General Holocaust Denial Discussion Part II

[FluffyPersian]

So where do you find the time and lamp light and the tools and materials to make their own SS-type uniforms?

Here's the quote from Phil Zimbardo's book:


"[Psychologist Bruno] Bettelheim observed that some inmates acted like their Nazi guards, not only abusing other prisoners but even wearing bits of cast-off SS uniforms."

 

[Nick Terry]

Here's the quote from Phil Zimbardo's book:


"[Psychologist Bruno] Bettelheim observed that some inmates acted like their Nazi guards, not only abusing other prisoners but even wearing bits of cast-off SS uniforms."

The fact that it's from Bettelheim places this in 1938-39 at Buchenwald.

 

[LemmyCaution]

Here's the quote from Phil Zimbardo's book:


"[Psychologist Bruno] Bettelheim observed that some inmates acted like their Nazi guards, not only abusing other prisoners but even wearing bits of cast-off SS uniforms."

What a novel idea - actually look at what someone wrote when debating it! But is a mundane connection with reality really an improvement on the buffoonish flights of fancy given us by Dogzilla and Mr Moore on this topic?

For the topic - thanks to FluffyPersian for having clarified it - has been well ventilated in writing on the Nazi camp and ghetto systems. Connected with the point made by Bettelheim is Langbein's coverage of those prisoners he called "the VIPs," or prisoner functionaries, a bit later in Auschwitz. Langbein wrote about how Greens and many Reds in the hierarchy tended to identify as "Aryans" superior to run-of-the-mill and "lower," "weaker" prisoners with Jewish or various national backgrounds. They looked down on laborers, Musselmanner, and other ordinary inmates.

One way in which Auschwitz Kapos and other functionaries, according to Langbein, signaled their superior status was in the way they dressed, using their relative power and privileges to gain access to "the good stuff." Langbein observed that these individuals were "tempted to adapt to the tone and methods of [their] masters. . . . The KZ and with it the SS became the measure of all things." (People in Auschwitz, p 144). One prisoner, Robert Waitz, described the VIPs in these terms, "[They] are very proud of their custom-made striped suits" and explained how they cooperated with and gained further privileges from SS guards (p 145). Freddy Diamant, a 16-year-old assistant to Monowitz camp elder Jupp Windeck, later recalled that "The capos always strutted around the camp with brightly polished boots, just like the SS men. Nothing was more important to them than these boots. God help the man who dirtied Windeck's boots, for he could be murdered for that." (p 151)

According to Primo Levi, in his famous essay "The Gray Zone," "the Lager, on a smaller scale but with amplified characteristics, reproduced the hierarchical structure of the totalitarian state" and, referring to prisoner functionaries, Levi commented, "the power of these small satraps [was] absolute." (p 47, in The Drowned and the Saved) Already in 1986, Levi wrote that "power was sought by many among the oppressed who had been contaminated by their oppressors and unconsciously strove to identify with them. This mimesis, this identification or imitation, . . . has provoked much discussion."

That some Greens and Reds discovered in the Nazi system a way to survive and even gain privileges - and took advantage of such opportunities by currying favor with the Nazis and even acting like little Nazis - should not be surprising. In organizing camp life to make sure of prisoner self-administration, the SS divided prisoners into a hierarchical, "class" system - giving power to a very few and allowing them ways and means to exploit their confinement for their relative benefit during their time in the camps. The self-identification of these individuals with their captors served as an expression to other prisoners of their relative power as well as a sign to their masters of their loyalty and dependability in playing the role assigned them and carrying out their functions.

A similar situation and similar behavior obtained within the ghettos. The most notorious case is, of course, Chaim Rumkowski, who, like the Greens and Reds described by Langbein and others, aped his masters in ruling Lodz ghetto. Parallel with camp life, ghettos were run by a form of so-called self-administration as well, with privileged leaders required to maintain order and compliance within the ghetto and to transmit Nazi policy and orders and to ensure that these were implemented. As the Eldest of the Jews in Lodz, like prisoner functionaries in the camps, Rumkowski was obligated to carry out German orders on pain of punishment, including threat of death. Like some prisoner functionaries, Rumkowski took his position in the ghetto to extremes and reveled in his own relative power, playing his role with relish, establishing a strong-man regime, which he referred to as his "little kingdom," extolling dictatorship, and setting himself as the Leader apart from the masses of Jews in the ghetto. A teenaged diarist in the ghetto, Dawid Sierkowiak, having observed Rumkowski and his affectations, commented that "The Germans will never find themselves another Rumkowski." (in Adelson & Lapides, Lodz Ghetto, p 159) Rumkowski traveled around the ghetto in a coach, driven by a driver in white livery; Rumkowski himself wore black boots in the SS style. According to Oskar Rosenfeld, a Prague Jew confined in Lodz ghetto, Rumkowski toured his domain "in high-heeled boots" with the airs of some kind of Roman governor. In his writing on "gray zones," Primo Levi considered the case of Rumkowski at length and wrote on other elements of his identification with the authoritarian system that Rumkowski "adopted the oratorical technique of Mussolini and Hitler." (p 63) A teenaged diarist in the ghetto, Dawid Sierkowiak had earlier noticed the same behavior and style, writing on 30 August 1941 that Rumkowski "gave a truly 'Fuhrer-like speech" that afternoon (diary p 123).

Why should Dogzilla and Mr Moore fumble around clownishly on a behavior well documented for decades? Simply because they are unfamiliar with the literature they are so eager to deny.

 

[Robert Muehlenkamp]

noun
the practice of taking someone else’s work or ideas and passing them off as one’s own.
[link]​

Previously you admitted your model and method was based on Carlo Mattogno’s model and method and now you are admitting you just refuted Carlo Mattogno’s model and method.

No, genius, I refuted Mattogno's conclusions applying a) his own calculation method and b) assumptions regarding average weights that, unlike his, were realistic.

Did you use Carlo Mattogno’s model and method or not?

See above.

Which is your own model and method?

Mattogno's method was good enough for me, but your method may turn out more precise results - if one doesn't make the hilarious mistake you made, that is.

I have already demonstrated in my original post:

​

Did you refute or did you apply Carlo Mattogno’s model and method?

See above.

How to tell if you are anorexic:

Are you fat?
Was your last period more than three months ago?
Does your weight fall below these sort of numbers:
metric:
1.60 metres: 45 kg1.70 metres: 51 kg
1.80 metres: 57 kg
English:
5 foot: 90 lbs
5 foot 6: 108 lbs
6 foot: 129 lbs
If you answered “yes” to at least two of these questions then there is a good chance you are anorexic. See your doctor to be sure.

[link]​

Looks like a weight below 45 kg at 1.60 meters height is a strong indication of anorexia, but further factors have to be present for anorexia to be diagnosed. This means that a person weighing less than 45 kg at 1.60 meters height (i.e. more than 4 kg below what is still considered normal weight at that height according to the BMI table) may be but is not necessarily anorexic. Such person is certainly underweight, and underweight may result from anorexia (maybe it it usually does in prosperous communities where people tend to be well-fed) or from malnourishment due to insufficient food availability (which I presume is the usual cause in communities with low food intake, such as Jewish ghetto communities in Poland in the early 1940s). And I strongly doubt that every underweight person (whether due to anorexia or to malnourishment brought on by circumstances) looks as bad as the skeleton on your photograph. That must be an extreme case of anorexia, close to or below the lower limit of underweight according to the BMI table, which is 38 kg.

(...) As the 6 months of semistarvation progressed, the volunteers exhibited many physical changes, including gastrointestinal discomfort; decreased need for sleep; dizziness; headaches; hypersensitivity to noise and light; reduced strength; poor motor control; edema (an excess of fluid causing swelling); hair loss; decreased tolerance for cold temperatures (cold hands and feet); visual disturbances (i.e., inability to focus, eye aches, "spots" in the visual fields); auditory disturbances (i.e., ringing noise in the ears); and paresthesias (i.e., abnormal tingling or prickling sensations, especially in the hands or feet).

[link]​

In general, the men responded to semi-starvation by reducing their activity levels. They became tired, weak, listless, apathetic and complained of a lack of energy. (...)

[link]​

Thanks for listing some factors that may have contributed to the passivity of ghetto Jews when they were made to board the trains to the extermination camps, to their high mortality on the transports and to the passivity of the survivors when they reached the camps, even though most of them knew or at least suspected that they were going to be killed. What does your source tell us about the height of the subjects and their weights prior to and after six months of semi-starvation? What it doesn't tell us, unless I missed something, is that the subjects were so weak that they couldn't move without external help, as you claimed earlier.

The method is deceitful because induce the reader to believe the human body volume variation is absolute proportional to the body mass variation.

You may call the method rudimentary, but caling it "deceitful" suggests your self-projecting paranoia. Besides, it was the method applied by your guru Mattogno. If you want to call Mattogno deceitful, be my guest.

You applied an imaginary mass value to a hypothetical model which was only defined to estimate the capacity of a mass grave.

What "imaginary mass value"?

With the imaginary mass you obtained the hypothetical density of the mass grave.

I guess you mean this:

According to the Body Measurement Index table[102], a person with a height of 1.60 meters is underweight at 38 to 48 kg. Assuming that the average weight of adult Jews in Polish ghettos at the time was in between the upper and the lower value of what the BMI table considers underweight, it would be (38+48) ÷ 2 = 43 kg. According to Mattogno's "other tables", the weight of an adult is 2.76 times that of a child up to 14. This relation would mean a weight of 43 ÷ 2.76 = 15.6 kg for ill-fed or starving children in Polish ghettos. Rounding up the latter value, a group of two adults and one child 14 years and younger from a Jewish ghetto in Poland would thus weigh (43+43+16)/3 = 34 kg on average, instead of the 55.1 kg calculated by Mattogno. The average weight of deportees to Bełżec was probably even lower as children made up a higher proportion of deportees from Galicia, at least 42.1 %[103] According to Mattogno's formula, 420 ÷ 34 = 12.4 (12) corpses with this average weight could fit into 1 cubic meter of grave space.

---

Then, ignoring a scientific established method, you transformed the density into “corpse per cubic meter”.

If I ignored a "scientific established method" (which would that be?), so did your guru Mattogno. I only followed his reasoning.

Thus you propose that density variation could estimate the volume of your lower mass odd model. Since you applied unknown values to the Charles A Bay hypothesis, you extrapolated the results.

I'm not sure what the poet is trying to tell me here, but I guess he's referring to this calculation:

Now to Mattogno’s reference weight based on "experimental data" (6 adults a 70 kg per cubic meter = 420 kg per cubic meter). Alex Bay[104] calculated the space that would be occupied by a human being having the measurements of proportions of Leonardo Da Vinci's "Vetruvian Man", and concluded that 91,000 corpes with the proportions of the "Vetruvian Man" and an assumed height of 68 inches (1.73 meters) could have fit into 8,502 cubic meters of grave space - 10.7 (11) per cubic meter. The ideal weight of a person 1.73 meters high would be 66 kg for men and 62 kg for women. Taking the lower value, 10.7 human bodies with the measurements and weight of an ideal adult person 1.73 meters high would have a weight of 10.7 x 62 = 663.40 kg, instead of Mattogno's 420 kg. Using the former value as a reference, the unrealistically high weights assumed by Mattogno for an adult+adult+child group, i.e. (70+70+25,4) ÷ 3 = 55.13 kg, would mean 663.40 ÷ 55.13 = 12.03 (12) corpses per cubic meter. With the more realistic weights for malnourished Polish ghetto Jews mentioned above, the average would be 663.4 ÷ 34 = 19.51 (20) corpses per cubic meter.[105]

The reasoning of this is simple: if 663.40 kg of body weight corresponding to 10.7 corpses with a weight of at least 62 kg (actually I should have used 66 kg and thus obtained a higher total weight, as Bay's model was for a male body, so the 663.40 kg are conservative) fit into one cubic meter of grave space, then 663.40 kg of body weight corresponding to 19.51 people with a weight of 34 kg fit into the same amount of grave space.

Yes, that is right. If you have a better assumption is up to you to present it.

I don't know what exactly you mean by a "better assumption", but I have no problem using your calculation method instead of the more rudimentary method underlying my above-mentioned results. Without, of course, making the stupid mistake you made

(...) post which I have already published in the JREF forum (...)

[link]​

Bodies per cubic meter is not a measurement.

On item (g) you regarded a toddler as a child. This explains why the first average volume is higher than the second average volume on item (m).

If my formula is applied with an appropriate low mass for the toddler (5Kg), the total average volume is:

V = x+y+z

{x = 129/(129+64+5)*0.44/3, y = 64/(129+64+5)*0.44/4, z = 5/(129+64+5)*0.44/1}

x~0.0955556, y~0.0355556, z~0.0111111

V = 0.0955556+0.0355556+0.0111111

V = 0.1422223m^3

x = 0.1422223m^3 /3

x = 0.0474074m^3
This is not the appropriate way to estimate capacity of a hypothetical space. The average volume of each body does not represent an accurate factor to estimate the number of bodies which a mass grave could hold. Since bodies of adults, children and toddlers have drastic difference in their absolute volume, the average volume of each group must be applied in accordance with a distribution ratio of adult per child per toddler. Instead to obtain the average volume of x, y and z and then estimate the capacity of a given space, I would use x, y and z in accordance with a body distribution ratio no lower than 2:1:1 or no higher than 3:4:1.

Item (m) of your calculation is a body distribution ratio of 1:1:1. Therefore, if you use the same multiplier or divider with my formula, the expected result is a common factor. If there is no variation in the proportional volume occupied by each group, there is no change of the average volume of each body.

Kindly spare me and our readers the patronizing blather, and if you're now arguing that your original formula was inappopriate, please say so loud and clear instead of trying to blame me for the supposed inadequacy of your original calculations, which I merely reproduced in an Excel sheet. The following is from this thread's post 1792, written by you:

The formula can be applied to the Holocaust Controversies estimations of 3 adults with a total mass (a) of 129Kg (3*43Kg), 4 children with a total mass (b) of 64Kg (4*16Kg) and 1 toddler with a total mass (c) of 16Kg (1*16Kg):

{x = a/(a+b+c)*0.44/3, y = b/(a+b+c)*0.44/4, z = c/(a+b+c)*0.44/1}

{x = 129/(129+64+16)*0.44/3, y = 64/(129+64+16)*0.44/4, z = 16/(129+64+16)*0.44/1}

x~0.0905263, y~0.0336842, z~0.0336842

Using the Holocaust Controversies distribution of 2 adults and 1 child the total volume of all bodies is:

V = 0.0905263 + 0.0905263 + 0.0336842

V = 0.2147368m^3

The average body volume of 2 adults and 1 child is 0.07158 cubic meters. Thus a 21,310 cubic meters burial pit would hold up to 297,713 bodies of adults and children with an average weight of 34 kilograms.

Your calculation method was not bad in principle, but you messed up badly in one respect, and that makes your calculation results worthless. I'll explain:

I first noticed and pointed out a conspicous oddity in your calculation results: while you claimed that no more than 14 people with an average weight of 34 kilograms could be squeezed into one cubic meter, Charles Provan had managed to squeeze 8 people with an average weight of 33.25 kg into 0.44 cubic meters, which is the equivalent of 18 people per cubic meter (and there would have been room for more if test subjects had been dead and not needed to breathe). What could explain so large a difference in concentration (14 vs. 18 per cubic meters) despite a low difference in average weight (34 vs. 33.25 kg)?

Things looked even more odd when I reproduced your very own calculations on an Excel spreadsheet:

Item_Provan's test group_Test group with 3 adults à 43 kg and 5 children à 16 kg
(a) Number of bodies in Provan's test group_8_8
(b) Volume m³ of Provan's box_0.44_0.44
(c) Volume m³ per body = (b) ÷ (a)_0.06_0.06
(d) Concentration of bodies per cubic meter_18.18_18.18
ST's formula:
(e) Total weight of adults kg_174_129
(f) Total weight of children (1) kg_85_64
(g) Total weight of children (2) kg_7_16
(h) Total weight of test group kg_266_209
(i) Average weight of test person kg_33.25_26.13
(j) Volume occupied by adult m³_0.095940_0.090526
(k) Volume occupied by child (1) m³_0.035150_0.033684
(l) Volume occupied by child (2) m³_0.011579_0.033684
(m) Total volume m³ (j)+(k)+(l)_0.142669_0.157895
Average volume per person = (m) ÷ 3_0.047556_0.052632
(o) Persons per m³ = 1 ÷ _21.03_19.00

How could it be that the bodies of Provan's test group occupied less volume on average than those of the hypothetical test group with 3 adults à 43 kg and 5 children à 16 kg, even though the total and average weights of the latter test group were lower than those of the former?

Using your calculations for the hypothetical test group with 3 adults à 43 kg and 5 children à 16 kg, I did the following execises:
a) cut the weights in half (21.5 kg for adults, 8 kg for children);
b) double the weights (86 kg for adults, 32 kg for children).

The results of these exercises were quite amazing, not to say hilarious:

Item_43/16 scenario_21.5/8 scenario_86/32 scenario
(e) Total weight of adults kg_129_65_258
(f) Total weight of children (1) kg_64_32_128
(g) Total weight of children (2) kg_16_8_32
(h) Total weight of test group kg_209_105_418
(i) Average weight of test person kg_26.13_13.06_52.25
(j) Volume occupied by adult m³_0.090526_0.090526_0.090526
(k) Volume occupied by child (1) m³_0.033684_0.033684_0.033684
(l) Volume occupied by child (2) m³_0.033684_0.033684_0.033684
(m) Total volume m³ (j)+(k)+(l)_0.157895_0.157895_0.157895
Average volume per person = (m) ÷ 3_0.052632_0.052632_0.052632
(o) Persons per m³ = 1 ÷ _19.00_19.00_19.00

As I confirmed by further calculations applying the same random factors to the adult and child weight values, it doesn't matter whether you double the weights, cut them in half or multiply them by or divide them through any given factor. As long as you use the same multiplier or divider for both and the relation between adult weight and child weight is not changed, the average volume occupied by one person in the test group will always be 0.052632 m³, and the concentration of bodies per cubic meter will always be 19.

This, of course, means that your calculations are deeply flawed, to put it politely.

Now, why is that your formula leads to such obviously mistaken results? Where did your mess up?

Your mistake was that you used the same volume, 0.44 cubic meters, for Provan's test group (175+85+7 = 266 kg) and for your hypothetical test group with the weights I had assumed (3*43 + 4*16 + 16 = 209 kg), while it is obvious that the latter group, with a lower total weight, could have been placed in a box smaller than the box of Provan's test.

Your calculations for the hypothetical test group should have been based on a box smaller than Provan's box in the same proportion that the weight of the hypothetical text group is smaller than that of Provan's test group:

0.44 m³ x 209÷266 = 0.345714 m³

With this lower box volume, your calculations for the 3*43 kg + 5*16 kg hypothetical test group would have turned out the following:

(e) Total weight of adults kg_129.00
(f) Total weight of children (1) kg_64.00
(g) Total weight of children (2) kg_16.00
(h) Total weight of test group kg_209.00
(i) Average weight of test person kg_26.13
(j) Volume occupied by adult m³_0.071128
(k) Volume occupied by child (1) m³_0.026466
(l) Volume occupied by child (2) m³_0.026466
(m) Total volume m³ (j)+(k)+(l)_0.124060
Average volume per person = (m) ÷ 3_0.041353
(o) Persons per m³ = 1 ÷ _24.18

You would then have concluded that a group consisting of 2 adults à 43 kg and one child weighing 16 kg occupied the following amount of space in m³:

Volume adult in m³_0.071128
Volume adult in m³_0.071128
Volume child in m³_0.026466
Total volume group in m³_0.168722
Average volume group member in m³_0.056241
Bodies per m³_17.780763
Available grave space in m³_21,310
Number of bodies that could be buried in available grave space_378,908

That would have been the correct calculation.

You could also have made things easier for yourself by simply considering the following:

1. Provan's experiment gives us 266 kg in 0.44 m³, which is the equivalent of 604.545455 kg/m³.

2. 604.545455 kg correspond to 17.780749 bodies with an average weight of 34 kg.

3. Thus 17.780749 bodies with an aveage weight of 34 kg fit into 1 cubic meter of grave space.

Now let's raise the weights in order demonstrate the irrelevance of your "anorexic" blather. Let's assume that adult ghetto Jews were just below normal weight threshold of the BMI table for persons 1.60 meters tall, i.e. that they weighed not 43 but 48 kg on average. According to Mattogno's "other tables", the weight of an adult is 2.76 times that of a child up to 14, so let assume that children weighed 48 ÷ 2.76 = ca. 17 kg on average. We would thus have an average weight of 38 kg for a ghetto population of which two-thirds were adults and one-third were children. Again we do the above calculation:

1. Provan's experiment gives us 266 kg in 0.44 m³, which is the equivalent of 604.545455 kg/m³.

2. 604.545455 kg correspond to 15.909091 bodies with an average weight of 38 kg.

3. Thus 15.909091 bodies with an aveage weight of 38 kg would have fit into 1 cubic meter of grave space, if the bodies of the Belzec victims had all been placed into the graves at the same time.

The bodies were placed in the graves not all at the same time but over a period of ca. 8 months (March to November 1943), so decomposition must be taken into account as a factor increasing available grave space as it made the corpses in the graves lose volume. The number of "fresh" corpses per cubic meter calculated above, 15.9, is higher than the number of "fresh" corpses per cubic meter I considered in the model that led me to the following conclusion (emphasis added):

Modeling the effects of corpse decomposition on the amount of grave space available at Bełżec should ideally be done on the basis of a day-by-day or at least month-by-month breakdown of the 434,508 deportees delivered at that camp according to the Höfle Report. Unfortunately no such breakdown is available. The next best thing is a table in Appendix A of Arad’s study on the Reinhard(t) camps[113] that adds up to a higher number (513,142, according to my summation) and allows for a day-by-day breakdown of this number, albeit with certain assumptions and the inaccuracies inevitably resulting from such assumptions. Based on this table, I modeled a scenario of mass grave space management at Bełżec taking into account the loss of body volume due to decomposition, the results being that even 513,142 dead bodies could have been buried in 20,670 cubic meters of burial space (the volume of the burial graves according to Prof. Kola’s investigation results, see section 2.1) considering decomposition-related grave space economy, and that it was therefore also possible to bury the much lower number of documented deportees to Bełżec (434,508) in the same burial space.[114] The model assumed a density of 14.8 non-decomposed corpses per cubic meter,[115] which means that with the density calculated above (19.51 per cubic meter) the saving of burial space due to decomposition would be even higher.

And we haven't yet taken into consideration the presumable further stretching of graves by top-down partial burning of the buried corpses, which was reported by Pfannenstiel and corroborated by Cornides.

Not to mention the fact that the mass graves discovered by Prof. Andrzej Kola were not necessarily the only mass graves that existed at Belzec extermination camp. Air photo analysis by Alex Bay suggests the presence of further graves. If Bay is right, that would make the above calculations rather theoretical.​

 

[Dogzilla]

On the contrary, Mexicans is pretty much exactly what they were, according to the contemporary anthropological studies of Polish Jews.

OK, Mexicans it is. Then the Polish Jews weren't so freakishly short that their height is one of the factors that makes it easier to fit them into mass graves. But Mexicans are good for comparative purposes. With the centuries of Aztec warfare, human sacrifices, and the Spanish conquest it should be easy to find a mass grave or two that approximates the size and density of an AR mass grave.

Dude, remember context. You're looking at photos from 1940, two whole years before the majority of Belzec victims were deported there.

Dude, remember context and history and reading comprehension. The only photo from from the Belzec slide show on the Holocaust History Project website that was dated 1940 was one of Hackenholt. The rest of the contemporary photos were undated. They show Jews at the camp and Jews being deported to the camp. They couldn't have been from 1940 because Belzec was a labor camp in 1940 that didn't even operate the whole year. It was reopened in 1942 and became an extermination center at that time. The photos shown are from the Belzec Death Camp Image Gallery. That means they are from 1942 or later unless the Holocaust Education & Archive Research Team is deceptively passing off photos of a labor camp as those of a death camp. But that's impossible because holocaust researchers [sarcasm]never deceptively label photographs to make a point.[/sarcasm]

Even regular rationing for ordinary civilians caused average weights to fall across most of Europe during the war; for Jews in Poland, you're talking a prolonged period of undernourishment and food shortages in an economy that was experiencing significant inflation.

Stop the presses! Are you telling me that there was rationing during the war for ordinary citizens? You mean there were food shortages? NOBODY had all the food they wanted? I thought there was plenty of food but they withheld it. What about those stories about SS supply depots packed full of food and medicine while Jews in the camps were scavenging potato peels and drinking urine?

Overall, more men than women would be selected for the kinds of work performed by Jews in western and eastern Galicia during 1942, eg the building of Durchgangsstrasse IV in eastern Galicia. In western Galicia as in other parts of western Poland, shtetl Jews were subjected to selection before deportation and the healthiest men and women were dispatched to forced labour camps. SS officers carrying out selections had to have some criteria to choose the labourers, and since very few selections were carried out in order to skim off skilled artisans, the main criteria would be physical strength, which correlates with height. Simply put, the runtiest and weakest Jews were significantly more likely to be deported than the healthiest, strongest and tallest Jews, while the bias in favour of male workers would skew the profile towards women, and thus reduce average height still further.

[sarcasm]And don't forget that the Jews were so skinny that the primitive camera technology in the 1940s wasn't even able to capture them on film. And invisible people weren't usually selected for labor because the Germans couldn't see them. So nearly all the invisible Jews ended up in the death camps. And we all know that the bodies of invisible people fit into mass graves much easier than those of people you can see.[/sarcasm]

This would be quite explicit with many early transports in the first half of 1942, i.e. the oldest victims of Belzec, since these transports were composed of entirely surplus populations of children and the elderly, eg from the Lublin ghetto in March-April 1942.

The majority of Jews who tried to escape were young men and women, with few families and few elderly Jews; the fact that this demographic escaped more frequently would further lower average height on the deportation transports, and by the time the transports arrived, escape attempts from the transports carried out by young physically fit men and women would have shaved a little more height off again.

But fat Jews can't run as fast so they would be more likely to be captured thus raising the overall volume of Jews in the mass graves.

Give it up. If Jews were made of cashmere and you washed them in hot and put them in the dryer, if Jews were hidden under a speedo and thrown into an ice cold swimming pool, you're not going to be able to shrink them enough to fit them into the mass graves you so desperately need them to be able to fit into.

 

[Dcdrac]

Dogzilla utter tosh.........

 

[Dogzilla]

I'm reminded of several well-documented cases of prisoners or POWs manufacturing mock uniforms that were used in a successful escape.

Excellent. I thought I was going to need to explain why the guards would not appreciate the prisoners making SS-like uniforms.

And remember, the people making SS-like uniforms were almost certainly trustees, not run-of-the-mill prisoners.

If they were prisoners, they were still prisoners. If they were Jews, they were still Jews. Rules applying to prisoners and Jews would still apply. Is the fact that they were trustees something you remember reading somewhere or are you basing that belief on logical inference?

 

[LemmyCaution]

The Bettelheim reference certainly implies prisoner functionaries of some sort.

 

[Nick Terry]

OK, Mexicans it is. Then the Polish Jews weren't so freakishly short that their height is one of the factors that makes it easier to fit them into mass graves. But Mexicans are good for comparative purposes. With the centuries of Aztec warfare, human sacrifices, and the Spanish conquest it should be easy to find a mass grave or two that approximates the size and density of an AR mass grave.

None of which would produce a need for mass graves on the scale of even Sobibor much less the bigger camps. Fail.

Dude, remember context and history and reading comprehension. The only photo from from the Belzec slide show on the Holocaust History Project website that was dated 1940 was one of Hackenholt. The rest of the contemporary photos were undated. They show Jews at the camp and Jews being deported to the camp. They couldn't have been from 1940 because Belzec was a labor camp in 1940 that didn't even operate the whole year. It was reopened in 1942 and became an extermination center at that time. The photos shown are from the Belzec Death Camp Image Gallery. That means they are from 1942 or later unless the Holocaust Education & Archive Research Team is deceptively passing off photos of a labor camp as those of a death camp. But that's impossible because holocaust researchers [sarcasm]never deceptively label photographs to make a point.[/sarcasm]

The photos are from the 1940 labour camp. The HEART site misrepresented them by putting them in a gallery marked 'death camp'. Since they're amateurs this is no skin off my nose. It's not just deniers who can be wrong.

So again, fail.

Stop the presses! Are you telling me that there was rationing during the war for ordinary citizens? You mean there were food shortages? NOBODY had all the food they wanted? I thought there was plenty of food but they withheld it. What about those stories about SS supply depots packed full of food and medicine while Jews in the camps were scavenging potato peels and drinking urine?

If you actually knew anything about WWII then you'd realise you're being exceedingly stupid with your attempted sarcasm. Again. If you also knew something about food economies and when these break down you'd have the same epiphany, and stop being so unutterably stupid.

And finally if you ever bothered to pay attention to geography and chronology then you'd realise you were being so stupid that I would actually fear for your well-being due to the sheer amount of shame and embarrassment.

So yet again, fail.

[sarcasm]And don't forget that the Jews were so skinny that the primitive camera technology in the 1940s wasn't even able to capture them on film. And invisible people weren't usually selected for labor because the Germans couldn't see them. So nearly all the invisible Jews ended up in the death camps. And we all know that the bodies of invisible people fit into mass graves much easier than those of people you can see.[/sarcasm]

Perhaps, instead of running before you can walk, you might once in a while deign to make a sensible, straight point before you start up with the sarcasm. Frankly, when you make as many mistakes as you do, and are as bone-ignorant of the subject as you are, it's really a pretty dumb idea to act all-knowing.

It also should be pointed out that you cannot actually communicate your point very effectively this way. Which is why whatever your point actually was has now sailed clean over everyone's heads, leaving only a memory of Dogzilla being a prat yet again.

So once more, fail.

But fat Jews can't run as fast so they would be more likely to be captured thus raising the overall volume of Jews in the mass graves.

Give it up. If Jews were made of cashmere and you washed them in hot and put them in the dryer, if Jews were hidden under a speedo and thrown into an ice cold swimming pool, you're not going to be able to shrink them enough to fit them into the mass graves you so desperately need them to be able to fit into.

It really seems as if the one who has given up is you. You haven't made a single sensible point in your entire post, and failed to refute a single point made in my previous post.

It's a fact that Polish Jews were generally of short stature. In reading around, I've found evidence that Warsaw Jews were 1-2cm taller than shtetl Jews, who were more impoverished and thus became comparatively stunted. But Belzec didn't claim any Jews from Warsaw. I might quibble with 1.60m for men but the average height of men and women was certainly around that figure, or even less. Should anyone wish to re-model the calculations with one man, one woman and a child, instead of two asexual 'adults', that would be fine with me. But that would still be a schematic breakdown.

It's also a fact that the deportees to Belzec were the product of negative selection. They were going to trend a lot younger than 2 adults and 1 child, a breakdown used by Roberto only because Mattogno used it. Mattogno didn't bother to model the victim population more precisely and offered no reasons why 2 adults + 1 child would be an accurate representation of the numbers.

It's also a fact that an experiment proved that 18 people can be fitted into a cubic metre - the Provan experiment. Nobody has yet refuted this experiment. The age breakdown of 3 adults, 4 children and 1 toddler/baby is probably closer to the age breakdown of the Belzec victims than 2 adults and 1 child. Yet the 8 subjects were healthy Americans who were fully clothed.

It's also a fact that there had been severe restrictions on food for 1-3 years prior to the deportations, which is going to cause weight loss and tighten belts.

It's also a fact that decomposition affects corpses in mass graves, as testified to by witnesses describing a rising and then a collapse of a fresh mass grave, which was also witnessed in more recent cases like the 2001 FMD outbreak deniers hate to talk about.

It's also a fact that Belzec was shut down at the end of 1942, something that only makes sense if the graves were overflowing rather than if the graves were swimming in space to bury the handful of deaths in transit that deniers seem to believe is the alternative.

That is of course assuming that you recognise the logical necessity of providing an alternative explanation for the same data (nota bene, same data, not fantasy made up data like Snow White and the Seven Dwarves).

Otherwise, all we have is the same-old, same-old nitpicking, sarcasm and utter intellectual cowardice from Dogzilla and his chums.

 

[Nick Terry]

Excellent. I thought I was going to need to explain why the guards would not appreciate the prisoners making SS-like uniforms.

If they were prisoners, they were still prisoners. If they were Jews, they were still Jews. Rules applying to prisoners and Jews would still apply. Is the fact that they were trustees something you remember reading somewhere or are you basing that belief on logical inference?

Since the thread has moved on and further information has been provided, it might help if you took that info into consideration. It might avoid further foot-bullet encounters.

 

[FluffyPersian]

Density divided by mass does not result in “corpses per cubic meter”. The result is reciprocal cubic meter, which is a measurement for inverse length, or inverse volume:

Reciprocal length or inverse length is a measurement used in several branches of science and mathematics.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reciprocal_length​

No, the result of Robert's calculation is precisely corpses per cubic meter. The reason you got this wrong is that you misunderstood the unit of measurement in the denominator of Robert's (and Mattogno's) calculation.

The numerator of Robert's calculation is density, kg/m^3. The denominator in Robert's calculation--the number you and Dogzilla tried to debate using photos of individuals--is kg/corpse. (Robert left the "/corpse" part unstated, probably because it's obvious.)

The result of his calculation, then, is

(kg/m^3)/(kg/corpse) = corpse/m^3

or, in English, corpses per cubic meter.

 

[LemmyCaution]

So who do I hate?

The Jewish people of the day who I say would have surely reacted with rage or eventual rage if they witnessed or knew of atrocities against their children?

Seems you people hold them in disdain by saying they wouldn't.

Since the beginning of time the most hated people in the world have been people who harm children.

Be that as it may, in the real world, people's reactions to extreme and violent conditions and acts vary, just as individuals' situations and psychology vary; the Jews in Nazi-built ghettos and camps reacted, as we've discussed, in different ways. Many of them expressed their anger and desire for revenge in writings; some of them acted on these emotions. Here is another way that some Jews reacted to the death sentence under which their children found themselves. Who is to say that rage and organized resistance are more natural than this?

Many labor-extermination camps were established for workers along the Durchgangstrasse-IV, a road through Ukraine built under Nazi command by forced Ukrainian, Russian POW, and Jewish laborers. The SS and Baltic auxiliaries guarding the camps weeded out non-productive people from time to time - hitting Jewish children especially hard. At one DG-IV camp, Mikhailkowka, therefore, only one child remained alive by April 1943, Mucki Enzenberg. Instead of venting impotent rage, knowing what was in store for the surviving child, the adults of Mikhailkowka, many of whom had lost their own children, organized a different sort of action, namely, hiding the child and doing whatever they could to help Mucki Enzenberg defy the odds and survive. This "resistance" worked for some time, but in all probability Mucki Ensenberg was killed at Tarrasiwka in December 1943, after the inmates of Mikhailkowka had been relocated there in late summer.

Many of us have already tried explaining the range of responses on the part of those caught up in the Holocaust, these responses depending on the age, family situation, employment, location, health, available opportunities, conditions of confinement, etc. of individuals. Organizing to save small children isn't something anyone's mentioned that I recall; my guess is that many other responses of varying effectiveness, actions that we haven't immediately thought of, can be documented - including organized resistance and blind rage, examples of which we have offered as often as Mr Moore refuses to retain them.

 

[000063]

...

Perhaps, instead of running before you can walk, you might once in a while deign to make a sensible, straight point before you start up with the sarcasm. Frankly, when you make as many mistakes as you do, and are as bone-ignorant of the subject as you are, it's really a pretty dumb idea to act all-knowing.
...

I think you're confusing cause and effect, here, doc.

 

[I am Bigfoot]

Here's the quote from Phil Zimbardo's book:


"[Psychologist Bruno] Bettelheim observed that some inmates acted like their Nazi guards, not only abusing other prisoners but even wearing bits of cast-off SS uniforms."

Thanks for posting it.
I was debating with myself whether or not it was worth the effort to hunt down a quote since the Nazi sympathizers would just handwave and dismiss it just like everything else that doesn't fit into their little fantasy world.

 

[nomuse]

Gross misunderstandings of human nature. Some of the deniers really should have gone to Stanford.

In August of 1971.

 

[Dogzilla]

None of which would produce a need for mass graves on the scale of even Sobibor much less the bigger camps. Fail.

Mexico wouldn't have anything close to the huge mass graves that were proven to have existed at the AR camps until the 1990s. But the new post-Kola mass graves that we always knew existed at the AR camps should be able to be found somewhere in Mexico. But no matter how big an Aztec mass grave might be, you'd be able to calculate the number of bodies per cubic meter for comparative purposes. Score!

Interestingly, wikipedia compares the Aztecs to Auschwitz and finds Auschwitz to be lacking. But it's wikipedia so who cares?

The photos are from the 1940 labour camp. The HEART site misrepresented them by putting them in a gallery marked 'death camp'. Since they're amateurs this is no skin off my nose. It's not just deniers who can be wrong.

So again, fail.

The only photo from that slide show that has a 1940 date is one of Hackenholt. The relevant photos are the ones that show Jews of various heights and weights and none of them looking like the skinny man of Buchenwald. Some of those photos are reproduced on the Yad Vashem site (here, here, and here) and are dated post 1942.

So again, score!

If you actually knew anything about WWII then you'd realise you're being exceedingly stupid with your attempted sarcasm. Again. If you also knew something about food economies and when these break down you'd have the same epiphany, and stop being so unutterably stupid.

And finally if you ever bothered to pay attention to geography and chronology then you'd realise you were being so stupid that I would actually fear for your well-being due to the sheer amount of shame and embarrassment.

So yet again, fail.

If was wrong about a specific point, you would address that point. Vague nondescript insults aren't very persuasive.

Perhaps, instead of running before you can walk, you might once in a while deign to make a sensible, straight point before you start up with the sarcasm. Frankly, when you make as many mistakes as you do, and are as bone-ignorant of the subject as you are, it's really a pretty dumb idea to act all-knowing.

It also should be pointed out that you cannot actually communicate your point very effectively this way. Which is why whatever your point actually was has now sailed clean over everyone's heads, leaving only a memory of Dogzilla being a prat yet again.

So once more, fail.

Well then let's recap. Nick and now the new kid yammer on about how small the Ostjuden were. When called on it, Team holocaust fights back with the fact that the short starving Ostjuden were only 10 kg below normal weight or roughly the same size as Mexicans. This means that they really weren't that tiny. Except when you need to fit lots of them into mass graves. Then they'll be dwarfs again. There. Now everybody's caught up.

It really seems as if the one who has given up is you. You haven't made a single sensible point in your entire post, and failed to refute a single point made in my previous post.

What would I refute? You conceded that the Ostjuden weren't freakishly tiny people.

It's a fact that Polish Jews were generally of short stature. In reading around, I've found evidence that Warsaw Jews were 1-2cm taller than shtetl Jews, who were more impoverished and thus became comparatively stunted. But Belzec didn't claim any Jews from Warsaw. I might quibble with 1.60m for men but the average height of men and women was certainly around that figure, or even less. Should anyone wish to re-model the calculations with one man, one woman and a child, instead of two asexual 'adults', that would be fine with me. But that would still be a schematic breakdown.

It's also a fact that the deportees to Belzec were the product of negative selection. They were going to trend a lot younger than 2 adults and 1 child, a breakdown used by Roberto only because Mattogno used it. Mattogno didn't bother to model the victim population more precisely and offered no reasons why 2 adults + 1 child would be an accurate representation of the numbers.

It's also a fact that an experiment proved that 18 people can be fitted into a cubic metre - the Provan experiment. Nobody has yet refuted this experiment. The age breakdown of 3 adults, 4 children and 1 toddler/baby is probably closer to the age breakdown of the Belzec victims than 2 adults and 1 child. Yet the 8 subjects were healthy Americans who were fully clothed.

It's also a fact that there had been severe restrictions on food for 1-3 years prior to the deportations, which is going to cause weight loss and tighten belts.

It's also a fact that decomposition affects corpses in mass graves, as testified to by witnesses describing a rising and then a collapse of a fresh mass grave, which was also witnessed in more recent cases like the 2001 FMD outbreak deniers hate to talk about.

It's also a fact that Belzec was shut down at the end of 1942, something that only makes sense if the graves were overflowing rather than if the graves were swimming in space to bury the handful of deaths in transit that deniers seem to believe is the alternative.

That is of course assuming that you recognise the logical necessity of providing an alternative explanation for the same data (nota bene, same data, not fantasy made up data like Snow White and the Seven Dwarves).

Otherwise, all we have is the same-old, same-old nitpicking, sarcasm and utter intellectual cowardice from Dogzilla and his chums.

And we're back to the freakishly small Ostjuden who had been starved for years before being sent to Belzec. Yet there don't seem to be any photographs of these emaciated dwarfs. We're treated to a reference to the Provan's report on Gerstein. Never mind the fact that Provan's "experiment" involved asking people to fit themselves into a two dimensional space while filling a mass grave involves throwing dead people into a three dimensional space. Or the fact that Provan's report merely says he was able to do it without any proof except for some poor quality photographs that don't actually show us that these people fit into the space. Or the fact that Provan has no formal qualifications for conducting this type of experiment or analyzing the results.

Then there's the decomposition theory that bodies in open mass graves will decay at the same rate as bodies in the open. Never mind that the graves were filled so quickly that the oxygen supply would be cut off, effectively stopping decomposition. If you believe the witnesses who say quicklime was sprinkled over the layers of bodies, we have another factor that would retard decomposition.

Then there's the latest one: Belzec must've ran out of space to bury bodies or they wouldn't have shut it down. Why Belzec ran out of space but Sobibor and Treblinka didn't isn't explained. But that's OK because it doesn't matter.

All of this back and forth between Snaketongue and the new kid regarding whether or not Belzec would work as described is interesting but not terribly relevant. Interesting because the holocaust is one of the few, maybe even the only historical event where you will find discussions such as this about whether or not something is actually possible. But it's not terribly relevant because proving that something is possible is not the same thing as proving it actually happened. It's too bad all the idiots who don't know anything about holocaust denial but still think it's wrong aren't here to see this sort of debate.

 

[I am Bigfoot]

Gross misunderstandings of human nature. Some of the deniers really should have gone to Stanford.

In August of 1971.

The Lucifer Effect (which id where my reference for Jews in SS uniforms came from) is a book by the guy who ran the experiment. The first.... 1/3 or 1/4 was about the experiment. The rest was applying the lessons elsewhere in the world, especially in Abu Grahib.

 

[Dcdrac]

The Standford Prison Experiment

http://www.prisonexp.org/

 

[Nick Terry]

Mexico wouldn't have anything close to the huge mass graves that were proven to have existed at the AR camps until the 1990s. But the new post-Kola mass graves that we always knew existed at the AR camps should be able to be found somewhere in Mexico. But no matter how big an Aztec mass grave might be, you'd be able to calculate the number of bodies per cubic meter for comparative purposes. Score!

It's interesting that instead of going and looking for such an example yourself, you basically offload the burden of doing any hard work onto everyone else. If you think this is a valid comparison, prove it. Until then, fail.

Interestingly, wikipedia compares the Aztecs to Auschwitz and finds Auschwitz to be lacking. But it's wikipedia so who cares?

Your link appears to have vanished, or did you just make this up?

The only photo from that slide show that has a 1940 date is one of Hackenholt.

No, the only photo that the slideshow dates is that photo. That doesn't mean the other photos are from 1942.

The relevant photos are the ones that show Jews of various heights and weights and none of them looking like the skinny man of Buchenwald. Some of those photos are reproduced on the Yad Vashem site (here, here, and here) and are dated post 1942.

So again, score!

Fail.

Neither of the pics I highlighted are in your trio. I frankly doubt that the 'Sonderkommando' pic really is from 1942, but would note that another scan of the same photo, submitted from the Imperial War Museum to YV, says 'probably kapos', which makes sense since there are men with armbands in the picture. The entire scene does not amount to a depiction of ordinary Polish Jews, so is useless for your apparent argument.

If was wrong about a specific point, you would address that point. Vague nondescript insults aren't very persuasive.

Your wrongness regarding food economies in occupied Poland is so profound that there isn't anything to say until you show some signs of mastering the basics. Are you ever going to do that? No, thought not.

Well then let's recap. Nick and now the new kid yammer on about how small the Ostjuden were. When called on it, Team holocaust fights back with the fact that the short starving Ostjuden were only 10 kg below normal weight or roughly the same size as Mexicans. This means that they really weren't that tiny. Except when you need to fit lots of them into mass graves. Then they'll be dwarfs again. There. Now everybody's caught up.

I think at this moment, the most appropriate response is 'que?'

What would I refute? You conceded that the Ostjuden weren't freakishly tiny people.

That's your strawman.

And we're back to the freakishly small Ostjuden

No we're not. Freakishly small would be men below 5 foot tall.

who had been starved for years before being sent to Belzec.

Under-nourished, malnourished, forced to go without. Starvation = famine, which kills. Peasants go hungry in lean years, and small town dwellers who are shut off from their normal opportunities to trade and sell their wares, robbed of their communal wealth and forced to compete with others on a black market are not going to eat as much as they did in normal times.

Yet there don't seem to be any photographs of these emaciated dwarfs.

And there's your strawman again. Look, if you say 'dwarf' then it's quite likely someone is going to think of this creature, which in fantasy-land averaged 4 feet in height. Which is waaaay under what has been discussed.

'Emaciated' is also a strawman; Belsen survivors were emaciated, and weighed quite a few kg less than the averages under discussion here. Emaciation or anorexia would be a step short of death. You can certainly find quite a few pics of emaciated Jews in the Warsaw ghetto and other localities where actual starvation broke out. They weighed even less than the averages proposed, and didn't even need to be deported because they were dying well before deportations even started.

We're treated to a reference to the Provan's report on Gerstein. Never mind the fact that Provan's "experiment" involved asking people to fit themselves into a two dimensional space while filling a mass grave involves throwing dead people into a three dimensional space. Or the fact that Provan's report merely says he was able to do it without any proof except for some poor quality photographs that don't actually show us that these people fit into the space. Or the fact that Provan has no formal qualifications for conducting this type of experiment or analyzing the results.

Clearly, you haven't been following the discussion. Presumably you switched off when your comrade-in-belief started spewing out pretend quadratic equations but it seems to have escaped your notice that even Snakey accepted the Provan experiment.

Now you're backing off and trying to throw poo at it because the results don't suit your incredulity. Well, tough cookies.

Instead of simply casting doubt on everything in a vain attempt to conjure up a gotcha, please present your sourced, scientifically validated figures and tell us how it really was.

Oh wait, you never do that. Silly me.

Then there's the decomposition theory that bodies in open mass graves will decay at the same rate as bodies in the open. Never mind that the graves were filled so quickly that the oxygen supply would be cut off, effectively stopping decomposition. If you believe the witnesses who say quicklime was sprinkled over the layers of bodies, we have another factor that would retard decomposition.

LOL. It would take a great deal more than dumping other bodies or even coversoil to cut off the oxygen supply. The bodies weren't wrapped in polythene. Decomposition occurs in all burials. It just takes place more slowly than if a body is left above ground. Quicklime isn't some sort of bodybuilding solution which can magically prevent changes from taking place in multi-corpse layered mass graves over the course of days, weeks, months.

Then there's the latest one: Belzec must've ran out of space to bury bodies or they wouldn't have shut it down. Why Belzec ran out of space but Sobibor and Treblinka didn't isn't explained. But that's OK because it doesn't matter.

This isn't a 'latest one', but has been pointed out several times before. You're simply too incompetent to respond coherently to points under discussion.

It shouldn't need to be explained to someone who is supposedly familiar with this history. Belzec was the first of the AR camps. It had a smaller acreage than the other camps. When the graves were obviously overflowing, the killing stopped and the camp went over to exhuming and cremating the bodies, which was evidently deemed to be a full-time task, preventing the camp from continuing to operate. Moreover, there were other potential killing sites in close reach. Jews surviving in Lublin area could be killed at Majdanek or Sobibor, Jews in the Krakow district could be and were sent west to Auschwitz.

Treblinka and Sobibor were built later on than Belzec, and allotted more space since they were not pilot facilities like Belzec had been. They had enough space that they could continue to operate on a lower scale in 1943 while the bodies were being cremated.

All of this back and forth between Snaketongue and the new kid regarding whether or not Belzec would work as described is interesting but not terribly relevant. Interesting because the holocaust is one of the few, maybe even the only historical event where you will find discussions such as this about whether or not something is actually possible. But it's not terribly relevant because proving that something is possible is not the same thing as proving it actually happened. It's too bad all the idiots who don't know anything about holocaust denial but still think it's wrong aren't here to see this sort of debate.

And here we have Dogzilla engaging in yet more projection. It's deniers - including you - who seem to believe that you can prove something was 'impossible', therefore an event didn't happen. Nobody is arguing the converse, they are simply disagreeing with the claim of impossibility by a tiny handful of ideologically motivated axe-grinders.

By all conventional standards of historical proof, Belzec happened, end of story - we have multiple contemporary sources identifying it as a death camp, many other sources which only make any sense if that was true, a fair number of witnesses, mainly German, Ukrainian and Polish, saying it was a death camp, and the evidence of physical investigations in 1945 and the 1990s which identified mass graves and masses of human remains.

The deniers spent decades attacking one piece of evidence only - a single witness, Gerstein, and thinking that doing so would not only handwave Belzec away but would cause all the other camps to vanish in a puff of smoke. Then an Italian doofus named Mattogno came up with the mass-graves-aren't-big-enough argument. Until that doofus advanced the argument, nobody was discussing whether Belzec was "possible" or not. Indeed after that doofus came up with the argument, nobody outside the internet was discussing whether Belzec was possible.

Mattogno's argument was countered in 2006, to which he tried to reply, which has led to the current spiral of is-too/is-not nonsense, propagated effectively by about 10 people on the internet - Mattogno, some of his sidekicks, SnakeTongue, and you, countered by an even smaller number of people who disagree with such tosspottery. I don't even notice many chimps at CODOH trying the mass-graves-are-too-small line on. Not that long ago, the chimps at CODOH were denying there were any graves at Belzec at all.

And no, the Holocaust is far from the only event where pseudoscientific discussions are started by ideologically motivated axe grinders; just look next door to the 9/11 forum, or at the JFK conspiracy theories thread; or god help you, the Moon Hoax thread. If you read Russian, you could have a whale of a time reading crankery about Katyn, too.

The denier argument basically amounts to the same nonsense as Daniken and other loonies saying, the pyramids were too big to be built by mere mortals, therefore aliens.

Could someone please post that History Channel gif to underscore this analogy, and keep on posting it every time this nonsense comes up.

 

[Dcdrac]

Yes Nick Dogzillas hot air is the usual nail out of palce on the moon ship syndrome

Using pages and pages of bogus mathmatical formulae that prove nothing at all followed by reams of links to go to whacko websites which also prove nothing