I guess you're referring to the "REAL" gas chambers then, the ones using diesel exhaust, or the Zyklon B ones where none of the witnesses can give a credible account of how they worked, or are telling stories of cherry pink corpses and where factual evidence, such as high enough traces of prussian blue, are often lacking. Or maybe I should listen more to witnesses like Bomba, the gas chamber hair dresser?
Stop the Gish Galloping. You're mixing up Auschwitz and the Aktion Reinhard camps in one gigantic ball of incredulity.
Really?
In the Nuremberg Trials (IMT, NCA and NMT) steam chambers was introduced as an accusation to the Nazi defendants. Its origin was the Polish government in exile’s document 3311-PS. This document was submitted as evidence to the IMT II, IMT XXXII, NCA I, NCA IIIII and NMT IIII trials. No historian today believes in the steam chambers.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steam_chamber_(holocaust_claim)
One isolated case, which is blown out of all proportion by deniers. The Polish government-in-exile drafted an indictment of Hans Frank on the basis of various wartime reports it had received. That corpus of reports actually specified gas chambers at Treblinka over and over and over again. All the other evidence at Nuremberg presented on Treblinka also specified gas chambers (namely a witness and the Soviets reading in part of the communist Polish government's investigative report into evidence).
The fact that an Allied organisation
got something wrong rather militates, by the way, against the frequent claims of forgery, coercion and orchestration peddled by deniers.
What's your sources on those?
The work of Joachim Neander, basically. Since soap 'n' lampshades are irrelevant red herrings, I'm not wasting time on this.
It is also impossible to investigate ALL of the claims of people who believe in God against evolution or whatever ("life is a violation of thermodynamics", "no transitional fossils"). It is however possible to show arguments against, prussian blue stains, cremation ovens of insufficient capacity, implausibility of diesel as killing gas, etcetera.
I'm sorry but this isn't a refutation of the principle of total evidence, and is in fact actively trying to derail the argument away from discussing witnesses, which suggests you actually have a huge problem with advancing a coherent argument against witnesses.
In the critique linked in my sig, we calculated that there were more than 300 witnesses to the Aktion Reinhard camps of Belzec, Sobibor and Treblinka, counting the SS, German visitors, Ukrainian guards, Jewish Sonderkommandos, and Polish villagers who lived in the immediate vicinity.
Now, any claim to refute the sum total of witness testimony to the Reinhard camps is eventually going to have to confront all of them. Because it would be the fallacy of hasty generalisation to pick out one minor discrepancy in one testimony and then claim that this refutes all 300 witnesses.
In our critique, we examined denier canards like diesel and corpse colour and found them all dramatically wanting. The deniers had advanced their claims, we refuted them. We didn't need to cite all 300 witnesses because the deniers hadn't done so, they hadn't covered more than a fraction of the witnesses. But we used
more witnesses. Our conclusions were thus firmer. And any refutation of our refutation
must use more evidence than we did.
In particular, on a classic issue like 'diesel' we were able to show where this had come from and why, noting a major disagreement between witnesses who actually operated the gassing engines and those who did not. The best explanation for the repetition of 'diesel' was that it was camp slang, reinforced by the fact that a diesel generator for the power supply was colocated next to the petrol-driven gassing engine. Thus, the diesel argument has been destroyed once and for all. Sorry.
Give me an example of what is "detail"? If there is anything, there is vast divergence and impossible "details" such as cherry red corpses..
Oh, an excellent example would be Hans Aumeier, SS officer, telling the British in Norway that the first gas chambers at Auschwitz were named 'Bunkers' at the same time as Szlama Dragon, Sonderkommando, told the Poles the exact same thing.
Explain me how you establish that things were testified "independently", especially since the Vrba report dates from before the end of the war?
By looking at details not mentioned in the report, silly. For example, the Vrba-Wetzler report doesn't discuss wire-mesh columns in Kremas II and III. However, we have witnesses on both sides of the Iron Curtain describing wire mesh columns to different investigating nation-states, with those interrogations or testimonies remaining unpublicised at the time. Ergo, they were independent reports since there is no common source in the public domain which could have formed the template for that detail, which is repeated so frequently that it would be massively improbable that it was invented simultaneously by telepathy or whatever other magic fantasy you have to claim to deny the fact that the witnesses are independent on this.
And on many other details, of course.
As to the gas chambers, people were tortured into telling that immediately after the war.
Bare assertion fallacy. And before you start blethering about Hoess, think on this: there were more than 30 SS officers who served at Auschwitz who described gas chambers and mass murder to Allied and East Bloc interrogators from 1945 to the time that Hoess was captured in March 1946.
Feel free to lay out an argument that they were all tortured. But first you have to identify who they are. Someone who had actually read a decent amount on Auschwitz would know who they were and who captured them. I'm pretty sure you don't.
Decades after that you have maybe 3 or 4 people tops that I know of who confessed to such things, and there are issues with those people's testimony. I'm not going to deny Einsatzgruppen or whatever.
It's patently obvious that you have
absolutely no idea how many witnesses there are from the SS side alone, never mind other witnesses. There were nearly 40 SS witnesses who served in the Reinhard camps just to name one example. Better than 100 SS witnesses testified in the run up to and during the Frankfurt Auschwitz Trial. There were 32 separate trials involving gas vans in postwar Germany, i.e. not conducted by the Allies. Each of those trials had multiple German witnesses, never mind other witness categories.
Those were West German trials. Nobody else prompted them, nobody else was involved, the interrogators and the interrogated were all German and were conducting their investigations in a liberal democracy with the rule of law and all the necessary guarantees that entails. Moreover, there were large numbers of Germans who would have cheered to the rooftops if the SS had said nothing bad happened. There was a legal fascist party, the NPD, and a lot of potential support from the conservative side of the political spectrum.
Yet the SS still confessed to gas chambers. As did Eichmann in Argentina when he was a free man, being interviewed by a Dutch SS veteran
who wanted him to deny the Holocaust. Yet Eichmann didn't.
These are all huge problems for 'revisionism' that have never been solved by deniers. They're just some of the reasons why denial has failed to convince very many people.
Far and few. The best and most credible documents I have seen relate to gas vans. For gas chambers not so much.
If there are so few documents then you can list them, no? And tell us why they don't prove gas chambers.
My point, which you sidestepped, is that those documents don't actually make any sense interpreted any other way.
Generations of deniers have tried to tell us what the 'Vergasungskeller' document meant. We have been told it was
a carburetion chamber
an air raid shelter
a morgue
a delousing chamber
which are all mutually contradictory explanations, and which all are contradicted by other documents and other facts relating to the same crematoria in Auschwitz.
Now, on its own the 'Vergasungskeller' document could be read in all sorts of ways but the document doesn't exist on its own. It is part of a lengthy paper trail regarding the crematoria of Birkenau. It is also part of the paper trail for Auschwitz as a whole, with at least one document referring bluntly to the 'gassing of the Jews'.
So that's your document angle buggered.
There are good revisionist arguments against that and it still doesn't explain cremations in 15 minutes, which you utterly fail to address. THAT specific part requires suspension of physics.
On the contrary, I specifically DID explain cremations in 15 minutes because I discussed multiple body cremations. If you cremate 2 bodies at the same time then you will complete the bulk of the cremation in 30 minutes. By this stage the size of the corpse is actually quite small and so you can insert 2 more bodies into the muffle. Thus, 4 bodies per hour, therefore 1 body per 15 minutes. In actual fact, each body is taking a full hour to be cremated down to cinders.
Of course, it's all a lot easier when a significant number of the bodies are those of children.
Too bad no one can find the tons of ash.
Since it's known that ash was thrown into the Sola river then it's pretty unsurprising that the full quantity of ash was not found. There are however still ash ponds and ash pits at Birkenau today. But the fact that the ash was thrown into the river makes your 'no one can find the tons of ash' a spectacularly stupid argument.
Urns were found however. You're an urn denier?
And if you actually knew anything about the concentration camp system then you'd know that the Nazis discontinued sending out urns quite early on for most inmates, especially for Poles, Czechs, Russians and Jews, continuing only for German inmates, whose relatives received an urn filled willy-nilly with some ash from the latest cremation rather than cremating each body individually.
So far, you're averaging about D minus by denier standards, Simon. That is compared to the Fs scored by Clayton Moore and the C minuses from Dogzilla. We've heard it all before. You'll have to try harder.
