My mistake. The word I was looking for was "crasher", not "cracker".
"After clearing of the pits the ashes were pulverized. This happened on a concrete slab where prisoners crushed the bone remnants with wooden crashers. These residues were brought with lorries to a secluded site and thrown into the Vistula (Weichsel) River."
I'm not sure what a "crasher" is, although mallet seems to be a reasonable assumption.
I don't know what a "crasher" is either. I have heard of hammers being used so it makes sense that a mallet is what they're talking about.
However, I disagree with your characterization. It wasn't necessary to completely erase all the evidence. At the time they were doing this, they thought they were going to win the war and they weren't worried about trials. All they had to do was conceal it sufficiently to prevent troubles that might cause unrest in the occupied territories' civilian populations, or in the ranks of their own military, some of whom had enough integrity to raise some objections to mass murder.
Maybe it wasn't necessary to erase all the evidence but that is what we're told they did. From your hdot source: Ya’akov Silberberg, a survivor of the incineration Sonderkommando, said: "We broke the bones and ground them up very, very fine and the Germans scattered the ashes in the Vistula River so that no traces would remain." The quotes from Srebnik and Hoess refer to the bone being crushed into a fine powder.
The mental state of the Germans, their desire to conceal their crimes from the locals or their own troops, and what they thought about their chances of winning the war, etc. don't matter. It is what is suppose to have happened that matters.
So, how long would it take one Jew to process one set of cremains? I don't know, but I won't take your word for it, either. Somehow, they managed. The paper I posted the link for has a lot of descriptions of how the murders were carried out, and the total capacity of the killing machinery at Auschwitz.
You are also making a common CT believer mistake. There was no need to dredge the Vistula River after the war. They had abundant evidence of what happened.
But they didn't have abundant evidence of what happened. Or, if they did have
abundant evidence, they didn't have enough or the right type of evidence. The looked at pairs of shoes, or bags of hair, men's overcoats, or potential capacity of the crematorium. Nothing they looked at was a valid way of estimating death toll or method of execution.
However, CT theorists are very prone to saying that whatever stone was unturned would have disproven the official version of events, and the only possible reason that the final stone was unturned was that someone wanted to hide evidence of the truth. If only they had searched the Vistula, they could have shown that this story about lorries full of ash was codswallop.
It's not that the unturned stones might have disproven the official version of events because it is not possible to prove a negative. Deniers know it's not possible to prove a negative. We'll ask for further investigation because the evidence that is used to support the official version of events isn't conclusive. It very often isn't even valid.
I don't think the motive to avoid looking real evidence is the desire for "hiding evidence of the truth." More likely it's laziness and/or stupidity. Something along the lines of 'opening mass graves is kind of disgusting so let's just say bags of human hair are proof that people were murdered and since it's the Germans nobody is going to make a fuss over using invalid evidence.'
No, really, that's not it. The Vistula wasn't dredged in a search for human remains because there was no need. There was plenty of evidence without it. If you could find a scientist who would assert that remains could still be found today, you could probably find support for a dredging/exhumation operation, if the cost was not too terribly high.
Remains wouldn't be found because the bones were ground up to a consistency of flour and dumped into the river. There might have been evidence that could be detected with DNA analysis in 1945 but extremely unlikely today. I would say impossible to find today but I don't know that for sure.
I don't know why anybody would want to dredge the river today even if scientists thought it would be possible to find human remains. Supposedly you can go to Treblinka and Sobibor today and find human bone shards laying all over and just below the surface. On Youtube and other websites you'll find photos and video of tourists at these death camps showing the camera these little pieces of Jew's dead bodies. Nobody has ever asked that these camps be excavated. Nobody has asked that any attempt to identify individuals be made (which is possible using DNA technology)
Former Sondercommando have testified that when they were cleaning out the mass graves at Treblinka they left entire skeletons intact in the mass graves along with bottles stuffed with notes describing the killing operation.
Why would anybody care about what happened to a parent or grandparent's remains at Auschwitz if nobody cares about it at Sobibor or Belzec?
ETA:These people seem to think it's possible.
http://www.hdot.org/en/learning/myth-fact/incineration10
As do these.
http://www.nizkor.org/features/qar/qar47.html
I found these following some links after googling "ashes in the vistula river".
I'm not surprised that HDOT and nizkor thinks it's possible. They're anti-deniers sites so that's what they do. I've read much of the material there and I (obviously) don't buy into it.
Just to pick on Lipstadt's site, the evidence there isn't any more in depth than that which you'd find elsewhere. Vague descriptions of burning bodies and dumping ashes supported by multiple eyewitness statements is OK for an overview. But the devil is in the details and there aren't any details. She also plays around with certain information when it doesn't fit the traditional narrative.
She says for example that the extermination area of Treblinka 85,000 square meters and could easily hold nine mass graves. The official story has been that the extermination area of the camp was roughly 200 x 250 meters and none of the maps she links to show more than five mass graves.
She says: "Once reduced to near dust the ashes could be reburied in the empty graves or placed in sacks for disposal outside the camp. Even so, it appears that the Germans were not able or stopped short of reducing all of the human remains to ash." Nobody has ever said anything about ashes being placed in sacks for disposal outside of the camp. The dead were all buried within the extermination area according to the story. She can't simply change the story when a part of it doesn't work.
Or "carefully studied Franz’s photographs and found two that show five
probable ash heaps surrounded by members of the Sonderkommandos who are
apparently crushing and sieving the ashes. Another photograph shows a horse and cart in the area of the
probably ash piles, indicating that the crushing and sieving sites were some distance from the incineration sites. These photographs also show the general size of the death camp area, which was more extensive than the Holocaust deniers maintain."
Probable? Apparently? Is this what passes for scholarship in the holocaust world? If you're going to convict and execute people for mass murder, you should have solid evidence.
Probably having evidence doesn't cut it.
And holocaust deniers don't underestimate the general size of the death camps. We use your numbers.
She says: "Finally, the map from Arad’s book that the videomaker used is un-scaled and cannot be used to precisely portray the size and area of the camps’ areas or the buildings located in them. The videomaker’s observations about space and scale-or the lack thereof-are therefore invalid when based on this map alone."
She completely mischaracterizes what the videomaker does with the map from Arad's book. The map isn't drawn to scale and that fact is noted in the video. The videomaker uses the dimensions of the camp and the size of the mass graves from the testimony of the eyewitnesses. It would be invalid to make observations about the camp based on map. But he doesn't use the un-scaled drawings on the map to estimate size. Lipstadt must be very stupid or (more likely) being intentionally obtuse knowing that nobody is going to call her on it.
BTW, the video she's talking about is One Third of the Holocaust. It can be seen at onethirdoftheholocaust.com.
There are a lot of people who seem to think it happened just as was reported.
A lot? In North America and Europe, it's more like nearly everybody.
