General Holocaust Denial Discussion Part II

[ddt]

And how does that quote address in any way shape or form AntPogo's assertion that Jews never committed crimes? You presented us with that quote in response to Snakey's response to Antpogo about Antpogo's unsupported assertion that Jews never committed crimes. It must've had something to do with supporting Antpogo's assertion that Jews don't commit crimes or else it was an attempted derail. You said it wasn't an attempted derail. You said it wasn't random as well. I'll assume you're not suffering from Holotourettes's Syndrome so what you said must make sense in the context of AntPogo's crimeless Jews. Explain yourself.

ANTPogo never claimed Jews never committed crimes. He/she only said that the "crime" they were being sought for was being Jewish:

You know full well that the only "crime" these Jews had committed in the eyes of the official authorities was the crime of being a Jew.

 

[Marras]

I did not used "symbolic logic". I used mathematical symbolism.

Unless you are introducing your own art movement following the late 19th century French tradition, expressing arguments with mathematical symbols is symbolic logic.

It is gibberish and I never pretend that was "symbolic logic".

It is good that you acknowledge that what you posted didn't make any sense, though, it leaves open the question why you thought that posting gibberish was a good idea.

Did I typed anything indicating that?

Yes, you did. You wrote 'Argument:' before it and 'Completely illogical. Try again.' after it. I took that mean that the string of symbols was intended to represent a logical argument and not be a mathematical symbolist piece of art.

This is veering to offtopic side, but if you ever want to learn logic, I would advice against using the site that you linked to. For starters, I don't like its notation (using '⊃' instead of '⇒' for implication has a risk for confusion because '⊃' is used for supersets in mathematics) but more seriously it is incomplete. It contains only the basic truth tables of propositional logic and the rest of the site has been under construction for something like three years. For basics you want something that includes both propositional and predicate logics and preferably also a modern tree-based proof procedure.

I have to admit that I don't know any good website for learning symbolic logic as there weren't any when I was an undergrad and I haven't searched for one afterwards. However, any relatively good library should have a selection of textbooks. Pretty much anything written after 1980 is usable, but it's a good idea to choose one whose index contains the term 'resolution'. This is a quick way to check that the book contains at least some of the advances that were made during the 1900s - unfortunately, people still write textbooks of logic that wouldn't have been out of place in the late 19th century. Resolution was the first modern proof procedure and if it is missing from the book, it will likely have only proofs by axioms. Those are difficult to understand and more difficult to construct, so it's much better to use something that is based on proof trees.

Note: that is your second post in this forum, which indicate that you recently registered only to address my post. What I could conclude of this evidence?

Well noted! You can now add this to your achievement page:

Achievement: Delurked Marras ✮✩✩✩✩

I lurked here for about a year before registering, I don't remember when I came but it was well before 9/11-investigator's ban. I originally followed a link to one of the freemen threads, and then started to follow these holocaust denial ones. I haven't felt the need to post because people who know more about the holocaust than me are doing much better job than I could ever do. You just had the distinction of being the first denier who posted nonsense directly related to my college major.

 

[000063]

I think you're strawmanning Snakey's argument. IIRC, this whole discussion started when Snakey asked to see a video of the gas chambers in operation back in the first HD thread. KevinSilberst linked to the Deadly Medicine clip on Youtube in response to Snakey's request. But that link doesn't show a gas chamber. You can use your imagination to fill in the blanks but the fact is that there is no gas chamber shown in that video.

And he argued, or at least strongly implied, that because no gas chamber was shown, that the people depicted were not gassed. My point was that not showing them gassed does not mean they were not gassed. Snakey did not contest the assumption, only sought to "prove" it was illogical using symbolic logic.

The spiral into a discussion of symbolic logic and the use/misuse thereof or the various photographs showing a vehicle with the exhaust on the right or the left side aren't worth talking about because no matter what, the video doesn't show what Snakey asked to see.

He's been presented with plenty of material, and just explains away all of it. He even scoffed at a list of books, then it turned out he made not even the slightest effort to even look at them. He came into the debate not knowing who Himmler was. The symbolic logic was bought into the discussion by Snaketongue. The exhaust pipe of the cars as evidence of the video being faked was bought into the discussion by Snaketongue.

Interesting use of the passive voice, by the way.

Even if it did, it would be about as persuasive at proving there was a German extermination program for the Jews utilizing gas chambers as this series of photographs is at proving the American extermination program of the Japanese Americans using gas chambers:

1. Terrorized Japanese citizens forced onto the death trains while armed Americans stand by

2. Innocent Japanese removed from trains and marched down the "Road to Heaven" for a "delousing"

3. The "delousing" chamber

4. The mass graves showing the remains of the three million murdered Japanese children

[/quote]Considering there are, literally, thousands of other pieces of corroborating evidence, testimony, and records, pretending the video is the only evidence is a straw man.

And, whoop, you still haven't said that the very claim you scoffed at was right or wrong. I think you're trying to change the subject. You also neglected to explain why you previously ignored my clarification about my own argument, and you did not address why Snaketongue used complicated symbolic logic few people understand to refute simple plain English logic. In fact, there's quite a lot you're ignoring.

Snaketongue did not merely say the video didn't show what he wanted. He said it was faked or deceptively edited. He has offered no real evidence of such, from what I can see.

 

[A'isha]

The analysis is mine under my username

The analysis was under your username, but it wasn't yours.

I read books about the subject, you just do not know that.

Really? What was the last book you read about the subject?

I'll even do the same and go first. The last book I read was historian Richard Evans' The Coming of the Third Reich. Even though it's the first volume in his exhaustive three-volume history of Nazi Germany, I actually read it after I read the second volume, The Third Reich in Power, mainly because it's the social aspects of Nazi Germany that interest me most. I'd skipped the first volume at the time because I'd been quite satisfied with the description in Shirer's classic work about the history of how Hitler and his buddies took the Nazi party from a tiny, obscure group that mostly ended up in prison after a failed coup attempt to the rulers of a reunited Germany that they were reforging in their image. But I'm something of a completist, so I figured I might as well read all of Evans' work.

What about you, SnakeTongue?

It is because "person in question actually is an authority" is call appeal of authority (My argument is the only authentic because I read the book of a authority on the subject discussed).

As I told you, if you think the work of Lozowick on this subject (that of the use of RSHA institutional symbols, signing protocols, and general document formatting) is incorrect, you'd better have something to stand against it besides your own ignorance.

"Nuh uh!" is not a valid counter-argument to a citation to a scholarly work on the topic.

Yes, an intellectual fallacy in a open debate.

This isn't any kind of debate. You have nothing for us to debate against.

This is people with an actual knowledge of the history of the Holocaust countering the lies, distortions, and ignorance of Holocaust deniers.

Weeks late means I have another activities than post replies in the JREF forum.

Strange, you were posting quite a bit right in this very thread during the weeks-long period where you refused to answer my question. Which is rather odd, considering that if your analysis truly was yours, as you claim, it would have taken you a few minutes at most to answer it.

That, in fact, is one of the big clues that the analysis wasn't yours after all, since you were completely able to answer simple questions about it.

You are proposing that Jews could not be criminals

No, I'm saying that the authorities didn't care if they were criminals (which possibly a few of them were), or if they were completely innocent of any actual crime (which the vast majority of them were).

The only thing the authorities cared about is that they were Jews.

forgery,

Jews certainly could be forgers, just like non-Jews. But the authorities didn't issue this proclamation because they thought the people they were looking for were forgers. They issued it because the people they were looking for were Jews.

theft,

Jews certainly could be thieves, just like non-Jews. But the authorities didn't issue this proclamation because they thought the people they were looking for were thieves. They issued it because the people they were looking for were Jews.

squatting,

Jews certainly could be squatters, just like non-Jews. But the authorities didn't issue this proclamation because they thought the people they were looking for were squatters. They issued it because the people they were looking for were Jews.

fraud,

Jews certainly could commit fraud, just like non-Jews. But the authorities didn't issue this proclamation because they thought the people they were looking for had committed fraud. They issued it because the people they were looking for were Jews.

assault,

Jews certainly could commit assault, just like non-Jews. But the authorities didn't issue this proclamation because they thought the people they were looking for had committed assault. They issued it because the people they were looking for were Jews.

burglary,

Jews certainly could commit burglary, just like non-Jews. But the authorities didn't issue this proclamation because they thought the people they were looking for had committed burglary. They issued it because the people they were looking for were Jews.

swindle, etc.) ?

Jews certainly could be swindlers, just like non-Jews. But the authorities didn't issue this proclamation because they thought the people they were looking for were swindlers. They issued it because the people they were looking for were Jews.

If I made a wrong interpretation of the translation presented, what is the right interpretation?

It says that even members of a household where Jews were hidden were not punished, as long as some member of that household went to the authorities to turn over the hidden Jews. It adds that those people who hid Jews and did not report that to the authorities were arrested, along with the Jews they hid.

This is to encourage non-Jews to turn in Jews, by saying that if you tell the authorities where Jews are, even if they're being hidden by members of your family in your house, you won't be punished...and if you don't tell the authorities where Jews are, you will be punished. It's an amnesty for those who would rat out the Jews to the authorities.

It finishes up with a threat, saying that all households had better truthfully report every member in the household, lest the authorities come busting down their doors and arresting them all on suspicion of harboring Jews.

 

[000063]

Yet your posting history shows this to be incorrect.

This would be the same "common sense" that compares a modified car to stock cars and says the former is a fake because it doesn't match?

I am correcting myself there - it bugged me on the way to work.

I misunderstood the meaning of your post here:

http://www.internationalskeptics.com/forums/showpost.php?p=8215592&postcount=776

You did not assert the exhaust was on the right hand side in that post and I apologise for claiming you did.

It is, however, quite clearly as modified exhaust pipe: modified to pass a pipe carrying exhaust gas into a room to kill people.

I've made that point several times already, and I don't think it stuck.

No but writing something that looks like a mathematical formula suggests it is a valid one. This one didn't even conform to the basic syntax. So what was the point of writing it down? Marras has a valid point.

I try and make what I'm saying as clear to my opponent as possible. When Snakey saw that I didn't understand his first formula, he just made it even more complicated.

How can you know? Isn't it more probable that you misunderstood, with your poor English skills? You know, you can't have your cake and eat it too.

Dunning-Kreuger says no, as far as he's concerned.

 

[000063]

Can you imagine the locals getting into gassing vans? How long would it take for gassing vans to be recognized for what they were? Any longer than it takes a child to recognize the ice cream truck's jingle? Or the meaning of the cry of "Salvation Army" in the 50s?

Yet we're told to believe that 10s of thousands were killed in gassing vans.

Where are the Saul Revere stories?

As I pointed out upthread, they had guns. Did you do any research on where the citizens were gassed?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gas_van

EXTANT? Who uses that word? And why? I call shenanigans.

Really? You're kvetching about a random word choice on Wikipedia? It's a perfectly cromulent word, used in several academic fields. Heck, I use several words when writing here which I never use in conversation.

 

[000063]

Extant was used to disguise its meaning. Plus the sentence it was in came BEFORE The existence of gas vans first came to light in 1943 during the trial of Nazi collaborators involved in the gassing of 6700 civilians in Krasnodar.


The sentence extant was in should have been the last sentence in the paragraph.

"Extant" means "still in existence". It takes about twenty seconds to look up the word. There's a whole blog full of unusual language used on Wikipedia, enough for a book.

 

[000063]

I don't know why Snakey is expending any time on this at all. KevinSilberst told us that the video shows a gas chamber execution. It doesn't. It's another example of the holocaust industry presenting evidence that isn't evidence. It's a particularly egregious one because any idiot watching the video can see that it doesn't show a gas chamber.

Therefore, no one was ever gassed, right?

I mean, at least with Pesye Schloss, somebody had to do some work to discover that a "credible Jewish eyewitness to the holocaust" probably exists only in the mind of a dead man who buried his diary. It only took a minute or two to see that KevinSilberst lied (or is incredibly stupid). And that point, Snakey should have just moved on and returned to asking for a video of a gas chamber execution.

He didn't merely assert that it didn't show what he claimed, he asserted that the video was faked. At that point, the onus was on him to prove his claim. He has utterly failed to do so.

He's new at this game. Maybe he still thinks you guys have some integrity and will actually answer his questions. It takes a while to realize that you guys don't have any integrity and, more importantly, you don't have any answers.

Yet you have no problem with him not responding to #677, wherein he claimed Eichmann's testimony was inadmissible. Not just statistically unreliable, he said it was entirely inadmissible. Then, after repeated challenges, he tried to pretend he really meant the statistical validity all along. This is far from the only example of your double standards.

And you, personally, avoid answering several of Terry's points about your incorrect claims and his questions; "If it doesn't show a gas experiment, then why is SnakeTongue arsing about denying that the car was on the market during WWII? Have either ST or you got a coherent explanation for why a car would be idling in a static position with a pipe sticking out of its arse like that? Any external proof for why it's doing that?" And you can't even respond to several paragraphs of evidence, so you ignore them entirely. Yet you see fit to call us out on allegedly avoiding things?

You can't even tell us what happened to millions of Jews who were allegedly exterminated. Nobody thinks you can bury hundreds of thousands of people in a small, well defined space without leaving proof of that activity behind. Dead people don't *poof* disappear into thin air. So tell me: where did they go?

Ah, yes, the SHC "turnabout" method. Asking your opponent the same (or slightly modified) question they asked you, in order to disguise the fact that you can't answer their question, and, in this case, that you have studiously and have deliberately avoided doing so on multiple occasions.

There's plenty of evidence of what happened to the bodies. Literally, reams of it. Doc Terry specifically refers to it, in detail, including its provenance. The fact that you refer to it as "no evidence" indicates that your view of the matter is...not objective. Good day.

*There's one of those words I never use in household conversation, Clayton.

 

[Nick Terry]

I don't know why Snakey is expending any time on this at all. KevinSilberst told us that the video shows a gas chamber execution. It doesn't. It's another example of the holocaust industry presenting evidence that isn't evidence. It's a particularly egregious one because any idiot watching the video can see that it doesn't show a gas chamber.

On the contrary, it quite clearly does show a situation which can only mean an improvised gas chamber execution. The film footage shows pipes running from a static car, which on the 2nd viewing is marked with the license plate 'Pol 51628'. The license plate alone confirms that this is a Nazi-operated vehicle since that is how Police license plates looked - whether Order Police, SD, Gestapo doesn't matter, they used such license plates. The film then shows people in hospital clothing arriving on a cart and being helped into a building by nurses, with a German guard looking on. Then the film cuts back to the pipes running from the car into the building. The look of the landscape, the physiognomy of the patients, point to the Soviet Union of the 1940s, with the fact that there are Nazis present this narrows it down to 1941-44.

This is perfectly good evidence, no matter how many times you try to deny it's evidence. Saying 'evidence that isn't evidence' simply proves you don't understand what evidence is or how to evaluate it properly. Again.

The film doesn't need to show the inside of the building for the viewer to allow the viewer to draw an obvious inference - that the patients being helped into the building through one entrance were killed by gas piped from the car through the wall.

This piece of film footage does not, as previously mentioned, stand on its own. I already said the killing of psychiatric patients by Einsatzgruppe B (which used Police license plates, as is documented elsewhere) is documented in one of the Einsatzgruppen reports.

Even in the absence of any other evidence, the document + film footage match up perfectly well and are compatible with each other.

But there is other evidence, too. The location where the film footage was found (Nebe's flat) is also evidence. It connects the film footage directly to Einsatzgruppe B and to 1941.

Another document connects the experiment to Nebe and to the KTI of the RSHA. An interrogation of the KIT chemist describes the action in great detail. And Russian eyewitnesses - nurses - corroborated the account entirely independently. At the time when Widmann was interrogated, the Soviet investigations were not available to the West German authorities, thus establishing independence of evidence. Nor did they have the document proving he had been ordered to Minsk.

No piece of evidence stands on its own. Demanding that it should do so is anti-historical, illogical and dishonest, not to mention completely frakking stupid.

There is nothing you can do to stop other people drawing the obvious conclusion to be drawn from the sum total of the evidence, except to challenge the evidence and show that it was fabricated/coerced, or that there is a much more coherent explanation of all the pieces of evidence which is more parsimonious or more satisfying or takes into account another piece of evidence left out.

Simply saying over and over that the most visual piece of evidence isn't evidence at all, while ignoring all the other evidence, is about the most pathetic piece of defense-lawyering imaginable.

You can't even tell us what happened to millions of Jews who were allegedly exterminated. Nobody thinks you can bury hundreds of thousands of people in a small, well defined space without leaving proof of that activity behind. Dead people don't *poof* disappear into thin air. So tell me: where did they go?

You've been told multiple times. But you can start by reading pp.382-516 of this white paper.

Then you can read pp.239-275, which will remind you why it is you keep on dodging the question of what it is that happened to the Jews.

 

[000063]

It occurs to me that Doggie's verbose dismissals of evidence are, at heart, the same as Clay's "witty" one-liners dismissing evidence, even when its evidence he asked for.

 

[tsig]

Please cite your source for the assertion that Jews were never involved in criminal activity during the war. Is the lack of criminal behavior among Jews unique to this particular time and place? That is, is it true that Jews have never been involved in criminal activity ever, anywhere? Or is it that during the years 1939-1945 Jews committed no crimes? Or is it only the Jews who live in Europe who are incapable of committing a crime but Jews everywhere else are as likely to commit crimes as the non-Jews? Or is it that Jews in general are just as prone to criminal behavior as non-Jews except for the Jews who were living under Nazi occupation who didn't commit crimes? Or is it that when a Jew commits a crime, it ceases to be a crime? Or is it just that Jews were charged with the crime of being Jewish no matter what else they might've done to come to the attention of the authorities because the crime of being Jewish was considered so heinous that any other crime paled in comparison?

You seem quite confident in your assertion. I'm sure you have the data to back it up.

Straw man.

 

[tsig]

Can you imagine the locals getting into gassing vans? How long would it take for gassing vans to be recognized for what they were? Any longer than it takes a child to recognize the ice cream truck's jingle? Or the meaning of the cry of "Salvation Army" in the 50s?

Yet we're told to believe that 10s of thousands were killed in gassing vans.

Where are the Saul Revere stories?



http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gas_van

EXTANT? Who uses that word? And why? I call shenanigans.

Who was Saul Revere? I call shenanigans.

 

[A'isha]

Please cite your source for the assertion that Jews were never involved in criminal activity during the war. Is the lack of criminal behavior among Jews unique to this particular time and place? That is, is it true that Jews have never been involved in criminal activity ever, anywhere? Or is it that during the years 1939-1945 Jews committed no crimes? Or is it only the Jews who live in Europe who are incapable of committing a crime but Jews everywhere else are as likely to commit crimes as the non-Jews? Or is it that Jews in general are just as prone to criminal behavior as non-Jews except for the Jews who were living under Nazi occupation who didn't commit crimes? Or is it that when a Jew commits a crime, it ceases to be a crime? Or is it just that Jews were charged with the crime of being Jewish no matter what else they might've done to come to the attention of the authorities because the crime of being Jewish was considered so heinous that any other crime paled in comparison?

As has been thoroughly pointed out in this thread by (by myself and others), the claim that "Jews have never been involved in criminal activity ever, anywhere" (and all the related nonsense in your post) is your own strawman, and has nothing to do with what I said.

 

[A'isha]

Who was Saul Revere? I call shenanigans.

He thinks he's being clever and witty, and is making an anti-Semitic pun on Paul Revere's name.

 

[Clayton Moore]

He thinks he's being clever and witty, and is making an anti-Semitic pun on Paul Revere's name.

That's the Holohoax in a nutshell. Because of the Holohoax any even mildly irreverent Jewish reference is a DEFCON 2 antisemitism alert.

 

[A'isha]

That's the Holohoax in a nutshell.

No, your anti-Semitism is all your own, and has nothing to do with the Holocaust.

Because of the Holohoax any even mildly irreverent Jewish reference is a DEFCON 2 antisemitism alert.

Actually, my post about your wearily predictable "sense of humor" makes for a nice contrast to your hysterical response to the "anti-Christian" comments in this thread that you were so outraged about.

 

[Clayton Moore]

Lest We Forget

Dogzilla
Graduate Poster

Join Date: Aug 2010
Posts: 1,350

Originally Posted by Nick Terry View Post

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.

Hi everybody! Did you miss me? I decided I needed to rebuild my system with an SSD boot drive and then I went on vacation. So I had some downtime. But

I'm back now and my system is screaming fast. Anyway, where were we? Oh yeah, heads and shades....

That's a pretty good answer. But it features a dash of confusion-for which I am responsible--because I mixed up two different questions in my original post. The two questions which should be dealt with seperately are: 1) Was Eisenhower talking about the holocaust--the extermination of the Jews when he said he "saw things that beggar description" at Ohrdruf? and 2) Are the shrunken heads and lampshades atrocities part of the holocaust?

But first...you mischaracterized Eisenhower's visit to Ohrdruf. Eisenhower didn't visit Ohrdruf after receiving reports from across the front about other liberated concentration camps. With the Moscow declaration in 1943, the Allies had found the Germans guilty of crimes against humanity/war crimes and needed to find evidence to support the conviction. The conditions in the camps in the closing days of the war turned out to be a Psych Ops wet dream as far as gathering evidence of German atrocities. Eisenhower visited Ohrdruf for the simple reason that it was the first concentration camp liberated by the Americans. The British overran Belsen (their first camp) right around the same time the Americans lost their camp cherry so any "reports from across the front" regarding the concentration camps prior to Ohrdruf would have come from the Soviets. And because the Soviets didn't find conditions in the death camps that they overran in late 1944 and early 1945 horrific enough to publicize, document or photograph to any great degree, any of their "reports from across the front" would have been much ado about nothing.

Anyway, your answer about what things Eisenhower saw that "beggar description" when he did drop by Ohrdruf for a photo op a week after it had been discovered is spot on accurate: he saw what he believed was (or what he believed could be spun into) evidence of Nazi Crimes Against Humanity. Now, according to you, these Nazi Crimes Against Humanity are a "set" that includes other "subsets." One of these subsets is the holocaust--the extermination of the European Jews. Another subset is the Ed Gein style haberdashery. I agree with your categorization schema here. I'm sure you'd agree that there are many other subsets of Nazi Crimes Against Humanity and that the subset of the holocaust can be broken down even further into sub-subsets.

So Eisenhower was reacting to the horrorshow at Ohrdruf in the overall sense. But that doesn't mean that his reaction to the overall set of "Nazi Crimes Against Humanity" was a reaction to the subset of NCAH--the holocaust anymore than you can say it was reaction to the subset of NCAH--shrunken heads and lampshades, or NCAH--Russian POWs, or NCAH--Communists, or NCAH--Jehovah's Witness, etc. Because there were Jews present at most of the NCAH--the holocaust sites and there were Jews present at Ohrdruf isn't particularly relevant. It certainly doesn't automatically turn the overall set of Nazi Crimes Against Humanity at Ohrdruf into Nazi Crimes Against Humanity--the holocaust.

Because Eisenhower didn't expand upon the "things that beggar description" we can't know specifcally what he was talking about. But we can determine what he was NOT talking about by looking at what was NOT at Ohrdruf. We can be reasonably certain Eisenhower was not talking about the shrunken heads or the lampshades when he said he "saw things that beggar description."

But neither did he see anything that was evidence of the extermination of the European Jews (and this is not because there was no extermination of the Jews. Even what passes for evidence of a German policy of extermination wasn't present at Ohrdruf). There weren't any documents talking about a policy of exterminating the Jews at Ohrdruf. Nothing I've read leads me to believe Eisenhower visited Ohrdruf because he heard it was a camp where Jews had suffered.

I haven't seen any evidence that he connected anything he saw with Jewish suffering. IIRC, the emphasis was on the suffering of citizens of the United Nations, including POWs and not Jews.

Even though the Eisenhower Memorial Commission website says that Ohrdruf was a holding pen for prisoners on their way to the gas chambers at Buchenwald, we know that isn't true. Ike didn't see any gas chambers at Ohrdruf. He didn't see the bodies of anybody who had died in gas chamber. We know he didn't see a camp where comdemned prisoners, Jewish or otherwise, waited to be murdered. He didn't see any Einsatzgruppen mass graves. He saw some relatively healthy prisoners demonstrating interrogation and punishment techniques. He saw some crispy corpses on the griddle. He saw some dead people. He saw some skinny people and he saw some sick people. We know that most of the dead, skinny, and sick people he saw became that way in the few weeks prior to liberation because of the breakdown of transportation infrastructure at the end of the war. The conditions were not even evidence of Nazi Crimes Against Humanity let alone evidence of a Nazi plan to exterminate the Jews.

The presence of Jews at Ohrdruf, if it is meaningful in anyway, is evidence AGAINST a deliberate German policy to exterminate the Jews. So nothing Eisenhower saw can be said to be evidence of the Nazi Crimes Against Humanity--the extermination of the Jews. Ergo, whatever Eisenhower saw that beggared description, it wasn't the holocaust.

Now, to answer the second part of the question, are the shrunken heads and the lampshades part of the holocaust or not, I would say not. The fact is that the shrunken head is obviously not of European origin--Jewish or otherwise--and only the most gullible of people would believe it was. And if there was any tattooed skin being turned into lampshades, Jewish law makes it extremely unlikely that it came from a Jew.

The fact that these props were found at only one camp isn't particularly relevant and is only partially true anyway. The shrunken heads were found at one camp only. But the tattooed skin has connections extending beyond Buchenwald. As we all know, collecting tattooed skin was one of Frau Koch's hobbies. She was at Buchenwald until her arrest in 1943. But we have at least one eyewitness who says Ilse Koch traveled to Madjanek to look for specimens of human skin.

Because her husband had been transferred to Majdanek in 1941, it's very likely that she did indeed visit that camp for no other reason than to be with her husband and vice versa. So this means that the Ed Gein style haberdashery wasn't restricted to just one camp and has connections with what is often considered a true holocaust "death" camp.

Still, I tend to agree with you that they're not part of the holocaust because the heads and shades were never identified specifically as coming from Jewish victims.

But this is true for everything in the western camps. None of the other iconic holocaust imagery--the bulldozing bodies of Belsen or the skinny men of Buchenwald--can be considered holocaustal because these weren't identified as Jewish victims of Nazism either. There were probably some dead Jews among the heaps of corpses but they were not identified as such. So they don't count.

If you want to say that Eisenhower was reacting to Nazi Crimes Against Humanity--the holocaust, there's no rational reason for disclaiming the shrunken heads and the lampshades as part of the holocaust. They're part of a package. You need to take them together or reject them together. Unless all the evidence for the holocaust is evidence for the holocaust until it is proven to be false at which point it never was evidence for the holocaust.

http://www.internationalskeptics.com/forums/showpost.php?p=7339513&postcount=3578
Dogzilla kicks Team Holocaust's butt.

In comparison

My points aren't rocket science. Pointing out what so and so said on page 86 won't be a deal breaker, a revelation that the Holocaust was 6 million, 10 million, 4 million, or 1.5 million.

My points show that sheer volume of alleged murders/executions make the Holocaust myth absurd if only by exaggeration.

Then there is the added absurdity of the Holocaust scholars demanding in the sixties and later that no one knew what was going in the camps then later doing a 180 and demanding that everyone knew and looked away.

And then there are all the testimony absurdities that bludgeon the sensibilities of any objective reader. Atop all those absurd testimonies are those by Wiesel and Wiesenthal the two most lauded Jewish men associated with the Holocaust. Both recognized as pathological liars....

And of course there is the immense power of the Holocaust lie(s) in spite of the Holocaust's biggest lie, gas chambers, never being mentioned in the post war writings of Churchill, Eisenhower, and de Gaulle.

http://www.internationalskeptics.com/forums/showpost.php?p=7346042&postcount=3595

Both are the truth and a salvation in contrast to the steamy wet flatulence smattered by Team Holocaust.

 

[Nick Terry]

I have posted a proposal to the admins that we have several threads since it's obvious that just one thread has become horrifically restrictive and confusing
http://www.internationalskeptics.com/forums/showthread.php?p=8224398#post8224398

 

[A'isha]

Both are the truth and a salvation in contrast to the steamy wet flatulence smattered by Team Holocaust.

This sentence is both creepy and scatological.

Yet one more sign of why this "discussion" is not a debate.

EDIT: And thank you for actually providing links to the posts you felt so religiously about. Everyone should go and read what happened in the thread after the posts in question.

 

[BaaBaa]

I have posted a proposal to the admins that we have several threads since it's obvious that just one thread has become horrifically restrictive and confusing
http://www.internationalskeptics.com/forums/showthread.php?p=8224398#post8224398

I support this move.