Merged General Holocaust denial discussion thread

[Wroclaw]

Do you really think that the citizens of towns would not fight the Einsatzgruppen?

How do you propose that unarmed people do that?

 

[SanityGap]

Einsatzgruppen?

So you're saying the Einsatzgruppen knew beforehand where the Jewish people lived and went house to house and killed the occupants of only Jewish homes? And the Jewish people just hung in there and waited for the Einsatzgruppen who had been killing Jewish people in a neighboring town?

I recommend the BBC production of "Nazis and the Final Solution" in which you can watch an ex Einsatzgruppen member describe in detail how they performed their "duties". Part one "Early beginnings".

Should be easier than using a library for you.

 

[Moss]

Small question: Where would I find the casualty numbers of members of the Einsatzgruppen?

 

[Nick Terry]

I'm not sure if I have said this before but, then that is the nature of the evidence.

What you have done here is describe the nature of the evidence for various investigations. That's all I'm asking. When I ask when westerners were allowed access to Auschwitz, that's what I want to know. It is important because it *might* impact the reliability of the evidence. If westerners weren't allowed in until 1988, then that is the nature of the evidence. There's no value judgement on that.

When Saggy asks when the Poles admitted the hoax gas chamber at Auschwitz was a hoax, there's a little bit more of a value judgement but his question is legitimate. You said the West German prosecutors had been given the Sehn report when they conducted their investigation for the trials. So, IF they read the report that said the "gas chamber" had been converted into an air raid shelter by the Germans, then..if they thought about it..they would know that obviously the "gas chamber" they were looking at had to be a "reconstruction" because it didn't look like an air raid shelter (when in fact it really does). But you said they were there to verify lines of sight, not to investigate the "gas chamber" so whatever the Sehn report says about modifications wasn't relevant at all to them. Or to answering the question. The question is when were visitors told that the "gas chamber" was a "reconstruction"? The question is not when were visitors given a copy of the Sehn report and could read about the gas chamber into air raid shelter conversion and figure out for themselves what had happened.

It's a reasonable question because it addresses how open the Poles are about the site. If the Poles tell tourists the "gas chamber" is in the original state and not a reconstruction, then they're being deceptive. It's legitimate to ask why.

If I ask when westerners were allowed in to inspect the site or Saggy asks when they admitted the modifications to the "gas chamber" and you say you don't know and you don't care and asking the question is stupid, that makes me think that either YOU don't care how reliable the evidence is as long as it supports your per-determined conclusion OR that you know the evidence is weak and are afraid that answering the question will lead to the same conclusion.

You didn't answer our specific questions but you did share some insights into how information passed back and forth between the East and the West. I guess you believe that the results of Soviet bloc investigations were trusted because the holocaust became an accepted historical fact by the end of the 1940s. That sort of sounds like a predetermined conclusion but maybe not.

A big problem I have with the trustworthiness of Soviet investigations into holocaustic crimes is Katyn. Actually, Katyn offers us many valuable lessons. For one, I assume that the Soviets blocked westerners from both Auschwitz and from Katyn right after the war. That impediment didn't prevent the Americans and the British from reaching the proper conclusion regarding Katyn, did it? So blocked access doesn't automatically mean any evidence is worthless and you don't need to get your tits in the wringer when someone asks when we did gain access.

Katyn also offer us a guide for assessing the relative value of the investigation of WWII atrocities. We know the Soviets investigated Katyn when they drove the Germans out. IIRC, it was a very complete and reasonably open process--certainly more extensive than their investigations of any death camps on Polish territory. We know they had expert witnesses brought in and were able to find Germans who freely and openly confessed to their involvement in the massacre. Did any of the Germans in Soviet custody deny the Katyn massacre? Did any of them blame it on the Soviets? Perhaps they denied their own responsibility for the crime but they didn't deny the crime itself, did they?

Now, let's pretend the Dutch wanted to put Germans on trial for Katyn. They would not need to physically visit the Katyn crime scene to investigate Katyn if they could interview Dutch citizens who were witnesses to the crime. They could be sent a copy of the Soviet investigation, right?

Likewise, the French wouldn't need access to Katyn if they wanted to carry out an investigation. They could have interviewed French eyewitnesses, produce a report and then they could sent their report to the Soviets who carried out a separate investigation which included expert testimony and perpetrator confessions, right?

If the West Germans traveled to Katyn because they wanted to verify lines of sight, and subsequently threw out hundreds of eyewitness statements because their investigations showed these eyewitnesses were mistaken, their investigation would be complete because they could use the results of the Extraordinary State Commission for ascertaining and investigating crimes perpetrated by the German–Fascist invaders and their accomplices, and the damage inflicted by them on citizens, collective farms, social organisations, State enterprises and institutions of the U.S.S.R report to fill in the details, right?

So if the East and the West had come to the conclusion that the the Germans were responsible for the Katyn incident, we could trust the Soviet investigation into Katyn because it agreed with our investigations. So the Soviet report would be valuable if a western government wanted to convict Germans of the crime. But how valuable would it be if they wanted to get to the truth?

So, yes, I am a bit suspicious of the Soviets. Don't get me wrong. The western allies aren't much better. Those were our shrunken heads and lampshades displayed to the world. And the United States produced a report saying that the conditions in the concentration camps were a result of deliberate German policy. So we're liars too. But it's helpful to know how long we had to rely on Soviet lies before we could start making up some of our own.

Your Katyn analogy isn't a very good one, I'm afraid, because the results of the Nazi and Soviet wartime investigations conflicted. Only some of the issues at stake were agreed upon. Nobody denied that there were mass graves full of Polish officers at Katyn, but the Soviet investigation spun this using forensic technobabble to argue for a 1940 date, despite points highlighted by the Nazis such as the date of documents found on the bodies. The NKVD leant on witnesses in the local area, with a full heavy mob arriving from Moscow. IIRC, some witnesses who had given evidence one way to the Nazis changed their tune when interrogated by the Soviets.

Meanwhile, the NKVD had no control over any other witnesses, including Wehrmacht officers who had been involved in organising the investigation. So it came to a standup fight at Nuremberg, with three witnesses on either side, heard over more than a day. Some reactions to this actually thought the Soviets had the better of the exchange. But the Allied judged prevailed on the Soviet judge to leave Katyn out since there was enough lingering doubt, no doubt fanned by Polish government-in-exile diplomacy and the widely voiced opinion among the Polish diaspora, that Katyn was a Soviet crime.

Then there was a US Congressional committee hearing on Katyn in 1951-2, during the Korean War. Polish exiles and also West Germans had continued to voice the opinion that Katyn was a Soviet crime. The Cold War climate made it opportune for US politicians to determine that this was so. But from then on, through all the bumps and twists of east-west relations, Katyn was seen as a Soviet crime in the West.

One important point you are missing is that so were a host of other sites seen as Soviet crimes - sites that had never been overrun by the Nazis and which had never been investigated using forensics.

This is ultimately why all your pseudolegalistic gambits, or your 'who-saw-what-when' gambits, will fail. The Cold war saw a strong consensus, which solidified ever more strongly, that Stalin had presided over the mass killing and mass death of millions of Soviet citizens. The evidence for this consisted of wishy-washy things like demographics, eyewitness testimonies and journalistic reports. It wasn't based on many documents if any and it wasn't based on forensic investigations. But it's fair to say that by the early 70s, everyone outside of diehard pro-Moscow communist parties in the west accepted Soviet mass murder as a reality.

You're also missing a crucial point, which is that very little of the Soviet investigations of Nazi war crimes were common knowledge by the 70s; it's only after the collapse of communism that we have reconstructed them in detail. Not so with Poland.

Merely pointing to the fact that Poland was a Soviet satellite and assuming that what is sauce for the goose is sauce for the gander would be an epic fail, since Poland didn't even become a one-party state until after the bulk of the investigations were over; and since there were demonstrable differences between the states in the East Bloc for obvious historical and cultural reasons.

One key difference was the degree of transparency and the lengths to which Polish authorities went to publish their source materials. The Poles didn't just stop with putting out German Crimes in Poland in 1946; that was an English translation of a journal of the Polish Main Commission which continues to this very day. The Jewish Historical Commission mutated into a Jewish Historical Institute which began publishing a journal in 1951. The Auschwitz museum started publishing a journal in 1957. The Majdanek museum started publishing a journal in the 1960s. There are documentary collections reproducing materials gathered for the Polish NTN trials and other cases which appeared in 1957, 1960 and on many other dates; in addition to the articles publishing documents in the various aforementioned journals.

Nothing like this degree of openness can be seen with the USSR, which essentially didn't bother to write a proper history of the war under Stalin, and which was extremely slow to commemorate even the frontline aspects of the war until the end of the Khrushchev era, much less acknowledge Nazi atrocities. When they started to do so, Soviet authors published materials cited from Soviet archives, which we can now see check out perfectly. A skilled scholar can parse their footnotes and locate their references very precisely. From the 1960s on you do get accurate information in Soviet accounts; it's just that before the 1960s, there were no accounts at all.

The Polish investigations were thus on display long before the end of the Cold War, and skilled scholars could integrate that material into their work by comparing the materials presented by the Poles with materials uncovered by the west. This especially applies, for what ought to be blindingly obvious reasons, to our knowledge of Auschwitz.

 

[OCaptain]

My superior intellect enables me to discern what is bilious Holocaust fabrication no matter the purported educational credentials of the source.

In other words, he's using the Pink Floyd defense:

"we don't need no education..."

 

[Wroclaw]

This is ultimately why all your pseudolegalistic gambits, or your 'who-saw-what-when' gambits, will fail. The Cold war saw a strong consensus, which solidified ever more strongly, that Stalin had presided over the mass killing and mass death of millions of Soviet citizens. The evidence for this consisted of wishy-washy things like demographics, eyewitness testimonies and journalistic reports. It wasn't based on many documents if any and it wasn't based on forensic investigations. But it's fair to say that by the early 70s, everyone outside of diehard pro-Moscow communist parties in the west accepted Soviet mass murder as a reality.

Bingo.

And I'm quite sure that Dogzilla, Saggy, CM, and others who deny the Holocaust readily accept Soviet mass murder as a reality in the face of such a lack of physical evidence. But they apply a different standard to the Holocaust. I wonder why.

 

[A'isha]

Bingo.

And I'm quite sure that Dogzilla, Saggy, CM, and others who deny the Holocaust readily accept Soviet mass murder as a reality in the face of such a lack of physical evidence. But they apply a different standard to the Holocaust. I wonder why.

Especially since CM's idiotic argument of "why didn't the victims fight back, huh?" would also apply to the Soviet mass murders.

How about it, Clayton? Do you think the Soviet atrocities occurred? If so, why didn't Stalin's victims fight back, do you think?

 

[Dogzilla]

so where did the transitees go?

WOW! I owe everybody here an apology! As you know, I'm a rigid visual-spacialist who has been led astray by the superficially logical argument that if you kill hundreds of thousands of people in one place and bury their bodies in holes in the ground there would be holes in the ground big enough to hold the bodies of hundreds of thousands of people. Conversely, if there aren't holes in the ground big enough to hold the bodies of hundreds of thousands of people then the the bodies of hundreds of thousands of people couldn't be buried there.

But I tuned into the BBC4 documentary on Treblinka featuring Sturdy Colls last night and realized that this chick is TOTALLY hot!. I mean, her smile and those soulful eyes alone persuaded me that a hole in the ground next to an old rock quarry is all the proof anybody needs that hundreds of thousands of innocent Jews were murdered there!!

As I continued listening, she explained what obviously probably happened to the bodies--and this gets to the heart of your question Nick. Starting around the 15:42 minute mark, I learned about how the Germans moved the oven next to a mass grave that held about a quarter million bodies. They loaded the proper number of bodies into the oven and then lit it on fire. But somehow the burning embers from the oven blew into the mass grave and the WHOLE GRAVE BURST INTO FLAMES! The blood was the fuel that flamed the inferno. The blood rose to the surface--no doubt from the well known geyser effect--and fire continued to burn. This is what the voice over said and because the voice sounded like an old man with a funny accent, it must be true. Besides, my sweet Caroline wouldn't lie to me.

So that's what happened to all the bodies. They caught on fire and they just burned until there was nothing left. Did you guys know this? Why didn't you tell me? It doesn't really matter because now I know that Treblinka really was a transit camp but that Heaven was the final destination.

I still have doubts about the gas chambers, though. Does anybody have a picture of Sturdy Colls in a bathing suit? That would convince me the gas chambers were real for sure.

 

[LemmyCaution]

So, in other words, you have no more clue about where the people taken through what you call transit camps went than you have about which units were involved in the killings in the east.

Your resort to flippant answers to important questions doesn't get you off the hook you've hung for yourself: you have made a number of claims, and you won't so much as support them. That is fine, and you needn't try to demonstrate the substance of your position. Your not trying to do so, however, especially when the other side offers detailed explanations of its positions, is unlikely to convince anyone of your claims.

 

[TSR]

They never arrived. That's the why of the fairy tales of Jewish people not being registered and instead going directly to the alleged gas chambers was made up.

.
How, then, do you explain all of those railway companies' records showing that they did, not to mention the fact that they were never heard from again?
.

The whole gassing myth is insane nonsense. The stupidity of gassing being an efficient way to kill large numbers of people is pure insanity.

.
And what evidence do you offer that it was not efficient?
.

Having enough labor and resources to gas millions of people, plus the labor to concurrently clean-up afterwards, plus the labor and resources to concurrently dispose of the corpses is even more unlikely/insane than the looney tune gassing nonsense.

.
Once again, demonstrating a fundamental ignorance of the history your deeply seated hatred requires you to pretend didn't happen.

Ever heard of the SK?
.

 

[Nick Terry]

A comment from a reader elsewhere, typo and all:

The lelvel of discussion at JREF is appalling. The three stooges don't seem to know a *********** thing about the Holocaust they deny happened. Since 100% of the readers seem to despise them and pick their illogic to pieces, I have forgotten the point.

Just sayin'.

 

[DirkSteele]

I'd hate to live in your head.

I thought this was a scientific objective logical website. I guess i was wrong.

 

[uke2se]

I thought this was a scientific objective logical website. I guess i was wrong.

Ohhh...

Could this be some much anticipated backup for our flailing deniers?

 

[DirkSteele]

What?

No.. not at all... dunno what happened to my truncated message... I am just saying that this issue will only be settled by science. I am a 54 year old that has always believed in what I was told. I am now starting to believe that the revisionists or whatever.. are correct.I am not anti-semite not a nazi... just please let us stick to science... although maybe science is political? I am not trying to agree or disagree.. but your insult to me is out of order...

 

[uke2se]

No.. not at all... dunno what happened to my truncated message... I am just saying that this issue will only be settled by science.

I has been settled by science.

I am a 54 year old that has always believed in what I was told.

Reading the rest of your post, it's obvious you still do.

I am now starting to believe that the revisionists or whatever.. are correct.

So, I was right. Why did you say "No.. not at all..."? Also, the deniers aren't correct, as this thread has shown.

I am not anti-semite not a nazi...

If you deny the holocaust, you are an antisemite.

just please let us stick to science...

We have been throughout this thread. The people making unscientific assertions backed by no evidence are the people you think are correct.

although maybe science is political?

No.

I am not trying to agree or disagree.. but your insult to me is out of order...

No, it's not. You pop into a discussion and pick up a small quote completely out of context and pass judgment on the entire forum because of it. I'd say you're out of order.

 

[DirkSteele]

Maybe I am out of order. I apologise. You are right I am wrong. Sorry. I was just saying.....

 

[DirkSteele]

You pop into a discussion and pick up a small quote completely out of context and pass judgment on the entire forum because of it. I'd say you're out of order


what quote? Sorry did not mean to pass judgement. Sorry yes obviously I am out of order. I will not post on this site ever again. What does that make you?

 

[tsig]

Maybe I am out of order. I apologise. You are right I am wrong. Sorry. I was just saying.....

What?

 

[Dogzilla]

So, in other words, you have no more clue about where the people taken through what you call transit camps went than you have about which units were involved in the killings in the east.

Your resort to flippant answers to important questions doesn't get you off the hook you've hung for yourself: you have made a number of claims, and you won't so much as support them. That is fine, and you needn't try to demonstrate the substance of your position. Your not trying to do so, however, especially when the other side offers detailed explanations of its positions, is unlikely to convince anyone of your claims.

I don't know why you would expect my answer to 'where did they go?' to be any different than it was last week? If the evidence that their bodies were buried at the transit camps is insufficient or nonexistent, then we cannot conclude their bodies were buried at the transit camps. If they were not buried at the transit camps, they went somewhere else. I have suggested looking in places where European Jews emigrated to after the war if you're looking for living Jews. If you've never looked for dead Jews at these sites, I would suggest doing that first before assuming they are there. Fortunately you have the lovely Ms Colls on top of it. It will be interesting to see what she comes up with. But beyond that I have no further interest in the whereabouts of any missing Jews.

Hypothetically speaking, if you could be convinced that hundreds of thousands of Jews had not been buried at the transit/death camps--and I don't know what that standard of evidence would be for you. But if overwhelming evidence were produced that convinced you that these people had never been buried at these sites, would you still believe they had been killed there?

 

[uke2se]

You pop into a discussion and pick up a small quote completely out of context and pass judgment on the entire forum because of it. I'd say you're out of order


what quote? Sorry did not mean to pass judgement. Sorry yes obviously I am out of order. I will not post on this site ever again. What does that make you?

Uhm...

Giddy?