Good. Then the "No Nazi denied the holocaust/The Germans don't deny the holocaust" are idiotic statements advanced by people who don't properly understand the holocaust.
They're not well expressed but they are hardly idiotic. Not a single Nazi came up with a credible statement which contradicts the accepted historical record.
The facts in the Law Report are the facts in the Law Report. The defendants were accused of supplying the murder weapon to Auschwitz with the knowledge that it was to be used as the murder weapon. That is the issue in this trial. The number of victims had already been determined, presumably based upon compelling evidence, and accepted by the court as true. If the number of victims was disputed, the report does not reflect that dispute. If the number of victims was revised, the report does not reflect that either. Absent a revision, the facts presented in the report stand.
No, the number of victims was explicitly stated to be an estimate, and was contradicted for Auschwitz by another estimate, with no one at the trial ruling firmly on the question.
If you want to say that only the facts presented in an indictment are relevant and only the facts which are specifically mentioned to be true in the judgement are in fact true, be my guest. That would mean that historians would be unable to rely on testimony given in court unless the facts in that testimony are specifically enumerated in the judgement.
Utter poppycock. Historians can use whatever sources they like to arrive at their conclusions. They are no more bound by past legal judgements than they are bound by the precise words of past historians.
You're confusing law and history. Yet again, I might add, because you keep on doing this despite being corrected repeatedly on the differences.
If you're going to focus only on the specific facts in the charge, the number of victims isn't mentioned but the fact that they were Allied nationals in an ecumenical sense is important as is the fact that the gas chambers at Auschwitz were operating until March 1945.
Indeed, the number of victims isn't mentioned in the charge. That means that you have been using a whopping great big strawman for the past umpteen posts by attributing a number to the court verdict.
There are no exact numbers for the holocaust. They're all estimates. Can we dismiss all estimates?
There are lots of exact numbers for the Holocaust. In the course of these threads people have mentioned things like the Ereignismeldungen, the Jaeger report, Stahlecker report, Korherr report, Hoefle telegram, Stroop report, Veesenmeyer telegrams and many other perfectly exact sources, along with the Dutch 1941 registration of Jews, the Dutch Red Cross investigation of Sobibor, and much else. All have exact numbers.
And no we don't dismiss all estimates, otherwise science and knowledge would grind to a halt and not be able to advance. We dismiss estimates that have been superseded by better information, narrowing down the range of possibilities.
I don't have the court records so I must use the summary document that I do have available. Unfortunately that means I must rely on the person writing the the summary to adequately summarize the facts in the case.
Just because you don't possess a particular source does not entitle you to dismiss it.
Broad's testimony at the Tesch trial is in any case excerpted in the Pelt report at length, placing it in the public domain. This means you could easily have looked it up and indeed, should have known this already.
Whatever Pery Broad's testified to vis-a-vis the number of victims wasn't important enough to warrant mentioning and it didn't alter the established facts. Any number Pery Broad mentioned wouldn't be terribly relevant anyway. At best he could provide us with nothing more than an estimate. And it would be an estimate based only upon what he witnessed himself.
The higher figures are also estimates, based ultimately on witness testimony.
So you were quoting from the prosecution opening statement, which does not have the same legal significance as a charge/indictment or a judgement. Prosecutors can and do exaggerate massively for effect, or they present information which is superseded by other information arising from the court proceedings. New information can come to light during the course of a trial, and in this case it did - Broad gave a lower estimate for the number of victims of Auschwitz.
The court then did not issue a reasoned verdict on this discrepancy, leaving it to posterity to notice the obvious. Posterity can likewise note that over the course of 1946 and 1947, other cases saw other numbers advanced and explained, eventually culminating in the expert witness testimony of Nachman Blumental at the Hoess trial, who calculated by means of simple subtraction that the number of Jewish victims of Auschwitz couldn't possibly be more than 1.5 million, and thus began a process which culminated in the work of Reitlinger, Hilberg and finally Franciszek Piper of calculating the death toll more realistically.
Posterity then notes that higher figures regarding the number of victims of Auschwitz were in circulation as estimates in the Tesch trial, but that these numbers did not form part of the specific convictions of the accused.
Exactly. The estimated number of victims had already been established and was accepted by the court.
No. An estimate was offered in a prosecution opening statement. "The court" = the judges not the prosecution. They did not issue a written verdict so we
do not know what they did or did not accept.
Of course it's not an exact number. Are you saying that estimates aren't facts?
Estimates are defeasible propositions which should be superseded when better estimates or exact information becomes available. We will never know the exact day, month, year when the asteroid which killed the dinosaurs struck the Yucatan peninsula, we only have estimates as to the approximate geological age in which this cataclysm occurred. The current estimates depend on a great deal of other information regarding geochronology. Those data point make it possible to establish a realistic ballpark for when the asteroid struck.
Similarly, a demographic estimate will rely on a great deal of other information to establish the ballpark. A demographic estimate is going to be superior to an estimate derived ultimately from a simple witness estimate, although we see many cases when witnesses do get things pretty much right.
In turn, an estimate based overwhelmingly on historical documents but which has to extrapolate to cover a few gaps or where there are less precise sources of information, is going to be better than a demographic estimate.
Evidence put on the record isn't always true. If the evidence put on the record had altered the numbers substantially, the report would reflect that. It didn't so it didn't.
The report summarises the case with very little detail offered on the contents of individual witnesses or other parts of the proceedings. The report summarised the opening statement in more detail because opening statements can be good summaries of the parameters of a particular case, and are excellent evidence regarding how the prosecution views a case.
As there was no written verdict, the report could not summarise what was thought by the court on the issue of numbers. There is no real reason to think that the court actually thought much of the contradiction that demonstrably emerged between witnesses (Bendel saying 4M , Broad saying 2.5-3M).
But this is irrelevant to the point under discussion, which is that a prosecution opening statement is identical neither with an indictment or charge nor with a verdict or judgement. You simply cannot say that 'the court' accepted any specific facts or rejected others because there is no written verdict.
The most you can state
correctly is that the prosecution in the Tesch trial alleged that an estimated 6M Allied citizens were killed using Zyklon with 4.5 million of those killed at Auschwitz. Which is thoroughly wrong, as all subsequent evidence has shown, but was also legally irrelevant to the issue of guilt or innocence of the Tesch executives, since they were not charged with supplying Zyklon to kill a specific number of people.
There is no gradation of charges whereby someone can be acquitted of killing 4.5 million people but is found guilty of killing 3 million ffs. They're simply charged with murder, mass murder or genocide.
What's childish is saying that "many millions" contradicts 4.5 million. They're both estimates. One is less ambiguous than the other but both of them contradict the 1.1 million that we always knew was the correct number today.
Evidently you didn't read the Peters judgement from the link. The relevant section quotes Hoess's Nuremberg affidavit referring to 'at least' 2.5 million gassed at Auschwitz, a statement which Hoess disavowed within a matter of weeks (to GM Gilbert) and again in November 1946 and once again in March 1947. Thus, the highest number mentioned in the relevant section of the Peters judgement was 2.5 million, which certainly does contradict 4.5 million, in a downwards direction.
One might add that the Nuremberg judgement, issued in October 1946, after the Tesch trial, quoted the same affidavit, thus specifying a maximum death toll for Auschwitz of Jews at 2.5 million.
http://avalon.law.yale.edu/imt/judwarcr.asp
Thus, the IMT judgement ignored the Soviet 4M figure and went for a lower one.
And no, we didn't 'always know' the Auschwitz death toll, any more than we 'always knew' the Kolyma death toll. Why aren't you picketing Robert Conquest's house and denouncing him for overestimating the Kolyma death toll by a factor of four?
You were mentioned. I didn't see my name in there. I know some people read them some of the time but alot of people don't like long posts with lots of words.
LOL of course you're not going to see your name mentioned in a thread about JREF members who are good educators. You're a Holocaust denier.
And just a thought, but maybe if you tried stating facts correctly instead of misrepresenting them, these posts would not stretch to the length that they do.
) in prisons today when inmates aren't being randomly tortured and killed. One would think there was less trust when the guards were prone to do this.
