Thank you. It is in some weird moon man language. And I can't ask Lance Armstrong, he's dead. Now I'll have to ask Buzz Lightyear.
It's in Italian. It's also free, and online. I am tired of you disputing already known facts and bogging down the discussion.
The PDF downloads mean you can easily copy and paste text into Google translate if you're that incapable of understanding Italian. Personally I find it quite easy to understand the Kalendarium in Italian despite never having learned the language.
So we find that on 4 December 1944 - I think anyone can guess that 'dicembre' appearing at the end of a file marked '1944' must mean December - there is an entry saying this:
La squadra di donne impegnata nella demolizione del
Crematorio III viene rinforzata con altre 50 detenute. Nella
squadra sono ora impegnate 150 detenute.
I also think anyone could spot 'Crematorio' and conclude it must mean 'crematorium'. It might be trickier to then learn how to read the referencing and see that alongside the entry there is this note:
APMO, D-AuII-3a/66b, Liste impiego manodopera
but it's not that tricky.
The reference is the Arbeitseinsatz report for the women's camp for the given day. Meaning that the entry discussing the increase of the demolition squad (Abbruchkommando) to 150 women is based on a Nazi document. Should someone still have difficulty grasping that fact, then it's really not my problem anymore.
And thus the reference, to the document, conclusively proves that the Nazis were destroying the crematoria in December 1944, before liberation, which means that people who blame the Soviets for this are not only doing so without the slightest shred of evidence, they are also ignoring well known sources, purely because they have an ideological axe to grind, or are extremely stupid.
Seems like they added a zero Nick. I don't recall my original source. I went Googling yesterday for the number of shoes to verify your statement and came across that figure on a non revisionist site, with 320.000 IF I RECALL CORRECTLY for Majdanek and Auschwitz together.
You recall wrong. Every source I've seen points to more than 800,000 pairs of shoes being found at Majdanek.
From a non bastion of revisionism:
Sigh. You're wasting my time by misunderstanding perfectly clear points. Majdanek contained a sorting depot for property taken from the victims of Belzec, Sobibor and Treblinka. The shoes traveled to Majdanek minus their owners, who were killed elsewhere.
I must say I am surprised Nick that as a serious historian you quote the Soviets as a serious source, wasn't it you who said no one believed the Soviet inflated number of 4 million for Auschwitz?
Are you seriously trying to pull 'falsus in uno, falsus in omnibus'? The logical conclusion would be that we cannot write the history of the Soviet Union from 1917-1991. How could one possibly write Soviet history without using Soviet sources?
Soviet sources are perfectly acceptable when critically examined using common sense and, where relevant, using comparisons with other, non-Soviet sources. The Soviet estimate of 1.5 million at Majdanek rested in part on the massive shoe mountain found on-site in August 1944. The Poles, their nominal 'satellites', rejected the 1.5 million figure in 1946 and re-estimated 360,000.
The Soviet report of finding 840,000 shoes on-site is
corroborated by western reporters visiting the site and mentioning the shoes in their reports, and also by photographic evidence showing, er, a lot of shoes. It is further corroborated by for example, a German document, not captured by the Soviets, from February 1943 reporting the handover of 298,000 pairs of shoes and boots from the stores of
both Auschwitz
and Majdanek to various agencies.
One could also add that
all the other evidence indicates that 1.5 million people were deported to the Reinhard camps (BST) and killed there, in the process being deprived of their shoes, along with 1 million killed at Auschwitz and deprived of their shoes, by the time the Soviets liberated that camp.
The Soviets reported finding 43,000 pairs of shoes at Auschwitz, along with 820,000 pairs at Majdanek, a total of 863,000; thus, approximately 1/3 of the shoes that would have been worn by 2.5 million deportees to Auschwitz and the Reinhard camps were found after liberation, the remaining 2/3rds, or more than 1.4 million pairs, were not; of these, we have a document tracking 298,000 pairs, leaving 1.1 million pairs unaccounted for with the pieces of information currently on the table.
Given this background knowledge, there is no reason to distrust the Soviets on the issue of how many shoes were found at Majdanek. There is however good reason to critically reject the overestimate of 1.5 million dead, precisely because we now know that shoes were brought to Majdanek
minus their owners, something that maybe wasn't crystal clear to the investigators a few weeks after they liberated the camp and trumpeted 1.5 million.
For the same reasons, the fact that the Soviet commission estimated 1.5 million died at Majdanek undoubtedly influenced their estimate of 4 million deaths at Auschwitz, since Auschwitz was much bigger than Majdanek, and so a higher death toll would not be wholly implausible, or would seem probable based on prior knowledge of Majdanek.
That estimate in turn was not based on much direct evidence, but was calculated on the basis of roughly accurate figures for how long each crematorium had functioned, multiplied by exaggerated estimates of how many bodies could be cremated in them.
One only needs to reject that multiplier. There is absolutely no good reason to throw out everything else in the Soviet investigation because of
one miscalculated variable. You cannot be seriously trying to argue that; it would be wholly irrational.
Irrelevant as to that 1,500,000 was claimed for Majdanek alone. It seems a trend for numbers to dwindle a bit. I found the following below for the death toll at Majdanek, I didn't check the sources to verify but probably it will check out:
1,700,000 Penal Court Lublin734
1,500,000 IMT735
1,380,000 Lucy Dawidowicz40
360,000 Zdzislaw Lukaszkiewicz,736 Israel Gutman737
250,000 Wolfgang Scheffler,738 Enzyklopädie des Holocaust739
235,000 Czeslaw Rajca15
160,000 Józef Marszalek740
125,000 Martin Gilbert (Jews only)741
100,000 Jean-Claude Pressac637
50,000 Raul Hilberg (Jews only)39
(Hits head repeatedly on table)
What are you trying to argue here? Nearly everyone on the planet has since 1946 accepted that the Soviet 1944 estimate was wrong. The near-solitary exception is Lucy Dawidowicz, who is one of approximately 10,000 separate authors who has written on the subject of the Holocaust, and not a very good one in many people's opinions.
The reason WHY the Soviets were wrong is because their estimate was influenced by the mountain of shoes found on-site. No other variable exists which helps explain anything
like a 1.5 million number. The selfsame Soviet Majdanek report acnowledges that the gas chambers weren't built until well into 1942 and doesn't mention more than a few 'actions' in which they were used.
NONETHELESS, that original Soviet estimate turns out to be remarkably accurate for the total number who died in the entire Lublin complex - Majdanek PLUS Belzec PLUS Sobibor PLUS Treblinka. That total number is based on various written sources and a closer critical examination of the evidence than was possible in the 1940s or even the 1960s.
Polish investigators were the first to point out that 1.5 million was wrong, with a new estimate of 360,000 in 1946. That was progressively reduced as the political climate in Poland became more liberal and as the museum historians did more research and became more open to acknowledging the Jewish dimension of the Holocaust rather than a Polish nationalist interpretation, so that the Majdanek museum now says 78,000 died at that camp. The satellite museum at Belzec now says 434,000 died at Belzec, instead of 600,000 as was claimed in 1946.
In 100 years' time nobody is going to care what revisions were done in the first decades after WWII. They are going to go with the most recent figures supported by the best research. They'll do the same thing for the GULag and Kolyma, which has incidentally ALSO been reduced from 4 million to 1 million dead.
That alone destroys the insinuation that there's something fishy going on here. As does this website, which shows that pretty much every single death toll in 20th Century history other than battle deaths of western powers has a wide range of estimates. There's nothing unusual with the Holocaust in that regard.
http://necrometrics.com/warstats.htm
So? Considering the hair of LIVING registered inmates was shaved AGAINST them DYING of you know what, what does this fact prove? And was is the relevancy to me other than that it reminds me I DO need a new mattress?
7 tons of women's hair was found on-site. More had been shipped out beforehand. 7 tons of women's hair represents about 140,000 women, supposedly. The hair was tested and shown to be saturated with prussic acid (Zyklon B). Another 1.95 tons of hair was found at a nearby processing plant, same result: it contained Zyklon B.
The purely visual dimension of a large stack of bales of hair - one was opened on-camera in the film made - underlined the sheer scale of Auschwitz. Not just cutting the hair but gathering it up for onward shipment is freaky. But it made perfect sense to the Soviets who saw the camps as a way of exploiting and recycling everything about a human being. As a symbolic by-product of industrial mass murder, 7 tons of women's hair is quite hard to beat. Thus it was prominently displayed in Pravda and Izvestiia on May 8, 1945, and that was more or less the only photo accompanying the report.
Before you try to wriggle, there is no evidence that women's hair cut from the heads of registered inmates was deloused in any of the delousing chambers in the Auschwitz complex. Testimonies suggest that it was washed in a weak ammonia solution and dried before being carted off to be placed in bales.
I don't know. I do notice that you used but an excerpt, is this a coincidence?
Since I also gave the figure for the rest of 1943 from March to December, 680, the 'concidence' is not typing out the entire table, because it wasn't necessary to make the point. I even elaborated that the last few months saw a rise in the rather reduced number of Jews given death certificates, and explained why: the Theresienstadt family camp was created, and evidently they were one of a few exceptions to the new rule.
If you add in several months before January 1943, perhaps we can see whether it consistently was around 2300-2800 a month or indeed that figures went up and down seriously over the course of months as in the source I gave.
Answer the question: are you going to tell me with a straight face that only 680 Jews died in 10 months of 1943 at Auschwitz?
At the very least, if you answer 'yes' then you'll be able to account for the quite substantial statistical discrepancy between the number of new inmates registered in the camp that year, and the known inmate population at the end of 1943. Please note that 'account' requires presenting evidence, not simply wildly speculating.
Your 100%-guaranteed inability to present any evidence that might account for the statistical discrepancy means you really ought to be rethinking this issue.
If it is a morgue on the plans, was intended to be used as a morgue in the very document alleged to be a criminal trace and had the doors opening the wrong way for a gas chamber, with the fewest assumptions or Occam's razor I would say it WAS a morgue, yes. That it was a gas chamber requires like a gazillion assumptions.
Wrong, multiply. Firstly the doors open the right way for a gas chamber on the later blueprints - outwards. That was one of many details which was changed over the design history of the crematorium project!
Secondly, your claim that it was a morgue requires some form of evidence post-dating its handover and the beginning of its operational life. That's because there is plenty of evidence that the space was used as a gas chamber, namely 100% of the witnesses who set foot in that building. But as we have seen, 0% of the witnesses say the space was used as a morgue and 0% say the space wasn't used as a gas chamber.
Your claim 'it was a morgue' is actually the one that requires a gazillion assumptions:
- that it's acceptable to ignore other evidence when making a claim
- that the absence of any documentary evidence of use as a morgue can be ignored
- that the absence of any documentary evidence of morgue fittings can be ignored
- that no one would ever come forward to state the truth
- that literally every single witness is lying
- that the witnesses knew
how to lie while scattered across Europe and unable to communicate with each other, agreeing on quite precise details, long before any blueprints were in circulation in publications or the press
- that you can ignore the fact that the anticipated future designation of the space was 'Vergasungskeller', which doesn't sound anything like any word for morgue in the German language
I was being sarcastic. If it is a bit TOO consistent for a gas chamber, it's a delousing chamber TOO. Who says it was not a delousing chamber ONLY at Majdanek?
Some of the gas chambers originally identified in 1944 as homicidal gas chambers do appear to have been ONLY delousing chambers. I'm simply unaware which chambers are presented as such by the Majdanek museum and whether they claim more chambers than is accepted by people like Pressac or the German historian Barbara Schwindt. I'm also aware that deniers have a propensity to lie through their teeth so any claim made by the nutter from scrapbookpages or any other kook isn't worth bothering with; they might simply be misrepresenting the situation. I'm basically not interested.
Finally, you seem to be straining for a point by analogy, but are evidently so wedded to 'morgue' that you don't yet seem desperate enough to declare LK1 to be a delousing chamber.
Have you not yet come across the batcrap crazy argument about air-raid shelters made by deniers? You ARE aware that the leading deniers contradict each other totally on what LK 1 was.
Arthur Butz says it was a carburetion chamber
Samuel Crowell says it was an air raid shelter
Carlo Mattogno says it was a delousing chamber
Robert Faurisson says it was a carburetion chamber, er morgue, er delousing chamber, er air raid shelter
I'm curious - which of these illustrious revisionists do you actually agree with and why are all the others wrong, and if the others are wrong, what makes you so much smarter than these 'famous' name revisionists who are so widely lauded and touted in your circles.
Thank you for your interpretation that it is another typo as Gasskammer. It is interesting. I must indeed admit however I have not been able to find anything sustaining the hypothesis that a Vergasungskeller was used as to against the frost impact.
I must also admit that I haven't been able to understand how on earth you could get to the last sentence above from the document. It's gibberish.
But it very well could be.
Not good enough. Just because something could be forged, doesn't mean it was. Anything
could technically be forged, but assuming that falls foul of the fallacy of possible proof.
There is no evidence of forgery, by which I mean external evidence or evidence regarding provenance. Internal 'evidence' of forgery is simply not good enough when it's the matter in dispute. To settle the dispute, you need a smoking gun
outside the text and layout of the document, because it's what's in the document which is at stake here. Any purely 'internal' document criticism claiming forgery runs the risk of assuming the consequent or advancing an untenable claim (handwriting = forgery).
You've not yet refuted the fact that nobody interpreted this document full stop until 1989 when Pressac published his book, yet there were two copies of the document, one in the Auschwitz museum and an identical one, the original, in Moscow, still under wraps in 1989.
The standard rule of thumb used by historians to dismiss forgery claims is firstly to observe that forgeries are ALWAYS made for a specific purpose. Nobody has ever in the entire history of archives randomly made up a document then planted it in an archive waiting for an unsuspecting historian to come along decades later.
The classic documentary forgeries are medieval charters 'proving' that some long-dead king granted rights and ownership to a piece of land to a monastery. In the modern era, forgeries are far outweighed by fabrications, thus it's easier to fabricate a nonexistent quote from Ariel Sharon painting him to be a monster, than to forge a document in Hebrew purporting to be from the Israeli government that somehow leaked. Propagandists have forged a tiny number of documents, usually for antisemitic or anticommunist purposes. Those documents are then publicised almost instantly.
Thus, the probability of a forgery declines exponentially the further one gets from a conflict which might 'require' some form of propaganda. A 1941 claim by the Americans would be most at risk of "forgery", and indeed we know that Roosevelt used a map purporting to be from the Germans striving for world domination, which had been forged by British intelligence. A Nazi document captured in 1942 is less likely to be a forgery (not least because by 1942 the Allies would actually have captured some documents), same with 1943, 1944, 1945. If the document captured wasn't used until later, then the chances of it being a forgery drop like a stone.
By the time you get to 1945, then we could for the sake of argument "reset" the chance because of the trials. But literally not one Nazi document presented at Nuremberg (IMT, 1945-6) has been shown to be a forgery, and not one of the 30,000+ used at the NMT trials from 1946-8 has been shown to be a forgery. Nor has any document since discovered by real historians, although I gather David Irving has fallen foul of his own overeagerness and swallowed forgeries created independently of archives - the Dresden Tagesbefehl being the all-time classic example.
That's the second rule of thumb regarding forgeries, namely that documents on their lonesome have a greater probability of being forged than documents bundled up in files and archives.
The Uebergabeverhandlung with 'Drahtnetzeinschiebevorrichtungen' was captured as part of 80,000 pages of documents in the Zentralbauleitung archive. The overwhelming majority are so tedious that not even a denier would claim they were forged. Denier claims of forgery are entirely selective. Since you're only claiming in this case ONE forgery out of 80,000 pages, then the onus is very much on you to explain WHY that 1 in 80,0000th document was the one to be forged and why the other 79,999 pages are OK.
That brings us back to rule #1, which is forgeries are made for a purpose. The 'Uebergabeverhandlung' sat in its file until the file was copied some time by the 1970s for the Auschwitz museum's research department. The original file continued to sit in Moscow and was barely touched by Soviet researchers. There is literally not one example of a Soviet historian citing that document from 1945 to 1989 and I don't think there's even an example of a Soviet historian citing from ANY document in that archive. Meanwhile, although the file copied to the Auschwitz Museum was copied some time by the 1970s, not one publication of the Auschwitz Museum cited the document before Pressac, an amateur researcher, published his book in 1989.
It is by the way a certainty that the file was copied BEFORE the Faurisson affair in 1978 and BEFORE Arthur Butz published in 1975, because extra documents from the Zentralbauleitung archive were conveyed to the museum prior to the 1972 Dejaco trial in Austria. Neither the Soviets nor the Poles gave a damn about Holocaust denial in the 1960s and they had zero understanding of it in the 1970s, only vaguely grasping it even existed until the 1980s.
Thus, the document was not fabricated in order to anticipate by several decades revisionist hissy fits after 1989 following the publication of Pressac.
All (wire mesh columns and gas tight door) but one the allegedly incriminating parts are handwritten, on separate pages. The one that isn't, the showers are supposed to be incriminating too but 14 doesn't make sense as to incriminate about anything. People working with corpses probably do need a shower. To fool hundreds of people into being showered, it would seem you'd need more than 14.
Lame reasoning, repeating previous nonsense from you. The showers weren't connected. That's the incriminating part. You've not refuted this.
Krema II was handed over in March 1943, Krema III in June 1943. That's far enough apart that one can dismiss the differences as the products of secretarial vagaries, since there is no Vorschrift that demands x be produced identically that you can cite to say otherwise.
The addition of a handwritten element is neither here nor there. Clerks do that all the time. Just because it's 'incriminating' means nothing. Gastight doors are typed out in other places, so that element is not suspicious. The very fact that there are typed out references to gastight doors in connection with the very same space refutes your claim above.
Moreover, the choice of handwriting for a forgery is dubious. The script does not look un-German and the handwriting is tiny and virtually illegible, as one would
expect from clerical work in a large bureaucracy.
Any claim of forgery requires, absolutely 100% requires, a graphologist to weigh in on the issue, and you've not produced a graphologist doing anything of the sort. For the time being, my expertise with German handwriting in the 1940s outweighs yours - you've not even attempted to claim that the handwriting is un-German, you've simply objected to the handwriting full stop. That's a fail, and you're not in a position to move the goalposts and start asserting how it looks super-funny to you, when your command of German is so demonstrably woeful and your knowledge of German documents so abysmally nonexistent.
The final point is that the document is not incriminating UNTIL it is correlated with witness testimonies. In and of itself the inclusion of Drahtnetzeinschiebevorrichtungen would be completely unintelligible on its lonesome. It would be neither incriminating nor unincriminating.
But that simply brings us back to the elephant in the room, which is that interpreting these documents minus witness testimony is bogus.
