Merged General Holocaust denial discussion thread

[Dogzilla]

I'm going to come back to Eisenhower in a separate post later on.

With this latest lull in action I thought now might be a good time for a reminder about an unanswered question.

 

[LemmyCaution]

You've got Eisenhower? And Churchill? After all these years? And you wonder why you people are viewed as worse than a sick joke?

 

[Dogzilla]

You've got Eisenhower? And Churchill? After all these years? And you wonder why you people are viewed as worse than a sick joke?

You don't even know what I'm talking about, do you?

 

[LemmyCaution]

You don't even know what I'm talking about, do you?

Is that so? You think you really have something, don't you? It's nothing, and it has no bearing on any of the evidence for the character of the Third Reich or the Nazis' persecution of the Jews, war crimes, and genocide. It is a tedious irrelevancy to the point you are promoting. But, please, carry on.

 

[Dogzilla]

Is that so? You think you really have something, don't you? It's nothing, and it has no bearing on any of the evidence for the character of the Third Reich or the Nazis' persecution of the Jews, war crimes, and genocide. It is a tedious irrelevancy to the point you are promoting. But, please, carry on.

Well, actually, it does. It does having bearing on the evidence for the character of the Third Reich or the Nazis persecution of the Jews because it is evidence of such that has been proven to be false. It begs the question: why does one need to fabricate evidence of Nazi atrocities? Isn't the truth enough?

It also shows up the double standard that applies to proof of the holocaust. Because you and probably many others don't like to remember inconvenient truths, I'll refresh your memory. The question is why is General Eisenhower's description in a letter to General Marshall of the things he saw at Ohrdruf relevant to the holocaust while the shrunken heads and lampshades that were shown to German civilians on the same day that Eisenhower wrote this letter not a part of the holocaust because they were never identified as being from Jewish victims?

So get a good night's sleep and put on your dancing shoes. Answering this question is like dancing a polka to Einstuerzende Neubauten.

 

[000063]

It's not the Holocaust that's being disputed it's the numbers.

"You are accused of 24 counts of ferret murder, and one count of jaywalking. How do you plead?"
"Actually, it was only nine murders."
"Oh, well, that changes everything. You're free to go."

 

[Dogzilla]

....and on the lighter side, here's a juxtaposition of "holocaust" and "I.G. Farben" that you wouldn't see in a newspaper today.

 

[beachnut]

I'm a revisionist. The bottom line is that not even close to 6 million Jewish children, women, and men were killed by Germans. Not even 1/12 of 6 million Jewish children, women, and men died in the concentration camps.

You lack knowledge and spread lies, that is not a revisionist, it is a more like someone spreading lies.
Less than 500,000 makes Hitler a bigger failure, his goal was to kill them all. Why are you making your hero Hitler look bad? Do you have problems with big numbers? What is your goal in spreading lies about the Holocaust? Have you thought about moving to Germany and preach your lies and delusions?
Are all your friends holocaust deniers too? Are they neoNAZIs? Why are you so ignorant on the Holocaust? Poor research skills, or hate?

Hitler made an industry out of killing humans, you can't count, what is new? You can't figure out 911, are these events related in your fantasy world? Where do you draw the line on delusions, how about the moon-landing, are you going to help Anders?

 

[LemmyCaution]

Well, actually, it does. It does having bearing on the evidence for the character of the Third Reich or the Nazis persecution of the Jews because it is evidence of such that has been proven to be false. It begs the question: why does one need to fabricate evidence of Nazi atrocities? Isn't the truth enough?

It also shows up the double standard that applies to proof of the holocaust. Because you and probably many others don't like to remember inconvenient truths, I'll refresh your memory. The question is why is General Eisenhower's description in a letter to General Marshall of the things he saw at Ohrdruf relevant to the holocaust while the shrunken heads and lampshades that were shown to German civilians on the same day that Eisenhower wrote this letter not a part of the holocaust because they were never identified as being from Jewish victims?

So get a good night's sleep and put on your dancing shoes. Answering this question is like dancing a polka to Einstuerzende Neubauten.

Let me get this straight -- you are so naive as to 1) confuse the political and cultural uses of events with their description in historical work, 2) imagine some kind of conspiratorial workup between historians and politicos involving the Third Reich, and 3) get all worked up that the Holocaust has been used and abused as though it were unique in this way -- and you think I need to dance?!?!? Sweet Jesus, you people are retarded in a sick kind of way.

 

[Nick Terry]

Well, actually, it does. It does having bearing on the evidence for the character of the Third Reich or the Nazis persecution of the Jews because it is evidence of such that has been proven to be false. It begs the question: why does one need to fabricate evidence of Nazi atrocities? Isn't the truth enough?

It also shows up the double standard that applies to proof of the holocaust. Because you and probably many others don't like to remember inconvenient truths, I'll refresh your memory. The question is why is General Eisenhower's description in a letter to General Marshall of the things he saw at Ohrdruf relevant to the holocaust while the shrunken heads and lampshades that were shown to German civilians on the same day that Eisenhower wrote this letter not a part of the holocaust because they were never identified as being from Jewish victims?

So get a good night's sleep and put on your dancing shoes. Answering this question is like dancing a polka to Einstuerzende Neubauten.

No, it's not. It simply involves patiently explaining, yet again, the difference between the particular and the general, and how the two can overlap. You probably weren't very good at Venn diagrams at school, were you?

Eisenhower is quoted reacting to what he saw in a liberated concentration camp, Ohrdruf, after he had received reports from across the front about other liberated concentration camps and decided to see for himself what they were about. The liberation of the camps marked the end of the Holocaust because more than a third of the inmates in the camps in Germany in 1945 were Jews. The liberation of the camps also marked the end of many other forms of Nazi persecution, since nearly two thirds of the surviving prisoners were not Jews. Among the victims of such persecution were German and Polish political prisoners, a very few of whom were the victims of freelance Ed Gein-style haberdashery in one particular camp, Buchenwald.

To put it another way, Eisenhower was reacting to Nazi crimes against humanity, in the form of the state of the concentration camps in 1945 when they were liberated. The set of Nazi crimes against humanity includes a subset, the Holocaust, and another subset, freelance Ed Gein-style haberdashery. One subset, the Holocaust, overlapped with the 20 or so concentration camps of the WVHA, but was not restricted to those sites, while the other subset, freelance Ed Gein-style haberdashery, took place exclusively in one camp.

Thus, shrunken heads and lampshades do not have anything to do with the Nazi genocide of European Jews, whereas the fate of many European Jews interned in camps in the Reich in 1945, including Buchenwald, does.

It begs the question: why does one need to fabricate evidence of Nazi atrocities? Isn't the truth enough?

This presumes that there was actually fabrication, which you and your ilk have failed to prove. You're also triggering the fallacy of the excluded middle, by presuming that the range of options is simply truth/fabrication, rather than allowing for the possibility that some things may have been misunderstood immediately after liberation, which one would surely expect.

Moreover, the fact that some elements of a larger event might get embellished is relatively normal; survivors of Dresden report low flying Allied fighter planes machine gunning them when there is no evidence of this whatsoever, but there is no doubt that the city was firebombed in February 1945.

Similarly, Belgian civilians reported all manner of apparitions and hallucinations in 1914 about Wilhelmine German atrocities, but there is no doubt that the Imperial German Army executed 6,000 civilians in reprisals (largely because inexperienced troops panicked and fired on their own units then blamed it on 'francs-tireurs') within just a couple of months.

 

[LemmyCaution]

Uh yes, that too, the outlandish possibility that Ike might have been right about what he saw and how it related. LOL.

 

[Thunder]

Oh please. Religion had little to do with it. Try a fear of Communism and aristocracy.

so why did the Nazis target converts to Judaism?

why did the Nazis target strongly anti-Communist Jews?

why did the Nazis round up and murder poor Jews and Jews living in virual poverty?

you argument is silly and nonsense.

 

[Saggy]

Thus, shrunken heads and lampshades do not have anything to do with the Nazi genocide of European Jews, whereas the fate of many European Jews interned in camps in the Reich in 1945, including Buchenwald, does.



This presumes that there was actually fabrication, which you and your ilk have failed to prove. You're also triggering the fallacy of the excluded middle, by presuming that the range of options is simply truth/fabrication, rather than allowing for the possibility that some things may have been misunderstood immediately after liberation, which one would surely expect.

I confess that I am becoming a little jaundiced, when even the 'professor' of the hoax regurgitates such nonsense, over and over, to wit ..

allowing for the possibility that some things may have been misunderstood immediately after liberation,

The lampshade hoax was not a misunderstanding, and it did not occur only immediately after liberation, it is still current. A book about the hoax was published just recently, titled I think, 'The Lampshade' about a 'Nazi lampshade made of Jewish skin' the author 'discovered' in New Orleans. There is no time limit to holohoax deceit.

 

[Saggy]

I just can't understand, with reading almost this entire thread, how some people can ACTUALLY (non trolls) think the Holocaust didn't happen. I mean I really tried to open my mind up and think "outside the box" but god damn, that's flat out impossible with this CT.

What a waste of time , though fun.

Well, just for fun, and your own edification and understanding, why don't you try to explain to us ....

1. the fact that the only two 'gas chambers' in existence, one a Auschwitz and one a Majdanek, both have large unbarred easily breakable plate glass windows. You see, the hoax is not a sophisticated ruse, it is obvious preposterous lies, but, you have to open your eyes.

2. the fact that Elie Wiesel wrote a book about his year at Auschwtiz and never mentioned gas chambers, he claimed that the Jews were killed by throwing them alive into burning pits, one for adults, one for children. This is not only preposterous, it is physically impossible.

3. the fact that the only evidence you've seen for the hoax is the pictures of the dead and dying taken at Belsen and Dachau after the war ! and that they were obviously victims of disease and not gassing.

4. etc. , the facts above should wake anyone ..

 

[Nick Terry]

How many events from the twentieth century are known almost exclusively through eyewitness testimony? And what is a comparable account?

Identical standards are impossible. Every event in history is unique and the mix of evidence we have for it is bound to be unique in some way as well. But if the standard for being truly honest epistemologically requires comparing events to know what is reasonable to expect, how can we know what to expect vis-a-vis the holocaust? What event in human history killed so many people in three or four very tiny well defined geographic regions in such a short period of time?

If the holocaust is one of the better investigated mass slaughters forensically speaking, the lack of forensic evidence is even more disturbing.

You have never pointed to documents which were entirely explicit about gassing. Since it didn't take much effort to not point me to explicit gassing documents, it should take even less of an effort to point me to them now. Be sure to look up the definition of 'explicit' before you go further with this.

Are you talking about the testimonial evidence from hundreds of thousands of individual survivors who have left testimony or only the five or six survivor testimonies that holocaust scholars use?

The importance of consistency in eyewitness descriptions rises as other forms of evidence fall by the wayside. Nobody expects no crazies at all. If all we knew about the Tunguska event was based on eyewitnesses, we would probably consider it as mass hysteria or something akin to the Phoenix Lights. Fortunately, with Tunguska we have irrefutable physical evidence of an enormous cataclysm. A few eyewitnesses who report seeing inconsistent colors streaking across the sky are not problematic here. We could probably reconstruct Tunguska without any eyewitnesses at all.

It's the lack of physical evidence where their should be some that makes the holocaust uniquely problematic. Perfectly consistent eyewitness testimony wouldn't overcome that hurdle. In this case, using the testimony of crazies such as Gerstein just makes the story even less tenable.

What?

What is the 'face of battle'?

You really can't compare WWI veterans to holocaust survivors. You can go to France today and see landscape still scarred by trench warfare that happened almost a hundred years ago. I bet in the 1920s it was even more obvious. There's video footage of airplanes shot down, men going over the top and getting mowed down, of poison gas attacks and tank battles. You could have a fifty percent totally useless rate among eyewitness accounts but still be able to piece together what happened based on other types of evidence. None of that other evidence exists for the holocaust.

The studies of mental illness among the population of holocaust survivors have been inconclusive. To what would you compare holocaust survivor's testimony to arrive at a measure of 'derangement?' What is your yardstick? If you compared holocaust survivors to the general population and found that the survivors manifested more mental illness or the stories they told were more 'out there' than the general population, what would that tell us? That the holocaust had a traumatic effect on some people? Well, duh. If comparing holocaust survivors to, e.g., Armenian genocide survivors showed that holocaust survivors suffered greater derangement, it could also be dismissed as a foregone conclusion because the holocaust was so much more traumatic.

So that's one difficulty. But if we can agree on what we use for comparison, then you have the problem of quantifying "derangement" on a sliding scale. Is defecating and swallowing diamonds over and over again for months while in Auschwitz more or less deranged than living with wolves? Is watching a lorry load of infants being dumped into a flaming baby pit more deranged than being pushed out of the gas chamber by two buck-naked nubile preteen girls? Is being pushed out of the gas chamber by nubile little girls more deranged than giving them a haircut inside the gas chamber? Is giving them a haircut inside the gas chamber more deranged than looking up into their "lady parts" for hidden diamonds after they're dead?

Then how do you handle minor mistakes in the survivor testimony that may or may not represent derangement? Not every survivor claims to have seen flames and smoke billowing from the crematorium chimney in Auschwitz but some do. We know that none of them actually did. But how do we handle a survivor who saw smoke coming out of a chimney and thought it was the crematorium vs. the lunatic rantings of a Mrs. Schaechter?

Not everybody was personally selected by Mengele. But some were. Not every mother who says she threw her baby out of the train did so. But some did. Everybody wasn't told that the only way out of the camp was through the chimney. But some were. Anybody who says they had to drink urine to quench their thirst is lying. But somebody probably drank urine at one time or another. How do we handle those? Do we just assume they're all lying or all telling the truth? If, e.g., somebody believes he drank urine but didn't is he more or less deranged than somebody who knows he never drank urine but says he did?

Then how do we weigh the importance of individual testimony? It wouldn't be right if we found a completely lunatic testimony that had never been published anywhere and gave it equal weight to the testimony of somebody like Elie Wiesel.

Do we limit ourselves to oral testimony or only written testimony? When a survivor's story keeps changing, which version to we use?

Establishing a methodology for such a study wouldn't be easy but perhaps it would be valuable. Although I have already said that the uniqueness of the holocaust can get in the way of any comparison I think we need to assume comparison is possible and go from there. But before we setup the measurement instrument, we need to make sure there's something to compare holocaust survivor testimony against. I would propose we conduct a simple pretest to determine the viability of a full study. Let's gather published eyewitness accounts of non-holocaust related traumatic events. Preferably they would be events for which little physical evidence remains and which occurred within the last two hundred years or so. Let's limit ourselves to only written testimony from innocent civilians that has been published in English. (no need to introduce translation artifacts into an already onerous study).

Perhaps we could look at the testimony of non-Jewish holocaust survivors. There were plenty of non-Jews in the camps. Do any of them tell stories similar to surviving because some little girl came to the fence everyday and threw an apple over it for them? Did they miraculously meet again on a blind date and get married?

I've read quite a few accounts of white men women and children who were captured by Indians back in the frontier days of the United States. The experience some of those captives went through make the holocaust sound like a walk in the park. Maybe if we found a story of a captive who said something along the lines of having escaped from the Indians and lived with wolves we could use that for comparison?

Armenian genocide survivor testimony might be something to look into. I'm open to suggestions.

But that's gotta be the first step. We know there are more than a few bats**t crazy memoirs by holocaust survivors. Let's find some bats**t crazy memoirs by non-holocaust trauma survivors to help us figure out how to tackle this challenge. And if we can't find any bats**t crazy non-holocaust trauma survivor testimony, we'll have our answer and won't need to go any further.

Evidence for those many more fake Vietnam vets? And what do you mean by "fake survivors?" Are you talking about the Mishas or the Zisblatts?

What is the quantitative dimension? How do you quantify crazy between subjects and within subjects? Is your population the hundreds of thousands of holocaust survivors or only the three or four that are relied on in the literature?

But you haven't leveled any coherent criticism. All you've really done is dismiss the problems with the eyewitness testimony by acknowledging the flaws in eyewitness testimony in general. You're ignoring that the problems with eyewitness testimony for the holocaust are exacerbated by the conditions under which much of this testimony was collected and by the fact that physical evidence doesn't exist to back it up.

So, after spending time away doing real history I find you penned the above series of rhetorical questions and ignorant assertions in my absence. The other stuff about museums and your soap fetish can be ignored since finally you get back to real issues, sort of.

Starting from the top - most events in 20th Century history are known primarily through eyewitness testimony. Take a gander at the offerings in most bookstores and you will find that works based on eyewitness accounts generall sell the best. Especially if they relate to wars. Look in university press catalogues and you will also find several genres of history, especially social hisory, which rests on testimony. The chances are that we find out most of what we know about history through eyewitnesses, with very little mediation from documents.

This said, the Holocaust is regarded as historical fact by historians because of the documents. So they 'know' it through the documents as much as through other sources. For about a quarter of a century the field revolved substantially around debating the origins of the Final Solution, a debate that was in the end largely driven by how documents are to be interpreted. By the end of that debate, those placing more faith in the testimonies of witnesses like Eichmann and Hoess than documents such as the Goebbels diary, Hans Frank's Diensttagebuch and the Dienstkalendar Himmler found it harder and harder to persuade their colleagues that they were right. And so we are all Gerlachs now.

The same quite obviously applies to the Holocaust in the Soviet Union, which in the past 25 years has become one of the dominant research fields both because the events there speak to the overall evolution and escalation, and because the scale of the Holocaust in the Soviet Union became much clearer once access to German documents held in East European archives became easy.

This said, at the same time as documents became available, it also became routine to examine postwar trials and to look at 1940s East Bloc investigations. Which is why Christian Gerlach (him again) cites from all of these sources at once, wherever they are available, which is not always, because although we do have many more documents than 30 years ago, and are still processing big piles of them, it's a stark fact that most Nazi records went up in smoke.

But not completely, which is why the camps have also been studied using both Nazi documents, testimonies and investigations, and that includes all the death camps. There were already quite a few such documents in circulation in the 1940s regarding Auschwitz, gas vans and Chelmno in particular, but the number of such documents has considerably increased since then. For Auschwitz, this is symbolised by Pressac who added a very substantial pile of documents to the already known examples. And Pressac wrote more than 20 years ago, so there are actually even more available.

Chelmno and gas vans, too, have been considerably boosted. Aside from 501-PS there is a well known document, which contrary to your trolling, I have mentioned to you before, commonly known as the '97,000 processed' document, which is on the Holocaust History Project website; it's not difficult to look up. There are more than 20 documents relating to gas vans scattered across various files. 501-PS and "97,000 processed" clearly describe gassings, while others use explicit terms like Gaswagen associated with license plate numbers that match other documents and even underground reports - matches that are impossible to explain either as a product of chance or as a product of manipulation, because the relevant sources were held in entirely different nation-states with no evidence of any connection.

Recently, there have been a slew of studies of Chelmno either directly, or in relation to the Lodz ghetto (Peter Klein's Gettoverwaltung Litzmannstadt) or the Warthegau (Michael Alberti). These have all used the evidence of the Sonderkommando Kulmhof's bank account, which rather interestingly documents shipments of quicklime among other curiosities. They also use the very interesting reports of phone conversations intercepted by Goering's bugging service which contain further nastiness.

The euthanasia program, too, has been much studied in the past while and once again studied using documents plus testimonies. There are enough documents which explicitly connect gassing to T4 cited in the work of the likes of Michael Burleigh, Ernst Klee, Henry Friedlander and Dick de Mildt (whose works would constitute a minimal entry-level requirement to an informed discussion of the issue) that denier prayer-wheel ululations like 'Nazi gassings never happened' are refuted beyond any shadow of a doubt.

The T4-Aktion Reinhard connection has been known since the 1940s, as has the fact that the core files for the AR camps were destroyed. That is a documented fact, explicitly mentioned in Globocnik's final report to Himmler, and that is why denier demands for x kind of document relating to the camps has pretty much always been laughed at. Past events do not disappear into a puff of smoke because someone got lucky and destroyed one kind of source material.

And not very well at that, since research has identified dozens of 'smoking gun' documents relating to Aktion Reinhard - by doing what historians always do when confronted with gaps in the record, and looking sideways at the issue. Indeed, some of the documents I am thinking of have been known since 1945 and very much formed part of the evidentiary basis to reach the initial verdict of the main Nuremberg trial. Hans Frank's Diensttagebuch contains more than half a dozen explicit statements about the destruction of the Jews of the Generalgouvernement, and it doesn't take a rocket scientist to work out that this is the same area which Treblinka et al "serviced". That's why Frank's diary plus Samuel Rajzman was all that was needed at Nuremberg to establish a basic evidentiary lock.

Since then we have simply added more and more such documents, including letters from Nazi officials repeatedly and inconveniently discussing extermination of the Jews, and a variety of documents found in other institutions' files relating to the AR camps or AR more directly. One would need to read through books like Dieter Pohl's study of the Holocaust in Galicia, or the tombstone of a reference work by Wolfgang Curilla on the Ordnungspolizei in Poland, to become familiar with all of these items. They do not leave a very large gap, even if there is no document to match the explicitness of '97,000 processed' for Chelmno, or the Hodys interrogation for Auschwitz, or the script of the euthanasia training film.

You're also wrong about the lack of physical evidence, as we have discussed before. All the sites were examined in the 1940s and virtually all have been re-examined in recent years. And this includes sites which don't really interest most deniers, such as the T4 institutes, the sites of mass shootings which either were or were not visited by Sonderkommando 1005 (btw, SK 1005 is documented and not a product of testimony alone), and sites inside Germany where bodies were buried or cremated en masse outside of crematoria.

Physical evidence, however, can only ever tell us so much. A while back deniers got very excited when Van Pelt said that 99% of what we know about the past does not come from physical evidence, they failed to notice he was speaking about what we know of the past as a whole. And that very much applies to what we know about wars.

Responding to a point I made earlier, you try to contrast WWI veterans with Holocaust survivors assuming that because there are trenches then somehow this corroborates the veterans. Utter bullflop. Most veterans' accounts from wars concern tactical movements, timings, intensities and numbers killed, none of which will leave physical evidence that can be accessed at a glance, if at all. The 'face of battle' is entirely evanescent and can hardly be reconstructed without relying on eyewitness testimonies. You are almost never going to be able to confirm or refute an eyewitness account left by a soldier by walking the battlefield. For all you know there could well have been a huge pile of bayoneted enemy soldiers lying over a now removed barbed wire fence, unfortunately civilisation deems it impolitic to leave them hanging up on the wire to rot.

Mentioning wars brings me onto another point about documents, which is the incredibly narrow definition of documents used by deniers. When deniers say documents they only ever mean German documents. But if one was studying a war then you should aim to look at both sides' documents. That is precisely what historians of the Holocaust have been doing, with varying emphases, since the 1940s.

Military historians have to do it as well because many collections of military records have gone up in smoke. If you want to write a detailed history of WWI from the German perspective you are more or less forced to look at the Bavarian Army because the Prussian records were all destroyed in 1945. Same with the air war - Luftwaffe records all went up in smoke. Most 1944-45 war diaries were burned by Wehrmacht divisions before they surrendered, as was standard policy. So historians use the records of their opponents together with whatever memoirs and surviving documents they can find to cobble together a picture.

With the Holocaust, it is not always appreciated how significant some of the non-German source bases are. There are substantial collections of surviving Judenrat records for Warsaw, Bialystok, Lublin and Lodz. These often include statements written down at the time about events elsewhere or inside the ghettos. Those are, like it or not, contemporary documents. They of course include numerous accounts of Treblinka written in 1942 which correctly and explicitly discuss gas chambers. To claim that gas chambers are not documented would be wrong speaking about German documents as a whole, it is doubly wrong when one adds in Jewish documents.

And it is trebly wrong when one adds in Polish documents. The Polish underground state had an entire regional hierarchy reporting upwards just like the Nazi one, and it did so in parallel. There are individual, weekly, fortnightly, and monthly reports for separate districts and entire regions, not to mention substantial collections of material gathered by resistance networks inside specific camps, such as Auschwitz. Indeed, the history of Auschwitz could hardly be written without such sources, since the camp resistance not only smuggled out or preserved actual German documents, it also reported so extensively on goings on inside the camp that one can compare and contrast their reports time and again with the surviving German sources, and with witness statements.

For example, the Polish underground reports record a mutiny among a company of Ukrainian guards who revolted in mid-1943. So did Pery Broad, who described the revolt in his 1945 statement to the British - this is independent evidence. There are, however, also SS documents about the mutiny, which have been found in a Russian archive, and which confirm details known from personnel files of the mutineers, as well as witness statements from Ukrainians who served in that company.

Another example - the Polish underground reports describe the liquidation of the Sosnowitz and Bedzin ghettos in early August 1943 and specify 30,000 victims. German documents from the Sosnowitz police confirm the number and deportation; SS documents confirm there was a Sonderaktion; survivors of the selections confirm the process described in the contemporary underground report. There might not be a German document saying explicitly 'these deportees were gassed' but the sum total of available sources makes that pretty clear. Contemporary documents make that clear. And there is no other evidence to support any other conclusion.

Other contemporary documents exist which do not conform to the usual government-produced report but which are of a type that is utterly standard for almost all eras of history. Diaries, for one. I have already mentioned the Goebbels diary which has long been regarded as a key source on Nazi Germany, but the number of diaries from Jews and bystanders is substantial. Sakowicz's diary from Ponary is a key independent source confirming the Jaeger report and adding details which a bald official tabulation would not give.

Another example is Zygmunt Klukowski's classic diary of the Nazi and Soviet occupation. Klukowski records his knowledge of the mass shooting at Jozefow, which is now fairly famous because it was carried out by Police Battalion 101. There is no German document relating to Jozefow, does the event disappear into a puff of smoke because of this? Not only do we have an exhaustive postwar investigation and interrogation of the shooters, we have Klukowski, and we also have the Polish Main Commission which investigated every killing site and wrote them up. Somewhere out there an exhumation report almost certainly exists. That is more than can be said for most historical massacres (please link to the forensic report on the Setif massacre in 1945 if you disagree with this).

So now we come to how to evaluate witnesses and how historians of the Holocaust evaluate witnesses - and whether this is really any different to other historiasn. There are really some pretty simple rules of thumb which allow us to be certain beyond any reasonable doubt about what happened

1) victims, bystanders and perpetrators give mutually corroborating accounts.

2) they did so in large numbers starting already during the war but especially in the 1940s. There are huge collections of testimonies at for example the Jewish Historical Institute in Warsaw, written down immediately after the events while the witnesses were in the same country as the events.

3) historians use many such testimonies in an increasingly systematic way. Yitzhak Arad used more than 90 testimonies in his book on the Aktion Reinhard camps and that is about 1/3 of the number I could cite from today. The Auschwitz museum published a 5 volume work in the late 90s on the camp's history which cited from literally hundreds of eyewitnesses, mostly from the 1940s Polish investigations. Again, I could draw on significantly more witnesses today, 10-15 years on. Your jibe, repeated twice, that historians only cite four or five testimonies is obvious nonsense.

4) the events and sites were repeatedly investigated, allowing historians to compare, usually, 1940s with 1960s accounts, and there is a remarkably high level of consistency despite the lapse of time. Some of the best and most detailed descriptions of the Auschwitz gas chambers were given in the early 1970s at the Dejaco trial, often as a result of probing and questioning by defense lawyers. Accounts are not repeated verbatim, but nor do they change so drastically en masse that one would dismiss them in toto as seems to be desired. Moreover, the investigations take place in diverse environments so that one can cross-examine them and compare them across different cultures. The Soviets conducted several thorough investigations and trials of Trawniki men serving at Belzec, Sobibor and Treblinka in the 1960s at the same time as the West Germans were conducting their investigations. The two sets of investigations were entirely independent of each other.

5) as time goes on and we get into the 1980s to the present, then the passage of time, cultural biases, increased mediatisation and the effects of old age plus generation combine to reduce the usefulness of recent eyewitness accounts. It's no accident that virtually all "crazy survivors" were young teenagers in 1944-45 and are living in America, where their testimonies have attained a cultural/social significance because they are "living witnesses". Although there has been a considerable effort to record video testimonies, these sources are much less often used by historians for what are obvious, basic reasons - they were produced long after the event. Rankeanism prefers sources as close to the event as possible chronologically. Journalism, and oral history, however, prefer sources as close to the event as can be laid hands on.

6) quantifying eyewitness testimony has been done fairly extensively in psychology. Aside from Elizabeth Loftus's pioneering work there are also specialist studies by Willem Wagenaar, who appeared as an expert witness for the Demjanjuk defense in 1987. Wagenaar's main study examined the memories of Dutch political prisoners held by the Nazis in a camp in Holland, IIRC, finding a postwar sample of statements and then reinterviewing them in the 1980s, and found unsurprisingly a considerable deterioration of some details along with a fairly high consistency on aspects he identified as 'core'. Historians have also quantified testimonies, notably Christopher Browning, who cut his teeth on more than 100 statements from Battalion 101 and noted the trends in this large sample, and then recently studied an unusually large sample of many hundreds of survivors from Starachowice labour camp. Browning found that circa 1980, these survivors started incorporating elements of the 'conventional Holocaust narrative' into their testimonies. The main example concerned their arrival at Auschwitz in 1944 - the transport was not selected, but after 1980, some of the survivors started 'remembering' Mengele conducting a selection.

7) the quantitative dimension is fundamentally why all your blethering is meaningless. There are probably more than 100,000 statements, testimonies or memoirs from Holocaust survivors in the narrow sense. The Central Jewish Historical Commission gathered 7000 in 1945-48 or so; DEGOB in Hungary gathered 4000, another 1000 were taken by the Jewish Agency in Romania; there are probably more than 1000 statements in the Polish Auschwitz investigation, 1400 witnesses were interrogated for the Frankfurt Auschwitz pre-trial investigation, so even with overlaps you are looking at more than 10,000 statements in just these collections. There are 1000s of memoirs, and 10s of 1000s of recent testimonies; there were 1000s of investigations in West Germany in the 1960s and 1970s into practically every sub-camp of a KZ and every district of occupied Poland. Since 1980 or so there have been probably 30,000 more testimonies produced.

I'm simply not going to be moved by the odd 'crazy' survivor a la Zisblatt until it is shown that they are a demonstrably and abnormally large percentage of these totals. Pointing to a supposedly particularly crazy survivor doesn't change this. I want proof that a full third or a half of all testimonies are utter bollocks. If revisionism was to be taken seriously, it would at least examine properly constructed samples numbering into the hundreds. I don't think the 'serious' revisionists have even got past 250 witnesses in 65 years of trying, including SS witnesses. And there is no revisionist book that examines more than about 50 of them in one go. Whereas scholars can produce works examining 100s.

8) unsurprisingly given the status of the Witness in Western society of the late 20th and early 21st centuries, 'fake' survivors do exist for the Holocaust, meaning people who were not actually in Nazi camps or ghettos. The evidence for there being more fake Vietnam vets is clearly laid out in BG Burkett's book Stolen Valor, which whatever one thinks of the author's obvious political biases, amasses enough examples to show that there flatly are more fake Vietnam vets than there have been fake Holocaust survivors. That's why Congress passed the Stolen Valor Act to clamp down on impostors claiming to have won the Medal of Honor and other military awards. A company manufactured more than twice as many Medals of Honor as there are living recipients. You also get guys like this one who claim to have won 17 medals while serving in the SAS. Or this one. Or this one, whose fake SAS service was swallowed by publishers, other military authors and magazines.

In fact, just looking at the Wiki entry for 'impostor' reveals enough examples of frauds that it's difficult to get worked up over a tiny handful of fake Holocaust survivors. And that some of them slip through the net for a brief while? Tell that to the New York Times which for a while had problem after problem with supposedly respected reporters fabricating stories.

9) How do we weigh different testimonies together? It is fairly obvious and intuitive how we do that. I suggest you look up Twining, Analysis of Evidence, or Wigmore, or Schum, or Douglas Walton's extensive work on testimony if you want something more theoretical. The bottom line is that none of your favourite examples or indeed, deniers' favourite examples, matter a damn when they target witnesses who played absolutely no role in the legal proceedings related to the different camps and who are not cited by historians.

10) the final point is obvious to anyone but, it seems, a denier. That is how documents and witnesses can be combined to write narratives. Deniers usually fixate on an abstracted ideal type of the procedure and ignore how practices change over time. Those subtle changes are precisely what one can get at most easily with testimonies. Belzec started out using a lot of deception to lull the victims, but as the news spread then the SS and Trawnikis started using massive amounts of coercion and violence to achieve their aim. The spread of knowledge is documented in diaries and contemporary underground reports. The witness testimonies - in this case, exclusively from the perpetrators, since only 2 Jews survived Belzec to give proper accounts - confirm this and are in turn confirmed by the external reports and diaries. Auschwitz underwent massive changes in practices and procedures depending on the killing sites used and the phase in question. This not only conforms to how real organisations usually work, it is confirmed by contemporary accounts, witnesses and sensible interpretations of the documents.

Basically, if you're going to try to criticise the evidence, you had better (a) know what it is and (b) not strawman it.

 

[LemmyCaution]

Sad for Saggy to have posted such a thin and distorted argument just before Nick's reply to Dogzilla, which, in addition to answering Dogzilla, makes a mockery of the ridiculous and uninformed posturing in Saggy's preceding post.

 

[Clayton Moore]

So, after spending time away doing real history I find you penned the above series of rhetorical questions and ignorant assertions in my absence. The other stuff about museums and your soap fetish can be ignored since finally you get back to real issues, sort of.

Starting from the top - most events in 20th Century history are known primarily through eyewitness testimony. Take a gander at the offerings in most bookstores and you will find that works based on eyewitness accounts generall sell the best. Especially if they relate to wars. Look in university press catalogues and you will also find several genres of history, especially social hisory, which rests on testimony. The chances are that we find out most of what we know about history through eyewitnesses, with very little mediation from documents.

This said, the Holocaust is regarded as historical fact by historians because of the documents. So they 'know' it through the documents as much as through other sources. For about a quarter of a century the field revolved substantially around debating the origins of the Final Solution, a debate that was in the end largely driven by how documents are to be interpreted. By the end of that debate, those placing more faith in the testimonies of witnesses like Eichmann and Hoess than documents such as the Goebbels diary, Hans Frank's Diensttagebuch and the Dienstkalendar Himmler found it harder and harder to persuade their colleagues that they were right. And so we are all Gerlachs now.

The same quite obviously applies to the Holocaust in the Soviet Union, which in the past 25 years has become one of the dominant research fields both because the events there speak to the overall evolution and escalation, and because the scale of the Holocaust in the Soviet Union became much clearer once access to German documents held in East European archives became easy.

This said, at the same time as documents became available, it also became routine to examine postwar trials and to look at 1940s East Bloc investigations. Which is why Christian Gerlach (him again) cites from all of these sources at once, wherever they are available, which is not always, because although we do have many more documents than 30 years ago, and are still processing big piles of them, it's a stark fact that most Nazi records went up in smoke.

But not completely, which is why the camps have also been studied using both Nazi documents, testimonies and investigations, and that includes all the death camps. There were already quite a few such documents in circulation in the 1940s regarding Auschwitz, gas vans and Chelmno in particular, but the number of such documents has considerably increased since then. For Auschwitz, this is symbolised by Pressac who added a very substantial pile of documents to the already known examples. And Pressac wrote more than 20 years ago, so there are actually even more available.

Chelmno and gas vans, too, have been considerably boosted. Aside from 501-PS there is a well known document, which contrary to your trolling, I have mentioned to you before, commonly known as the '97,000 processed' document, which is on the Holocaust History Project website; it's not difficult to look up. There are more than 20 documents relating to gas vans scattered across various files. 501-PS and "97,000 processed" clearly describe gassings, while others use explicit terms like Gaswagen associated with license plate numbers that match other documents and even underground reports - matches that are impossible to explain either as a product of chance or as a product of manipulation, because the relevant sources were held in entirely different nation-states with no evidence of any connection.

Recently, there have been a slew of studies of Chelmno either directly, or in relation to the Lodz ghetto (Peter Klein's Gettoverwaltung Litzmannstadt) or the Warthegau (Michael Alberti). These have all used the evidence of the Sonderkommando Kulmhof's bank account, which rather interestingly documents shipments of quicklime among other curiosities. They also use the very interesting reports of phone conversations intercepted by Goering's bugging service which contain further nastiness.

The euthanasia program, too, has been much studied in the past while and once again studied using documents plus testimonies. There are enough documents which explicitly connect gassing to T4 cited in the work of the likes of Michael Burleigh, Ernst Klee, Henry Friedlander and Dick de Mildt (whose works would constitute a minimal entry-level requirement to an informed discussion of the issue) that denier prayer-wheel ululations like 'Nazi gassings never happened' are refuted beyond any shadow of a doubt.

The T4-Aktion Reinhard connection has been known since the 1940s, as has the fact that the core files for the AR camps were destroyed. That is a documented fact, explicitly mentioned in Globocnik's final report to Himmler, and that is why denier demands for x kind of document relating to the camps has pretty much always been laughed at. Past events do not disappear into a puff of smoke because someone got lucky and destroyed one kind of source material.

And not very well at that, since research has identified dozens of 'smoking gun' documents relating to Aktion Reinhard - by doing what historians always do when confronted with gaps in the record, and looking sideways at the issue. Indeed, some of the documents I am thinking of have been known since 1945 and very much formed part of the evidentiary basis to reach the initial verdict of the main Nuremberg trial. Hans Frank's Diensttagebuch contains more than half a dozen explicit statements about the destruction of the Jews of the Generalgouvernement, and it doesn't take a rocket scientist to work out that this is the same area which Treblinka et al "serviced". That's why Frank's diary plus Samuel Rajzman was all that was needed at Nuremberg to establish a basic evidentiary lock.

Since then we have simply added more and more such documents, including letters from Nazi officials repeatedly and inconveniently discussing extermination of the Jews, and a variety of documents found in other institutions' files relating to the AR camps or AR more directly. One would need to read through books like Dieter Pohl's study of the Holocaust in Galicia, or the tombstone of a reference work by Wolfgang Curilla on the Ordnungspolizei in Poland, to become familiar with all of these items. They do not leave a very large gap, even if there is no document to match the explicitness of '97,000 processed' for Chelmno, or the Hodys interrogation for Auschwitz, or the script of the euthanasia training film.

You're also wrong about the lack of physical evidence, as we have discussed before. All the sites were examined in the 1940s and virtually all have been re-examined in recent years. And this includes sites which don't really interest most deniers, such as the T4 institutes, the sites of mass shootings which either were or were not visited by Sonderkommando 1005 (btw, SK 1005 is documented and not a product of testimony alone), and sites inside Germany where bodies were buried or cremated en masse outside of crematoria.

Physical evidence, however, can only ever tell us so much. A while back deniers got very excited when Van Pelt said that 99% of what we know about the past does not come from physical evidence, they failed to notice he was speaking about what we know of the past as a whole. And that very much applies to what we know about wars.

Responding to a point I made earlier, you try to contrast WWI veterans with Holocaust survivors assuming that because there are trenches then somehow this corroborates the veterans. Utter bullflop. Most veterans' accounts from wars concern tactical movements, timings, intensities and numbers killed, none of which will leave physical evidence that can be accessed at a glance, if at all. The 'face of battle' is entirely evanescent and can hardly be reconstructed without relying on eyewitness testimonies. You are almost never going to be able to confirm or refute an eyewitness account left by a soldier by walking the battlefield. For all you know there could well have been a huge pile of bayoneted enemy soldiers lying over a now removed barbed wire fence, unfortunately civilisation deems it impolitic to leave them hanging up on the wire to rot.

Mentioning wars brings me onto another point about documents, which is the incredibly narrow definition of documents used by deniers. When deniers say documents they only ever mean German documents. But if one was studying a war then you should aim to look at both sides' documents. That is precisely what historians of the Holocaust have been doing, with varying emphases, since the 1940s.

Military historians have to do it as well because many collections of military records have gone up in smoke. If you want to write a detailed history of WWI from the German perspective you are more or less forced to look at the Bavarian Army because the Prussian records were all destroyed in 1945. Same with the air war - Luftwaffe records all went up in smoke. Most 1944-45 war diaries were burned by Wehrmacht divisions before they surrendered, as was standard policy. So historians use the records of their opponents together with whatever memoirs and surviving documents they can find to cobble together a picture.

With the Holocaust, it is not always appreciated how significant some of the non-German source bases are. There are substantial collections of surviving Judenrat records for Warsaw, Bialystok, Lublin and Lodz. These often include statements written down at the time about events elsewhere or inside the ghettos. Those are, like it or not, contemporary documents. They of course include numerous accounts of Treblinka written in 1942 which correctly and explicitly discuss gas chambers. To claim that gas chambers are not documented would be wrong speaking about German documents as a whole, it is doubly wrong when one adds in Jewish documents.

And it is trebly wrong when one adds in Polish documents. The Polish underground state had an entire regional hierarchy reporting upwards just like the Nazi one, and it did so in parallel. There are individual, weekly, fortnightly, and monthly reports for separate districts and entire regions, not to mention substantial collections of material gathered by resistance networks inside specific camps, such as Auschwitz. Indeed, the history of Auschwitz could hardly be written without such sources, since the camp resistance not only smuggled out or preserved actual German documents, it also reported so extensively on goings on inside the camp that one can compare and contrast their reports time and again with the surviving German sources, and with witness statements.

For example, the Polish underground reports record a mutiny among a company of Ukrainian guards who revolted in mid-1943. So did Pery Broad, who described the revolt in his 1945 statement to the British - this is independent evidence. There are, however, also SS documents about the mutiny, which have been found in a Russian archive, and which confirm details known from personnel files of the mutineers, as well as witness statements from Ukrainians who served in that company.

Another example - the Polish underground reports describe the liquidation of the Sosnowitz and Bedzin ghettos in early August 1943 and specify 30,000 victims. German documents from the Sosnowitz police confirm the number and deportation; SS documents confirm there was a Sonderaktion; survivors of the selections confirm the process described in the contemporary underground report. There might not be a German document saying explicitly 'these deportees were gassed' but the sum total of available sources makes that pretty clear. Contemporary documents make that clear. And there is no other evidence to support any other conclusion.

Other contemporary documents exist which do not conform to the usual government-produced report but which are of a type that is utterly standard for almost all eras of history. Diaries, for one. I have already mentioned the Goebbels diary which has long been regarded as a key source on Nazi Germany, but the number of diaries from Jews and bystanders is substantial. Sakowicz's diary from Ponary is a key independent source confirming the Jaeger report and adding details which a bald official tabulation would not give.

Another example is Zygmunt Klukowski's classic diary of the Nazi and Soviet occupation. Klukowski records his knowledge of the mass shooting at Jozefow, which is now fairly famous because it was carried out by Police Battalion 101. There is no German document relating to Jozefow, does the event disappear into a puff of smoke because of this? Not only do we have an exhaustive postwar investigation and interrogation of the shooters, we have Klukowski, and we also have the Polish Main Commission which investigated every killing site and wrote them up. Somewhere out there an exhumation report almost certainly exists. That is more than can be said for most historical massacres (please link to the forensic report on the Setif massacre in 1945 if you disagree with this).

So now we come to how to evaluate witnesses and how historians of the Holocaust evaluate witnesses - and whether this is really any different to other historiasn. There are really some pretty simple rules of thumb which allow us to be certain beyond any reasonable doubt about what happened

1) victims, bystanders and perpetrators give mutually corroborating accounts.

2) they did so in large numbers starting already during the war but especially in the 1940s. There are huge collections of testimonies at for example the Jewish Historical Institute in Warsaw, written down immediately after the events while the witnesses were in the same country as the events.

3) historians use many such testimonies in an increasingly systematic way. Yitzhak Arad used more than 90 testimonies in his book on the Aktion Reinhard camps and that is about 1/3 of the number I could cite from today. The Auschwitz museum published a 5 volume work in the late 90s on the camp's history which cited from literally hundreds of eyewitnesses, mostly from the 1940s Polish investigations. Again, I could draw on significantly more witnesses today, 10-15 years on. Your jibe, repeated twice, that historians only cite four or five testimonies is obvious nonsense.

4) the events and sites were repeatedly investigated, allowing historians to compare, usually, 1940s with 1960s accounts, and there is a remarkably high level of consistency despite the lapse of time. Some of the best and most detailed descriptions of the Auschwitz gas chambers were given in the early 1970s at the Dejaco trial, often as a result of probing and questioning by defense lawyers. Accounts are not repeated verbatim, but nor do they change so drastically en masse that one would dismiss them in toto as seems to be desired. Moreover, the investigations take place in diverse environments so that one can cross-examine them and compare them across different cultures. The Soviets conducted several thorough investigations and trials of Trawniki men serving at Belzec, Sobibor and Treblinka in the 1960s at the same time as the West Germans were conducting their investigations. The two sets of investigations were entirely independent of each other.

5) as time goes on and we get into the 1980s to the present, then the passage of time, cultural biases, increased mediatisation and the effects of old age plus generation combine to reduce the usefulness of recent eyewitness accounts. It's no accident that virtually all "crazy survivors" were young teenagers in 1944-45 and are living in America, where their testimonies have attained a cultural/social significance because they are "living witnesses". Although there has been a considerable effort to record video testimonies, these sources are much less often used by historians for what are obvious, basic reasons - they were produced long after the event. Rankeanism prefers sources as close to the event as possible chronologically. Journalism, and oral history, however, prefer sources as close to the event as can be laid hands on.

6) quantifying eyewitness testimony has been done fairly extensively in psychology. Aside from Elizabeth Loftus's pioneering work there are also specialist studies by Willem Wagenaar, who appeared as an expert witness for the Demjanjuk defense in 1987. Wagenaar's main study examined the memories of Dutch political prisoners held by the Nazis in a camp in Holland, IIRC, finding a postwar sample of statements and then reinterviewing them in the 1980s, and found unsurprisingly a considerable deterioration of some details along with a fairly high consistency on aspects he identified as 'core'. Historians have also quantified testimonies, notably Christopher Browning, who cut his teeth on more than 100 statements from Battalion 101 and noted the trends in this large sample, and then recently studied an unusually large sample of many hundreds of survivors from Starachowice labour camp. Browning found that circa 1980, these survivors started incorporating elements of the 'conventional Holocaust narrative' into their testimonies. The main example concerned their arrival at Auschwitz in 1944 - the transport was not selected, but after 1980, some of the survivors started 'remembering' Mengele conducting a selection.

7) the quantitative dimension is fundamentally why all your blethering is meaningless. There are probably more than 100,000 statements, testimonies or memoirs from Holocaust survivors in the narrow sense. The Central Jewish Historical Commission gathered 7000 in 1945-48 or so; DEGOB in Hungary gathered 4000, another 1000 were taken by the Jewish Agency in Romania; there are probably more than 1000 statements in the Polish Auschwitz investigation, 1400 witnesses were interrogated for the Frankfurt Auschwitz pre-trial investigation, so even with overlaps you are looking at more than 10,000 statements in just these collections. There are 1000s of memoirs, and 10s of 1000s of recent testimonies; there were 1000s of investigations in West Germany in the 1960s and 1970s into practically every sub-camp of a KZ and every district of occupied Poland. Since 1980 or so there have been probably 30,000 more testimonies produced.

I'm simply not going to be moved by the odd 'crazy' survivor a la Zisblatt until it is shown that they are a demonstrably and abnormally large percentage of these totals. Pointing to a supposedly particularly crazy survivor doesn't change this. I want proof that a full third or a half of all testimonies are utter bollocks. If revisionism was to be taken seriously, it would at least examine properly constructed samples numbering into the hundreds. I don't think the 'serious' revisionists have even got past 250 witnesses in 65 years of trying, including SS witnesses. And there is no revisionist book that examines more than about 50 of them in one go. Whereas scholars can produce works examining 100s.

8) unsurprisingly given the status of the Witness in Western society of the late 20th and early 21st centuries, 'fake' survivors do exist for the Holocaust, meaning people who were not actually in Nazi camps or ghettos. The evidence for there being more fake Vietnam vets is clearly laid out in BG Burkett's book Stolen Valor, which whatever one thinks of the author's obvious political biases, amasses enough examples to show that there flatly are more fake Vietnam vets than there have been fake Holocaust survivors. That's why Congress passed the Stolen Valor Act to clamp down on impostors claiming to have won the Medal of Honor and other military awards. A company manufactured more than twice as many Medals of Honor as there are living recipients. You also get guys like this one who claim to have won 17 medals while serving in the SAS. Or this one. Or this one, whose fake SAS service was swallowed by publishers, other military authors and magazines.

In fact, just looking at the Wiki entry for 'impostor' reveals enough examples of frauds that it's difficult to get worked up over a tiny handful of fake Holocaust survivors. And that some of them slip through the net for a brief while? Tell that to the New York Times which for a while had problem after problem with supposedly respected reporters fabricating stories.

9) How do we weigh different testimonies together? It is fairly obvious and intuitive how we do that. I suggest you look up Twining, Analysis of Evidence, or Wigmore, or Schum, or Douglas Walton's extensive work on testimony if you want something more theoretical. The bottom line is that none of your favourite examples or indeed, deniers' favourite examples, matter a damn when they target witnesses who played absolutely no role in the legal proceedings related to the different camps and who are not cited by historians.

10) the final point is obvious to anyone but, it seems, a denier. That is how documents and witnesses can be combined to write narratives. Deniers usually fixate on an abstracted ideal type of the procedure and ignore how practices change over time. Those subtle changes are precisely what one can get at most easily with testimonies. Belzec started out using a lot of deception to lull the victims, but as the news spread then the SS and Trawnikis started using massive amounts of coercion and violence to achieve their aim. The spread of knowledge is documented in diaries and contemporary underground reports. The witness testimonies - in this case, exclusively from the perpetrators, since only 2 Jews survived Belzec to give proper accounts - confirm this and are in turn confirmed by the external reports and diaries. Auschwitz underwent massive changes in practices and procedures depending on the killing sites used and the phase in question. This not only conforms to how real organisations usually work, it is confirmed by contemporary accounts, witnesses and sensible interpretations of the documents.

Basically, if you're going to try to criticise the evidence, you had better (a) know what it is and (b) not strawman it.

Talk about idiocy. The soap stands tall as do gas chambers and gas vans.

How many pick ups would be needed before "the gas vans are coming, the gas vans are coming"?

How many Zyklon-B gas chamber executions would it have taken the Germans to figure out that pumping the air out of the chamber would be faster and much safer for the workers?

 

[MG1962]

Talk about idiocy. The soap stands tall as do gas chambers and gas vans.

How many pick ups would be needed before "the gas vans are coming, the gas vans are coming"?

How many Zyklon-B gas chamber executions would it have taken the Germans to figure out that pumping the air out of the chamber would be faster and much safer for the workers?

Yeah all the survivors would be spreading the word

 

[Corsair 115]

Talk about idiocy. The soap stands tall as do gas chambers and gas vans.

How many pick ups would be needed before "the gas vans are coming, the gas vans are coming"?

How many Zyklon-B gas chamber executions would it have taken the Germans to figure out that pumping the air out of the chamber would be faster and much safer for the workers?

What a contrast. Nick Terry offers up a long, detailed, well-written post... and Clayton offers the above.

It's like watching a fight between an elephant and an ant. Only Clayton the ant (and his fellow colony compatriots) doesn't realize just how often and how thoroughly he's been squashed.

 

[Saggy]

Basically, if you're going to try to criticise the evidence, you had better (a) know what it is and (b) not strawman it.

'Evidence'? There is no evidence. And why would we need strawmen when we have Mueller, Weirnik, Bomba, Weisel? These are the most reliable 'witnesses' as selected not by the revisionists, but by the holohoax establishment. The quickest way to understand the holohoax is to read the original 'testimony' of these pathological liars.