Nick Terry
Illuminator
This would be true if there were zero evidence of mass graves, but this is not so, therefore no fatal flaw.
But in turn you create your own false dilemma by asserting that "if they were not buried there, they must have gone somewhere else".
The absence of bodies doesn't indicate they went elsewhere, because of the known cremations. Et cetera.
I know you like to pretend it's just a 'story', but it'd help if you paid attention to what is actually claimed.
The evidence for the deportations to Treblinka and Belzec and Sobibor is that the deportees, numbering 1.25 million in 1942 (Hoefle minus the figure for Majdanek) and a smaller number in 1943 which can often only be estimated due to lack of documentary evidence, were packed onto trains after a very large number had been shot on the spot by various SS and police units. The deportation organisers chalked the numbers of deportees onto the railway carriages. There is no evidence of any kind of headcount, roll-call or other attempt to generate numbers at the points of arrival, in the camps themselves.
However it is spun, the Hoefle figure therefore includes all successful and unsuccessful escapes from the deportation trains, and it also includes all those who died of heatstroke, exhaustion or suffocation before we even get to the camps.
You can easily find references to these issues in Arad and other sources, including Hilberg, who quotes a contemporary German report complaining that there are bodies littering the tracks in the wake of the deportation trains. There is also another contemporary German report, already mentioned, relating to a deportation from Kolomea to Belzec which indicates that many deportees tried to break out of the trains and were shot doing so. Some of the bodies remained on the trains, some fell onto the tracks. One police company stationed en route to Belzec reported shooting 94 train-jumpers over a period of some months, who thus fell onto the tracks.
There are also testimonies from successful train jumpers who survived the documented policy of hunting down and exterminating any fugitive Jews, there were certainly also successful train jumpers who were caught and killed.
So already the 'story' is more complex, and this starts to affect the figures. By the summer of 1942 when the overwhelming majority of the 1.25 million were deported, Polish Jews were fairly aware of the fate intended for them and many reacted as one would expect, by trying to escape.
When we reach the camps, we know that at Treblinka and Sobibor, some few Jews were selected to work in nearby labour camps, in the case of Treblinka at Treblinka I. Again, a minority and a tiny one for Treblinka, but this also starts to displace the numbers into other locations. Some died in Treblinka I and were buried there, some escaped. A contingent of Jewish slave labourers at Treblinka I was dispatched from that camp to Treblinka II and gassed in the spring of 1943, i.e. after the mass cremations began.
Moreover: another minority was selected for labour and used as Sonderkommandos in the death camps themselves. In Treblinka this was a sizeable number in the early phase who were used up for a few days then shot. Only after the Stangl reorganisation did more stable Sonderkommandos emerge, but even those experienced substantial personnel turnover. The Belzec Sonderkommando was after completing the task of exhuming and cremating the mass graves there, sent to Sobibor and killed there at a time when Sobibor was already cremating without burying the bodies. In both Treblinka and Sobibor, there were also successful breakouts which resulted in many deportees being captured and killed outside the camp, and only a few survivors. In the early phase of Treblinka, escapes were actually quite numerous and we have contemporary written testimonies from escapees, plus a few who survived the war. There were surely others who escaped, and then were caught and killed elsewhere.
These factors may have reduced the number who were either DOA or gassed by several percentage points, i.e. we are speaking in total of perhaps 10-20,000 deportees, or 1-2%. But this would apply unevenly, with Belzec more affected by trainjumpers, based on available sources, and Treblinka by the high turnover of Sonderkommandos. The practice of selection at Sobibor - well described in Schelvis - also affected a large number and further skews the stats.
Where your 'story' is actually a major misrepresentation is in ignoring the practice of shooting those too frail or sick to walk to the gas chambers at so-called 'hospitals'. According to the witnesses, these claimed the lives of a low but significant percentage of the victims. Moreover, the 'Lazarette' already operated as cremation pits from a very early stage, long before any of the mass graves were exhumed. Exhausted Sonderkommandos were also killed in the Treblinka Lazarett, which makes the high turnover of Sonderkommandos in the early phase statistically significant, and would thus reduce the number of victims who were buried in the mass graves still further.
There are also reports of unsuccessful experiments with cremating the bodies in the mass graves long before the onset of the main work of cremation. This wouldn't affect the ultimate task as much as the previously mentioned factors, but certainly points to the issue of time and chronology. By the time that the mass graves were opened and exhumed for cremation, many of the bodies had undergone significant decomposition. This also would have affected their capacity, especially at Belzec, which began operations earliest and thus would be most noticeably affected by this issue.
The closure of Belzec at the end of 1942 cannot be explained other than by pointing to the overflowing mass graves located on a very small site - much smaller than the other camps. If Belzec had been something else, i.e. a 'transit camp', then there would have been no reason to close it, especially since there were 161,000 Galician Jews that needed 'processing' left alive at the time of closure.
All the sites were inspected in 1944-45 and at the very least at Belzec, Treblinka and Chelmno (I have yet to actually see a 1945 report on Sobibor a la those for Treblinka and Belzec), some excavations primarily to determine grave depth were undertaken, as well as some tests of the remains found on site. At Treblinka the ultimate depth of the graves was found to be up to 7.5 metres deep. The surface area could not be determined because the site had been trashed by grave robbers using explosives. Instead, an area of 1.8 hectares, i.e. bigger than a professional soccer field, was found strewn with ash, cremains, bones and other human remains. This evidence is perfectly compatible with the numbers of deportees who should have been buried there, and the sheer size of the reported ash field - which is also visible in photographs, which indicate a moonscape littered with bones - is powerful evidence that a mass extinction has taken place on the site.
One can also utilise other sources such as air photos and witness testimonies to ascertain the maximum possible dimensions of the mass graves on the actual site, and then apply these external sources of evidence - in the case of the air photos, entirely independent evidence - to produce a series of estimates which could be best/middle/worst cased, as is standard practice in many disciplines and methods of enquiry.
There are plenty of contemporary documentary and eyewitness sources testifying to the condition of the site in 1945 and thereafter in Polish records and other writings. One of the apparent motives to construct the memorial was to prevent further grave robbing attempts.
No attempt has hitherto been made to conduct modern-day excavations at Treblinka, but not so at the other three camps where probe methods have been used to determine the approximate size of the mass graves fairly successfully, indicating substantial mass graves which do not indicate a merely 'decimatory' number of victims of deportees in 'transit'. The archaeological evidence is entirely consistent with mass extinctions, burials and cremations at Belzec, Sobibor and Chelmno.
Given that all four camps are an undeniable set, we can therefore say that the 3 out of 4 camps investigated using modern archaeological methods correspond to 50% of the total number of victims of the four camps. The 'sample' is therefore entirely reasonable - indeed, far above that which would be regarded as an acceptable sample in most scientific methodologies - and it would require external evidence to explain why Treblinka would be fundamentally different to Belzec, Sobibor or Chelmno. No such external evidence has so far been forthcoming.
Therefore, since the modern investigations of 3 of 4 sites have confirmed the 1945 investigations, there is no reason not to also accept the 1945 investigation of Treblinka.
It's blatantly obvious why you fixate on Treblinka, because you know that it alone of the four 'pure death camps' has not been subjected to recent archaeological investigation.
Therefore, the last refuge of deniers like you is to revert back to the strawman of demanding actual bodies even though the story you are trying to attack states they were cremated, or demanding ever more precise details regarding Treblinka while ignoring the rest of the evidence from the 'set' of four pure death camps.
The assumption upon which your argument rests is that you represent a viewpoint which commands more than negligible support, which is manifestly not the case since on this forum, in the wider public sphere, and in academia, your denial is utterly rejected, and your fellow deniers number at most a few hundred people online, with a couple of crank book authors arguing the same thing, although you apparently think their books are unreadable.
There is no burning social or political need to conduct further investigations at Treblinka, not even to shut up Ahmadinejad, since the other investigations more than suffice to any rational person in the 21st Century. Religious objections are quite real and not part of a Jewish conspiracy, and there are also practical and general human cultural objections, namely why on earth disturb a known grave site which is already capped with symbolic headstones, when no good reasons have been presented - no external evidence to cast doubt on anything has been forthcoming, no systematic critique of the sum total of evidence for Treblinka (or any of the other camps) has been written, etc. Would the US government accept the arguments of a fringe movement to exhume the Gettysburg cemeteries or Arlington? No, it wouldn't.
You seem blithely unaware that your increasingly obsessive fixation on mass graves makes you and your ilk come across as unpleasant, rebarbative, ghoulish and disturbed individuals. The blatant goalpost moving and refusal to answer the obvious question, so what happened to them then?, makes you appear intellectually dishonest and also rather challenged in your logic and grasp of the evidence.
I'm not sure anyone here actually cares whether you 'believe' or 'disbelieve' that the Holocaust happened. This isn't a matter for belief, but for knowledge, which is always going to be incomplete as that's just how the past is. You are not presenting us with any knowledge, any information, any evidence, which contradicts the knowledge, information and evidence relating to the Holocaust. You are simply declaring this knowledge to be inadequate, even when everyone else thinks it is sufficient, within the described limitations. A lot of the time, the declaration seems to rest purely on arguments to incredulity.
If you were serious, then you could respond to the brief outline above, which comes to about 1800 words, with a flowing argument rather than a fisking and nitpicking. Let's say of 1000 words, half a typical undergraduate essay and less space than is devoted to the issue of mass graves at particular sites in already available extracts from reports.
But as we know by now, you're not serious, don't have the patience or endurance to reach even this low threshold, or the wit to use Google to discover easily available information, or the honesty to address all four camps together.
