MG1962
Unregistered
- Joined
- Sep 27, 2006
- Messages
- 17,252
I have no idea what you are talking about
Merged General Holocaust denial discussion thread
- Thread starter kageki
- Start date
- Status
I have no idea what you are talking about
Wroclaw
Graduate Poster
- Joined
- Jan 4, 2011
- Messages
- 1,500
As a non-partisan organization, it's not the role of the ICRC to do such things. At most, it could have reported war crimes to a responsible authority and left it there. It feared if it did so it would then be barred by Germany from visiting other camps where war crimes were not being committed. Half a loaf, in this case, was better than none, particularly given their powerlessness.
If that sounds "Paterno-ish" to you, I suggest — yet again — that you've never had a gun to your head.
Clayton Moore
Banned
- Joined
- Apr 23, 2008
- Messages
- 7,508
Back when I traversed the Silver Strand if a teenage or old man guard did indeed put a gun to my head it's likely he would have ate it.
So exterminating the Jews was a ground up decision like Irving postulates? Not a decision that started at the top? That sounds reasonable to me...except for the part about a conscious decision to exterminate the Jews.
Yeah right. My holocaust model has always been that it's a single monolithic hard edged object and questioning part of it is tantamount to denying all of it. <=(That's sarcasm. In case you missed it.)
Do you have any examples of these "instructions" that initiated the early mass extermination actions targeting Jews? Do you have examples of Himmler's and Heydrich's orders that expanded the mass extermination actions against the Jews? Specifically orders to exterminate Jews qua Jews. Not Jews qua partisans or black market profiteers or looters, etc. and not innocent Jews shot in reprisal.
The Jaeger Report is evidence of anti-partisan actions. Some might say the anti-partisan actions were sometimes excessive but unfortunately excesses have always been a part of war. Even if it were evidence of mass murder actions, it does not 'therefore' follow that there is good evidence for mass murders at Ponar.
I called Pesye Schloss pathetic. I said if the rest of the evidence is of the same calibre as Pesye Schloss, then I'd agree that it's all pathetic. Those are rather important 'ifs' however. The definition and nature of the "holocaust" has always been an ongoing problem.
If "National Socialist extermination actions" are actions that intended to and resulted in the deaths of Jews that were instigated by the Nazi government in furtherance of a state policy to kill every Jew they can, then, yes, I do have a knee-jerk reflex to deny that. But Nazi's killing Jews? No. I do don't deny that that happened. But I do have a problem with saying that every Jew who was missing at the end of World War II was dead and that every Jew who was dead was murdered because of the Nazi policy to exterminate all the Jews in Europe.
No. Pesye Schloss is pathetic. I did not say all the evidence of National Socialist instigated murder operations in Lithuania is pathetic--unless it is all of the same calibre as Pesye Schloss. Would you happen to have any evidence that ninety percent of Lithuania's pre-war Jewish population was "murdered?" That is, that they were killed. They were killed because they were Jews. They were not killed because they were engaged in resistance or criminal activity. They were not killed in a reprisal action. They were not killed because were in the wrong place at the wrong time. They were not killed by the Germans for any other reason than because they were Jews and if they hadn't been Jews they would not have been killed by the Germans and they would have been alive at the end of the war.
How do I define "cleanings?" The same way the UN defines it. How do I define "holocaust?" The holocaust is what happened to the Jews in Europe during World War II. What exactly that was is what I am trying to understand.
I have not heard of the intentionalists being broken down into further categories based upon how far back the intent can be traced. I just know functionalist and intentionalist. These categories are good for giving the illusion of an open debate on the holocaust but they're really not. If you don't know if the decision to kill the Jews was always in place or if it evolved into that due to the exigencies of war, you don't know if there actually was a plan in place to kill all the Jews. Besides, ultimately you guys are all intentionalists anyway. The functionalist says the decision to exterminate the Jews evolved out of the exigencies of the war. But at some point somebody had to make a conscious decision to exterminate the Jews in response to these exigencies of war. Otherwise, there never was a plan to intentionally exterminate the Jews.
One good way to get yourself called a holocaust denier is to say that the Final Solution was policy of ethnic cleansing, not extermination. Saying that the Nazi government displayed a shocking disregard for the welfare of the people targeted by this ethnic cleansing and which therefore resulted in the deaths of many innocent lives isn't enough to avoid the label of holocaust denier. So the INTENTIONAL murder of the Jews is necessary. In fact, since saying there was no intent to murder all the Jews is the same thing as saying there was no holocaust, it's not an exagerration to say that without the intentional premeditated state-sponsored policy of extermination, you don't have a holocaust.
But now you're saying that there were Jews who were murdered by the Nazis before there was a master plan to exterminate all the Jews. But these murders were actions that are still considered holocaust related deaths. How can that be? You can't have it both ways.
When I say there are no documents, I mean that there are no documents that support the notion that Jews are to be killed. I don't mean that the Allies didn't capture any Nazi documents. They captured and preserved mountains of documentation. And all that documentation clearly shows a policy of ethnic cleansing. Intending to make regions free of Jews does not prove an intent to kill the Jews.
No. I said IF they are all as credible as Pesye Schloss, then they can all be dismissed.
No. I said the documentation for the holocaust by bullets part of the holocaust MIGHT be pathetic. IF all the documentation for the holocaust by bullets part of the holocaust is as credible as Pesye Schloss, then, yes, the documentation is pathetic. I don't believe it is. But it was your team that named Pesye Schloss as a credible Jewish eyewitness to the holocaust. It was your team that confirmed that Pesye Schloss is as good as it gets. That is why I suspect all of it.
And in the final analysis, if there isn't any evidence that there were ever mass graves where we're told there are mass graves, nothing anybody says or writes matters anyway.
I know that you consider Pesye Schloss a credible witness. It gives us all great insight into the mindset of holocaust scholarship. In Pesye Schloss we have a person who cannot be independently verified to have ever existed who gives testimony to a man who summarizes it in his diary which he has the foresight to bury hours before he is murdered in 1944 but which is later dug up by the only person out of six who witnessed it being buried after which it sat around for seventeen years before it was published in 1961. The chain of custody from Pesye Schloss to us has been shattered which is why her testimony is worthless.
To assess an eyewitnesses credibility, you must first be able to distinguish the eyewitness from a person who is a figment of another person's imagination. Pesye Schloss fails right there.
If Pesye could be verified to have existed, we might have a credible eyewitness if we knew what she said. But we don't have first hand testimony. We have an interpretation of her first hand testimony in a summary written by Kruk in his diary. So Pesye fails at that juncture.
We could maybe salvage some credibility if we could interview Kruk to ask him for some detail about Pesye's testimony. Like, what did she mean when she said the men were numbed with blows to the head and it wasn't until later that they were shot. Were they knocked unconscious? Were walking around in a stupor waiting to be shot? How long were they "numb" before they were shot? If they were unconscious, how did they get to the mass graves to be shot? And what's up with that part about getting shot in the foot?
The scene described by Pesye Schloss is one that any intelligent reader would question. We wouldn't want to immediately dismiss the testimony. But we would want some answers from Kruk before we accepted it.
But we can't find out any of this detail because Kruk himself was killed before the end of the war. So Pesye fails again at this juncture.
So what we have is the testimony of Pesye Schloss as interpreted by Kruk as interpreted by the person who translated and edited what Kruk wrote in his diary that wasn't published until seventeen years after Kruk had buried the diary right before being shot.
And this is what passes for credible testimony in the world of holocaust scholarship? This is eyewitness testimony that is as credible as any other eyewitness testimony? This is what holoscholars would describe as direct first person testimony?
Maybe the Germans gave them all beer before they boarded the death truck? The Germans always had plenty of beer, being Germans and all.
TSR
Illuminator
- Joined
- Mar 8, 2009
- Messages
- 4,783
.
Which is, of course, why Jews are listed separately, as are Jewish children.
Do yourself a favour, actually *read* the damned thing before you continue to discuss things you obviously know nothing about.
Or are you going to whine now again that you don't do that, all evidence to the contrary notwithstanding?
.
Robrob
Philosopher
- Joined
- Aug 29, 2011
- Messages
- 5,497
Everyone is a tough guy on the internet.
Funny how in all the gun massacres, Columbine, Norway, India, Virginia Tech, etc... no one has ever been as tough as you claim to be.
I guess you are uniquely amazing.
LemmyCaution
Master Poster
- Joined
- Mar 8, 2011
- Messages
- 2,857
Thank you, ANTPogo. So, here we have my mention of The Complete Black Book of Russian Jewry, Saggy's response quoting from what he claims to be a book he owns presumably on Polish Jews during the war, Saggy's refusal to cite the page for his quotation, a number of Internet references to the purported quotation but with little consistency, and Porter's Website. At least Saggy may now know where Poland and Russia are, so this tangent hasn't been a total loss.
I'm a little disappointed in Porter's list, which is very incomplete, I assure you. There are many more absurdities in the book than those he listed.
I was not aware of the various Black Books, so now I believe there is a 'Black Book', a 'Black Book of Soviet Jewry', and a 'Black Book of Polish Jewry'. Does anyone know the connection between the books?
LemmyCaution
Master Poster
- Joined
- Mar 8, 2011
- Messages
- 2,857
In the posts of mine you are replying to, I wrote the following: 1) "Jaeger's report on 'Secret Reich Business!' does, of course, refer to a policy of the state in eliminating most of the Jews in his sphere of operation, using the phrases 'goal of making Lithuania free of Jews' and 'decision to systematically make every district free of Jews' and reporting agreements reached with the civil administration and military on the numbers to be killed that fall. The report came before historians conclude there had been a decision in favor of a European-wide extermination of Jews." 2) "[The Jaeger Report] reflected a policy to exterminate Jews in Lithuania, unequivocally, and can be connected to other documents and actions to kill Jews throughout the East, even before the general European program was decided." 3) "The early mass extermination actions targeting Jews, initiated by instructions to the Einsatzgruppen and then expanded by orders from Himmler and Heydrich in the summer of 1941, occurred in the East, with victims being Jews living in the occupied East. There are documents and other evidence that show this. One such document is the Jaeger Report." 4) "[T]he intention to murder all of Europe's Jews developed over time, with input from regional activists as well as central orders."
For now, let's stick with one simple question: Why do you mislead about what I wrote and set up a strawman, claiming that I restricted the decision-making to the periphery (or as you put it, even when I wrote about "input" from regions AND "central orders" and mentioned that the EG murders were based on central instructions, "exterminating the Jews was a ground up decision like Irving postulates")?
I think the members of this forum would be interested in what makes you dishonest, why you distorted what I wrote, and why you think strawmen are a substitute for real discussion.
No, I understand sarcasm and underlining it kind of ruins the effect. Still, you miss my point: First, I don't know what your model is and cannot discern it from the way you knee-jerk and jump around. Second, instead of assuming what your viewpoint is, I told you that one point you'd written - about a plan to exterminate all Jews of Europe - hinted at an intentionalist model and then asked if that is what you were probing for. In the same vein, I asked, "How do you define cleansing? How do you define the Holocaust?" I truly don't know what you think about this - you could answer directly, or you could use more rather lame sarcasm.
Before the initiation of Barbarossa, Heydrich specifically ordered the murder of some classes of Jews (his communique to HSSPFs of 2 July 1941); the Ereignismeldungen trace the expansion of limited categories of Jews to include whole populations (as I told you, the Ereignismeldungen were official reports filed from the field, compiled by the Gestapo, and distributed to senior officials of the government and party). There is postwar trial testimony about this: By early August, Filbert's EK 9 was killing women and children as well as male Jews in the region of Army Group Center. Filbert gave postwar testimony that he was ordered to shoot women and children by Nebe, commander of EG B. Although not the first such expanded action, the Vitebsk extermination in August is often cited in this regard. Bradfisch, leader of EK8, also testified after the war that when Himmler came to Minsk in summer 1941 to observe an execution there, Himmler had explained the existence of a Fuhrer order calling for the "difficult" task of executions of all the Jews. Bradfisch also testified that Nebe had informed him that "there exists an order from the Führer according to which all Jews, i.e. also women and children, are to be exterminated." This postwar testimony meshes with details of the Ereignismeldungen.
Have you read the Jaeger Report? Please show where in that report the extermination actions are shown to involve anti-partisan actions. Further, please show what anti-partisan activity existed, for example, in the cities of Vilna and Kovno at that time and which caused residents, including children (as TSR points out) to be taken to the woods at Ponar or to the Seventh and Ninth Forts to be executed. Please name the leaders of these partisan groups, where they were headquartered and operating, and actions they had carried out.
Those "some" who might argue this are either apologists for the Nazi mass murders or ignorant of the events. Or the same type of people who think that the murders of 10s of 1000s of Jews are similar to what happened at Abu Ghraib.
I suggest you re-read this post http://www.internationalskeptics.com/forums/showpost.php?p=7865630&postcount=8312 in which it is shown from testimony at the NMT trial how Einsatzgruppen leaders explained that they shot Jews as Jews, even as they tried to exonerate themselves with anti-partisan/anti-communist rationales. I also suggest you read the trial judgment itself and at least some of the Ereignismeldungen.
Not one of you deniers here has yet, to go at this a different way, explained why the terms judenrein and judenfrei existed and how they were used.
Finally, as to "unfortunate excesses," 90% of Lithuania's Jews were murdered during the war years, that is around 195,000, mostly in fall 1941. In Vilna, where according to Jaeger and to other sources, like diaries, memoirs, and testimony, of the maybe 70,000 Jews living in the city in spring/summer 1941, by December, according to Arad using mostly German sources, about 27,000 of these Jews had been murdered. As described above, in the summer the victims were restricted to certain groups of Jews (males, for one thing) but by September the victims were simply Jews - men, women, children. For you to call this sort of action an unfortunate excess connected to anti-partisan activity shows the bankruptcy of your position. You are wriggling and squirming to apologize for, minimize, obfuscate or otherwise deny genocidal crimes.
Now, you need to show 1) the anti-partisan activity at Vilna and Kovno , for example, prompting these mass murders in summer and fall 1941, 2) how these mass murders were responsive to such alleged activity, and 3) how Jeager in his report explained this.
That is not what you wrote. You specifically called "the documentation . . . for the holocaust by bullet" to be "pathetic" based on a discussion in which Pesye Schloss figured. That is what you wrote. I quoted what you wrote and, yep, there it is, you called the documentation for Ponar, which you haven't read, "pathetic," as here, "It wasn't until the Pesye Schloss discussion that I realized how pathetic the documentation might be for the holocaust by bullets part of the holocaust." Your "if the rest" signals again that you don't know what you're talking about - your not knowing what the evidence you seem hell-bent on rejecting does in fact say.
For you to be taken remotely seriously, you need to read at least some of the sources mentioned in this discussion. You are really showing both your ignorance and your knee-jerk negationism.
Well, here is another strawman, in fact two. We've been over your strawmanning before, so let's pursue another angle on this: Tell us, according to your best thinking, based on what you know, and tell us roughly how you know this, 1) how many Vilna Jews were ordered killed and killed by the National Socialists in 1941? 2) how many Lithuanian Jews out of a pre-war population of approximately 210,000 were killed in extermination actions? 3) how many eastern Jews were murdered by the Nazis and groups under their command in extermination actions during the years of the war? Give us high and low estimates if you'd like. And then 4) explain how these deaths were merely unfortunate excesses or by-products of legitimate anti-partisan or other military actions.
Well, I have been trying to share this evidence with you. You keep refusing to read it and go through it. Can you at least settle down and look at Jaeger and Sakowicz, say, just those two, for extermination actions of Jews at Vilna?
Among much other evidence, I cited Arad's book on Vilna ghetto and asked you or any other denier to critique his conclusions. I have mentioned the Ereignismeldungen and testimony from the trial of the EG leaders, but you haven't wanted to look at this material. Whenever you come up against this evidence, you hide behind its not being your area. If we could get you into the evidence for the Ponar murders, to take one example, then we could move on. You prefer making gratuitous and silly comments about one victim's report to actually engaging the full burden of the evidence. Why?
As it is, you seem to like asking hypotheticals - weren't these murders anti-partisan or "for any other reason than because they were Jews"? - without 1) looking at the evidence brought to you and 2) providing any contrary evidence. If you won't look at the evidence mentioned so far, what good will more do you?
So, in your view, assuming that 195,000 of Lithuania's 210,000 Jews were murdered in extermination actions, and that about 3 million Polish Jews were murdered in extermination actions, were these actions "cleansings" or cases of genocide?
You are really showing your ignorance again. You should read the vast literature on "the decision." It involves historians trying to pinpoint when the Nazis passed from regional extermination actions in the East to a European-wide program to murder Jews, for example, bringing western Jews along with eastern Jews to killing sites, building fixed facilities for mass murder, etc. I don't know of an argument that the evolution had to do with the "exigencies of war" (I wouldn't even put Mayer in such a category), but of an escalation or radicalization process driven by many factors.
Works you might consult are those by Breitman, Browning, Musial, Gerlach, Kershaw, Longerich, Epstein, and just published Gerwarth. These could help clear up your confused thoughts on this topic. And, no, these debates are not part of an attempt in academia to give an illusion of debate - you truly overestimate the significance of crankery. The works debating how the decision was made in favor of European-wide genocide are part of what academics do - study developments and try to clarify them. The study of history is full of such debate, and this topic is no different.
Who is arguing that there was no intention to murder Jews? I never argued this proposition. In fact, I quoted you passages from Jaeger's Report showing an intent to murder Jews in the Baltics. I really don't follow what you are trying to argue here. Earlier you seemed to be strawmanning an intentionalist position - intent as in an early master plan - now you just seem baffled. One problem is tying the concept of intent to a pre-existing master plan. I am not trying to do anything except reflect how the radicalization process, culminating in a decision to exterminate Europe's Jews, developed.
You are wrong.
Please read some of these documents. Really. You are just plain embarrassing yourself.
Instead of playing games, why don't you read the sources. "If," "might," haven't read, etc.: take a position, say what you mean, stop weaseling.
Stop playing rhetorical games.
You have had weeks and weeks of opportunity: state what you believe and why.
Again, I am not part of a team. Again, I mentioned Pesye Schloss, along with Yudis Trojak, as an example and to lead to a discussion, not as a witness who "is as good as it gets." You have ignored all the rest of the sources and evidence, in favor of speculating and knee-jerk dismissals based on wishful thinking, true to denier profile. There are problems with Pesye Schloss as a witness. Ditto Yudis Trojak. Ditto Oscar Strawczynski, whom I also mentioned. And so on. Every single witness presents problems - but most witnesses also offer value. Taken together, witness testimony, documents, and other evidence can work to inform us about what happened and how. Your failure to engage the totality of the sources is by now a joke.
Strawman. Ignoring material I've linked to within the past week or so as well.
The fact that you grab bits and pieces from posts on this thread, refuted, shows how you operate. Let's just take one point, Kruk's diary, to see how reliable you and LGR are: the portion written in Vilna during 1941-1943 was not with him in Klooga. So it was not buried "hours before he is murdered in 1944." How do you know what you claim? There is material in the early portion of the diary itself saying where it was - and there is other material showing where it was, in Vilna, hidden there. And yet you argue differently? Show us for this one issue how you use evidence to draw conclusions. Prove where the 1941 section of the diary was citing the totality of evidence for your claim.
Another simple request: You charge Kruk with fictionalizing a witness, Pesye Schloss. I have told you what I know about Schloss. Now you tell us how you know that Schloss is "a figment of another person's imagination," that is, Kruk's.
Because you want Pesye Schloss to be a figment of Kruk's imagination doesn't make her so. Her testimony exists with other testimony - in Kruk's diary. Kruk's diary exists alongside other testimony and sources. Survivors knew Kruk and so forth. You have been unable, week after week, to show why Kruk is not credible. You stay miles away from other witnesses whose testimony corroborates reports in Kruk - because these witnesses (and Jaeger) are fatal to your beliefs. And that's what you are left with - beliefs. You could look at what is in Kruk. You could compare it to other sources, you could examine the supposed problems you raise, such as translation (have you read the Yiddish? do you have grounds to suspect the translation? etc.). You could read Kruk and try to evaluate his reliability and his "proneness" to fictionalize and the like. You could evaluate Jaeger and Sakowicz. But you don't. You ask hypothetical questions, which are answered in the sources by the way, and you clutch at straws - yourself fictionalizing, for example, that Kruk's diary was in Estonia.
Again I suggest that before you mouth off, you actually read the sources you're mouthing off about.
Last edited:
LemmyCaution
Master Poster
- Joined
- Mar 8, 2011
- Messages
- 2,857
Figure it out for yourself. What page is the material you quoted on - and from which book, copyright what year?
A'isha
Miss Schoolteacher
Yes, Saggy...if you have this particular book with the exact same quote as found in the photocopies printed by Porter, can you please transcribe the publication information on the copyright page? Especially the title, publisher, and ISBN.
Thank you.
Thank you.
John Ball on how reconnaisance photos disprove the claims of Babi Yar www.air-photo.com/english/ Scroll down to section on Babi Yar.
Carlos Porter on the unreliability of prosecution einsatzgruppen documents www.cwporter.com/cl180.htm
Jurgen Graf talks about the einsatzgruppen in his book The Giant With Feet of Clay Chapter V www.vho.org/GB/Books/Giant/
Carlos Porter on the unreliability of prosecution einsatzgruppen documents www.cwporter.com/cl180.htm
Jurgen Graf talks about the einsatzgruppen in his book The Giant With Feet of Clay Chapter V www.vho.org/GB/Books/Giant/
TSR
Illuminator
- Joined
- Mar 8, 2009
- Messages
- 4,783
.
... who has no particular training on photographic analysis, posts unsourced photos, has been refuted by an *actual* expert employed in the field, and whose $100,000 challenge was quietly removed from his website *after* it had beeen accepted.
.
.
... who is on record as stating he does not speak German.
.
.
... neglects to take into account that the EG also used locals to help them murder, and ignores,e.g., the Jaeger report which explicitly details the killing of Jews qua Jews.
.
Walter Ego
Illuminator
So you sincerely and honestly do hate the Jews. Thanks for clarifying that.
Clayton Moore
Banned
- Joined
- Apr 23, 2008
- Messages
- 7,508
Wroclaw
Graduate Poster
- Joined
- Jan 4, 2011
- Messages
- 1,500
Ball and Porter? Are you kidding? Graf just got buried, along with Mattogno and Kues, by the way.
You spread ten inches of quicklime on the floor in the hermetically sealed cargo hold of a truck. You lock a bunch of Jews in the cargo hold and go for a drive. You drive around until at least one of the Jews complains he needs a bathroom break. You tell him that "urine alot of trouble because this van ain't stopping" while laughing maniacally. You keep driving around and around until eventually the call of nature overwhelms everything the Jews learned in Finishing School about proper urination behavior and the guy just whips out his trouser snake and drains the lizard on the floor. The combination of urine and the quicklime on the floor generates gas and fumes which choke the Jews to death.
Gas and fumes resulting from the combination of quicklime and water (or urine) is going to be the least of their problems.The truck is hermetically sealed. There are four times as many people crammed into this hermetically sealed cargo hold than the truck is designed to carry. The Jews are going to run out of oxygen before they need to urinate.
If for some reason they don't suffocate first, the heat from all the bodies is going to cause sweating. Quicklime and water (or sweat or urine) generate heat first and foremost. This will cause the temperature to rise which will lead to more sweating which will lead to more liquid saturating the quicklime which will lead to more heat. As the temperature rises, the air inside the hermetically sealed cargo hold expands. Eventually this heat build up would cause the cargo hold to burst. This would put the driver in a very dangerous situation. The heat generated by water and quicklime can become hot enough to ignite combustible materials, such as the clothing of the Jews. The cargo hold itself might catch on fire. A fire in the cargo hold of the truck is going to be close enough to the fuel tanks of the truck to create a possible explosion hazard.
So this method of exterminating the Jews isn't going to kill the Jews the way the passages says it did. It's going to create a situation that will put the driver of the vehicle in danger of being killed or seriously injured and might destroy the truck in the process.
That is what is "absurd" about the passage.
abaddon
Penultimate Amazing
Why must the truck be hermetically sealed?
How many die each year due to carbon monoxide poisoning in their own homes?
How many of those homes are hermetically sealed?
- Status