If the graves were too small to hold the bodies of all the people that were buried there, it means that 1) not as many people were murdered there or 2) if they were murdered there, they weren't buried there. It doesn't mean that the holocaust didn't happen. It means that our understanding of what happened is incorrect. It's about getting the facts straight. Frankly I don't understand the 'so what if we're wrong' attitude. I don't know how anybody could question the desirability of knowing the truth.
One more for the road...
Problem is, you aren't coordinating all the facts, and you're not arguing with facts. You're arguing using your own
interpretation of some facts and then wishing away all the other facts.
You're probably the most knowledgeable believer here. The fact that you don't really care about an accurate understanding of the event reveals an overall lack of concern about accuracy in the holocaust historiography.
I think the above is one of the most silly pieces of nonsense I have read from you yet.
Wanting to know the truth isn't purely negative. It's not something motivated by spite and malice. An accurate understanding of what happened is a way to honor the victims. Not caring about what happened is an act of desecration.
If you're such a truthseeker, then why are you still fixated on mass graves at just a couple of sites?
For starters, any argument about the graves has to examine them as a set in order to be coherent, because all of the other evidence points to them being a set and because it's simply plate-spinning to go from one site to the next and back again without evaluating them as a group.
Any argument claiming that the graves couldn't have held enough bodies is totally incomplete and incoherent. The immediate, logical question is then where are they? Are they alive or dead? If you have no answer to this question, then you should return to your original interpretation and ask yourself whether you might be wrong.
Quite a few posters have made this same point in a variety of different ways, but you refuse to address it.
What have you done to try and find the three million people who evidently didn't die at Auschwitz or the 1.9 million that people now say didn't die at Majdanek?
I don't need to do anything. Those figures were produced at a time before there was a systematic demography of civilian casualties and of population movements in WWII. The matter is self-evidently cleared up by a process of elimination in matching deportation statistics for Jews and non-Jews from all countries which experienced deportations.
Your question, in effect, boils down to 'have you read Reitlinger and Hilberg?' because they cleared it up a very long time ago - fifty plus years ago. Or 'have you read Frumkin?' because there are plenty of studies of the demographic losses from WWII as a whole, starting in the 1940s. The answer is, yes I have read Frumkin, and many other such studies.
There's no reason to explain what happened to anybody if they're not missing.
But they are missing, and you have not provided any evidence to the contrary. That's why it's nihilistic to focus only on mass graves, and in the current rhetorical slippage, only at Treblinka.
We cannot dismiss somebody's quest for the truth no matter what the motivation. If the truth is that there are no bodies buried at these camps, there's no doubt somebody might try to exploit that truth for anti-Semitic purposes. But that doesn't mean that truth itself is anti-Semitic and it's sure as Hell no reason to not want the truth to be revealed.
The above is typical of you. I wrote a two clause sentence:
That immediately casts severe doubt on the plausibility of the claims made by deniers regarding the mass grave sites (or cremation facilities), even if we ignore for the moment the obvious motivations of someone like Saggy to make such claims.
the second clause of which said,
leaving aside the obvious motivation of Saggy.
I stated that the evident indifference and lack of follow-through in this discussion, the refusal to try and explain what happened or to come up with a testable hypothesis, makes denial nihilistic.
That to my mind casts doubt on whether denier interpretations of mass grave evidence are plausible.
This isn't an ad hominem argument ('U R antisemits nur nur'), it's an observation on the apparent chain of deductions you are making, since the deductions don't go anywhere. All you say is 'no mass graves nur nur', and
stop.
You then blithely assert there are no missing when generations of missing persons bureau research as well as historical research says otherwise.
I mean the forensic studies that have been conducted on the death camps by the Poles, the Soviets, the Germans, or anybody who has conducted any such forensic test. The Polish investigation of Treblinka in 1945 or the Kola study of Belzec in the late 1990s are just two examples. If there's a forensic study that I'm told will prove to me just how wrong I am, I want to see that study. The whole thing, not just excerpts or somebody's summary. They need to be available to somebody in the United States and they need to be in English. I could do French or German if I really needed to but my reading comprehension is so limited that it wouldn't work. Ideally, I'd like to be able to download them in PDF format at no cost but I'm willing to pay.
And don't tell me that I can't learn any of this stuff without being able to read twenty languages or travel to various archives. There are alot of people in the United States who speak only English who have bought into the standard narrative. There should be enough English language material to convince me.
Your claim was that no reports have been shown. As expected, this translated into 'shown to me personally by spoonfeeding'.
I think you'd find that the actual reports have been discussed in quite a few books on the subject, both from mainstream historians and by deniers. They are excerpted online all over the place. There have been links given previously. The summaries you can read also online from German Crimes in Poland are accurate summaries of the 'protokoly' from 1945.
I would ask you to parse the evidence previously posted in the following link
http://holocaustcontroversies.blogspot.com/2010/05/mass-graves-at-nazi-extermination-camps.html
By parse I mean identify what reports are referred to and how much of them is recapitulated - by an amateur blogger who is not a professional historian. This is the obvious starting point for your 'shopping list'.
I'm an American. We don't do foreign languages.
But here you are discussing events which are essentially part of Polish and Soviet history.
By the way, please don't engage in special pleading about the significance of the Holocaust in western culture. There has been a lengthy discussion of Stalin's crimes since the 1930s and 1940s which thus also revolved around issues of megadeaths and mass murder in faraway places.
I imagine in Poland or Russia.
Which would be appropriate given the location of the sites, no?
Then the issue is for you to trace the discussion of these reports from 1945 onwards, bearing in mind the Cold War, subsequent war crimes trials and in what countries they were held, the language barriers that might follow from this, and finally whether it's normal to see much discussion from historians/social scientists/journalists of mass graves for comparable events, like the many other genocides and crimes against humanity in the 20th Century.
A conspiracy to prevent disclosure of information that would convince all holocaust deniers of the error of their ways would be about the stupidest cover-up in the world.
Holocaust denial isn't a very big phenomenon, and it is fairly easy to establish by reading what deniers have written that they will blindly deny evidence when it is put in front of them.
As far as I can make out, deniers didn't give a flying monkeys' about mass graves until the late 1980s, which is several decades into the existence of the movement. That was after they were failing badly to explain away all the documents and witnesses. So the last refuge was the physical evidence.
For much of the past 25 years, deniers obsessed over Auschwitz. Having failed to make a case on Auschwitz, they moved on in the 2000s to Treblinka, Belzec and Sobibor.
That's even dumber than the CTers who think denial is a neo-Nazi conspiracy to whitewash National Socialism to make it a viable political option so they can take over and finish the job.
Yet neo-Nazis are on record as saying revisionism is precisely about making Nazism acceptable again. It's not the fault of observers who notice these things if the neo-Nazis in question (or the German ultranationalists, the antisemites, the Israel haters, the contrarians, the trolls or the simply cognitively challenged) think they can wave a wand and intone 'no mass graves, no mass graves' and the world will be set to rights somehow.
The stupidity is in the denial itself.
If these reports are available I haven't been able to find them so you could say that they are beyond my ken
Then you clearly didn't read the links provided earlier, one of which I have now reposted.
You still haven't answered the main question of my post. What would it prove if the mass graves were smaller? You replied with a lot of waffle about 'wanting to know the truth'. That isn't a statement which involves proof, it simply postpones the issue into an apparently ever-receding future.
I'd like to see a coherent chain of reasoning from you before we get down to the nitpicking details.
