Polish reports placed the number deported by the Soviets from eastern Poland in 1940-41 at about 3 to 4 times the actual number that can be documented now the Soviet archives are opened. When you have precise transport lists with dates and numbers then there is little reason to doubt the lower, documented numbers in this case, yet one still finds authors and historians repeating the higher number today, 18 years after the correct information was published. Why? Because the correct information was published in Polish and Russian.

Kolyma was overestimated by Robert Conquest by a factor of four, too. One might also add Dresden as another example where inflated estimates circulated for many years when other evidence contradicted the exaggeration. Nobody other than those satirising the feeble mental processes of chimp revisionists pretends Dresden wasn't bombed.

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

In my view, law is probably the discipline closest to history in its approach. Law and history are also the two academic disciplines that most routinely deal with witness testimonies or what German scholars call 'ego documents'. The only other profession that deals so routinely with them is journalism. Sociology and anthropology might approach individual opinions through survey methods but rarely do they have to engage quite so routinely with critically examining groups of individual testimonies. In the cases where they do, then the methods used by sociologists and anthropologists find ready acceptance among historians. Geertz's 'thick description', pioneered in anthropology, is all the rage among a number of cultural historians. Oral history was pioneered by social historians entirely independently of the study of the Holocaust, but has seen some use in that field as well.

If one turns to philosophy, then one finds major overlaps in both the philosophy of history and the analysis of evidence, with routine comparisons between law and history as well as psychology. There is an entire sub-field of the epistemology of testimony which makes this comparison even more explicit.

Moreover, historians are forced by the nature of the evidence at their disposal to deal with things like hearsay evidence and other accounts with serious distortions. For much of human history - especially in the ancient and medieval periods - hearsay is almost all we have. For even more of human history, we lack anything other than eyewitness accounts, not the clinical reportage of state bureaucracies.

Documents, after all, are easily destroyed, forcing historians to turn to other sources to fill in the blanks.

That is why West German historians "documented" the expulsions of ethnic Germans from Eastern Europe in 12 volumes of testimonies. They did not, after all, have access to East Bloc governmental reports. Viewed today, even though the volumes were supposed to present the most reliable accounts, there are some major cultural biases and fantasies that have crept in to this collection, and if one examines the efforts of the West German government to establish the number who died in the course of the expulsions, then one finds a huge discrepancy between the 'common knowledge' figure of 2 million, and later investigations which calculated about 600,000 deaths. Virtually none of those deaths - whether 600,000 or 2 million - can either be documented or established on the basis of forensic evidence. Almost all of the data was derived from testimony and missing-persons reports.

You beat me to it.

I somehow doubt that you will be able to sustain a denial of gas chambers without eventually resorting to a conspiracy allegation.

If it's not already clear, your alternate method of trying to throw evidence out of the window and dismiss it without further consideration is not going to work. All those witness statements you are trying to dismiss, and all of those documents you are trying to ignore, exist whether you like it or not. Any serious discussion of this evidence must consider why they say what they say. Why do so many SS men and camp survivors report gas chambers at Auschwitz?

Simply crying 'dismissed' and 'objection' like a bad lawyer (that's the real reason why you've earned so many remarks about the law, as it happens) isn't going to make for a very interesting discussion.

 

[kerikiwi]

I wonder if Saggy has yet decided whether the fact that the holocaust didn't actually happen is a good thing or a bad thing...

 

[Gawdzilla Sama]

I wonder if Saggy has yet decided whether the fact that the holocaust didn't actually happen is a good thing or a bad thing...

Answer would require honesty or prevarication. Which way you betting?

 

[Nick Terry]

What absolute crap.

blah blah blah

Can it get any more absurd.

When you have come back with your book reports on Doerner and Longerich, we can resume this discussion.