It's perhaps unsurprising that you rewrite thread history yet again. Treblinka only recurred because you issued one of your typical handwaving pronouncements that it was 'physically impossible'. You specified 'scale' as the reason for this impossibility.
Naturally, you were challenged on this by several posters. I enquired as to whether the argument about 'scale' could cope with 42 other sites where the Nazis had cremated bodies en masse, many of which also saw gassings. To date you've not really come back with a coherent reply to this. But it's there, waiting in the wings, no matter how much you try to reduce the focus to Treblinka.
I gave a coherent reply: The other forty two sites where the Nazis cremated bodies en masse, many of which also saw gassings are irrelevant. No matter how often you try to confuse the issue at hand there is nothing there, waiting in the wings, with those other camps.
I mean, I presume you understand that an argument about scale can only make any sense if you can specify the threshold past which scale might actually matter. And that you're likely to be left with a lot of sites where an argument about scale doesn't apply.
Of course. That's why we're only talking about Treblinka.
I also presume that you understand it's perfectly possible for Arad's figure of 870,000 to be "impossible", but for the impossibility not to apply to a figure below 800,000. In which case: where is the threshold? 700,000? 600,000? 500,000? How can you establish this convincingly?
That is definitely the challenging part, especially with the gullibility and magical thinking of team holocaust. And the relevant Arad figure is 700,000 anyway--just another of those things that need to be agreed to in advance.
It's your claim, so you're the one who has to specify the threshold. If you don't specify a threshold and establish theoretical or hypothetical maximums, then your argument re: scale will be incomplete and will fail.
Uh......yeah. And that threshold must be established using data we all agree is accurate.
Invoking impossibility naturally prompts the question of what was possible. Unless you are going to argue that Jews are inflammable, then at some point you're going to have to concede that it's perfectly possible to cremate large numbers of human beings in the open, since this was done several dozen times by the Nazis at sites with bodycounts varying by two orders of magnitude, from 7,000 to more than 700,000 victims. You've only chosen to dispute the higher end, however.
But even the higher end doesn't seem intrinsically impossible given that the British Army and MAFF managed to incinerate 10s of 1000s of tons of FMD-culled animal carcasses in a very short space of time just over 10 years ago, and also buried 61,000 tons of carcasses at four sites, the latter weight being equal to or very near to the most probable weight of the corpses produced by the three Reinhard camps. (It would work out at 870,000 adult males averaging 70kg, or 1.2-1.3 million men, women and children with an average weight of 45-50kg, bearing in mind that children will pull the average down drastically, and arguably even lower than 45kg).
Again, uh........yeah. But also keep in mind that Jews aren't cows. Pigs are the animal most similar to Jews (and other humans) but pigs aren't perfect either. None of these incinerations were done in secret, they didn't involve burying all the animals first and then digging them up and burning them using fresh cut wood and a flammable substance. The bones weren't smashed by people using wooden mallets and there's probably some pretty good documentation of the event.
uke2se not unreasonably asked you to show your maths. Instead of answering him, you went on a long ramble about Arad and got called on it by several posters, including me. It doesn't actually matter whether anyone calling you on this advanced any counter-evidence or counter-argument, the simple fact is that you hadn't advanced an argument of your own worth refuting.
You still haven't, and now you tell us it will await your 'review' of the sources recommended to you by me up thread, even though they are the same sources which have been mentioned before in previous Treblinka discussions (again, with me and others). Understandably, this prima facie evidence of your inability to digest information pisses people off.
If anybody is pissed off they can stop being angry and start answering questions. Are the sources you cited reliable?
You can use whatever numbers you like, Dogzilla. It's your argument, not ours. But you have been given fair warning that there are a variety of sources you might want to take into consideration before advancing your argument.
And that is why I will only use team holocaust approved sources.
Another issue which needs to be borne in mind is the time scale. It is certainly more than possible that if you went for the worst-case scenario of 700,000 bodies tumbling into graves simultaneously, then they wouldn't have fitted. But all the evidence points to the fact that those bodies were dumped into graves over a period of many months.
But none of them were taken out and removed until they were all there. They didn't fall into the holes in the ground at the same time but they were all there at the same time.
Not only would space efficiency be optimised by practice and experience,
The guards supervising the sondercommando could have learned how to optimize the placement of bodies through observation and might have been able to provide advice to the grunts doing the actual work. But this doesn't fit with the eyewitness testimony. Survivors tell us the guards were occupied with unspeakable acts of cruelty rather developing training programs. Perpetrators don't talk about any training programs either. Any skills the sondercommando gained would have been self-taught and the increase in productivity would have been lost every time the commando team was liquidated.
but decomposition would certainly come into play.
This seems to have been the case at Belzec, for which we possess much better data regarding the grave dimensions and number of graves. There is a fair bit of empirical data on what happens when bodies decompose, which would have to be taken into consideration in any serious discussion. So any argument you make would have to take into consideration how the situation played out over time.
Decomposition would have had negligible effects. The initial bodies would have bloated at first, increasing the space they occupied. As more layers of bodies were dumped on top and covered with a layer of soil or chlorine or lime, air circulation would have been greatly reduced and decomposition might have stopped completely. The first bodies would have been in the ground for no more than four months before the onset of winter. The cold weather would have severely curtailed any decomposition even further. After five months or so of being buried in frozen earth, the bodies were dug up and burned.
If the investigative team at Belzec was drilling through what it believed were corpses transforming into waxy fat fifty years after the last innocent gasped his final breath, it means there was a very very slow breakdown of organic material.
So, yes, of course, decomposition must be taken into account. But it wouldn't change much.
I would also give you fair warning that some of the issues cannot be resolved easily one way or another. The number and exact dimensions of the graves at Treblinka is one of them.
Uh oh. Here comes the team holocaust waltz.
We have much better data on those things for Belzec and Sobibor.
We have no such thing for Sobibor and the 'data' for Belzec doesn't prove the case.
Given this uncertainty, if you're going to try debunking the graves then you should do the sensible scientific thing of best/middle/worst case scenarios. As should be clear, it is quite likely that a worst case scenario can be debunked. But given the uncertainties you would have to debunk the best, middle and worst case scenarios to claim 'impossibility'.
So rather than trying to find some general agreement on one set of numbers (for Treblinka), it would be much more pleasant all round (and virtually revolutionary for a denier) if you went the best/middle/worst case route.
Of course there's going to be a range. But it will be relatively narrow. If you don't have a pretty good idea of all the relevant data then you don't have the ability to know if it is possible or not.
That's also another reason why the other 42 sites were mentioned. You know full well that Belzec, Sobibor and Chelmno have been excavated and much better data is now available than was the case in 1945. Any argument about mass graves or cremation is thus going to stand or fall on how it deals with those three camp sites. If there is no impossibility with those, then the chances of there being a genuine impossibility with Treblinka are slim to none.
Any 'excavations' at Belzec, Sobibor, and Chelmno are a joke and are more useful for what they didn't find rather than what they did. Arguments regarding Treblinka won't stand or fall on those three camps anyway. Studies of non-holocaust mass graves, both for their methodology and their findings, are far more relevant than any other AR camps.
