General Holocaust Denial Discussion Part II

[EtienneSC]

EtienneSC, I'm still waiting for that reply.

We didn't seem to be going anywhere. I wrote:

That [there is no reason to propagandise after a war] might be the case for a dynastic or commercial war, but WW2 was in part, perhaps predominantly, an ideological war between fascism, communism and liberal democracy. [...]

You cited this and replied:

On the side of the Germans, the war seemed to be sold on ideology, sure. But considering the reasons for the USA and USSR to enter the war, I'd like to see some solid argument for that by you. Thing is, we're talking after the war. A LOT after the war.

Then I said:

There is no serious doubt that prominent figure like Ilya Ehrenberg were involved in anti-German and pro-communist propaganda. Radio Luxembourg was a contemporary American propaganda project. Britain and France were also belligerents. Propaganda does not imply falsehood, but it leads naturally to exaggeration and lack of scrutiny of evidence. You may be talking "a LOT after the war", but I am talking about the atmosphere at the time of the Nuremberg trials.

Then you said:

You know, this doesn't prove what you claimed.

So I'm not sure what you want me to "prove", or how you think it relates to the holocaust. If it is that WW2 was an ideological war, I can recommend Ernst Nolte's Three Faces of Fascism (1963) or his later The European Civil War (1987) that gave rise to the Historikerstreit, or the published debate between Nolte and François Furet. If that isn't an answer, you'll have to remind me of the question.

 

[Nick Terry]

This is no misfortune for me either way, quite the reverse.

It's a misfortune for you rather typically 'revisionist' attempt to reduce the pile of evidence you have to explain away. As we will see below, you make several assertions which would logically have to be tested against the evidence you want us to ignore wholesale, including the witness testimonies of 'ordinary' camp inmates, which brings us back full circle.

This is consistent with attempts by SS medical staff to isolate sick patients with infectious diseases such as typhus,

No, it is not. Prisoners suffering from typhus were taken to the camp hospitals. There were of course selections inside the hospitals, but also killings with lethal injections. The major selections took place at roll-calls, and those selected to die were first taken to separate isolation blocks (Block 7 in the Birkenau men's camp, Block 25 in the women's camp) then from these blocks to the killing sites (Bunkers or crematoria after March 1943).

This procedure is described so repetitively by so many witnesses that it would really stretch credulity to doubt them all, which was my original point.

which again is consistent with their extensive attempts to disinfest the camp in order to preserve life. As the son of eye-witness Kitty Hart said in an ITV documentary, why would they have had hospitals (if they wanted to kill everyone)? Her reply was less than convincing.

But this is a typical denier strawman.

Quite obviously by registering inmates in the camp at all, the SS at Auschwitz did not 'want to kill them all', otherwise they would have simply liquidated all new arrivals or only selected a tiny minority for the Sonderkommandos, as happened at Chelmno or Belzec. Auschwitz was both a labour camp complex and also contained a killing site.

I should really not need to keep reminding people on this thread that selection was built-in to SS planning from Wannsee onwards. Once this is remembered, then questions like 'why didn't they kill them all?' are just plain silly.

Provision of healthcare varied considerably over 1942-44 when there were mass arrivals of Jews, and there is a correlation with a changed attitude based on the overall development of the war economy and war situation. The basic principle was that prisoners unable to work would be killed. This finished off most of the new arrivals right through to October 1944. Registered prisoners were put to work. They were interned in the case of Auschwitz in a mixed camp with non-Jews, who 'deserved' healthcare more than Jews in the eyes of the camp staff. So we find that differences emerge, one of which is a cessation of selection of non-Jews but a continued practice of selecting Jews who were too sick to regain their health. As labour demands increased, the length of time that Jews could remain in camp hospitals increased.

Yet selections continued through to October 1944. And it is selections which require explaining with something more coherent than 'isolation of typhus victims', a handwave which doesn't even vaguely account for 1944 when typhus was essentially suppressed in the camp.

The problem here is to establish whether these particular crematoria emitted smoke and a smell. This was not addressed in depth in the Irving Trial, where it was simply said that these crematoria might be "different", but it appears from Mattogno that these were normal Topf ovens, designed not to smell (which would distress a civilian population) and which do not smoke. You also omit to mention that some eye-witnesses mention "flame and soot" (e.g. in Spielberg's Last Days), which would have to be reconciled with the expectation that a brick chimney would crumble if set afire. How many flame emitting chimneys have you seen? Would you not expect the Fire Brigade to be called? And of course there could have been organic smells from the nearby synthetic rubber factory.

The smell of burning flesh from open-air cremations is first and foremost what I had in mind. In 1944 during the Hungarian Action, the old Bunkers site was reactivated, sending up one plume of smoke regardless of whether crematoria do or do not smoke, and there were several sets of open air pits around Krema V. Those pits were noted and identified after liberation. Especially with Krema V being inside the camp wire, this meant that virtually everyone who was present in Birkenau in the summer of 1944 had the chance to notice large amounts of smoke and to smell burning flesh. Thus, quite a few witnesses report this; there is no reason to expect all to report this, but enough do that the numbers are considerable.

Regarding the crematoria, one would expect some flames to shoot out from time to time, and for this to be so striking that witnesses, especially later in life, remembered this as more frequent than was probably the case. Natural slippages in language can easily make someone exaggerate the frequency ('all the time', 'day and night') or be unclear in what they are saying. The evidence suggests that smoke was emitted from the crematoria, not least because of how they were operated but also because smoke was a problem that had not yet been fully solved by the cremation technology of the era.

Revisionist arguments regarding smoke are contradictory both between revisionist authors as well as internally in some cases. One big argument is that there was no smoke coming from the crematoria chimneys shown in the 1944 air photos. But in fact in some cases there is, and also signs of smoke from open-air sites; the fallacy of the argument is that each photo is a snapshot and only shows what was going on at that precise moment. In actual fact in at least one photo, magnification shows a line of what must be people entering a crematorium courtyard. One wouldn't expect the crematorium to be smoking before it had started burning bodies. And the frequency of actions was not usually more than one per day per site, even at the height of the Hungarian Action.

187,000 people left Auschwitz. The number of witnesses is much smaller and thus there is room for it to be self-selecting.

Actually more like 200,000 left Auschwitz, and then they had to survive until the end of the war, which reduces the number who would have been alive in May 1945 and able to give any kind of testimony by at least a quarter to a third. More than 100,000 Auschwitz inmates survived the war, but then left quite a large amount of testimony:

- 200 statements to the Soviets in spring 1945
- essentially every single Dutch survivor to the Red Cross in the 1940s (more than 1,000 statements)
- a mass of statements to the Polish investigations from 1945-1947, more than 500 to the core investigations and many more to the separate trials of more than 600 SS men
- several hundred to the French police in 1945
- many hundreds to British and American investigations in the 1940s
- more than 3,000 to the Hungarian relief agency DEGOB in 1945
- 1,000 to the Jewish Agency in Romania in 1945
- more to the Jewish historical commissions in DP camps in Germany
- quite a hefty number of the 7,000 statements to the Central Jewish Historical Commission in Poland
- a large number to the Czechoslovakian war crimes commission
- some to the Yugoslav war crimes commission from Croatian survivors

thus already approaching 10,000 statements in the 1940s.

Then we have:
- approximately 2,000 published memoirs or short testimonies/interviews appearing in publications
- more than 2,000 unpublished testimonies collected by the Auschwitz museum
- several thousand testimonies collected for West or East German investigations from the 1950s onwards, for various purposes, including 1400 for the Frankfurt pretrial investigation
- a testimony gathering project by the Wiener Library in the 1950s
- Yad Vashem's testimony gathering from the 1950s
- video testimony projects from the late 1970s/early 1980s
- separate oral history projects, eg 3 with non-Jewish Belarusian and Russian survivors conducted by German, Belarusian and Russian researchers

Even with overlaps, there are 10s of 1000s of testimonies.

As for people filing in and not coming out, the normal reaction would be to ask 'what on earth is happening?' and to express outrage and do something about it when the reply came. This relates back to my reliance on psychology point. I have known a few Jews in my life and I would not describe them as abnormally indifferent to injustice or unconcerned about the fate of their co-religionists, if anything quite the reverse, but this is implied in the narrative you are proposing.

We have dealt at length with this particular. argument from incredulity in these threads.

The narrative which is commonly accepted notes, as I mentioned above, the resistance of the able-bodied Gypsies in the Zigeunerlager when this sector was surrounded prior to its liquidation. There was a further effort to organise resistance during the liquidation of the Theresienstadt family camp. In both cases, the SS imposed a Blocksperre on Birkenau, shutting the movement of prisoners down entirely. There were more than 3,000 armed guards in the Auschwitz complex; when resistance did break out, as with the documented Sonderkommando revolt, entire companies seem to have been rushed in as fire-brigades.

Weakened prisoners selected from inside the camp were in no position to put up a fight. They were also moved under armed guard from the death blocks to the killing sites, which made a rescue attempt out of solidarity a forlorn hope which would undoubtedly have resulted in the deaths of several times the number of victims, short of a general uprising that could sweep the entire Nazi occupation out of Silesia.

The prisoners were deliberately divided against each other, with the prisoner functionaries and kapos drawn especially at first from among German criminals who showed very little solidarity with either Poles or Jews. Once the Poles rose in the ranks, they were not always helpful to Jews, that depended on their political leanings and inclinations. The history of Birkenau is of a constant fight to improve conditions which was in the end very, very partially successful. Resistance networks existed, but could not be built up extensively among Jewish prisoners who were divided a dozen ways by language (Greek and Dutch Jews in particular could often scarcely communicate with other inmates, not knowing Yiddish, German or Polish), and unable to advance into many privileged positions.

It ought to go without saying that the prisoners were unarmed; that they rapidly became exhausted due to a poor diet and harsh working conditions; that there was always a very high proportion of sick among the inmates; that they were divided by sex; and that they were hemmed in by electrified barbed wire fences with watchtowers manned with machine-gunners. To get around the camp meant passing through multiple fences and cordons.

One solution to this predicament was to try to escape, but that meant overcoming all of the above barriers, and was attempted by around 800 people from the entire complex, which is 0.2% of the number registered at Auschwitz in its life-span. For the majority of prisoners, escape would have meant trying to survive on the run in a foreign country with a very strange language, while covering up a shaved head, tattoo and trying to find other clothing to replace the KZ pajamas, with no money and no papers. Thus it is unsurprising that the majority of escape attempts ended in failure. It was easier from sub-camps, but only just barely possible from Birkenau, which was better guarded and had more security infrastructure, and was also located deeper inside the security zone of the camp complex.

The best solution was the one adopted by the majority of survivors, namely to seek out 'good' work commandos or get transferred somewhere better, organise extra food from various sources, and rely on connections to help them survive stays in the hospitals. Many other examples exist of quite canny measures to aid in survival, such as prisoners being hidden in blocks for months on end, children being protected from selection by collective action, the swapping of names on death lists, assuming false identities, being hidden in hospital barracks when selections were underway, and many other tactics which collectively saved probably a few thousand lives.

The "throwing" of unheated Cyclon B pellets into cold rooms is a strange way to release the gas quickly. According to Robert Faurrisson, the SS would have had to ask the victims to shut the windows again in Kremas IV and V, as they open inwards and the window lock is on the inside. Presumably someone has come up with an answer to that?

Faurisson is talking rubbish on that one. I've never heard anything so ridiculous, it doesn't correspond to the blueprints at all that I can see.

As for heating the chambers, there is evidence of the use of coal braziers to prewarm the chambers somewhat in especially cold weather, but the fundamental chemistry and physics of outgassing don't mean as deniers often pretend that Zyklon was a delayed-reaction gas. The evidence suggests that massively excessive quantities were used per gassing compared to the relatively small amounts that would theoretically be necessary to kill the victims.

This cuts both ways. If the segregation of the Sonderkommandos is a "give-away", then the contacts between them and the inmates gives it back again and the location of the secret killing operation in full view of thousands of camp residents gives it back in spades.

This assumes that secrecy was an absolutely overriding concern for the SS. The initial killing site of the Bunkers was located at some distance from the camp and was arguably more 'secret' than the crematoria, which were located right inside the camp. The convenience of having them close to the ramp that was eventually completed in 1944 was evidently much more significant than the secrecy consideration. Moreover, the evidence suggests that the crematoria were adapted to become gas chambers in the late summer of 1942, after in fact Krema II's foundations had been begun. Thus, it was more expedient to develop the existing situation than to start all over from scratch and 'plan' for perfect secrecy, which was always going to be an unrealistic goal.

The majority of secrecy and deception measures took place outside the camp. Once in the camp, the inmates could be reasonably expected to become fully aware of the camp's purpose, which they duly did, as 10s of 1000s of witness statements indicate. But the inmates were slated for the most part to stay within the KZ system, and thus knowledge could be partially controlled.

There were releases from the camp of Polish prisoners, who were lectured not to say anything or spread stories, but if they did so then this served to help terrify the Polish population, and was an infinitely lesser concern than keeping the 'secret' from spreading all the way across Europe to the west, especially into Germany. The majority of releases occurred from the Auschwitz main camp, whose inmates had a reduced level of knowledge.The release of Polish prisoners was confined to a region east of the police border which sealed off Regierungsbezirk Kattowitz from the rest of Germany. One might also note that a number of prisoners 'released' from the camp were promptly reemployed in the camp complex and more or less forced to remain put.

Nonetheless, it is quite clear that a fair number of Germans both locally in Silesia as well as in the rest of the Reich heard about Auschwitz. And then were prosecuted for talking about it. The majority of such stories came from the SS guards and civilian contractors, who in turn were lectured not to say anything and punished if they breached the rule too egregiously. There are field post letters of German soldiers discussing Auschwitz as a death camp in late 1942.

It's also worth noting that secrecy went largely out the window regarding the Final Solution as early as December 1942, when the Allies accused the Nazis of exterminating the Jews in comparably much more secret camps such as Belzec and Treblinka, located away from larger population centres, yet although there was good knowledge of Auschwitz as a death camp in Poland already by the same date, this did not sink in properly until 1944 outside Poland, by which time there was copious evidence from other angles that the Nazis were committing mass murder.

On the whole, the majority of secrecy measures quite strongly resemble the tactics of Holocaust deniers, to pretend that the elephant wasn't in the room, and were about as effective, that is to say, not at all. It's my belief that the Nazis talked up secrecy as a first step to going into total denial that they had carried out mass murder, and thus had much more to do with the management of psychological guilt, which is also why they used a lot of euphemisms, to create distance between themselves and the acts.

Internal security measures would include things like a separation of the sexes and a separation of the Gypsy camp from the Theresienstadt family camp from the camp jail from the penal companies. Fundamentally, no one was allowed to roam the camp freely, with only a very few prisoners acting eg as messengers or with specific skills allowed to cross sectors. There was no good reason to have the crematoria open for a Sunday stroll to the inmates, so they were shut off behind the ubiquitous electrified fences in their own spaces.

The Sonderkommando was named as such in multiple sources, but appears as a 'Krematoriumkommando' in others. If all they were doing is burning bodies from a high mortality rate and there were no gas chambers, then there would be little reason to segregate them fundamentally from the rest of the male inmate population in BIId. But they were segregated, first in their own fenced-off block, then by moving them en bloc to live in the attics of the crematoria and other free spaces.

This cut down on the contacts they could have with other inmates, but did not eliminate them, since quite a few other commandos had to visit the crematoria, eg to gather personal property, deliver dead bodies or as messengers. And while a fence can reduce contacts it cannot prevent all of them, so prisoners had furtive contact with the Sonderkommandos when they were in their block in BIId. The Sonderkommandos could quite easily throw things over the fence when nobody was looking, including valuables as well as notes.

One might add that the size of the Sonderkommando in the summer of 1944 reached 900 prisoners, a cohort of KZ inmates of this size at that date could be reasonably expected to generate many survivors if left undisturbed. The task required of them according to revisionists did not need nearly as many people as this, and revisonist attempts to explain away the size of workforce are not convincing.

It does not make any sense whatsoever if the crematorium commando was simply burning a lot of typhus victims (a) to seal them off from everyone else and (b) to expand the commando at a time when there was no noticeable increase in 'normal' mortality.

While the Sonderkommando was decimated several times first in a selection and then in a revolt, there were still a large number of survivors, and yet not one of them has ever come forward to tell a different story about the benign, inocuous crematoria simply burning bodies out of concern for the hygiene situation in the camp. Nor has any other witness claiming to have set foot inside the crematoria, including not one single SS man.

The revisionist claim that all the Sonderkommando survivors are lying doesn't pass a basic smell test, but it also must be checked against other lines of evidence. One of those lines of evidence is the copious reference to Sonderkommandos and contact with Sonderkommandos in the eyewitness testimony of the other inmates of Birkenau, which includes naming names; along with the evidence of non-Sonderkommando prisoners who report details from visits to the crematoria for a variety of purposes.

One might add, finally, that the staggered transfer of large cohorts of prisoners through the summer, autumn and winter of 1944, more or less precludes any coherent scenario in which the inmates collectively decided at some point to tell a specific set of stories and match up all the little details. The fact that inmates had been escaping at regular intervals since 1942 telling the same essential story with many key details matching up quite neatly, and passed on secret messages to the Polish underground with yet more details, means that the complexity of the hypothetical 'fraud' scenario becomes absolutely mind-boggling.

 

[EtienneSC]

So how on earth could their [Police battalions] involvement in the Final Solution be 'budgeted'? The costs of maintaining a police battalion would be the same no matter what, varying only in terms of purely logistical expenditures of fuel and ammunition. And once the police battalion had removed the Jews from a specific district in 1941 or 1942, then they spent the rest of the war having virtually nothing to do with the Holocaust.

From an accounting point of view, it can be done if you want to do it. Typical means would be recharging of costs (on a pro rata basis), allocation of costs by function, a common chart of accounts, for example. The better argument is probably, the Nazis wanted the Final Solution, didn't care about the cost implications or financial responsibility and perhaps didn't want a record trail.

All historians have to infer from evidence and use abductive reasoning to arrive at conclusions. You are trying the exact same procedure of inferring - "ammunition delivery, must have been near the front" - but forgot to take into account where the units were in relation to the front.

No, my speculation was "could have" not "must have" and that is because I prefer to operate with deductive reasoning. In logical terms, abductive reasoning is a species of invalid reasoning. It's like inductive reasoning as ordinarily understood, with the "All swans are white" danger, but more so. I'm thinking of abductive reasoning as 'inference to the best explanation'. This may have more purchase in general history than in biography, with which I am more familiar, but it still carries with it a risk of error.

To take an example from this debate, on my method, I didn't concede anything about the delivery of quicklime to Chelmno when challenged, deliberately refrained from drawing a conclusion, but just said "it doesn't look good, admittedly". When I later looked up the uses of quicklime and found other possible uses than burial, I didn't have to contradict myself, because I had not abductively gone beyond the evidence. The point about method stands regardless of the truth about Chelmno. Even with this caution, I have had to withdraw at least two hastily drafted statements. It is easy to get hold of the wrong end of the stick, so I find.

The dangers of abductive reasoning in history as I see them are:
1. The facts point a certain way, but don't establish a given conclusion, but we accept it anyway for the sake of parsimony.
2. Having seen a pattern, we then look out for and see things that fit, neglecting other possibilities.
3. We state conclusions as fact when it might be better to state the evidence, draw a conclusion with a "may well be" and let the reader decide, rather than leaving a hostage to fortune.

 

[Belz...]

So I'm not sure what you want me to "prove",

Your claims, would be a good start. But I'm willing to let this go as a side-issue.

 

[Tommy1234]

This is only partly true because "Holocaust deniers" and their social affiliates aren't typically involved in the propaganda industry. Let's take a wild guess at which social group has a disproportionate dominance in this field.

Let's not. Let's make an assertion and support it with evidence.

That's how it works here -- this is neither CODOH nor alt.rev, Tommy

I thought this was common knowledge, TSR:
"Four of the largest five entertainment giants are now run or owned by Jews. Murdoch's News Corp (at number four) is the only gentile holdout -- however Rupert is as pro-Israel as any Jew, probably more so." - Los Angeles Jewish Times, 'Yes, Virginia, Jews Do Control the Media,' Oct. 29-Nov. 11, 1999, p. 14.

"Time-Warner, Disney, Viacom-CBS, News Corporation and Universal rule the entertainment world in a way that the old Hollywood studio chiefs only dreamed of. And, after all the deals and buyouts, four of the five are run by Jews. We're back to where we started, bigger than ever." - Jewish Week, 9-17-1999, 12.

The name a few: the Katyn Forest Massacre,

Not, nor ever was a part of the Holocaust.

The only forensic report submitted into Nuremberg isn't related to the 'Holocaust'?

"This kangaroo court at Nuremburg was officially known as the 'International Military Tribunal.' That name is a libel on the military profession. [...] One of the judges came from the country which committed the Katyn Forest massacre and produced an array of witnesses to swear at Nuremberg that the Germans had done it." - Rear Admiral, U.S.N. Dan V. Gallery, Thompson, and Strutz ed., pp.XXI-XXII.

prior claims of 'gas chambers' in every camp,

Claims by whom?

Some examples of 'gas chambers' that mainstream historians are now "deniers" of:

BUCHENWALD:
Regarding a non-existent gas chamber: "...at Buchenwald, they had even lengthened a railway line so that the deportees might be led directly to the gas chamber." - Nuremberg document 274-F (RF-301). IMT, Vol. 37, p. 148.

BERGEN-BELSEN:
"As an 11-year-old boy held captive at the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp during World War II, Moshe Peer was sent to the gas chamber at least six times." - The Gazette Montreal, "Surviving the horror", Aug. 5, 1993

MAUTHAUSEN:
"On the occasion of one such visit in 1942, Kaltenbrunner personally observed the [impossible] gas chamber in operation" (2753-PS)
"Between 1,500,000 and 2,000,000 political prisoners are known to have been incarcerated and labeled for extermination at the Mauthausen system of concentration camps from available records." (2176-PS)

SACHSENHAUSEN:
"There exists a notarized, sworn affidavit about the construction of a gas chamber and a shooting facility [at Sachsenhausen concentration camp] in October/November 1945 by eight [Soviet] prisoners, of whom I was one." - Col. Gerhart Schirmer

"steam chambers",

Citation?

Take your pick:

- World Jewish Congress, Lest We Forget(New York, 1943), pp.4, 6-7.
- OSS document, April 13, 1944. National Archives (Washington, DC), Military Branch, Record Group 226 (OSS records), No.67231.
- Nuremberg Trial Document 3311-PS. IMT, Trial of the Major War Criminals before the International Military Tribunal (IMT “blue series”/1947-1949), vol.32, pp.152-158; Also published in Carlos Whitlock Porter, Made in Russia: The Holocaust(Historical Review Press, 1988), p.2-7.

evidence of torture in many cases,

Speaking of non-existent...

Speaking of...

"The London Cage was used partly as a torture centre, inside which large numbers of German officers and soldiers were subjected to systematic ill-treatment. In total 3,573 men passed through the Cage, and more than 1,000 were persuaded to give statements about war crimes. The brutality did not end with the war, moreover: a number of German civilians joined the servicemen who were interrogated there up to 1948. [...] As the work of the Cage was wound down, the interrogation of prisoners was switched to a number of internment camps in Germany. And there is evidence that the treatment meted out in these places was, if anything, far worse." - The Guardian, 'The secrets of the London Cage', Ian Cobain, Nov. 11, 2005

"During the first interrogation [the British Field Security Police] beat me to obtain evidence. I do not know what was in the transcript, or what I said, even though I signed it, because they gave me liquor and beat me with a whip. It was too much even for me to bear." - Rudolf Hoess, "The Memoirs Of The Ss Kommandant At Auschwitz", Da Capo Press, Mar 22, 1996

"...a great majority of the official investigators [...] were persons with a preconceived dislike for these enemy aliens, and their conduct was such that they resorted to a number of illegal, unfair, and cruel methods and duress to secure confessions of guilt and to secure accusations by defendants against other defendants." - Honorable Edward Leroy Van Roden, President Judge, Thompson, and Strutz ed., p. 67.

highly apparent motive.

And what motive was that, Tommy?

Revenge-seeking, political motives are more than plausible.

"I have always regarded the Nuremberg Trials as a travesty upon justice and the farce was made even more noisome with Russia participating as one of the judges." - Charles Callan Tansill, Ph.D.

"The entire atmosphere here is unwholesome [...] Lawyers, clerks, interpreters and researchers were employed who became Americans only in recent years, whose backgrounds were imbedded in Europe's hatreds and prejudices." - Presiding Nuremburg Judge, Iowa Supreme Court Justice Charles F. Wennerstrum

Like what?

Like traces of deadly gas in (and only in) those chambers used for gassing, like mass graves, like thousands of bullets right where the testimony says there would be, like rooms and rooms of personal effects stolen from the victims...

You claim there are traces of deadly gas "only in" those chambers used for 'gassing'. This is the most absurd statement yet. Where did you get your information? From what can be shown with forensic evidence, there were copious amounts of iron-cyanide in every delousing chamber and extremely low, non-incriminating quantities in all alleged 'gas chambers'.

Rooms full of personal effects? It is well-documented that standard hygienic procedures were enforced at all camps (delousing chambers are a noteworthy example). Disease was rampant nearing the end of the war and clothing may have been isolated from inmates for sanitation and fumigation purposes. Most Jews that had prepared for deportation would have been likely to bring several items of clothing when possible. "Personal effects" prove nothing in this context.

Have any of these alleged 'bullet sites' produced the requisite mass graves to show evidence of German atrocities?

During WWII Germany "ausrottung" was more closely defined as "uprooting", for which I can provide several examples.

No, it wasn't -- not when being used to refer to living creatures.

And no, you cannot.

While *I* can supply multiple examples of native speakers (which you are not) confirming this.

- In 1993, Robert Wolfe, supervisory archivist for captured German records at the National Archives admitted that a more precise translation of 'ausrottung' would be extirpation or tearing up by the roots. Wolfe also pointed out that in Himmler's handwritten notes for the speech, that Himmler used the term, 'judenevakuierung', or evacuation of the Jews, not 'extermination'.

- From a 1935 speech by Rudolf Hess (well before any claims of an 'extermination plan'):
"National Socialist legislation has now introduced corrective measures against this over-alienization. I say corrective, because the proof that the Jews are not being ruthlessly rooted out [AUSGEROTTET] is that in Prussia alone 33,500 Jews are working in manufacturing and industry, and 89,800 are engaged in trade and commerce; and that with only 1 per cent of the population Jewish, 17.5 per cent of our attorneys and in Berlin nearly half the registered doctors are still Jewish."

- There is a 1936 (once again, well before 'extermination' claims) anti-German book by Leon Feuchtwanger and others entitled "DER GELBE FLECK: DIE AUSROTTUNG VON 500,000 DEUTSCHEN JUDEN". Were a half-million Jews already 'gassed'?

Regarding any reference to 'genocide':

"Even these excerpts — Peterson and Smith [publishers] do not give the whole texts of the speeches — must be regarded with skepticism, for they were taken from documents that are manifestly unreliable. In both of these cases, there are elements that strongly suggest a manipulation of text or forgery."

See? Care to detail this "elements" for us, Tommy?

- Missing pages, questionable origin.
- SS General Gottlob Berger, former head of the SS administrative department, Himmler's personal liaison with Rosenberg's Ministry for the Occupied East, and chief of POW affairs toward the end of the war was present during the Posen speech. He testified in direct examination that not only did he know nothing of an extermination plan, but that the so-called "transcript" of Himmler's speech was missing key elements that he had remembered specifically.
- YIVO, Yiddish Research Institute, was very active in the Rosenberg Ministry to process documents for submittal to Nuremberg.
- A lack of orders and physical evidence to support the required assumptions.

Too bad for you Himmler himself explains this:

Too bad your quote-mining has taken the most absurd segments of a lengthy document that is only alleged to be Himmler's exact words and presents them as out-of-context as possible. These sentences often-cited by Believers are the only bits of these speeches of several hours in length that have even the potential to be misinterpreted as an 'extermination' reference. Whether that is due to plausible alterations or misinterpretation of context is debatable.

On that note, how many have heard of the Allied concentration camps in which more than 750,000 Germans were murdered post-war?

Any one who has read "Other Losses", which is to say anyone interested in the pathopsychology of denial.

Unfortunately for you, we have also read the criticisms of Bacque detailing the many errors in his work.

I haven't read "Other Losses" and I've only briefly reviewed Bacque's arguments but I find it hard to believe it is any less substantiated than the magical 'Holocaust'.

Since negation of this event can be shown, who has been the negationist?

Scholarly refutation of error is not "negationism".

The irony here is excruciating.

This reminds me of why I am not religious; just because we don't know the answers doesn't mean "God did it" any more than it means "extermination plan". Ironically, both of these magical stories are dependent on 'eyewitness testimony'.

No, they *both* do not.

No matter how much of your life you have spent really really really wanting it to be so.

Maybe "babies used as targets for machine gunners" and 'evil doctor schemes' are more believable when you're accustomed to getting on your knees for a magical-man-in-the-sky.

I find your neglect of 'gas chamber' evidence, which would account for more than half of the 'Holocaust', to be far more significant. The members of CODOH are still waiting for your response to both of these topics.

If they are so anxious for that response, don't you suppose they ought to stop banning anyone that offers it?

I'd love to hear which arguments you claim have had their users 'banned'. I'll tell you what, let me know which argument you believe to be the strongest for "the Holocaust" and I'll post it for you. Rather, I'll leave up to our readers to join the site, themselves, and see whether or not they are 'banned' for participating.

Really? From what I gather, Revisionists have held steadfast to the same basic assertions: no 'gas chambers', nothing close to '6 million' Jewish deaths, no 'extermination plan'.

Talk to David Irving.

There are fringe members of any group. That's a good point, though, TSR. I wonder how many exterminationalists believe in 6 million versus 4 or 5 million Jewish deaths. For that matter, how many believe in 'gas chambers' at Mauthausen or Ilse Koch's "skin lampshades"?

Tell me, Mr. Terry, where are these "steam chambers", "skin lampshades" and "human soap"?

Tell us, Tommy -- where does Dr. Terry assert the (current or former) existence of these?

You've got me. I haven't even heard a clear definition of what Mr. Terry believes the "Holocaust" was.

Of course, this is more evidence against the ridiculous 'gas chamber' proposal. It shows there would have been widespread rumor of 'gassings' throughout the main camp.

In what way?

254 of 400 witnesses commented on gassings with 44 (11%) having directly witnessed them? Didn't they tell their friends and family to stay away from that tricky "shower room"? I'm sure the message would have gotten out somehow, considering there were at least 500 recorded escapees from Auschwitz. This isn't the only evidence supporting that these rumors were floating throughout the camps and is at odds with the fact that near-absolute cooperation would have been required from victims as they enter the so-called 'chamber'.

How were 2,000 Jews crammed into a relatively tiny gas chamber on a regular basis with apparently flawless precision (by other Jews) if they had already known these buildings were not "showers", as alleged?

Perhaps you should learn what the historical record *actually says* about these events, rather than rely on denier distortions of that record?

I'll go into greater detail with my response to Mr. Terry. Here's a few good quotes:

"1,000 - 2,000 persons were killed per application depending on the size of a given transport." - Auschwitz curator Franciszek Piper

"In Crematoria 1 [II) and 2 [III], 2,000 into each; Crematoria 3 [IV] and 4 [V), 1,000 each: and into the Bunker [2/V], 1,000." - Dr. Charles Bendel

"The people were herded in so tightly that there was no possibility even to put in one more. It was a great amusement for the SS to throw in children above the heads of those who were packed tightly into these rooms." - Dr. Charles Bendel

Moreover, why do you regard testimony so highly when these witnesses who would have been predominantly Jewish had overwhelming personal reasons to 'punish' the Germans by whatever means possible?

Why should Zundel's testimony be so highly regarded by deniers when he had overwhelming personal reasons to "punish" the Canadians by whatever means possible.

And once again -- learn about the history you are so rabid to deny, so you you don't make obvious blunders like "predominately Jewish".

These camps were predominantly Jewish; most 'eyewitnesses' were Jewish. On account of the extremely harsh conditions at these camps, I think it's also safe to assume many of them were very angry at Germany.

Zundel was the defendant, not the accuser. I don't think it can be claimed that his trial was "rigged" to favor his agenda. The same cannot be said for Nuremburg. In addition to the fact that Colonel David Marcus (a fervent Zionist Jew) selected most of the judges, prosecutors and lawyers for the NMT Trials, here is what some authoritative figures of the time have had to say on the matter:

"During the war the WJC (World Jewish Congress) had created an Institute of Jewish Affairs in New York. The directors were two great Lithuanian Jewish jurists, Jacob and Nehemiah Robinson. Thanks to them, the Institute worked out two completely revolutionary ideas: the Nuremberg tribunal and German reparations." - Nahum Goldmann, former president of World Jewish Congress and the World Zionist Organization

"The Nuremberg trials are so repugnant to the Anglo-Saxon principles of justice that we must forever be ashamed of that page in our history ... The Nuremberg farce represents a revenge policy at its worst." - US Congressional Rep. Lawrence Smith

"[Chief US prosecutor] Jackson is away conducting his high-grade lynching party in Nuremberg. I don't mind what he does to the Nazis, but I hate to see the pretense that he is running a court and proceeding according to common law. This is a little too sanctimonious a fraud to meet my old-fashioned ideas." - US Supreme Court Chief Justice Harlan Fiske Stone

"The Nuremberg trial constitutes a real threat to the basic conceptions of justice which it has taken mankind thousands of years to establish." - Jewish lawyer and NYU professor Milton R. Konvitz

"The trial of the vanquished by the victors cannot be impartial no matter how it is hedged about with the forms of justice... By clothing policy in the forms of legal procedure, we many discredit the whole idea of justice in Europe for years to come." - US Senator Robert Taft

"The entire atmosphere here is unwholesome ... Lawyers, clerks, interpreters and researchers were employed who became Americans only in recent years, whose backgrounds were imbedded in Europe's hatreds and prejudices." - Justice Charles F. Wennerstrum, president judge at Nuremberg

"You know how I have despised anti-Semitism. You know how strongly I feel toward those who preach intolerance of any kind. With that knowledge — you will understand when I tell you that this [Nuremberg] staff is about seventy-five percent Jewish." - Senator Christopher Dodd in a private letter to his son

You should be well aware of this as a historian. Are there authenticated originals of these documents available for review?

Yes.

Could you post them, please? It'd be nice to have a real challenge to share with CODOH.

Have any of these 'mass graves' been excavated?

"Any?" Yes.

Now, how many mass graves from other genocides have be excavated to your personal asatisfaction?

How many mass graves from other 'genocides' do we know the alleged exact locations of?

Which 'Holocaust' mass graves have been excavated? Can you draw out the *exact* location? Is there actual evidence of 'extermination', or just cremated remains?

Why should the scientific method account for what the "rest of the world" has been convinced of?

Read for comprehension: in order for denial to become more than simply an expression of Jew hatred, the evidence which the historical method has documented must be accounted for as a while.

Not the nit-picking you have attempted in this post.

The historical method by Believer standards consists of a biased view of unreliable testimony, Soviet documentation, a deliberately falsified chemical analysis and whatever else is now spoon-fed by Zionist institutions worldwide.

If you are making an initial claim, such as a mass German conspiracy to exterminate all Jews, YOU have the burden of proof.

And this has been met, to the satisfaction of courts and academics worldwide.

So has Jesus Christ. What do they both have in common? Indoctrination and dogma.

This is common sense. Revisionists don't claim to know exactly what happened during WWII -- they assert that no evidence has been sustained to support an "extermination plan".

Which is why they are *deniers* and not actually revisionists.

You have slipped up, and admitted your claims comprise an assertion. Since the opposite assertion has already accounted for the available evidence, you assertion must do so as well.

Get cracking.

My assertion that there is no sustaining evidence to support an 'extermination plan' has already been proven. I don't need to prove 'the Holocaust' as-alleged didn't happen, only that you have no sustaining evidence to show it did.

Clearly, because citing a lack of physical evidence isn't a rational argument.

Asserting a lack of physical evidence when it actually exists is completely irrational, but is done routinely by Holocaust deniers.

You mean all the physical evidence you are unable to provide on CODOH?

This is only partly true because "Holocaust deniers" and their social affiliates aren't typically involved in the propaganda industry. Let's take a wild guess at which social group has a disproportionate dominance in this field.

Holocaust deniers aren't very involved in the media, arts, universities, schools or in genuine intellectual discourse. They are in fact pretty well shut out from public sphere in pretty much every single country in the West, regardless of what laws might or might not exist, and with no correlation between things like the size of the Jewish community or number of Holocaust museums.

I'd like to know of which of these "pretty much every single country in the West" you believe doesn't have a disproportionate Jewish influence in the propaganda industry.

I'd also like to know which university you believe would allow me to host open debate on the 'Holocaust'.

The name a few: the Katyn Forest Massacre, prior claims of 'gas chambers' in every camp, "steam chambers", evidence of torture in many cases, highly apparent motive.

This is a Gish Gallop, and doesn't even make coherent sense in response to what uke2se wrote.

The 'Holocaust' itself is a Gish Gallop. I missed the original context of what 000063 wrote. My mistake. I'll try to pay attention from now on.

Like what?

Like the fact that witnesses reported open air mass cremations and there is physical evidence of the cremation of human remains at the relevant sites. This would generally be regarded as corroboration.

Cremations during both a major war and a disease outbreak don't prove anything but death, certainly not 'extermination'. Can you point out the exact location of these graves? Are there corresponding 'gas chambers' to fit the claims, if applicable?

During WWII Germany "ausrottung" was more closely defined as "uprooting", for which I can provide several examples. This changes the the perceived context of the Posen speech.

You're going to provide these examples, or just assert that words mean what you want them to, Alice in Wonderland style?

See above response to TSR.

According to Dr. Wilhelm Staeglich, the speech in Sonthofen given by Himmler:

"refers to the execution of Jews only in connection with the fight against partisans and other bandits operating behind the German lines on the eastern front."

No it doesn't. The speech quite clearly refers to the mass murder of Jews including very explicitly, women and children. Sonthofen doesn't sit on its own - there are a whole string of documents which make the intent perfectly clear.

You don't seem to realise that your gurus or yourself have to explain all of them. Together. Since your long dead guru Wilhelm Staeglich was writing originally in 1979, it's a dead cert that he missed a whole load of things which have been noticed in the past 33 years of research.

Another good example of what has been "noticed" is an overwhelming lack of iron-cyanide residue in all alleged 'gas chambers'. Care to address that, Mr. Terry? You've only dodged it about fifty times. Documents can be forged; forensic evidence cannot.

Considering the verbatim German transcripts aren't even available for this document, that there are several documents that contradict the entire 'extermination' hypothesis including the Schlegelberger letter and the Luther memo, along with all available forensic evidence supporting the Revisionist stance with a virtually endless record of expressed intent to *deport* not exterminate, I'm going to have to reject your 'gas chamber', Jew-hunting fairytale.

Regarding any reference to 'genocide':

"Even these excerpts — Peterson and Smith [publishers] do not give the whole texts of the speeches — must be regarded with skepticism, for they were taken from documents that are manifestly unreliable. In both of these cases, there are elements that strongly suggest a manipulation of text or forgery."

Utter nonsense. I'm sorry, but as soon as a denier starts spewing out forgery claims they might as well pack their bags and give up. Staeglich didn't even examine the original document so his assertion carries precisely zero weight.

But what is really intellectually offensive is the invocation of the standard denier trick 'it doesn't prove anything/but it's a forgery anyway'. Make up your mind - either it is an incriminating document or it's not. If it's not incriminating, there's no reason to allege forgery. Your claims are contradictory and illogical.

It doesn't matter what I argue, either possibility holds better ground than "extermination". These documents must not accurately depict an 'extermination plan' for the simple reason that such a plan is in stark contrast to a convergence of evidence that Believers haven't been able to put a dent in. Take your pick: cremation capacity, forensic evidence, political influences at Nuremburg shaping the narrative, an overwhelming lack of documentation with regards to the immense implications of organized genocide, ample documentation from immediately after the war supporting deportation, frequently, and "death camps", never, anomalies such as monthly postcards, a swimming pool, delousing chambers (to save lives), recreational activities and camp currency for inmates...

Does it all point to 'extermination' despite the fact that this accusation relies almost entirely on testimony and trials from biased parties?

Code words were used first and foremost to create psychological distance between the killers and their actions.

Not with the alleged 'gas vans'.

Verbal orders are given because the management style of the Nazi leadership preferred them on many occasions.

Yet they preferred written orders for everything else of this magnitude.

One set of documents can be ordered destroyed by one institution (such as Globocnik's SSPF Lublin staff, which reported that it burned the files from the Reinhard camps) and another set of documents might still be in use by another institution (such as Himmler's personal papers).

Try thinking through the bureaucracy involved.

By the way, the destruction of records is hardly unique to the SS. Less than 2% of the Luftwaffe records survived the war.

Allied bombing of the Potsdam archives account for some, if not most of the records destroyed there. Regardless, it is not unusual for a government to destroy military records after losing a war. I don't suppose you're claiming the German air force played an incriminating role in the 'Final Solution', are you?

On that note, how many have heard of the Allied concentration camps in which more than 750,000 Germans were murdered post-war? Since negation of this event can be shown, who has been the negationist? Is it the US Government, the Jewish media bias in the United States and abroad or other anti-German interests? If so, doesn't that show these organizations are willing to lie? What does that say about 'the Holocaust', in general?

No such Allied "concentration camps" existed. You're repeating a long debunked claim by James Bacque which did not stand up to scrutiny.

Neither does the 'Holocaust'.

Perhaps that is because Revisionists tend to admit when a lack of evidence exists rather than make up fairy tales to fill in gaps. This reminds me of why I am not religious; just because we don't know the answers doesn't mean "God did it" any more than it means "extermination plan". Ironically, both of these magical stories are dependent on 'eyewitness testimony'.

Obfuscating history by saying we cannot know something when we know perfectly well what happened isn't very convincing. This is why revisionism is essentially shut out. While you may convince yourself and a few others with bad arguments by analogy, the fact remains that 'revisionism' is negationism. It is always saying something did not happen and never, ever says clearly what actually did.

We know "perfectly well" what happened? How many Jews were exterminated, Mr. Terry? Where are the 'gas chambers'?

Revisionists include all but the ludicrous 'extermination plan' (e.g. mass deportations, Jewish imprisonment and maltreatment, widespread disease). Do you need evidence of these things?

Unless you give me some kind of evidence to confirm what really did happen, if you say there were no gas chambers, then I will reply that they must have been abducted by Ernst Zundel's Nazi UFOs from the camps, because there is just as much evidence for that explanation as there is for any other claim you might make.

Maybe you can give me some evidence as to what really happened in your beloved 'gas chambers'. There certainly weren't any 'gassings' going on. Without that, we might as well wipe our asses with the Nuremburg transcripts, questionable and scarce documents, etc.

I find your neglect of 'gas chamber' evidence, which would account for more than half of the 'Holocaust', to be far more significant. The members of CODOH are still waiting for your response to both of these topics.

This discussion is not about me. It is about whether revisionism is anything more than a lunatic fringe belief espoused by what seem to be at best, a few hundred cranks on an exceedingly marginal internet forum like CODOH.

It's telling that in response to an observed weakness of revisionism, you simply try to shift the burden onto someone else and are effectively dodging the point.

Edited by LashL: 

Do not import arguments from other forums.

I assume you would claim that the opposite cannot be said for Believers.

Protip: when you simply try to drag the other side down to your own level without refuting the point then it doesn't convince many people.

If these 'people' cannot infer what has been implied, they aren't likely to be persuaded with rational arguments, anyway.

Really? From what I gather, Revisionists have held steadfast to the same basic assertions: no 'gas chambers', nothing close to '6 million' Jewish deaths, no 'extermination plan'.

And yet we have the spectacle of revisionist gurus contradicting each other on supposedly quite important points, like what the 'Vergasungskeller' document means. As I have reminded one of your brethren only recently, we see that the leading revisionist authors cannot agree on this simple matter of interpretation.

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

They cannot all be right, so some of them are wrong.

None of these Revisionists have ever proclaimed "certainty" for what they have suggested here. You cite these proposed theories as if they were ever the "official" stance for Revisionist beliefs, in perpetuity. Unlike Believers, we don't have a cure-all based on fabricated testimony that we can refer to, so that every discrepancy automatically pertains to 'extermination'. Among the only general consensus in Revisionism is that there has been absolutely no sustaining evidence of homicidal 'gas chambers' nor an 'extermination plan', as alleged.

Clearly, in this example, Butz has been outvoted by his fellow revisionists. Butz was wrong. That makes Butz look silly. This makes anyone who cites Butz look silly.

Another Butz gem was claiming that 'New York Zionists' invented the alleged hoax, based on the fact that Butz didn't bother to look any further than the New York Times for reports of the Holocaust during the war, ignoring totally all the material in archives, and especially all the material in Polish, which Butz couldn't read.

Again, Butz was wrong. Clearly the reports of the Holocaust did not originate in New York, but in Europe. This also makes Butz look silly.

He's no less credible than Dr. Jan Markiewicz, whose evidently flawed "forensic" work at Auschwitz is about as pathetic as it gets. Or, perhaps, not as much as Roberto Muehllenkamp, Richard Green, or any of the others who have put forth some very imaginative theories yet fail to sustain the ridiculous 'gas chamber extermination' claims.

Edited by LashL: 

Do not import arguments from other forums.

Or we can go back to David Hoggan and Richard Harwood, who both repeated a fabricated claim about what was said in the ICRC report on relief efforts, that is so flagrantly wrong that present-day revisionists on CODOH were crestfallen when they realised that these revisionist heroes were lying.

Not only is this a vast exaggeration of the implications and perceivable intent of their mistake, but the "Hoaxters" have made far more outstanding claims. At the Nuremburg Trials, IMT XXXII, Dr. Tadeusz Cyprian, Polish Deputy Representative on the UN War Crimes Commission in London:

"Late in April 1942, the erection of the first three chambers was finished in which these general massacres were to be performed by means of steam. Somewhat later the erection of the real "death- building" was finished which contains ten death chambers. It was opened for wholesale murders early in autumn 1942... In these camps the Jews were put to death in their thousands by hitherto unknown, new methods, gas and steam chambers as well as electric current employed on a large scale."

Let's not forget the memorable statements made by Holocaust 'survivors':

- "In the camp [Buchenwald] there was a cage with a bear and an eagle. Every day, they would throw a Jew in there. The bear would tear him apart and the eagle would pick at his bones." - Ari L. Goldman

- "Babies were thrown into the air and the machine gunners used them as targets." - Elie Wiesel, "Night"

- A graphic depiction of 'zombie muscles' by Filip Mueller: "The doctors proceeded to cut pieces of still warm flesh from thighs & calves and threw them into waiting receptacles. The muscles of those who had been shot were still working and contracting, making the bucket jump about".

Marvelous, isn't it?

Unfortunately the same process can be repeated for the revisionists of the 80s, 90s and 2000s. That's because deniers tell lies, and because deniers make assertions which turn out to be wrong. Quite how telling lies and making flat-out mistakes helps revisionism is beyond me.

Once again, the irony here is overwhelming. Let's play a game. You list as many Revisionist "flip-flops" as you can and I'll list as many Believer flip-flops as I can. Make sure you cite sources.

There is a marked tendency to flush embarrassing or inconvenient past revisionist assertions down the memory hole.

Really? From what I gather, Revisionists have held steadfast to the same basic assertions: no 'gas chambers', nothing close to '6 million' Jewish deaths, no 'extermination plan'.

Tell me, Mr. Terry, where are these "steam chambers", "skin lampshades" and "human soap"?

Oh look, another Gish Gallop 'I know you are but what am I' reversal.

You're dodging. What of these "inconvenient and embarassing" past exterminationist assertions?

There were 400 witnesses at the Frankfurt Auschwitz Trial from 1963-65, of whom 254 commented on gassings, 44 offering direct eyewitness evidence. And this was not the only such large trial, or the only occasion on which witness testimony was offered or taken down.

Of course, this is more evidence against the ridiculous 'gas chamber' proposal. It shows there would have been widespread rumor of 'gassings' throughout the main camp.

Advanced inverted comma theory doesn't prove they were rumours. Sorry.

Your above-referenced large ratio of witnesses pertaining to alleged 'gassings' suggests so. I can cite more examples if my case depends on it.

How were 2,000 Jews crammed into a relatively tiny gas chamber on a regular basis

Clearly you've never actually read very much about Auschwitz if you repeat such a lame misrepresentation. The extant records show transports arriving at a rate of less than 1 per day, with often 1000 or fewer passengers, of whom typically 20-30% were selected for labour, so that with 2 gas chambers typically operating, each crematoria had to handle a group of maybe 700 victims every other day.

...and none of these victims were ever registered, nor can you provide their names. It sounds a lot more like they were in-transit to other labor camps. In either case, that's a lot of gassings being alleged. Why the lack of incriminating iron-cyanide in the alleged 'chambers'? Why such poor design for this designated purpose, even in Krema IV and V?

Only from May to July 1944 was the tempo slightly higher, but in this phase you had five gassing sites to handle approximately 330,000 victims over the course of at least 54 days, which works out at an average of 1,200 per site per day. And quite a few batches revolted.

How convenient your "average" discounts the fact that Krema II accounted for 15 of the 46 muffles at Auschwitz-Birkenau, which totals to *at least* (considering your low estimates) 2,000 'gassed' bodies per day. These numbers cannot account for the alleged role of Auschwitz in a '6 million' figure and even if we err in your favor and say each muffle was capable of cremating 1.3 cadavers every hour, we're looking at a minimum of 100 working hours for cremation, alone, per batch. Then, if we factor in a 12-hour work day, the process of physically dragging each of the bodies onto a hand-drawn 2m² elevator, 8 at a time, plus any clean-up, repairs or any revolts that would have undoubtedly taken place, how can we make sense out of your claims, Mr. Terry? And what do you have to say about the total lack of forensic evidence to support any of the 'gas chambers' essential to your assertions?

with apparently flawless precision (by other Jews) if they had already known these buildings were not "showers", as alleged?

As is typical for deniers, you confuse two separate killing processes. New arrivals at Auschwitz would not necessarily have known what was in store, knowledge was only common among victims from Poland because reports spread across the whole of the country by 1943. Thus we find that transports of Polish Jews did on occasion resist, as did others when they realised what was coming next.

Hungarian Jew Eva Speter was in-transit as her train stopped in Linz, Austria:
"I was standing naked before the doctor and looking very proud into his eyes and ah, thought he should see how a Jewish woman is going, how a proud Jewish is going to die, because most of us knew that in Auschwitz from the taps there didn't come any water but gas. And ah, from the taps came fine warm water, afterwards we dressed up and returned to our train. It was a very relieving experience after we were ready to die there."

From the testimony of Judith Becker, a German Jew, on surviving what she had expected to be a 'gassing':
"And by a miracle again, instead of the gas came the water. Later on it turned out that he had switched on the Zyclon and the delivery system had been damaged and it didn't come so instead, the other valve opened up and the water came."

Registered camp inmates were only taken to the gas chambers if selected as 'Muselmaenner' or in specific special actions such as the liquidation of the 'Gypsy camp' in August 1944. The 'Muselmaenner' knew exactly what was in store but were too physically weak to do anything about it. The Gypsies fought back when the SS surrounded their sector of the camp to haul them off to the crematoria.

I'm sure you have some questionable testimony and/or limited, unverifiable documents to back it up. Let's see them.

Moreover, why do you regard testimony so highly when these witnesses who would have been predominantly Jewish had overwhelming personal reasons to 'punish' the Germans by whatever means possible?

The Jewish witnesses report the same things as the Polish, Dutch, French, Russian, Ukrainian, German, Austrian and other non-Jewish prisoner witnesses, who report the same things as the SS witnesses.

I think you missed where I said that all the witnesses irrespective of nationality, ethnicity, religion or political background who were at Auschwitz agreed that it was a site of mass murder.

*All* of them agreed? That is simply not true. Do you really need examples?

Most of these tallied "witnesses" lost contact with family members permanently, in one way or another. Many 'survivors' simply presume their family member had been 'exterminated'. The vast majority do not claim to have witnessed mass murder, firsthand, yet they "agree it was a site of mass murder" because they have been convinced so and have little reason to defend the good will of Germany based on the awful conditions they may have experienced, particularly in the final years. This also provides incentive to contribute to a damning revenge policy for their former oppressors -- regardless of their own nationality.

If you cite "witnesses", be sure to cite their exact claims.

If you're referring to witnesses at Nuremberg, the injustice certainly applied in this regard, as well. Germar Rudolf elaborates:

"How different, in comparison, is the Courts’ treatment of witnesses for the defense! The most devastating example is that of G. Weise, for whose trial a great number of witnesses for the defense appeared, i.e., were suggested to the Court. However, they were either not summoned by the Court, or their testimony was construed as incriminatory (contrary to its actual content) or simply declared irrelevant on the grounds that only incriminating testimony could clear up the facts of the crime. Anyone who knew nothing of the alleged crime had simply been in the wrong place at the wrong time.[270] In the end Weise was convicted on the basis of one witness for the prosecution, while the more than ten defense witnesses were utterly disregarded. Rieger reports that another Court scornfully dismissed two defense witnesses with the comment that it was a mystery why these witnesses would lie.[271] Burg reports that as defense witness he was regularly threatened and even physically assaulted.[272]

German defense witnesses who were not confined to concentration camps and ghettos at the time in question are on principle treated with distrust by the courts. If they cannot remember the atrocities alleged by witnesses for the prosecution, or if they should even dispute them (which is generally the case),[273] they are declared unreliable and are therefore not sworn in.[274] Prosecutor Grabitz expresses revulsion and loathing for such witnesses, as for the accused who testify in a similar vein and whom she would like nothing better than to slap resoundingly in the face.[275] Rückerl even insinuates perjury,[276] and in fact some witnesses have been prosecuted to this effect.[277] Lichtenstein reports a case where such "ignorant" witnesses were charged en masse with lying and perjury and where threats of arrest, and actual arrests, were repeatedly made.[278] He quotes the judge’s response to one witness who avowed that he was telling the plain and simple truth:

"You will be punished for this truth, I promise you."[279]

In the Auschwitz Trial, witness Bernhard Walter, whose testimony was not to the prosecution’s liking, was placed under arrest until he had revised his statements.[280] It is clear that such actions by the Court cannot but have intimidated witnesses. But Lichtenstein merely fumes that despite all this some witnesses were still so insolent as to continue to deny everything.[281] German defense witnesses for the ‘criminal side’ who were willing to testify for Adolf Eichmann in the Jerusalem trial were always threatened with arrest by the prosecution, so that they stayed away from the proceedings.[282]"


The IMT Statutes make it quite clear how "common knowledge" such as 'gas chambers' should be treated:

"The Tribunal shall not be bound by technical rules of evidence."
—Article 19 of the Statutes of the International Military Tribunal at Nuremberg

"The Tribunal shall not require proof of facts of common knowledge, but shall take judicial notice thereof."
—Article 21 of the Statutes

It is not a rare occurence for governments to conspire for private gains. You should be well aware of this as a historian.

There is simply NO EVIDENCE of collusion or contact. You're trying to assert something as fact without having the slightest shred of evidence, simply by appealing to a precedent which doesn't really exist.

With due recognition of the scarcity of so-called incriminating 'Holocaust' documents, and a total lack of forensic evidence, such collusion wouldn't necessarily have to be as elaborate as you would imply. While the US and Soviets may have been suspicious of each other's motives, they had similar, if not overlapping goals. Both sides had to justify their own involvement in the war. The Soviets and other ideological enemies possessed a motive to portray National Socialism as negatively as possible. The Soviets put forth the fraudulent Katyn Report, the US hosted the laughable Buchenwald human artifact exhibition. With consideration of these examples and the evidently deplorable background of the post-war trials along with the torture they entailed, we are foolish to deny the likelihood of some level of conspiracy.

In either case, the 'Holocaust' has to be the greatest conspiracy theory of all.

Are there authenticated originals of these documents available for review?

What on earth do you think historians have been citing all these years? They're in the sodding archives. Where else would they be?

I really can't help it if you are that unable to follow reference trails in footnotes or endnotes and cannot read history books for comprehension.

Could you post photos of the authentic original German documents? I'd also like to know if they are located in archives that are openly-accessible to Revisionists. I have trouble taking such extravagant claims on faith, alone.

Have any of these 'mass graves' been excavated?

Um, why do you think I used the term exhumation/investigative reports? The mass graves were excavated precisely when they should have been, immediately after liberation, by the appropriate authorities, the Soviets, whose land had been invaded and whose citizens had been murdered en masse the length and breadth of the Eastern Front.

"The appropriate authorities"? We all know how "appropriate" they've been. Katyn was the only so-called "forensic report" submitted to Nuremberg. What about the Jews allegedly buried at Babi Yar? Why don't we start digging there?

Did they find the 'gas chamber' at Sobibor yet?

And please, stop and think before blethering about the wonderful international investigation of Katyn. An international investigation of a mass grave site was conducted precisely once in the first half of the 20th Century and essentially not at all during the Cold War. Was literally nobody other than the victims of Katyn murdered in a mass execution in all that time? Because if an international investigation is needed then no other atrocity can ever be regarded as proven.

I guess you forgot about yet another "international investigation of a mass grave site", only a few months after Katyn: the German-led excavation at Vinnitsa in May of 1943. Oops! More than 9,000 Ukranian civilians were executed by NKVD. It looks like the Soviets had a lot more incentive to vilify the Germans than once thought; it was their own reputation vs. Germany's. Take note of that when considering the reliability of Soviet 'evidence'.

There are many photographs depicting the results of the exhumations, as can be seen here.

The vast majority of these photographs don't even show evidence of murder, let alone non-partisan Jews murdered by Germans en masse as part of an 'extermination plan'. Do we know the original sources for all of these? If not, how do we know where they were taken? Why should we assume they're all Jews? I see at least one in particular that has been shown to be a forgery.

With all those remains from Majdanek, there must have been an autopsy to reflect cyanide gassing. Can you refer me to one such report?

Why should the scientific method account for what the "rest of the world" has been convinced of?

Because the scientific method requires that any claim be substantiated and can be 'repeated' by another investigation achieving the same results, as determined by scientific-academic consensus, safeguarded through institutions such as the peer review system and universities.

These "safeguards" include an all-out banning of Revisionist views. Who is going to peer-review something that they will lose their credentials for expressing support of? How will the scientific-academic consensus be influenced by a topic that isn't allowed in the official academic environment?

The fact is that revisionist 'science' hasn't convinced the relevant judges, academics, and has been rejected.

This is easily explained by who dominates these institutions. Remember, Jews are a mere 1.8% of the US population. Let's take it from Jewish Dr. Gerhard Falk:

"Although we are only 1.8% of the American population, 23% of students at such “Ivy League” schools as Harvard University, Yale, Princeton and the University of Pennsylvania are Jewish..."

Regarding institutions of law in America:

"In the 1930s... 65 percent of lawyers in New York City were Jewish." - Steven Silbiger, "The Jewish Phenomenon", Taylor Trade Publishing, 2000.

Popular rejection is further confirmation that revisionism has not been convincing.

A vastly disproportionate Zionist dominance in American media is a good way to influence what is "popular".

The popular rejection is most vividly demonstrated in the US, where despite the First Amendment and a large percentage of the population believing all manner of hogwash, revisionists amount to a few hundred isolated cranks led by an 80-something failed novelist.

I'm sure the same was said about Galileo and his followers when introducing a new solar model. And as you've just clarified, Americans are indeed a nation most easily influenced by propaganda.

By contrast, the evidence for the Holocaust has demonstrably convinced academics and is generally accepted in society. The academics who have been convinced come from all backgrounds and there is a firm international consensus across multiple disciplines about the Holocaust.

I'm sure this "firm international consensus" can be most often attributed to indoctrination from youth into an environment that supports a limited perspective on the matter and marginalizes any Revisionist views as "antisemitic".

Does one have to disprove every religion before it can be regarded as false?

The thousands of academics who regard the Holocaust as a proven historical fact don't think of this fact as a matter of religion. They consider it in terms of evidence.

Yet they follow a kind of 'scripture' that limits permissible discussion. Shouting "no Holocaust!" in a Jewish history classroom would achieve similar reactions as "no God!" in a Christian church.

If you are making an initial claim, such as a mass German conspiracy to exterminate all Jews, YOU have the burden of proof. This is common sense.

But that burden of proof has been carried long ago. It was carried in the war crimes investigations. It was carried in many thousands of criminal and civil trials in multiple countries with different legal systems. It has been carried with 10s of 1000s of books written on the subject, and 1000s of dissertations defended in oral examinations/viva voces according to the same prevailing standards as any other dissertation in the relevant discipline. It has been carried every time a peer-reviewed article on the subject appears in a scholarly journal.

The burden of proof is not reset to zero because an anonymous internet denier troll says so.

Yet, for any other fact that is so firmly established in reality, concise, tangible evidence can be presented to express exactly why we believe this established fact to be true. Why have you had so much difficulty doing this with regard to the "Holocaust"? If the assertion is "gas chambers", why are there so many holes in your explanation? Why do you rely so heavily on evidence that, in every instance, may have been tampered with by groups who have a bone-to-pick with Germany? Why do you rely so heavily on Zionist post-war "updated" population statistics, notoriously anti-German Soviet documentation and "corroboration" from the United States (which has a long list of accepted conspiratorial behavior and needed a justification for joining the war), when seemingly endless documentation supports mass emigration as an expressed ambition, along with forensic, chemical evidence against the mainstream account that can be observed in the standing remnants of the alleged murder weapon: 'gas chambers'?

We have a number of so-called "witnesses" that claim various scenarios of mass murder and malevolance, at least dozens of which can be shown to be downright nonsense, with a relatively miniscule amount of self-proclaimed "eyewitnesses" to the 'gas chambers' in action. Of these few, many of them have made claims that have been long-since proven false. We are left with a limited number of "eyewitnesses" who have inevitably interacted amongst one another within these camps while building resentment for the Germans, and who have managed to formulate a somewhat cohesive storyline. All it would take is one meeting with both US and Soviet officials to "corroborate" these claims and thereby fulfill the common interest of all: punish the Germans, glorify ourselves.

Revisionists don't claim to know exactly what happened during WWII -- they assert that no evidence has been sustained to support an "extermination plan".

And I've been saying that revisionists can assert this until they are blue in the face, they are not only wrong about their assertion, but the "we can't possibly know what really happened" line is fundamentally unconvincing and essentially an admission of intellectual bankruptcy.

That is why revisionism is such a rip-roaring success that its flagship internet forum has accumulated just over 650 members in 10 years. Worldwide.

1) You don't know exactly what happened during WWII -- neither does the entire collective knowledge of every human being on the planet. We only know what we are told and we, as a society, can easily be swayed by the loudest voices.
2) People are unlikely to consider views that challenge their world view so greatly, particularly when these views are barred from discussion by every social institution.

The collective inability of revisionists to tell us what DID happen instead of what DID NOT happen is the #1 reason why you fail to make more converts even among those who ignore the fact that deniers are generally a bunch of Hitler-kissing antisemitic conspiraloons.

Edited by Locknar: 

Edited, breach of rule 11, rule 12.

That's what I'm doing here. I am setting aside the fact that your post contained large dollops of antisemitism, anti-Americanism and pro-Nazi sentiments. I am engaging your belief system as I would any other.

Edited by Locknar: 

Edited, breach of rule 11.

And what I and many others want to know from revisionists are two things:

1) what actually happened
2) how did the world get it so drastically wrong and get hoodwinked.

1) Mass deportations postponed until after the war, slave labor camps, "show trials" against the defeated.
2) Propaganda, corrupt institutions, angry people.

Simple as that.

I and many others want answers to these questions which are detailed, substantiated and convincing. If the answers are detailed, substantiated and convincing then many people would switch sides. If the answers are vague, unsubstantiated and nonsensical then they won't.

Considering that the majority of the world believes in magical beings, I think indoctrination plays a bigger role than the above-mentioned. Duly noted, nonetheless.
------------------


"Insofar as no one has yet discovered a written trace of this order [to liquidate the Jews under German control] in the sources which have been exploited up to the present, and insofar as it seems unlikely, it is incumbent on the historian to date it as precisely as possible by appealing to interpretation. Since the methods and the hypotheses on this subject are very numerous, we find ourselves confronted with very diverse opinions."—Saul Friedländer, L'Allemagne nazie et le genocide juif, Gallimard, Le Seuil, 1985, pp. 177-178.

 

[Corsair 115]

1) Mass deportations postponed until after the war, slave labor camps, "show trials" against the defeated.
2) Propaganda, corrupt institutions, angry people.

Simple as that.

Simple as that. Really? Then feel free to explain why Holocaust denial isn't widespread in Germany. Of all the nations in the world, it has suffered most in terms of its reputation and image as a result of the Holocaust. And yet Germany to this day does not deny it happened. Research to this day from German scholars and researchers (numerous examples of which have been cited by Nick Terry in this very thread) does not dey it happened.

Your "simple as that" is wholly insufficient as explanation for why Germany to this day does not deny the Holocaust.

 

[000063]

I thought this was common knowledge, TSR:
"Four of the largest five entertainment giants are now run or owned by Jews. Murdoch's News Corp (at number four) is the only gentile holdout -- however Rupert is as pro-Israel as any Jew, probably more so." - Los Angeles Jewish Times, 'Yes, Virginia, Jews Do Control the Media,' Oct. 29-Nov. 11, 1999, p. 14.

"Time-Warner, Disney, Viacom-CBS, News Corporation and Universal rule the entertainment world in a way that the old Hollywood studio chiefs only dreamed of. And, after all the deals and buyouts, four of the five are run by Jews. We're back to where we started, bigger than ever." - Jewish Week, 9-17-1999, 12.


...

Wow. A 13 year old pair of articles. I have a niece and nephew who can walk, talk, and cross the street who were born after those were published. Who runs them now? And why are you conflating the studios with the media? Even in 1999, the Internet was a significant presence. How does owning media companies mean they necessarily have control over the news? Do these companies own all academic publishing houses and universities as well? What about all the years where those companies weren't owned by Jews?

These questions are all rhetorical, BTW.

... The only forensic report submitted into Nuremberg isn't related to the 'Holocaust'? ...

Related, yes. Part of it, no.

It was the murder of Poles by Soviets. Russia proceeded to lie about it until 1990. It was an open secret in the West, but they had to hide it for political purposes. And those charges of a massacre were dismissed, in the end, which is entirely inconsistent with a conspiracy to pin everything on the Nazis.

In fact, it's also inconsistent with the idea that They would be able to conceal the evidence for seventy years.

... Revenge-seeking, political motives are more than plausible. ...

That's funny. I thought you said they were "highly apparent".

It would be extremely difficult to find even a single impartial judge in Europe or North America.

You claim there are traces of deadly gas "only in" those chambers used for 'gassing'. This is the most absurd statement yet. Where did you get your information? From what can be shown with forensic evidence, there were copious amounts of iron-cyanide in every delousing chamber and extremely low, non-incriminating quantities in all alleged 'gas chambers'.

Forensic evidence you do not produce. Have your quotes abandoned you? Is iron-cyanide the only deadly gas in existence?

Rooms full of personal effects? It is well-documented that standard hygienic procedures were enforced at all camps (delousing chambers are a noteworthy example). Disease was rampant nearing the end of the war and clothing may have been isolated from inmates for sanitation and fumigation purposes. Most Jews that had prepared for deportation would have been likely to bring several items of clothing when possible. "Personal effects" prove nothing in this context.

I'm noticing a complete lack of sources here.

Have any of these alleged 'bullet sites' produced the requisite mass graves to show evidence of German atrocities?...

Requisite under whose standards? Because mass graves have been found. We also have eyewitness testimony and records.

- Missing pages, questionable origin.
- SS General Gottlob Berger, former head of the SS administrative department, Himmler's personal liaison with Rosenberg's Ministry for the Occupied East, and chief of POW affairs toward the end of the war was present during the Posen speech. He testified in direct examination that not only did he know nothing of an extermination plan, but that the so-called "transcript" of Himmler's speech was missing key elements that he had remembered specifically.

Argument from ignorance, not evidence of alteration.

- YIVO, Yiddish Research Institute, was very active in the Rosenberg Ministry to process documents for submittal to Nuremberg.

Poisoning the well.

- A lack of orders and physical evidence to support the required assumptions.

I do find it interesting how you like to use testimony right up until it doesn't support you, then you switch to evidence and physical records.

... I haven't read "Other Losses" and I've only briefly reviewed Bacque's arguments but I find it hard to believe it is any less substantiated than the magical 'Holocaust'. ...

So you know almost nothing about them, yet you are sure they are wrong. That's confirmation bias.

The irony here is excruciating.

Hand-wave. Got it.

Maybe "babies used as targets for machine gunners" and 'evil doctor schemes' are more believable when you're accustomed to getting on your knees for a magical-man-in-the-sky.

You're on a skeptic forum. Most people here are atheist.

I'd love to hear which arguments you claim have had their users 'banned'. I'll tell you what, let me know which argument you believe to be the strongest for "the Holocaust" and I'll post it for you. Rather, I'll leave up to our readers to join the site, themselves, and see whether or not they are 'banned' for participating.

Oh boy. I want to see this. One caveat; the evidence has to refer to, specifically, the gas chambers, not the Holocaust in general, it's not limited to one argument, and you have to post it as your own.

There are fringe members of any group.

You don't actually say he's wrong or a "fringe member", I note.

That's a good point, though, TSR. I wonder how many exterminationalists believe in 6 million versus 4 or 5 million Jewish deaths. For that matter, how many believe in 'gas chambers' at Mauthausen or Ilse Koch's "skin lampshades"?

Very few with any real historical knowledge whatsoever. Also, Tu quoque. Also, would 4 mil be significantly better?

You've got me. I haven't even heard a clear definition of what Mr. Terry believes the "Holocaust" was.

In other words, you can't even get Doc Terry's claims right.

254 of 400 witnesses commented on gassings with 44 (11%) having directly witnessed them? Didn't they tell their friends and family to stay away from that tricky "shower room"?

Incredulity.

I'm sure the message would have gotten out somehow, considering there were at least 500 recorded escapees from Auschwitz.

From a prison camp with hundreds of thousands of people, yes.

This isn't the only evidence supporting that these rumors were floating throughout the camps and is at odds with the fact that near-absolute cooperation would have been required from victims as they enter the so-called 'chamber'.

No, it wouldn't. You can force people in there with guns. You can psychologically demoralize them. You can starve them so they can't resist. The only people claiming "near-absolute cooperation" as necessary are revisionist. You don't have any actual evidence, just "anomalies".

... "The people were herded in so tightly that there was no possibility even to put in one more. It was a great amusement for the SS to throw in children above the heads of those who were packed tightly into these rooms." - Dr. Charles Bendel

Considering that they packed in people like sardines on the trains to Auschwitz without any noteworthy resistance, your point?

These camps were predominantly Jewish; most 'eyewitnesses' were Jewish. On account of the extremely harsh conditions at these camps, I think it's also safe to assume many of them were very angry at Germany. ...

So they had reasons to want the Nazis punished. If the events actually happened, they could do that very efficiently by, y'know, telling the truth.

Now, how many mass graves from other genocides have be excavated to your personal asatisfaction?

How many mass graves from other 'genocides' do we know the alleged exact locations of?

Quite a few, actually. But that's a sidetrack, seeing as you never actually answered TSR's question.

Which 'Holocaust' mass graves have been excavated? Can you draw out the *exact* location? Is there actual evidence of 'extermination', or just cremated remains?

Would you care to make a point, or are you going to continue to argue by loaded question and quote?

So has Jesus Christ. What do they both have in common? Indoctrination and dogma.

Well...no, Jesus Christ hasn't.

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

Virtually all scholars of antiquity agree that Jesus existed.[11][12][13][14][15][16] Most scholars hold that Jesus was a Jewish teacher from Galilee in Roman Judaea, was baptized by John the Baptist, and was crucified in Jerusalem on the orders of the Roman Prefect, Pontius Pilate.[8][17][14] Scholars have offered competing descriptions and portraits of Jesus, which at times share a number of overlapping attributes, such as a rabbi, a charismatic healer, the leader of an apocalyptic movement, Messiah, a sage and philosopher, or a social reformer who preached of the "Kingdom of God" as a means for personal and egalitarian social transformation.[18][19][20][21] Scholars have correlated the New Testament accounts with non-Christian historical records to arrive at an estimated chronology of Jesus' life.[3][5][22][23]
​

Note how that's not the same as believing the guy from Galilee was the Messiah. Also note how there are differing interpretations of particular facts. Almost as if they're researching independently or something.

My assertion that there is no sustaining evidence to support an 'extermination plan' has already been proven. I don't need to prove 'the Holocaust' as-alleged didn't happen, only that you have no sustaining evidence to show it did.

Wow. Incorrect. Very incorrect.

You mean all the physical evidence you are unable to provide on CODOH?

I also find it interesting how you shift from "there is no physical evidence" to "TSR has personally not been able to provide any".

I'd like to know of which of these "pretty much every single country in the West" you believe doesn't have a disproportionate Jewish influence in the propaganda industry.

Poisoning the well. "Oh, they're owned by Jews! That means the Jews must be controlling them!" You've only provided evidence that most of the five main media companies in America were owned - not run - by Jews in 1999. Nothing about Canada, or Europe. I'd really like to see evidence of orders down the line not to report any of the "truth" about the Holocaust, which not one of the millions of people those companies employ running to the holocaust deniers.

I'd also like to know which university you believe would allow me to host open debate on the 'Holocaust'.

TSR said "universities, schools or in genuine intellectual discourse." not "open debate". Straw Man.

The 'Holocaust' itself is a Gish Gallop.

"I know you are, but what am I?"

I missed the original context of what 000063 wrote. My mistake. I'll try to pay attention from now on.

Good idea.

Cremations during both a major war and a disease outbreak don't prove anything but death, certainly not 'extermination'. Can you point out the exact location of these graves? Are there corresponding 'gas chambers' to fit the claims, if applicable?

Appeal to impossible perfection.

Another good example of what has been "noticed" is an overwhelming lack of iron-cyanide residue in all alleged 'gas chambers'. Care to address that, Mr. Terry? You've only dodged it about fifty times. Documents can be forged; forensic evidence cannot.

Wait, come to think; when was this evidence collected? Are you quoting the Leuchter report, from 1988, by a guy with a Bachelor of Arts degree at a holocaust denial trial?

Leuchter chiefly cited the absence of Prussian blue in the homicidal gas chambers in support of his view that they could not have functioned that way. However, residual iron-based cyanide compounds are not a categorical consequence of cyanide exposure. By not discriminating against that, Leuchter introduced an unreliable factor into his experiment, and the outcome was seriously flawed as a result. In contrast, fair tests conducted by Polish forensic scientists (who discriminated against iron-based compounds) confirmed the presence of cyanide in the locations and manner in accordance with where and how it was used in the Holocaust. In addition, the report also showed that Leuchter overlooked critical evidence, such as documents in the SS architectural office which directly contradicted him, indicating the mechanical operation of the gas chambers, and verifying the rate at which the Nazis could burn the bodies of those gassed.
​

And how could Terry have denied it fifty times if this is your second post?

I also note how you keep referring to him as Mr. Terry, not Doctor. I assume this is a deliberate attempt to needle him.

Considering the verbatim German transcripts aren't even available for this document, that there are several documents that contradict the entire 'extermination' hypothesis including the Schlegelberger letter and the Luther memo, along with all available forensic evidence supporting the Revisionist stance with a virtually endless record of expressed intent to *deport* not exterminate, I'm going to have to reject your 'gas chamber', Jew-hunting fairytale.

And where were they deported to? Did the Nazis not get around to that? Did the mass cremations occur after, whoops, shedloads of people just happened to die in the camps?

It doesn't matter what I argue, either possibility holds better ground than "extermination". ...

Well, yes, it does. See, you have been discounting evidence on the grounds that we don't have the originals to look up, including the evidence in question. But when your side makes claims about the exact same documents, without the originals, its perfectly fine.

Does it all point to 'extermination' despite the fact that this accusation relies almost entirely on testimony and trials from biased parties?

False. There is also physical evidence and records.

Not with the alleged 'gas vans'.

Whoop de doo.

Yet they preferred written orders for everything else of this magnitude.

Everything else? No Nazi ever gave a verbal order on any other subject? You're sure? I can't, say, produce evidence of such?

... Neither does the 'Holocaust'.

Is this your fallback position? When you're proven wrong, just complain about how the Holocaust doesn't exist?

We know "perfectly well" what happened? How many Jews were exterminated, Mr. Terry? Where are the 'gas chambers'?

Revisionists include all but the ludicrous 'extermination plan' (e.g. mass deportations, Jewish imprisonment and maltreatment, widespread disease). Do you need evidence of these things?

Yes, in a historical context. In a debate, not so much, since, as you say, both sides agree with that as a premise. Incidentally, a denier or two here has attributed German starvation of their Prisoners, which we hold was part of the "extermination", to the harsh conditions of a certain German winter. When it was pointed out that the period in question was nine months long, they never mentioned it again.

Maybe you can give me some evidence as to what really happened in your beloved 'gas chambers'. There certainly weren't any 'gassings' going on. Without that, we might as well wipe our asses with the Nuremburg transcripts, questionable and scarce documents, etc.

Based on your nonsense and incorrect report by an unqualified man who was laughed out of court, whose forensic examination consisted of stealing bricks, and had to lie to one of his own witnesses, who contradicted him?

Edited by LashL: 

Removed quote of moderated content.

If these 'people' cannot infer what has been implied, they aren't likely to be persuaded with rational arguments, anyway.

So you admit you're not actually making rational arguments, or even clearly stated ones?

None of these Revisionists have ever proclaimed "certainty" for what they have suggested here.

False. People in this very thread have done so.

You cite these proposed theories as if they were ever the "official" stance for Revisionist beliefs, in perpetuity. Unlike Believers, we don't have a cure-all based on fabricated testimony that we can refer to, so that every discrepancy automatically pertains to 'extermination'.

There isn't such a belief for the official story. People are still arguing over certain facts even today. In general, however, they agree.

Among the only general consensus in Revisionism is that there has been absolutely no sustaining evidence of homicidal 'gas chambers' nor an 'extermination plan', as alleged.

Also incorrect. I've also noticed the curious reluctance to address the evidence in relation to other evidence, in toto. You can speculate about why individual pieces don't count, but you can't actually prove anything.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3X2vUMh9Hr0
http://answers.yahoo.com/question/index?qid=20120311180429AAul2Ox
http://answers.yahoo.com/question/index?qid=20100504195401AAHMDUf
http://www.wingtv.net/holocausthoax.html Note how he specifically makes reference to "revisionist history".
http://www.natvan.com/national-vanguard/assorted/hoax.html
http://www.biblebelievers.org.au/holohoax.htm
http://www.prothink.org/holohoax/
http://vidrebel.wordpress.com/2012/04/21/holy-holohoax-my-government-wouldnt-lie-to-me/
http://www.landoverbaptist.net/showthread.php?t=11045

Revisionists often make positive assertions that the Holocaust was a hoax, not just that it's not supported by evidence. Some of those are even Christian, which seems bizarre. I had never seen anyone actually using "Joo" before that last link. I thought it was a joke.

So you can't even get the claims of "revisionists" right, much less the "other side".

 

[TSR]

I thought this was common knowledge, TSR:

Your "thoughts" don't count here. What can you *prove*? For example:

"Four of the largest five entertainment giants are now run or owned by Jews. Murdoch's News Corp (at number four) is the only gentile holdout -- however Rupert is as pro-Israel as any Jew, probably more so." - Los Angeles Jewish Times, 'Yes, Virginia, Jews Do Control the Media,' Oct. 29-Nov. 11, 1999, p. 14.

Only hit on this exact quote, antisemetic sites such as David Duke dot com.

Care to try again?

"Time-Warner, Disney, Viacom-CBS, News Corporation and Universal rule the entertainment world in a way that the old Hollywood studio chiefs only dreamed of. And, after all the deals and buyouts, four of the five are run by Jews. We're back to where we started, bigger than ever." - Jewish Week, 9-17-1999, 12.

Ditto, ditto.

Five companies -- five *publicly held companies, which anyone can buy a share and therefore some control of* do not "rule the entertainment world," no matter what you read on Prison Planet.

We went over this back in the day -- is it really still your "A" game?

The only forensic report submitted into Nuremberg isn't related to the 'Holocaust'?

Nope. Since it wasn't submitted nor more importantly *accepted* at the IMT, nor was anyone convicted there of participation in crimes at Katyn, it has nothing whatever to do with what *real* historians consider the Holocaust.

As you have been told before, you *might* have the beginnings of a point if you could cite a pop source which does not laugh at this "forensic report" -- maybe one of those five companies that control entertainment?

But you cannot, so you do not.

"This kangaroo court at Nuremburg was officially known as the 'International Military Tribunal.' That name is a libel on the military profession. [...] One of the judges came from the country which committed the Katyn Forest massacre and produced an array of witnesses to swear at Nuremberg that the Germans had done it." - Rear Admiral, U.S.N. Dan V. Gallery, Thompson, and Strutz ed., pp.XXI-XXII.

What grade did Mr. White get on this paper, and what did his professor have to say about that citation?

What were the names of that "array of witnesses" who swore under oath during the IMT about Katyn?

Some examples of 'gas chambers' that mainstream historians are now "deniers" of:

BUCHENWALD:
Regarding a non-existent gas chamber: "...at Buchenwald, they had even lengthened a railway line so that the deportees might be led directly to the gas chamber." - Nuremberg document 274-F (RF-301). IMT, Vol. 37, p. 148.

BERGEN-BELSEN:
"As an 11-year-old boy held captive at the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp during World War II, Moshe Peer was sent to the gas chamber at least six times." - The Gazette Montreal, "Surviving the horror", Aug. 5, 1993

MAUTHAUSEN:
"On the occasion of one such visit in 1942, Kaltenbrunner personally observed the [impossible] gas chamber in operation" (2753-PS)
"Between 1,500,000 and 2,000,000 political prisoners are known to have been incarcerated and labeled for extermination at the Mauthausen system of concentration camps from available records." (2176-PS)

SACHSENHAUSEN:
"There exists a notarized, sworn affidavit about the construction of a gas chamber and a shooting facility [at Sachsenhausen concentration camp] in October/November 1945 by eight [Soviet] prisoners, of whom I was one." - Col. Gerhart Schirmer

Second hand sources at best.

We've been over this -- can you quote these people directly as deniers?

Take your pick:

- World Jewish Congress, Lest We Forget(New York, 1943), pp.4, 6-7.
- OSS document, April 13, 1944. National Archives (Washington, DC), Military Branch, Record Group 226 (OSS records), No.67231.
- Nuremberg Trial Document 3311-PS. IMT, Trial of the Major War Criminals before the International Military Tribunal (IMT “blue series”/1947-1949), vol.32, pp.152-158; Also published in Carlos Whitlock Porter, Made in Russia: The Holocaust(Historical Review Press, 1988), p.2-7.

What do those documents actually *say* about steam chambers, or hasn't the close to twenty years been enough to read them rather than parrot what you were told they said.

Speaking of...

No one was speaking of desperate accusations by someone facing the death penalty for supervising the killing of more than 100 POWs to produce evidence which was never used at his trial.

Was there a reason you felt this was significant?

"During the first interrogation [the British Field Security Police] beat me to obtain evidence. I do not know what was in the transcript, or what I said, even though I signed it, because they gave me liquor and beat me with a whip. It was too much even for me to bear." - Rudolf Hoess, "The Memoirs Of The Ss Kommandant At Auschwitz", Da Capo Press, Mar 22, 1996

And again, what evidence was obtained? Oh, that's right: his real name.

And how do we know this?

Because, apparently, he was tortured into telling us, years afterwards.

Just like he was apparently tortured to give a death toll he was responsible for which was quite a bit less that his captors were saying.

You never got around to telling us why they would have done this...

"...a great majority of the official investigators [...] were persons with a preconceived dislike for these enemy aliens, and their conduct was such that they resorted to a number of illegal, unfair, and cruel methods and duress to secure confessions of guilt and to secure accusations by defendants against other defendants." - Honorable Edward Leroy Van Roden, President Judge, Thompson, and Strutz ed., p. 67.

Still haven't learned to cite, have you?

Nor to stop talking about Van Roden, who was referring to a completely different trial on a completely different crime and whose statements were found to be without merit.

Revenge-seeking, political motives are more than plausible.

If by "plausible", you still mean "I really want this to be true, in spite of all of the evidence which could not possibly have been collaborated on by countries who had no earthly reason to cooperate in such a conspiracy", I suppose.

"I have always regarded the Nuremberg Trials as a travesty upon justice and the farce was made even more noisome with Russia participating as one of the judges." - Charles Callan Tansill, Ph.D.

Who is Tansill, and why is his opinion relevant?

"The entire atmosphere here is unwholesome [...] Lawyers, clerks, interpreters and researchers were employed who became Americans only in recent years, whose backgrounds were imbedded in Europe's hatreds and prejudices." - Presiding Nuremburg Judge, Iowa Supreme Court Justice Charles F. Wennerstrum

So, no one from Europe, where the crimes were committed, should have been allowed a voice?

You claim there are traces of deadly gas "only in" those chambers used for 'gassing'. This is the most absurd statement yet. Where did you get your information? From what can be shown with forensic evidence, there were copious amounts of iron-cyanide in every delousing chamber and extremely low, non-incriminating quantities in all alleged 'gas chambers'.

"Non incriminating?"

And which of those delousing chambers showed "copious amounts"?

Show your work, please.

Rooms full of personal effects? It is well-documented that standard hygienic procedures were enforced at all camps (delousing chambers are a noteworthy example). Disease was rampant nearing the end of the war and clothing may have been isolated from inmates for sanitation and fumigation purposes. Most Jews that had prepared for deportation would have been likely to bring several items of clothing when possible. "Personal effects" prove nothing in this context.

So you can document that, oh, let's say, eyeglasses were "isolated" for "sanitation purposes" such that the reports of such that refer to these having been confiscated from the death *all* misspoke?

Have any of these alleged 'bullet sites' produced the requisite mass graves to show evidence of German atrocities?

You can document that such mass graves have ever been required from any other genocide?

- In 1993, Robert Wolfe, supervisory archivist for captured German records at the National Archives admitted that a more precise translation of 'ausrottung' would be extirpation or tearing up by the roots. Wolfe also pointed out that in Himmler's handwritten notes for the speech, that Himmler used the term, 'judenevakuierung', or evacuation of the Jews, not 'extermination'.

Citation? And while you're trying to find it, you might as well ask for evidence that Wolfe was a native speaker -- that being your claim.

- From a 1935 speech by Rudolf Hess (well before any claims of an 'extermination plan'):
"National Socialist legislation has now introduced corrective measures against this over-alienization. I say corrective, because the proof that the Jews are not being ruthlessly rooted out [AUSGEROTTET] is that in Prussia alone 33,500 Jews are working in manufacturing and industry, and 89,800 are engaged in trade and commerce; and that with only 1 per cent of the population Jewish, 17.5 per cent of our attorneys and in Berlin nearly half the registered doctors are still Jewish."

Citation? In German, please.

Oh, sorry -- you don't read German. But since you're prepared to accept what others tell you it says anyway...

- There is a 1936 (once again, well before 'extermination' claims) anti-German book by Leon Feuchtwanger and others entitled "DER GELBE FLECK: DIE AUSROTTUNG VON 500,000 DEUTSCHEN JUDEN". Were a half-million Jews already 'gassed'?

Nice try at redirect. No one has claimed that "ausrottung" == "gassing".

Bonus question: what *was* Feuchtwanger talking about? You'll find it easier to answer this question if you spell his first name correctly...

- Missing pages, questionable origin.

Because you say so? There's an Internet meme making the round which contains two words, the last of which is ", please" which would seem to apply.

- SS General Gottlob Berger, former head of the SS administrative department, Himmler's personal liaison with Rosenberg's Ministry for the Occupied East, and chief of POW affairs toward the end of the war was present during the Posen speech. He testified in direct examination that not only did he know nothing of an extermination plan, but that the so-called "transcript" of Himmler's speech was missing key elements that he had remembered specifically.

And these were? And during which trial?

- YIVO, Yiddish Research Institute, was very active in the Rosenberg Ministry to process documents for submittal to Nuremberg.

And ... ?

- A lack of orders and physical evidence to support the required assumptions.

No such lack exists.

Too bad your quote-mining has taken the most absurd segments of a lengthy document that is only alleged to be Himmler's exact words and presents them as out-of-context as possible.

Too bad that I cited a complete transcript, made from a recording.

Really, I thought you'd've gotten better at this by now...

These sentences often-cited by Believers are the only bits of these speeches of several hours in length that have even the potential to be misinterpreted as an 'extermination' reference. Whether that is due to plausible alterations or misinterpretation of context is debatable.

Edited by LashL: 

Moderated thread.

Do tell...

I haven't read "Other Losses" and I've only briefly reviewed Bacque's arguments but I find it hard to believe it is any less substantiated than the magical 'Holocaust'.

No one care what you "believe", nor is anyone surprized that you have not read the source for the crap you are parroting.

Edited by LashL: 

Moderated thread.

The irony here is excruciating.

The only irony seen here is in your posts.

Maybe "babies used as targets for machine gunners" and 'evil doctor schemes' are more believable when you're accustomed to getting on your knees for a magical-man-in-the-sky.

Maybe. But neither of these has anything to do with the Holocaust, either, I am again curious why you bring them up.

I'd love to hear which arguments you claim have had their users 'banned'. I'll tell you what, let me know which argument you believe to be the strongest for "the Holocaust" and I'll post it for you. Rather, I'll leave up to our readers to join the site, themselves, and see whether or not they are 'banned' for participating.

Ah, so you pay no more attention there than you do to history.

Shall, I get you, say, Scott Smith's email and you can ask him?

There are fringe members of any group. That's a good point, though, TSR. I wonder how many exterminationalists believe in 6 million versus 4 or 5 million Jewish deaths. For that matter, how many believe in 'gas chambers' at Mauthausen or Ilse Koch's "skin lampshades"?

Then do the research and get back to us.

That's how it works here.

You've got me. I haven't even heard a clear definition of what Mr. Terry believes the "Holocaust" was.

Then, again, you aren't paying attention. He has posted more than once recently a bibliography.

254 of 400 witnesses commented on gassings with 44 (11%) having directly witnessed them? Didn't they tell their friends and family to stay away from that tricky "shower room"? I'm sure the message would have gotten out somehow, considering there were at least 500 recorded escapees from Auschwitz. This isn't the only evidence supporting that these rumors were floating throughout the camps and is at odds with the fact that near-absolute cooperation would have been required from victims as they enter the so-called 'chamber'.

That near-absolute cooperation was obtained at the point of many guns.

How did this escape your notice?

I'll go into greater detail with my response to Mr. Terry. Here's a few good quotes:

When you have a fact based point to make which you can support, let us know, hmmmn?

I'm out for pizza now.

 

[Charles Traynor]

I was staying with friends in Germany recently and used the opportunity to make myself useful in my role as RODOH representative to NW Europe. The relatively easy task I had given myself was to show that the Kaiser Wilhelm denkmal at Porta Westfalica looks nothing like a Krema chimney, as was claimed by Holohoax “survivor” Kitty Hart. I believe everybody who views my photographs will agree my mission was a great success.

...

Edited by LashL: 

Snipped for compliance with Rule 4 as this lengthy post is posted in its entirety elsewhere.

 

[000063]

Someone correct me if I'm wrong, but I believe you left some questions unanswered last time you posted.

 

[Belz...]

Wow. A 13 year old pair of articles. I have a niece and nephew who can walk, talk, and cross the street who were born after those were published. Who runs them now? And why are you conflating the studios with the media? Even in 1999, the Internet was a significant presence. How does owning media companies mean they necessarily have control over the news? Do these companies own all academic publishing houses and universities as well? What about all the years where those companies weren't owned by Jews?

Also, even if it's true, it wouldn't follow that "The Jews" are in absolute control of the media, or that they all have the same agenda. The problem with saying Jews are the owners of media chains is that it doesn't really help the denier side. It's just a baby step towards an ad hominem rather than an actual argument.

 

[Nick Terry]

From an accounting point of view, it can be done if you want to do it. Typical means would be recharging of costs (on a pro rata basis), allocation of costs by function, a common chart of accounts, for example. The better argument is probably, the Nazis wanted the Final Solution, didn't care about the cost implications or financial responsibility and perhaps didn't want a record trail.

Again with the coulda-woulda-shouldas. The fact is that no state in WWII cost-accounted the varied activities of its military or paramilitary units serving in a warzone or occupied territory, and the Nazi state was no exception. There is no reason to expect that the Nazi state would decide to bill the agriculture ministry for several weeks' harvest duty (i.e., forcing peasants to give up requisition quotas) and then bill themselves for the generic security duties and bill someone else for the Final Solution duties. That would be utterly absurd in the 1940s.

Advances in information technology make it easier for police forces to calculate the costs of security for specific events such as the Olympics, measured in overtime pay and other costs, but one does not have to go back that far and the newspapers stop reporting things about such costs, or they are simply measuring incomplete costs and not accounting for the hidden costs of deploying manpower for such a purpose.

Thus, the notion of a 'budget' for the Final Solution is prima facie absurd when its main perpetrators in manpower terms were being used for multiple purposes in the same accounting years as they carried out mass executions and deportations.

No, my speculation was "could have" not "must have" and that is because I prefer to operate with deductive reasoning. In logical terms, abductive reasoning is a species of invalid reasoning. It's like inductive reasoning as ordinarily understood, with the "All swans are white" danger, but more so. I'm thinking of abductive reasoning as 'inference to the best explanation'. This may have more purchase in general history than in biography, with which I am more familiar, but it still carries with it a risk of error.

To take an example from this debate, on my method, I didn't concede anything about the delivery of quicklime to Chelmno when challenged, deliberately refrained from drawing a conclusion, but just said "it doesn't look good, admittedly". When I later looked up the uses of quicklime and found other possible uses than burial, I didn't have to contradict myself, because I had not abductively gone beyond the evidence. The point about method stands regardless of the truth about Chelmno. Even with this caution, I have had to withdraw at least two hastily drafted statements. It is easy to get hold of the wrong end of the stick, so I find.

The dangers of abductive reasoning in history as I see them are:
1. The facts point a certain way, but don't establish a given conclusion, but we accept it anyway for the sake of parsimony.
2. Having seen a pattern, we then look out for and see things that fit, neglecting other possibilities.
3. We state conclusions as fact when it might be better to state the evidence, draw a conclusion with a "may well be" and let the reader decide, rather than leaving a hostage to fortune.

Firstly, your speculation about 'could have' was completely irrelevant to any discussion of evidence. Coulda-woulda-shouldas fall foul of the fallacy of possible proof, which is one of many examples of ill-reasoning noted in David Hackett Fischer's Historian's Fallacies. Speculation is only valid where there is no or genuinely insufficient evidence, and only when marked as such. It cannot, ever, trump other evidence, no matter what form that evidence takes. Just because you dislike the conclusion supported by other evidence doesn't mean you can ignore it.

Secondly, all historical disciplines use abductive reasoning and inference to the best explanation extensively. Denying these as 'invalid' is actually denying the possibility to know about the past as a whole. Historical disciplines proceed on the basis of evidence, but do so on the basis of all available evidence. That evidence is not always complete, but where it exists, it must always be taken into consideration, obeying the principle of total evidence.

In the first particular case of ammunition supply, you asserted a speculative argument without being aware of, or forgetting about, several other pieces of evidence. Standing alone, the ammunition supply record could indeed have been related to the movement of the frontline. But we have daily reports showing the whereabouts of the command and its sub-units, which were nowhere near the front. Not only do we have the whereabouts, but we know the activities of the units. Those activities make the claim that extra ammunition was supplied for frontline fighting nonsensical, and also make the claim that it was supplied for antipartisan activity improbable, since no such activity was specified.

Through abduction, one can certainly arrive at the most probable explanation, i.e. inference to the best explanation. In literally millions of examples, this is the absolute best human knowledge will ever achieve about the past, because of inevitable gaps in the record (doesn't matter if it's geological, palaeontological, archaeological or historical), because the passage of time destroys information about the past in a wide variety of ways, some of which include deliberate or inadvertent human actions.

But that is not the end of it, because as pointed out, there are multiple written sources saying that in fact, units under the command of HSSPF Russland-Sued carried out a mass execution of 33,000 Jews from Kiev over a period of several days, coinciding with the report that relevant sub-units were assigned in the Kiev area on blocking duty.

It would be entirely illogical to insist that every single written statement spell out the full context, because contexts change; ammunition supply officers do not need to know for what purpose ammunition is being used, so they will generally not note down this information. They are concerned with noting down recipients, perhaps, depending on how good their records are. Building suppliers do not need to know whether a supply of timber or a supply of construction explosives are being used to build a house, blast rock, or stage a bank robbery. They simply keep a record of sale, which may or may not include identifying the customer. But the record of sale could become evidence in a criminal case against a bank robber.

Thus, in the above example, the inference that the ammunition was supplied for Babi Yar becomes clear from the fact that the only potential major use for the extra ammunition by that command in the immediate time-frame was the action at Babi Yar. And that is established by a process of elimination, i.e. abduction.

No one can reasonably object to this; an assertion that in fact the ammunition was being used for another purpose must, absolutely must, have some other evidence to back it up. Because mere speculation is never enough to overcome the black-and-white evidence of written sources stating quite clearly what HSSPF Russland-Sued did at the end of September 1941.

The same thing applies to the delivery of quicklime to Chelmno in massive quantities of many tons before June 1942, and 13 tons in June 1942. We have a separate document from June 1942, i.e. the same month, stating quite explicitly that 97,000 people had been killed ('processed') in gas vans, described explicitly and clearly, to that date from December 1941. The two pieces of evidence relate to the same site and fit with the same conclusion. Other pieces of written evidence substantiate and corroborate this explanation. Not only are there more German records, but there are contemporary Polish underground reports, as well as diaries of Germans and Jews living in the vicinity who learned things through various channels, all supporting the same conclusion.

I have so far simply dealt with entirely contemporary evidence. The very fact that we have so much contemporary evidence produced by the people who carried out or supported these actions is from a conventional historical perspective, enough to prove them beyond a reasonable doubt. But the evidence does not stop there; there are other entirely contemporary, written reports from other observers noting the fact that these actions took place. Those are documents no matter who produced them. So both 'sides' have documents on these actions.

And then quite rapidly, from a very early stage, we have large numbers of witnesses who come forth to testify about the actions, whether they participated (there are statements from men of Sonderkommando Kulmhof given voluntarily to the British in 1945, along with interrogations of captured members by the Soviets in the same year), observed as bystanders or were used in the relevant Sonderkommando burial/cremation details and escaped to tell their stories.

Finally, there are the records - some photographic, some written - of the site inspections after the war, which noted physical characteristics of the sites consistent with the reported exhumation and cremation of the victims. Evidence was destroyed. The destruction of evidence is no barrier to knowing what went on in the past if there are other routes - as is clearly the case. One would not expect to find 33,000 bodies at Babi Yar if there were reports of mass cremations. One would maybe expect to find some bone shards decades later, which is what visitors have reported to me. One would expect archaeological work decades later to reveal physical evidence consistent with burial and cremation sites, as at Chelmno.

The catch is that archaeology is actually a very nebulous discipline, which unavoidably relies on inference to the best explanation and abduction, to an even greater extent than historians dealing with written records. The same procedures of inference to the best explanation, abduction and saying that x is "consistent with" y also pertains in much of forensic science.

I honestly don't know which is more annoying, the typical revisionist demand for a level of certainty which goes far beyond normal expectations and easily tips over into solipsism, or the equally typical revisionist habit of analysing one piece of evidence in splendid isolation while ignoring the rest, and making up any old nonsense to explain away something which fits together perfectly well with other evidence that is being ignored by the denier.

 

[Nick Terry]

I wonder if Tommy1234 is ever coming back. No matter. His last major post is such a textbook example of shoddy argumentation it's worthy of closer dissection. It's taken a short while to get around to this, mainly because I have a life and because several others already replied without a peep in response from Tommy1234, but hey, it's the weekend...

I don't know if he is aware that the mega-reply to TSR and myself ran to more than 5,000 words. I'm actually not objecting to the length so much as to the incoherence.

Needless to say, in true conspiracist style, a fair bit of that consisted of spammed copypasta quotes offered without any commentary or explanation of why they mattered. I counted 35 of them and have numbered them in round brackets from (1) to (35).

More impressive is the way in which Tommy1234's attempted fisking produced such an extremely repetitive yet meandering rant. Rather than repeat myself as much as Tommy did, I decided to reorganise the post, quoting every single word in his reply, under common-sense headings.

To call the post a Gish Gallop would be an understatement; it might even be libellous of Duane Gish. Tommy evidently cannot make an argument without firing off a barrage of questions. I counted 41 such questions or implicit questions and have numbered them in square brackets from [1] to [41]. What virtually all the questions share in common is that they were designed to waste time by reversing burden of proof, arguing from ignorance or simply intended to clog up the discussion.

There's little reason to answer many of them on this forum since it's not like Tommy is actually that interested in the answers. And he doesn't seem to understand that whether someone does or doesn't answer them on an internet forum means [ nothing ] . They are answered elsewhere, in venues which Tommy doesn't seem to understand very well, like academia.

Readers may well have forgotten in all of this that Tommy was trying to explain away the fact that revisionism has the intellectual and social cachet of skunk secretions and is demonstrably, irrefutably marginalised in the western world. Mostly, Tommy tried to explain this away by changing the subject and going on the attack, but our latest installment does start off with some remarks on the epic fail that is revisionism, kicking off with that old classic...

1. Jews Control Everything

I thought this was common knowledge, TSR:
"Four of the largest five entertainment giants are now run or owned by Jews. Murdoch's News Corp (at number four) is the only gentile holdout -- however Rupert is as pro-Israel as any Jew, probably more so." - Los Angeles Jewish Times, 'Yes, Virginia, Jews Do Control the Media,' Oct. 29-Nov. 11, 1999, p. 14. (1)

"Time-Warner, Disney, Viacom-CBS, News Corporation and Universal rule the entertainment world in a way that the old Hollywood studio chiefs only dreamed of. And, after all the deals and buyouts, four of the five are run by Jews. We're back to where we started, bigger than ever." - Jewish Week, 9-17-1999, 12. (2)

I'd like to know of which of these "pretty much every single country in the West" you believe doesn't have a disproportionate Jewish influence in the propaganda industry.

This is easily explained by who dominates these institutions. Remember, Jews are a mere 1.8% of the US population. Let's take it from Jewish Dr. Gerhard Falk:

"Although we are only 1.8% of the American population, 23% of students at such “Ivy League” schools as Harvard University, Yale, Princeton and the University of Pennsylvania are Jewish..." (3)

Regarding institutions of law in America:

"In the 1930s... 65 percent of lawyers in New York City were Jewish." - Steven Silbiger, "The Jewish Phenomenon", Taylor Trade Publishing, 2000. (4)

A vastly disproportionate Zionist dominance in American media is a good way to influence what is "popular".

Quite how Tommy1234 can think he won't be perceived as antisemitic by spamming carefully chosen and outdated quotes about supposed Jewish dominance is beyond me, and I suspect most other readers.

Edited by LashL: 

Moderated thread.

These quotes do not explain away the fact that revisionism is globally rejected by academia, the media and the public sphere as a whole, because the world consists of more than America. I made a point not long ago that acceptance of the Holocaust as a historical fact did not vary in correlation to the size of the Jewish community in a particular country or indeed to the number of Holocaust museums. Tommy1234 seems to have forgotten that his Nazi heroes drastically reduced the Jewish population of Europe, so claiming universal Jewish dominance of everything would be downright silly and won't help him sell his ideas.


2. Indoctrination

Considering that the majority of the world believes in magical beings, I think indoctrination plays a bigger role than the above-mentioned. Duly noted, nonetheless.

So has Jesus Christ. What do they both have in common? Indoctrination and dogma.

If these 'people' cannot infer what has been implied, they aren't likely to be persuaded with rational arguments, anyway.

I'm sure this "firm international consensus" can be most often attributed to indoctrination from youth into an environment that supports a limited perspective on the matter and marginalizes any Revisionist views as "antisemitic".

Yet they follow a kind of 'scripture' that limits permissible discussion. Shouting "no Holocaust!" in a Jewish history classroom would achieve similar reactions as "no God!" in a Christian church.

2) People are unlikely to consider views that challenge their world view so greatly, particularly when these views are barred from discussion by every social institution.

There are fringe members of any group. That's a good point, though, TSR. I wonder how many exterminationalists believe in 6 million versus 4 or 5 million Jewish deaths. For that matter, how many believe in 'gas chambers' at Mauthausen or Ilse Koch's "skin lampshades"?

Moving on, we find that Tommy repeatedly asserts that acceptance of the Holocaust as a historical fact, and the rejection of revisionism, is the product of 'indoctrination'. It's an especially bad idea for Tommy to make a lame analogy with belief in Christianity on a skeptics' forum where the overwhelming majority of members are atheists or agnostics.

Protip: if you are seeking to win converts, then berating them and abusing them because they were supposedly 'brainwashed' is downright insulting, and usually ineffective.

It's also untrue, because the acceptance of the Holocaust as a historical fact rests to a very significant degree on the volume of historical research done on the subject over the past 65 years. In my country, schoolkids CHOOSE to do AS or A levels in history and then take a variety of curricula chosen by schools - interestingly there are not that many A Level syllabi offering the Nazis or Holocaust, judging by comments from my students over the past few years. In all countries, students CHOOSE to study history at university or major in that subject. They certainly CHOOSE to study specific electives or optional courses in the Holocaust. Some then CHOOSE to study the subject at graduate school, and some go on to CHOOSE to research the subject for a doctorate.

This pattern of choice continues all the way to the professors and lecturers, who have the freedom to offer what courses they like, and to change them when they want, depending on what they are currently researching, which can change over the course of a career. University tutors almost invariably become involved in teaching a wide variety of subjects - in my case, covering European and world history from c.1750 to the present, in particular the Cold War, Divided Germany 1945-1990, and the history of the Habsburg, Romanov, Wilhelmine and Ottoman Empires from the early 19th Century onwards - so have lots of opportunities to develop their interests as they wish. Which can easily mean not teaching the Nazis/Holocaust.

Yet large numbers still do. Is it because there is so much money sloshing around that field? Not really. There's probably more money in medical history and the history of science.

No, the reason why historians research and write about the history of the Holocaust is because it interests them. They can then participate in an international research discussion the same as any other. Most historians of the Holocaust are German, large numbers are continental Europeans without Jewish ancestry. In the UK, there are probably more non-Jews than Jews researching the Holocaust, and in any case, all of them have to answer to peer assessments, peer review and grant application reviews which cannot be skewed in a biased way.

Calling all of this 'indoctrination' is so wide of the mark that it's not even wrong.

3. The Inability of Revisionism to Get a Hearing

I'd also like to know which university you believe would allow me to host open debate on the 'Holocaust'. [1]

These "safeguards" include an all-out banning of Revisionist views. Who is going to peer-review something that they will lose their credentials for expressing support of? [2] How will the scientific-academic consensus be influenced by a topic that isn't allowed in the official academic environment? [3]

I'm sure the same was said about Galileo and his followers when introducing a new solar model. And as you've just clarified, Americans are indeed a nation most easily influenced by propaganda.

Here Tommy1234 missed the point to which he was trying to respond. Revisionism is shut out of all universities because it doesn't meet academic standards. Asking for a university which would have an 'open debate' on revisionism is like asking for a university which would have an 'open debate' on flat-earth theory.

The easiest way to demonstrate why revisionism doesn't meet academic standards is to invite Tommy1234 to compare the products of revisionism with the scholarly literature on Stalinism. He ought to swiftly notice major differences between revisionist works and the historiography of Stalinist Russia. Like readablity, formatting, presentation, levels of archival research, conceptual focal points and so on. Then he can compare the literature on Stalinism with the literature on the Nazis/Holocaust. Maybe then he might learn why the mainstream study of the Holocaust is accepted and revisionism isn't.

4. CODOH

Could you post them, please? [4] It'd be nice to have a real challenge to share with CODOH.

I'd love to hear which arguments you claim have had their users 'banned'. I'll tell you what, let me know which argument you believe to be the strongest for "the Holocaust" and I'll post it for you. [5] Rather, I'll leave up to our readers to join the site, themselves, and see whether or not they are 'banned' for participating.

Edited by LashL: 

Do not import arguments from other forums.

Edited by LashL: 

Do not import arguments from other forums.

Edited by Locknar: 

Edited, breach of rule 11, rule 12.

Edited by Locknar: 

Edited, breach of rule 11.

Tommy evidently wrote a string of remarks trying to take this debate elsewhere. This begs a question which has hitherto gone unanswered by revisionists, namely why they think internet forums trump all other possible venues where facts and interpretations are discussed or determined.

People evidently post vast amounts of crap on the internet, and this applies in spades to forums dedicated to fringe beliefs. It's not up to the mainstream to come to cranks and debate them in their little control freak echo chambers. Tommy1234 may be unaware that many JREF members have been banned from 9/11 Truth forums or from David Icke forum, just as many non-deniers have been banned from CODOH, all because they offended the loonies by asking inconvenient questions.

One might add that the 650-member CODOH forum is hardly the Supreme Court or the American Academy of the Arts and Sciences. There are revisionists there who have believed in denial for 10 to 30 years yet do not seem to have read a new book on the Holocaust for roughly the same length of time. A rather large number of the user accounts are sockpuppets of a psychotic white nationalist named Greg Gerdes, who is so obnoxious that even his fellow Holocaust deniers ban him. There are exceptions (and here I think we should acknowledge EtienneSC's civilised discussion manner) but for the most part this is a bunch of uneducated, ignorant, middle-aged, politically motivated conspiraloons.


5. Flaws of Revisionism

None of these Revisionists have ever proclaimed "certainty" for what they have suggested here. You cite these proposed theories as if they were ever the "official" stance for Revisionist beliefs, in perpetuity. Unlike Believers, we don't have a cure-all based on fabricated testimony that we can refer to, so that every discrepancy automatically pertains to 'extermination'. Among the only general consensus in Revisionism is that there has been absolutely no sustaining evidence of homicidal 'gas chambers' nor an 'extermination plan', as alleged.

The irony here is excruciating.

Here Tommy1234 once again misses the point. The fact that none of the leading revisionist authors agree on a simple matter of interpretation, i.e. what the 'Vergasungskeller' in Krema II was, means that they contradict each other totally on this issue. They cannot all be right, some must be wrong.

Reducing revisionism to a few consensus tenets simply turns it into a catechism. If all you have are a few articles of faith, and you disagree about literally everything else, then why should anyone take the time to read a revisionist work when it is a virtual certainty that the arguments would be contradicted by other revisionists?

The issue isn't whether a 'school' like revisionism has some disagreements. Every 'school' of thought has disagreements. It's that revisionism cannot agree on the absolute basics. Like whether a document was forged or not.

• The Wannsee protocol doesn't prove extermination/it was forged anyway
• The Stroop Report doesn't prove extermination/it was forged anyway
• The Goebbels diaries don't prove extermination/they were forged anyway
• The '4756' cremation document was forged (Rudolf)/no it wasn't (Mattogno)
• Crematoria do/don't smoke
• Air photos from Birkenau disprove extermination/they were forged
• Nyiszli is a liar (Mattogno)/but we can quote-mine him about air raid shelters all the same (Crowell)
• The Hungarian Action didn't happen (Butz)/yes it did (Mattogno, Graf, Crowell)

It goes on. And on. And on. And on....

I'll deal below with your conflation of sources and historiography, so think carefully before you reply.

6. Defining the Holocaust

You've got me. I haven't even heard a clear definition of what Mr. Terry believes the "Holocaust" was.

We know "perfectly well" what happened? [6] How many Jews were exterminated, Mr. Terry? [7] Where are the 'gas chambers'? [8]

Gish Gallop. Not interested.

7. “Story Keeps Changing”

Take your pick:
- World Jewish Congress, Lest We Forget(New York, 1943), pp.4, 6-7.
- OSS document, April 13, 1944. National Archives (Washington, DC), Military Branch, Record Group 226 (OSS records), No.67231.
- Nuremberg Trial Document 3311-PS. IMT, Trial of the Major War Criminals before the International Military Tribunal (IMT “blue series”/1947-1949), vol.32, pp.152-158; Also published in Carlos Whitlock Porter, Made in Russia: The Holocaust(Historical Review Press, 1988), p.2-7.

Not only is this a vast exaggeration of the implications and perceivable intent of their mistake, but the "Hoaxters" have made far more outstanding claims. At the Nuremburg Trials, IMT XXXII, Dr. Tadeusz Cyprian, Polish Deputy Representative on the UN War Crimes Commission in London:

"Late in April 1942, the erection of the first three chambers was finished in which these general massacres were to be performed by means of steam. Somewhat later the erection of the real "death- building" was finished which contains ten death chambers. It was opened for wholesale murders early in autumn 1942... In these camps the Jews were put to death in their thousands by hitherto unknown, new methods, gas and steam chambers as well as electric current employed on a large scale." (5)

You're dodging. What of these "inconvenient and embarassing" past exterminationist assertions? [9]

Some examples of 'gas chambers' that mainstream historians are now "deniers" of:

BUCHENWALD:
Regarding a non-existent gas chamber: "...at Buchenwald, they had even lengthened a railway line so that the deportees might be led directly to the gas chamber." - Nuremberg document 274-F (RF-301). IMT, Vol. 37, p. 148. (6)

BERGEN-BELSEN:
"As an 11-year-old boy held captive at the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp during World War II, Moshe Peer was sent to the gas chamber at least six times." - The Gazette Montreal, "Surviving the horror", Aug. 5, 1993 (7)

MAUTHAUSEN:
"On the occasion of one such visit in 1942, Kaltenbrunner personally observed the [impossible] gas chamber in operation" (2753-PS) (8)
"Between 1,500,000 and 2,000,000 political prisoners are known to have been incarcerated and labeled for extermination at the Mauthausen system of concentration camps from available records." (2176-PS) (9)

SACHSENHAUSEN:
"There exists a notarized, sworn affidavit about the construction of a gas chamber and a shooting facility [at Sachsenhausen concentration camp] in October/November 1945 by eight [Soviet] prisoners, of whom I was one." - Col. Gerhart Schirmer (10)

Once again, the irony here is overwhelming. Let's play a game. You list as many Revisionist "flip-flops" as you can and I'll list as many Believer flip-flops as I can. Make sure you cite sources. [10]

Here we find Tommy confusing sources with historiography. One might also note that since there have been 10s of 1000s of mainstream writers and historians of the Holocaust, whereas there have only ever been a few hundred revisionist authors, the overall number of mistakes will inevitably be higher in the mainstream. What is significant is the proportion of mistakes. And that 'fail rate' is infinitely higher among the Dunning-Krueger sufferers making up the revisionist massive than in the mainstream.

We also note the resort to copypasta of 'revisionist talking points', aka entries on Denier Bullflop Bingo. Moshe Peer - check! Steam chambers - check! All these things have been thrashed out repeatedly and simply make Tommy1234 look out of date.

He quote-mines a French report which appears to place gas chambers at Buchenwald, but closer examination of the same text indicates that Auschwitz was clearly meant, and the names were mixed up. This is usually as good as it gets with these 'misplaced' gas chambers - a revisionist finds a very early source which made a minor mistake, and starts braying about how the story 'changed'. Yet not one court judgement or history of Buchenwald ever talked about a gas chamber there.

The quote re: Sachsenhausen cites a right-wing author whose witness testimony asserted 'no gas chambers'. The mainstream ignored him and still notes that gas chamber was set up at Sachsenhausen to be used on an 'execution'/demonstration basis (Oranienburg-Sachsenhausen was the main training centre for the KZ system).

Mauthausen is still regarded as having had several gas chambers (one in the main camp, one in Gusen). There were plenty of exaggerated initial figures which have all been cut down to size, in nearly all cases within about 12-24 months of the end of the war. Is there a single history of Mauthausen or the Holocaust which asserts 1.5-2 million died there? No, there isn't.

The fallback is our old friend Moshe Peer. Sure, there have been a few entirely mistaken witnesses, and Peer was one of them. But it is completely illogical to think this proves anything. How does it challenge the accepted account if out of the thousands of Belsen witnesses, one or two hallucinated gas chambers or tell a tall tale? The mainstream recognises that a witness like Moshe Peer is flat-out wrong, which is why there have been zero citations of his memoir in any history book and also why it's been out of print for nearly 20 years.

I have a dim memory of the usual babble about soap 'n' lampshades and simply refer Tommy1234 to the work of Joachim Neander. Human fat was misused in the Danzig Anatomy Institute. The 'lampshade' was as I understand it a one-off. It attracted a lot of tabloid attention in the 1940s but it doesn't really make much difference either way to the history of the Holocaust, as it was (a) a one-off not a matter of state policy, (b) comparable to the antics of a serial killer, and Germany already had those in Weimar, (c) didn't involve Jews.

I dealt with the 'steam chambers' tedium in Chapter 1 of the critique linked in my sig.

8. Historical Method

The historical method by Believer standards consists of a biased view of unreliable testimony, Soviet documentation, a deliberately falsified chemical analysis and whatever else is now spoon-fed by Zionist institutions worldwide.

Yet, for any other fact that is so firmly established in reality, concise, tangible evidence can be presented to express exactly why we believe this established fact to be true. Why have you had so much difficulty doing this with regard to the "Holocaust"? [11] If the assertion is "gas chambers", why are there so many holes in your explanation? [12] Why do you rely so heavily on evidence that, in every instance, may have been tampered with by groups who have a bone-to-pick with Germany? [13] Why do you rely so heavily on Zionist post-war "updated" population statistics, notoriously anti-German Soviet documentation and "corroboration" from the United States (which has a long list of accepted conspiratorial behavior and needed a justification for joining the war), when seemingly endless documentation supports mass emigration as an expressed ambition, along with forensic, chemical evidence against the mainstream account that can be observed in the standing remnants of the alleged murder weapon: 'gas chambers'? [14]

More Gish Galloping. Lots of unproven assertions here, and a lot of major misunderstandings of how the world came to learn about the Holocaust and what evidence was accumulated on the way.

Mainstream historical method for any subject consists of relying on sources as close to the events as possible, which does not always translate into "same-day documents" no matter what the period, era or subject. There are a hell of a lot of contemporary documents for the Holocaust, though.

Gassing is discussed in diaries and letters produced by Nazis, and institutional documents generated by the Nazis. It's also discussed extensively in secret messages smuggled out of camps, contemporary local underground reports written by Poles and Jews. The supporting documents converge strongly on all of this. There are gaps, but this is not unusual. Witness testimony fills those holes, and is used on the same basis as any other historian of any other period uses witness testimony. That is to say, if you think historians don't use witness testimony on other subjects, you are completely deluded.

Most of the rest is well-poisoning rubbish about provenance which ignores the fact that relevant documents and information spread to multiple parties during the war and after 1945, and cannot be reduced to one power or the other. There was no global conspiracy of all non-German powers to invent a story which plenty of Germans admitted to freely.

The forensic babble is dealt with below.

9. Nihilism

1) You don't know exactly what happened during WWII -- neither does the entire collective knowledge of every human being on the planet. We only know what we are told and we, as a society, can easily be swayed by the loudest voices.

This is an appeal to perfection coupled with selective nihilism. We know very well what happened in WWII based on documents and other sources including forensics. We know for example that there were 7 million foreign workers in Nazi Germany by 1944, and their presence left a mass of documentary traces, and sadly in many cases also left human remains in a wide variety of mass graves or killing sites where some of these foreign workers had been murdered by the Gestapo. Obviously, out of 7 million people a proportion then left testimony after the war, or they preserved diaries and letters of various kinds. There is enough evidence to keep a battalion of German historians busy researching the subject of foreign workers in the Third Reich for the better part of 30 years so far, and enough that they will be doing so for the next hundred or more.

We reasonably expect in the modern era that any major phenomenon affecting millions of people leaves traces. This is clearly the case for Nazi gas chambers, despite the evident efforts of the Nazis to cover up the use of gas chambers. So if you make any other claim that x happened instead then you need a greater volume of evidence to substantiate that claim, otherwise it will have less evidence than gassing, and will therefore be ignored.

And you don't have that evidence. You can babble about policy involving 'only' deportations 'after the war', but train records and other sources show there were deportations during the war to Auschwitz, Treblinka, where the trains stopped. The explanation with the largest amount of evidence is that the majority were then gassed on arrival. There is no evidence that the trains went onwards somewhere else, and no evidence that the deportees showed up anywhere else, either on an individual (name) or statistical level.

10. I Know You Are But What Am I

The 'Holocaust' itself is a Gish Gallop. I missed the original context of what 000063 wrote. My mistake. I'll try to pay attention from now on.

I haven't read "Other Losses" and I've only briefly reviewed Bacque's arguments but I find it hard to believe it is any less substantiated than the magical 'Holocaust'.

Neither does the 'Holocaust'.

I find it grimly amusing, and entirely typical of revisionists, that you asserted that the Americans had murdered a million German POWs but never even bothered to investigate the claim. No better illustration of your blatant double standards could have possibly been provided.

The Holocaust isn't a Gish Gallop. It was a complex event whose immediate roots span a period of at least 12 years, affecting people directly in about 25 present-day nation states, and indirectly in several dozen more. The victims of the Holocaust died in a multiplicity of situations and at the hands of multiple agencies, including Axis allies like Romania, Croatia and the Hungarian Arrow Cross as well as Nazi collaborator units. They were starved to death, shot, and gassed, the latter using two distinct methods.

It's fairly obvious you cannot even present a coherent summary of the chronology and geography of the Holocaust, yet this would be a sine qua non if you were going to mount a coherent argument against it. That's why you end up Gish Galloping and conflating different aspects together.

One problem is you forget that the genocide of European Jews was only one of the many Nazi crimes committed in WWII. Gassing was also used to kill psychiatric patients, Soviet POWs and political prisoners. The Nazis had multiple targets, as did their murderous Axis allies. Some people say this is all the Holocaust, but the killing of psychiatric patients clearly doesn't fit under the heading of the genocide of European Jews. Yet it was connected because the same people who gassed psychiatric patients were sent to gas Jews under Odilo Globocnik.

11. Did Someone Say Conspiracy?

With due recognition of the scarcity of so-called incriminating 'Holocaust' documents, and a total lack of forensic evidence, such collusion wouldn't necessarily have to be as elaborate as you would imply. While the US and Soviets may have been suspicious of each other's motives, they had similar, if not overlapping goals. Both sides had to justify their own involvement in the war. The Soviets and other ideological enemies possessed a motive to portray National Socialism as negatively as possible. The Soviets put forth the fraudulent Katyn Report, the US hosted the laughable Buchenwald human artifact exhibition. With consideration of these examples and the evidently deplorable background of the post-war trials along with the torture they entailed, we are foolish to deny the likelihood of some level of conspiracy.

In either case, the 'Holocaust' has to be the greatest conspiracy theory of all.

I'm sure you have some questionable testimony and/or limited, unverifiable documents to back it up. Let's see them. [15]

You were asked to provide evidence of US-Soviet collusion, and have failed to do so. Most of your remarks relate to alleged motives, but you cannot infer from a possible motive that this was actually the case. You need actual evidence to prove this. And you provided none. Try again.

We'll ignore the refrain of 'I know you are but what am I' in alleging that the Holocaust is a conspiracy theory when you cannot even provide the slightest shred of evidence to substantiate your conspiracy theory.

12. Attacks on Nuremberg

Revenge-seeking, political motives are more than plausible.

"I have always regarded the Nuremberg Trials as a travesty upon justice and the farce was made even more noisome with Russia participating as one of the judges." - Charles Callan Tansill, Ph.D. (11)

"The entire atmosphere here is unwholesome [...] Lawyers, clerks, interpreters and researchers were employed who became Americans only in recent years, whose backgrounds were imbedded in Europe's hatreds and prejudices." - Presiding Nuremburg Judge, Iowa Supreme Court Justice Charles F. Wennerstrum (12)

"The entire atmosphere here is unwholesome ... Lawyers, clerks, interpreters and researchers were employed who became Americans only in recent years, whose backgrounds were imbedded in Europe's hatreds and prejudices." - Justice Charles F. Wennerstrum, president judge at Nuremberg (18)


Zundel was the defendant, not the accuser. I don't think it can be claimed that his trial was "rigged" to favor his agenda. The same cannot be said for Nuremburg. In addition to the fact that Colonel David Marcus (a fervent Zionist Jew) selected most of the judges, prosecutors and lawyers for the NMT Trials, here is what some authoritative figures of the time have had to say on the matter:

"During the war the WJC (World Jewish Congress) had created an Institute of Jewish Affairs in New York. The directors were two great Lithuanian Jewish jurists, Jacob and Nehemiah Robinson. Thanks to them, the Institute worked out two completely revolutionary ideas: the Nuremberg tribunal and German reparations." - Nahum Goldmann, former president of World Jewish Congress and the World Zionist Organization (13)

"The Nuremberg trials are so repugnant to the Anglo-Saxon principles of justice that we must forever be ashamed of that page in our history ... The Nuremberg farce represents a revenge policy at its worst." - US Congressional Rep. Lawrence Smith (14)

"[Chief US prosecutor] Jackson is away conducting his high-grade lynching party in Nuremberg. I don't mind what he does to the Nazis, but I hate to see the pretense that he is running a court and proceeding according to common law. This is a little too sanctimonious a fraud to meet my old-fashioned ideas." - US Supreme Court Chief Justice Harlan Fiske Stone (15)

"The Nuremberg trial constitutes a real threat to the basic conceptions of justice which it has taken mankind thousands of years to establish." - Jewish lawyer and NYU professor Milton R. Konvitz (16)

"The trial of the vanquished by the victors cannot be impartial no matter how it is hedged about with the forms of justice... By clothing policy in the forms of legal procedure, we many discredit the whole idea of justice in Europe for years to come." - US Senator Robert Taft (17)

"You know how I have despised anti-Semitism. You know how strongly I feel toward those who preach intolerance of any kind. With that knowledge — you will understand when I tell you that this [Nuremberg] staff is about seventy-five percent Jewish." - Senator Christopher Dodd in a private letter to his son (19)

"This kangaroo court at Nuremburg was officially known as the 'International Military Tribunal.' That name is a libel on the military profession. [...] One of the judges came from the country which committed the Katyn Forest massacre and produced an array of witnesses to swear at Nuremberg that the Germans had done it." - Rear Admiral, U.S.N. Dan V. Gallery, Thompson, and Strutz ed., pp.XXI-XXII. (20)

The IMT Statutes make it quite clear how "common knowledge" such as 'gas chambers' should be treated:

"The Tribunal shall not be bound by technical rules of evidence."
—Article 19 of the Statutes of the International Military Tribunal at Nuremberg (21)

"The Tribunal shall not require proof of facts of common knowledge, but shall take judicial notice thereof."
—Article 21 of the Statutes (22)

Argument by Quotation is never particularly convincing, especially when they're the same incantations that have been muttered by revisionists for the better part of 50 years, without the slightest effect in convincing a larger number of people there is anything to the denier claim, because people who have investigated the trials and the 1940s context know there were politically partisan critics in the US who disliked the trials, and you quote almost exclusively from those critics.

The bigger problem is your Nuremberg fixation, and your apparent assumption that the International Military Tribunal was the only occasion when war crimes evidence was uncovered or used in court or became available to posterity even in the 1940s. Pretending that the evidence for the Holocaust boils down to Nuremberg is obvious nonsense. I doubt you could even spell out the full array of investigations, trials, document publications or other occasions when evidence was uncovered, even for 1945-49. And they were carried out by essentially every state affected by the war in Europe.

13. Documents

Considering the verbatim German transcripts aren't even available for this document, that there are several documents that contradict the entire 'extermination' hypothesis including the Schlegelberger letter and the Luther memo, along with all available forensic evidence supporting the Revisionist stance with a virtually endless record of expressed intent to *deport* not exterminate, I'm going to have to reject your 'gas chamber', Jew-hunting fairytale.

Yet they preferred written orders for everything else of this magnitude.

Allied bombing of the Potsdam archives account for some, if not most of the records destroyed there. Regardless, it is not unusual for a government to destroy military records after losing a war. I don't suppose you're claiming the German air force played an incriminating role in the 'Final Solution', are you? [16]

Could you post photos of the authentic original German documents? [17] I'd also like to know if they are located in archives that are openly-accessible to Revisionists. [18] I have trouble taking such extravagant claims on faith, alone.

It seems you are deeply confused about how historical documents and historical document citation works. The rule since the 19th Century has been that an author cites a document with a traceable reference. It is then up to whoever doubts the reference or wants to investigate further to check the reference themselves by visiting a relevant library or the relevant archive, no matter where it might be in the world, no matter what the subject. The advent of the internet has not changed this because the overwhelming majority of historical documents especially for the modern era are not online.

And that's it.

Your paranoid flourish about archives being open access further suggest you haven't even read revisionist works properly, since there is sometimes a smattering of archival references in those screeds. This indicates that revisionists have visited the archives and been given access. That would be because national archives in every country in the world are open-access and can be used by anyone who presents identification and registers.

Your inability to parse and comprehend the endnotes or footnotes and referencing systems found in history books pretty much destroys your credibility on nearly every other issue you posted about.

The babble about 'authentic and original' documents reminds me of freeman-on-the-land/OPCA pseudolegalese.

And no, the Nazis and in particular Hitler didn't always prefer written orders for everything else of this magnitude. Hitler disliked paperwork and very few of his personal papers survive. We don't have most of the protocols of his situation conferences, yet we know he held them daily.

Assuming that something did not happen because there is no document of type x which you fancifully imagine must have existed, is the worst kind of historical nonsense it is possible to imagine. If historians took this attitude we'd never know very much about the past at all.

14. Extermination Plan

Does it all point to 'extermination' despite the fact that this accusation relies almost entirely on testimony and trials from biased parties? [19]

"Insofar as no one has yet discovered a written trace of this order [to liquidate the Jews under German control] in the sources which have been exploited up to the present, and insofar as it seems unlikely, it is incumbent on the historian to date it as precisely as possible by appealing to interpretation. Since the methods and the hypotheses on this subject are very numerous, we find ourselves confronted with very diverse opinions."—Saul Friedländer, L'Allemagne nazie et le genocide juif, Gallimard, Le Seuil, 1985, pp. 177-178. (23)

My assertion that there is no sustaining evidence to support an 'extermination plan' has already been proven. I don't need to prove 'the Holocaust' as-alleged didn't happen, only that you have no sustaining evidence to show it did.

Revisionists include all but the ludicrous 'extermination plan' (e.g. mass deportations, Jewish imprisonment and maltreatment, widespread disease). Do you need evidence of these things? [20]

Oh look, more out-of-date quotes. I suggest you read and digest the following more recent studies on the decision-making process

1.Christopher Browning, expert report for the Irving trial (2000)
2-3. Peter Longerich, 2 expert reports for the Irving trial (2000)
4. Chapter 2 of the Holocaust Controversies-authored critique of revisionists (2011) linked in my signature and here

and get back to us when you have an explanation which factors in and cites every single source mentioned in those studies.

15. Ausrottung

See above response to TSR.

- In 1993, Robert Wolfe, supervisory archivist for captured German records at the National Archives admitted that a more precise translation of 'ausrottung' would be extirpation or tearing up by the roots. Wolfe also pointed out that in Himmler's handwritten notes for the speech, that Himmler used the term, 'judenevakuierung', or evacuation of the Jews, not 'extermination'.

- From a 1935 speech by Rudolf Hess (well before any claims of an 'extermination plan'):
"National Socialist legislation has now introduced corrective measures against this over-alienization. I say corrective, because the proof that the Jews are not being ruthlessly rooted out [AUSGEROTTET] is that in Prussia alone 33,500 Jews are working in manufacturing and industry, and 89,800 are engaged in trade and commerce; and that with only 1 per cent of the population Jewish, 17.5 per cent of our attorneys and in Berlin nearly half the registered doctors are still Jewish." (24)

- There is a 1936 (once again, well before 'extermination' claims) anti-German book by Leon Feuchtwanger and others entitled "DER GELBE FLECK: DIE AUSROTTUNG VON 500,000 DEUTSCHEN JUDEN". Were a half-million Jews already 'gassed'?

- Missing pages, questionable origin.
- SS General Gottlob Berger, former head of the SS administrative department, Himmler's personal liaison with Rosenberg's Ministry for the Occupied East, and chief of POW affairs toward the end of the war was present during the Posen speech. He testified in direct examination that not only did he know nothing of an extermination plan, but that the so-called "transcript" of Himmler's speech was missing key elements that he had remembered specifically.
- YIVO, Yiddish Research Institute, was very active in the Rosenberg Ministry to process documents for submittal to Nuremberg.
- A lack of orders and physical evidence to support the required assumptions.

Too bad your quote-mining has taken the most absurd segments of a lengthy document that is only alleged to be Himmler's exact words and presents them as out-of-context as possible. These sentences often-cited by Believers are the only bits of these speeches of several hours in length that have even the potential to be misinterpreted as an 'extermination' reference. Whether that is due to plausible alterations or misinterpretation of context is debatable.

Not with the alleged 'gas vans'.

I'm afraid you have a lot more uses of Ausrottung and Vernichtung to deal with than just the few mentioned above. The babble about the Posen speech is ancient old rubbish, and simply not enough when there are many other examples you need to deal with. These are spelled out quite extensively here:

Peter Longerich, 2 expert reports for the Irving trial (2000)

and you can find more examples here which is far from exhaustive.

The rest in the next post.

 

[Nick Terry]

Part II

16. Cremation

How convenient your "average" discounts the fact that Krema II accounted for 15 of the 46 muffles at Auschwitz-Birkenau, which totals to *at least* (considering your low estimates) 2,000 'gassed' bodies per day. These numbers cannot account for the alleged role of Auschwitz in a '6 million' figure and even if we err in your favor and say each muffle was capable of cremating 1.3 cadavers every hour, we're looking at a minimum of 100 working hours for cremation, alone, per batch. Then, if we factor in a 12-hour work day, the process of physically dragging each of the bodies onto a hand-drawn 2m² elevator, 8 at a time, plus any clean-up, repairs or any revolts that would have undoubtedly taken place, how can we make sense out of your claims, Mr. Terry? [20]

Garbage in, Garbage Out. The garbage in this case is your blithe assertion that only 1.3 bodies/hour could be cremated. This is refuted by a dozen contemporary Nazi documents, and by the fact that multiple bodies were cremated per muffle. We've also discussed this repeatedly on this thread.

17. Leuchter

And what do you have to say about the total lack of forensic evidence to support any of the 'gas chambers' essential to your assertions? [21]

Another good example of what has been "noticed" is an overwhelming lack of iron-cyanide residue in all alleged 'gas chambers'. Care to address that, Mr. Terry? [22] You've only dodged it about fifty times. Documents can be forged; forensic evidence cannot.

You claim there are traces of deadly gas "only in" those chambers used for 'gassing'. This is the most absurd statement yet. Where did you get your information? [23] From what can be shown with forensic evidence, there were copious amounts of iron-cyanide in every delousing chamber and extremely low, non-incriminating quantities in all alleged 'gas chambers'.

He's no less credible than Dr. Jan Markiewicz, whose evidently flawed "forensic" work at Auschwitz is about as pathetic as it gets. Or, perhaps, not as much as Roberto Muehllenkamp, Richard Green, or any of the others who have put forth some very imaginative theories yet fail to sustain the ridiculous 'gas chamber extermination' claims.

Why the lack of incriminating iron-cyanide in the alleged 'chambers'? [25]

Arguments from negative evidence are only ever valid when we should reasonably expect a contrary result. The entire premise of the 'chemical disproof' peddled by Leuchter and Rudolf is completely flawed. There is no reason to expect that exposure to cyanide gas for half an hour a day, and usually half an hour every other day, followed by ventilation, washing down, and repeated whitewashing, would necessarily lead to the formation of Prussian Blue. By contrast, exposure to cyanide gas 24-7 in delousing chambers for prolonged periods does often lead to the formation of Prussian Blue. The delousing chambers at Birkenau were also in operation many months before the gas chambers in the crematoria were in operation, since killing was done in the Bunkers until spring 1943.

However you try to spin this, the fact that the gas chambers were exposed to a tiny fraction of the cyanide used in delousing chambers is enough to refute the silly chemical contention. And cyanide traces were found in the ruins of the Birkenau gas chambers, by every single person who tested for it (Leuchter, Rudolf, Markiewicz).

18. Eyewitnesses

These camps were predominantly Jewish; most 'eyewitnesses' were Jewish. On account of the extremely harsh conditions at these camps, I think it's also safe to assume many of them were very angry at Germany.

Your above-referenced large ratio of witnesses pertaining to alleged 'gassings' suggests so. I can cite more examples if my case depends on it.

254 of 400 witnesses commented on gassings with 44 (11%) having directly witnessed them? Didn't they tell their friends and family to stay away from that tricky "shower room"? [24] I'm sure the message would have gotten out somehow, considering there were at least 500 recorded escapees from Auschwitz. This isn't the only evidence supporting that these rumors were floating throughout the camps and is at odds with the fact that near-absolute cooperation would have been required from victims as they enter the so-called 'chamber'.

I'll go into greater detail with my response to Mr. Terry. Here's a few good quotes:

"1,000 - 2,000 persons were killed per application depending on the size of a given transport." - Auschwitz curator Franciszek Piper (25)

"In Crematoria 1 [II) and 2 [III], 2,000 into each; Crematoria 3 [IV] and 4 [V), 1,000 each: and into the Bunker [2/V], 1,000." - Dr. Charles Bendel (26)

"The people were herded in so tightly that there was no possibility even to put in one more. It was a great amusement for the SS to throw in children above the heads of those who were packed tightly into these rooms." - Dr. Charles Bendel (27)

Hungarian Jew Eva Speter was in-transit as her train stopped in Linz, Austria:
"I was standing naked before the doctor and looking very proud into his eyes and ah, thought he should see how a Jewish woman is going, how a proud Jewish is going to die, because most of us knew that in Auschwitz from the taps there didn't come any water but gas. And ah, from the taps came fine warm water, afterwards we dressed up and returned to our train. It was a very relieving experience after we were ready to die there." (28)

From the testimony of Judith Becker, a German Jew, on surviving what she had expected to be a 'gassing':
"And by a miracle again, instead of the gas came the water. Later on it turned out that he had switched on the Zyclon and the delivery system had been damaged and it didn't come so instead, the other valve opened up and the water came." (29)

*All* of them agreed? That is simply not true. Do you really need examples? [26]

Most of these tallied "witnesses" lost contact with family members permanently, in one way or another. Many 'survivors' simply presume their family member had been 'exterminated'. The vast majority do not claim to have witnessed mass murder, firsthand, yet they "agree it was a site of mass murder" because they have been convinced so and have little reason to defend the good will of Germany based on the awful conditions they may have experienced, particularly in the final years. This also provides incentive to contribute to a damning revenge policy for their former oppressors -- regardless of their own nationality.

If you cite "witnesses", be sure to cite their exact claims.

...and none of these victims were ever registered, nor can you provide their names. It sounds a lot more like they were in-transit to other labor camps. In either case, that's a lot of gassings being alleged.... Why such poor design for this designated purpose, even in Krema IV and V? [27]

We have a number of so-called "witnesses" that claim various scenarios of mass murder and malevolance, at least dozens of which can be shown to be downright nonsense, with a relatively miniscule amount of self-proclaimed "eyewitnesses" to the 'gas chambers' in action. Of these few, many of them have made claims that have been long-since proven false. We are left with a limited number of "eyewitnesses" who have inevitably interacted amongst one another within these camps while building resentment for the Germans, and who have managed to formulate a somewhat cohesive storyline. All it would take is one meeting with both US and Soviet officials to "corroborate" these claims and thereby fulfill the common interest of all: punish the Germans, glorify ourselves.

Let's not forget the memorable statements made by Holocaust 'survivors':

- "In the camp [Buchenwald] there was a cage with a bear and an eagle. Every day, they would throw a Jew in there. The bear would tear him apart and the eagle would pick at his bones." - Ari L. Goldman (30)

- "Babies were thrown into the air and the machine gunners used them as targets." - Elie Wiesel, "Night" (31)

- A graphic depiction of 'zombie muscles' by Filip Mueller: "The doctors proceeded to cut pieces of still warm flesh from thighs & calves and threw them into waiting receptacles. The muscles of those who had been shot were still working and contracting, making the bucket jump about".

Marvelous, isn't it?

Maybe "babies used as targets for machine gunners" and 'evil doctor schemes' are more believable when you're accustomed to getting on your knees for a magical-man-in-the-sky.

Maybe you can give me some evidence as to what really happened in your beloved 'gas chambers'. [28] There certainly weren't any 'gassings' going on. Without that, we might as well wipe our asses with the Nuremburg transcripts, questionable and scarce documents, etc.

The above compiles various jabs at eyewitness testimony from Tommy1234, none of which add up to a coherent answer to the question of how, if all the witnesses are lying about the Holocaust, they all knew what to say and could come up with so many matching points of detail independently.

Look, it really doesn't matter how many supposedly absurd quotes you compile, until they reach a measurable percentage of the sum total of witnesses, who run into the 100s of 1000s for the whole of the Holocaust, then nobody is going to give a monkey's, because of your obviously fallacious hasty generalisations.

Why 100s of 1000s, because you deny mass shootings, and they were extra visible, so if you think they didn't happen then you're really, really screwed. If you need to deny the mass shootings, you're more or less accusing the entire population of Nazi occupied Eastern Europe of lying. Which really ought to bust most people's BS detectors - why not yours?

I don't even see a coherent analysis of the sum total of direct testimony on gassings, which amounts to well over 1,000 witnesses, of diverse backgrounds and taken down or recorded in diverse situations. It's pretty dubious to claim that they were 'mostly' Jewish when witnesses to gassing include all the staffs of the T4 institute, large numbers of SS men, Polish KZ inmates and villagers around the Reinhard camps, not to mention the political prisoners of diverse nationalities who saw gas chambers in Mauthausen or another camp in the Reich.

I see there are also various questions and attempts to shift burden of proof so let's just spam the following obvious works once more:

1. Jean-Claude Pressac, Auschwitz: Technique and Operation of the Gas Chambers (1989)
2. Robert Van Pelt, Expert Report for the Irving Trial (2000)
3. Christopher Browning, Expert Report for the Irving Trial (2000)
4. The Holocaust Controversies authored critique of revisionist arguments about the Aktion Reinhard camps of Belzec, Sobibor and Treblinka (2011) linked in my sig and here including a discussion of archaeological research

and in particular, to refer Tommy1234 to Chapter 6 of the critique linked in my sig.

19. Torture

If you're referring to witnesses at Nuremberg, the injustice certainly applied in this regard, as well. Germar Rudolf elaborates:

"How different, in comparison, is the Courts’ treatment of witnesses for the defense! The most devastating example is that of G. Weise, for whose trial a great number of witnesses for the defense appeared, i.e., were suggested to the Court. However, they were either not summoned by the Court, or their testimony was construed as incriminatory (contrary to its actual content) or simply declared irrelevant on the grounds that only incriminating testimony could clear up the facts of the crime. Anyone who knew nothing of the alleged crime had simply been in the wrong place at the wrong time.[270] In the end Weise was convicted on the basis of one witness for the prosecution, while the more than ten defense witnesses were utterly disregarded. Rieger reports that another Court scornfully dismissed two defense witnesses with the comment that it was a mystery why these witnesses would lie.[271] Burg reports that as defense witness he was regularly threatened and even physically assaulted.[272]

German defense witnesses who were not confined to concentration camps and ghettos at the time in question are on principle treated with distrust by the courts. If they cannot remember the atrocities alleged by witnesses for the prosecution, or if they should even dispute them (which is generally the case),[273] they are declared unreliable and are therefore not sworn in.[274] Prosecutor Grabitz expresses revulsion and loathing for such witnesses, as for the accused who testify in a similar vein and whom she would like nothing better than to slap resoundingly in the face.[275] Rückerl even insinuates perjury,[276] and in fact some witnesses have been prosecuted to this effect.[277] Lichtenstein reports a case where such "ignorant" witnesses were charged en masse with lying and perjury and where threats of arrest, and actual arrests, were repeatedly made.[278] He quotes the judge’s response to one witness who avowed that he was telling the plain and simple truth:

"You will be punished for this truth, I promise you."[279]

In the Auschwitz Trial, witness Bernhard Walter, whose testimony was not to the prosecution’s liking, was placed under arrest until he had revised his statements.[280] It is clear that such actions by the Court cannot but have intimidated witnesses. But Lichtenstein merely fumes that despite all this some witnesses were still so insolent as to continue to deny everything.[281] German defense witnesses for the ‘criminal side’ who were willing to testify for Adolf Eichmann in the Jerusalem trial were always threatened with arrest by the prosecution, so that they stayed away from the proceedings.[282]" (32)

Speaking of...

"The London Cage was used partly as a torture centre, inside which large numbers of German officers and soldiers were subjected to systematic ill-treatment. In total 3,573 men passed through the Cage, and more than 1,000 were persuaded to give statements about war crimes. The brutality did not end with the war, moreover: a number of German civilians joined the servicemen who were interrogated there up to 1948. [...] As the work of the Cage was wound down, the interrogation of prisoners was switched to a number of internment camps in Germany. And there is evidence that the treatment meted out in these places was, if anything, far worse." - The Guardian, 'The secrets of the London Cage', Ian Cobain, Nov. 11, 2005 (33)

"During the first interrogation [the British Field Security Police] beat me to obtain evidence. I do not know what was in the transcript, or what I said, even though I signed it, because they gave me liquor and beat me with a whip. It was too much even for me to bear." - Rudolf Hoess, "The Memoirs Of The Ss Kommandant At Auschwitz", Da Capo Press, Mar 22, 1996 (34)

"...a great majority of the official investigators [...] were persons with a preconceived dislike for these enemy aliens, and their conduct was such that they resorted to a number of illegal, unfair, and cruel methods and duress to secure confessions of guilt and to secure accusations by defendants against other defendants." - Honorable Edward Leroy Van Roden, President Judge, Thompson, and Strutz ed., p. 67. (35)

More Argument by Quotation. The claims about Hoess have been shot down so many times they're not even funny anymore. Stick a fork in it, that one is well and truly done. But in the event that you want to try again, please identify all the SS men who testified to gas chambers at Auschwitz from 1945 to the 1990s, and explain case by case what evidence you have that they were tortured/coerced/bribed or whatever fanciful explanation you might have.

This is your job, no one else's, since you're the one claiming these SS men were all tortured/coerced/bribed/whatever. Be aware that people here have actually read history books and know how to locate information, so if you miss people out, we will spot this.

20. Gas Chambers and Forensic Evidence

Did they find the 'gas chamber' at Sobibor yet? [29]

With all those remains from Majdanek, there must have been an autopsy to reflect cyanide gassing. Can you refer me to one such report? [30]

1) yes.

2) why 'must' there have been an uncremated body showing cyanide poisoning at Majdanek? The gas chambers at Majdanek used both CO as well as Zyklon, and were largely used in 1943, not inmediately prior to liberation, so there is therefore no reason to expect that any of the bodies found on-site at liberation would have been victims of cyanide poisoning. You fail, again.

21. Mass Graves

The only forensic report submitted into Nuremberg isn't related to the 'Holocaust'?

"The appropriate authorities"? We all know how "appropriate" they've been. Katyn was the only so-called "forensic report" submitted to Nuremberg. What about the Jews allegedly buried at Babi Yar? Why don't we start digging there?

I guess you forgot about yet another "international investigation of a mass grave site", only a few months after Katyn: the German-led excavation at Vinnitsa in May of 1943. Oops! More than 9,000 Ukranian civilians were executed by NKVD. It looks like the Soviets had a lot more incentive to vilify the Germans than once thought; it was their own reputation vs. Germany's. Take note of that when considering the reliability of Soviet 'evidence'.

Have any of these alleged 'bullet sites' produced the requisite mass graves to show evidence of German atrocities? [31]

How many mass graves from other 'genocides' do we know the alleged exact locations of? [32]

Which 'Holocaust' mass graves have been excavated? [33] Can you draw out the *exact* location? [34] Is there actual evidence of 'extermination', or just cremated remains? [35]

You mean all the physical evidence you are unable to provide on CODOH? [36]

The vast majority of these photographs don't even show evidence of murder, let alone non-partisan Jews murdered by Germans en masse as part of an 'extermination plan'. Do we know the original sources for all of these? [37] If not, how do we know where they were taken? [38] Why should we assume they're all Jews? [39] I see at least one in particular that has been shown to be a forgery.

Quite a lot of fail here. Firstly, the Soviets produced 55,000 investigative reports including medico-legal reports in the course of their war crimes investigations. You complain about one report, whose standout characteristic is that it's about a crime which the Nazis uncovered and used against the Soviets. The same does not apply to the other 54,999 reports. You might have a tough time demonstrating that all 55,000 reports are frauds, especially as I doubt very much that you read Russian.

Secondly, your mention of Vinnitsa bumps the number of apparently satisfactorily investigated war crimes from one to... two. This leaves out every single Bolshevik atrocity in the Russian Civil War, all actions in the Great Terror other than Vinnitsa, the entire GULag system, and pretty much every other mass atrocity in the 20th Century through to the Bosnian War. If the necessary standard of evidence is that any violent death must be documented forensically by an international investigation, then no one would ever be allowed to say anything about any atrocity other than Katyn, Vinnitsa and Srebrenica. Except I gather there are also various morons who deny Katyn was a Soviet crime and other ideologically motivated idiots who delight in denying Srebrenica, so presumably we have to listen to them just like we have to listen to you, and thus we can't say anything at all about any atrocity, full stop!

This is what is known as throwing the baby out with the bathwater.

The simpler route is to note that a) the Soviets and Poles investigated all the sites, b) there was evidence in the possession of the western Allies which was independent of the Soviets and Poles about the same sites and c) the same Soviet and Polish investigations of the 1940s allow people to relocate the graves today, as has happened extensively in the past 6-7 years due to the Yahad in Unum archaeological initiative.

If Soviet evidence is so unreliable, how is it possible that historians of the Soviet Union can write history at all, since 95%+ of their evidence must come from ultimately Soviet sources? I doubt you much care that in denying the Holocaust this way, you also take out 70 years of much-studied history, but that's effectively what you're doing.

22. Witnesses and Mass Graves

Cremations during both a major war and a disease outbreak don't prove anything but death, certainly not 'extermination'. Can you point out the exact location of these graves? [40] Are there corresponding 'gas chambers' to fit the claims, if applicable? [41]

More missing the point. If witnesses report cremations and sites are found with evidence of cremains and large emptied pits with smaller ash pits, then the witness testimonies are corroborated. You cannot then just throw out the witness statements and make up a fanciful, unsourced coulda-woulda-shoulda explanation just because you like it. As for the rest, the usual appeals to perfection and downright laziness earn you nil points.

23. Property of Victims

Rooms full of personal effects? It is well-documented that standard hygienic procedures were enforced at all camps (delousing chambers are a noteworthy example). Disease was rampant nearing the end of the war and clothing may have been isolated from inmates for sanitation and fumigation purposes. Most Jews that had prepared for deportation would have been likely to bring several items of clothing when possible. "Personal effects" prove nothing in this context.

Again, more missing the point (made by TSR). The same witnesses who report gassings and selections also report property plunder. Property plunder is documented and confirmed with physical evidence. Ergo the witnesses are corroborated on one point in their testimonies. The more they are corroborated on different parts of their testimonies, the more reliable they are as a whole. You cannot actually just cherrypick the bits you really hate and ignore the rest of the testimonies.

24. Gish Gallop

It doesn't matter what I argue, either possibility holds better ground than "extermination". These documents must not accurately depict an 'extermination plan' for the simple reason that such a plan is in stark contrast to a convergence of evidence that Believers haven't been able to put a dent in. Take your pick: cremation capacity, forensic evidence, political influences at Nuremburg shaping the narrative, an overwhelming lack of documentation with regards to the immense implications of organized genocide, ample documentation from immediately after the war supporting deportation, frequently, and "death camps", never, anomalies such as monthly postcards, a swimming pool, delousing chambers (to save lives), recreational activities and camp currency for inmates...

I saved this to nearly last because it was such a textbook example of Gish Galloping.

Firstly, the mainstream hasn't been especially bothered by the nonsense arguments of deniers. The few that seemed more serious were refuted long ago, like Leuchter's drivel. Your belief that there is an overwhelming lack of documentation just provokes laughter among people familiar with the mainstream historiography.

Secondly, your Gish Galloping contains several bare assertions. None of your spam quotes prove 'political influence at Nuremburg (sic) shaping the narrative' in the slightest. You may of course have a slight problem in not having digested the full contents of the Nuremberg trial and not evidently having noticed the lengthy sections on
- forced labour
- concentration camps
- ill-treatment and killing of POWs
- ill-treatment and killing of civilians in all occupied territories
in addition to the treatment of the persecution of the Jews at the trial.

I don't want to fry your brain too much, but there is a consensus among recent historians of Nuremberg which is almost exactly the opposite of your apparent view. That is, the Holocaust was not given as much prominence as we might expect today, and was merged into other Nazi crimes because all the prosecutors shared universalist values, either as liberal democracies or as communists, and found Nazi antisemitism too difficult to understand.

Finally, your 'anomalies' betray a hopeless ignorance of the concentration camp system and how it created apartheid conditions between different types of prisoners. Jews weren't allowed into the brothels set up for the benefit of the non-Jewish kapos and functionaries. Jews never received camp scrip for the 'canteen' which never actually had anything worth buying anyway according to Polish survivors. I recall one memoir mentioning something about snails being on sale in one camp canteen at one point.

Jews generally wrote one postcard to deceive their relatives before being killed, a small number were allowed to write postcards to keep the deception up, except it becomes a problem when as happened, the Slovak Jewish community stopped receiving any postcards from Majdanek in the summer of 1943, not long before all surviving Slovak Jews (down to less than 900 vs 40,000 deported to the Lublin district in spring 1942) were murdered in Aktion 'Erntefest'. So that one blew up in your face entirely.

25. What Actually Happened

1) Mass deportations postponed until after the war, slave labor camps, "show trials" against the defeated.
2) Propaganda, corrupt institutions, angry people.

Simple as that.

the only appropriate response is our old friend:

 

[Mondial]

First, Article 21 is in fact a restatement of a rule that normally applies in court proceedings. Facts that are "common knowledge" would be, for example, that war happened, that Germany surrendered, that Hitler was the Chancellor of Germany. Such commonplace things do not particularly need to be proven in court. The function of judicial notice was and is to avoid wasting time. Unless you have some particular fact in mind, of which judicial notice was taken, raising Article 21 is rather misleading.

Second, complaining about a lack of rules of evidence might possibly be relevant to the fairness of the trial, however, it doesn't alter the evidence or the weight we give it from an historical perspective. To put it simply, historians do not say that the holocaust occurred because the Nuremberg Trials convicted the defendants. They says so because the evidence supports that conclusion. The rules of evidence are irrelevant.

So... you're complaining about evidence which was withdrawn? And complaining that it was unreliable because military investigators were found to have abused prisoners, not actually in relation to the evidence complained of, but in other cases. Note 137 out of 139 cases which were in which interrogations were investigated. Investigated, perchance, because abuse had been reported? So, 137 out of how many interrogations in total, do you think?




I've no problem with that general statement.

[/quote]
So it doesn't bother you that US supreme court justice Harlan Fiske Stone referred to the Nuremberg trials as a "lynching party" and a "sanctimonious fraud" ? www.ihr.org/jhr/v12/v12p167_Webera.html www.cwporter.com/innocent.htm

 

[Loss Leader]

So it doesn't bother you that US supreme court justice Harlan Fiske Stone referred to the Nuremberg trials as a "lynching party" and a "sanctimonious fraud" ?

You've missed the point entirely. It doesn't matter what one person thought of the Nuremberg trials. It doesn't matter if that person was Chief Justice of the United States, or even the fact that he was a pretty good one. It doesn't matter if that person had the finest legal mind of the century.

It doesn't matter if the Nuremberg trials ever successfully convicted even one person. It doesn't matter if the laws and rules they used would have been wildly unconstitutional on US soil.

The only thing that does matter is the evidence: the evidence adduced at those trials; the evidence of the trials themselves; the evidence of the defenses and words of the accused; and more. That evidence is what historians partially rely on. That evidence, and all of the other evidence that exists, is what convinces the rational mind.

 

[Nick Terry]

OK, but first you have to bear in mind that Article 19 of the Protocols of the International Military Tribunal states that "The Tribunal shall not be bound by technical rules of evidence." and article 21 states that "The Tribunal shall not require proof of facts of common knowledge but shall take judicial notice thereof." In other words, the rules of evidence that exist to protect defendants, such as the Birmingham Six, did not apply at Nuremberg.

It's funny, I've never seen a single denier ever define what 'rules of evidence' actually are when bringing up this cliche about Nuremberg, or even ask whether 'rules of evidence' existed in the legal systems which were involved in the trial.

The simple fact is that 4 out of 5 legal systems involved in Nuremberg did not have US-style rules of evidence (which weren't codified until 1975 anyhow). German law still doesn't. British law had virtually no rules of evidence in the 1940s, an exception being the hearsay rule, which in turn was shot through with multiple exceptions. The Supreme Court in Germany didn't issue a ruling restricting hearsay in case law practice until the 1990s.

Judicial notice of common facts is explicitly included in the current US federal rules of evidence, and is entirely unobjectionable.

However, article 21 further specified that the court should take judicial notice of "official government documents and reports of the United Nations", specifically the reports of war crimes investigations and national war crimes tribunals.

That sounds ominous, but in practice such documents would be considered 'self-authenticating documents' under current US Federal Rules of Evidence (rule 902) as they were generated by nation-states and were generally accompanied by certification.

The fact that a separate US tribunal convicted various SS men serving at Dachau of war crimes and crimes against humanity was not something that could be reasonably disputed by a defendant; the verdicts were a matter of record. The relevance of the US judgement against Martin Weiss et al to the guilt of specific defendants at IMT is a different matter, and this was not short-circuited by Article 21.

The best illustration of the limits of Article 21 was, of course, the fact that defense lawyers for the Army High Command and General Staff were able to dispute the Soviet report on Katyn and challenge its findings in open court. The IMT transcript is quite unambiguous here; the Nuremberg court did not prevent the relevant defendant from vigorously contesting the charge. And of course, the judges then recognised the successful defense by dropping the charge from the judgement.

 

[EtienneSC]

[...] Coulda-woulda-shouldas fall foul of the fallacy of possible proof, which is one of many examples of ill-reasoning noted in David Hackett Fischer's Historian's Fallacies. Speculation is only valid where there is no or genuinely insufficient evidence, and only when marked as such. It cannot, ever, trump other evidence, no matter what form that evidence takes. Just because you dislike the conclusion supported by other evidence doesn't mean you can ignore it.

Secondly, all historical disciplines use abductive reasoning and inference to the best explanation extensively. Denying these as 'invalid' is actually denying the possibility to know about the past as a whole. Historical disciplines proceed on the basis of evidence, but do so on the basis of all available evidence. That evidence is not always complete, but where it exists, it must always be taken into consideration, obeying the principle of total evidence.

[...] I honestly don't know which is more annoying, the typical revisionist demand for a level of certainty which goes far beyond normal expectations and easily tips over into solipsism, or the equally typical revisionist habit of analysing one piece of evidence in splendid isolation while ignoring the rest, and making up any old nonsense to explain away something which fits together perfectly well with other evidence that is being ignored by the denier.

Speculation as you describe it is never valid in a logical sense, in that it never excludes the possibility of error. However, I agree with you that we have to loosen our requirements and let the evidence speak. When we focus on individuals, their deeds and thoughts, there is a greater place for deductive reasoning. A piece of paper with writing on it and certain information about provenance proves that Mr X had such and such a thought, for example. There have been considerable changes in my lifetime in the nature of narrative history. Formerly, a historian was expected to be a story teller, with a certain license to shock, but also with privileged access to witnesses as a member of a particular community (John Prebble, AJP Taylor to some extent). Now there is more of an approximation to science at least in presentation, but I think there are limitations to the ability to challenge an entrenched narrative.

The relations of the holocaust narrative to other disciplines ought also to be raised in relation to considering one thing in isolation from others. It is significant that two philosophers have noticed the difference between the holocaust narrative and other history. Berel Lang (from New York) in Act and Idea in the Nazi Genocide (Chicago, 1990) states that it introduces a new idea of evil into history. Emil Fackenheim has made similar observations and regards this as a challenge to moral philosophy. Both of these individuals accept the narrative, but see it something different to other historical narratives, where the agents have some understandable motive which they realise or make steps towards, etc.

I have noticed this myself in Richard Evans books on the Third Reich, where the Germans are described like zombies. One thing about the Nazis is that they were young and enthusiastic, but that never comes across. This is in contrast to Evans' book about the Irving trial, where the style is lively, even though he clearly dislikes Irving, for understandable reasons.

It is as though a concept of metaphysical evil is accepted as having explanatory force and this is something other than, or in addition to, empirical history backed up by a view of human action as aiming at some (apparent) good.

It's funny, I've never seen a single denier ever define what 'rules of evidence' actually are when bringing up this cliche about Nuremberg, or even ask whether 'rules of evidence' existed in the legal systems which were involved in the trial.

The simple fact is that 4 out of 5 legal systems involved in Nuremberg did not have US-style rules of evidence (which weren't codified until 1975 anyhow). German law still doesn't. British law had virtually no rules of evidence in the 1940s, an exception being the hearsay rule, which in turn was shot through with multiple exceptions. The Supreme Court in Germany didn't issue a ruling restricting hearsay in case law practice until the 1990s.

Judicial notice of common facts is explicitly included in the current US federal rules of evidence, and is entirely unobjectionable.

However, article 21 further specified that the court should take judicial notice of "official government documents and reports of the United Nations", specifically the reports of war crimes investigations and national war crimes tribunals.

That sounds ominous, but in practice such documents would be considered 'self-authenticating documents' under current US Federal Rules of Evidence (rule 902) as they were generated by nation-states and were generally accompanied by certification.

The fact that a separate US tribunal convicted various SS men serving at Dachau of war crimes and crimes against humanity was not something that could be reasonably disputed by a defendant; the verdicts were a matter of record. The relevance of the US judgement against Martin Weiss et al to the guilt of specific defendants at IMT is a different matter, and this was not short-circuited by Article 21.

The best illustration of the limits of Article 21 was, of course, the fact that defense lawyers for the Army High Command and General Staff were able to dispute the Soviet report on Katyn and challenge its findings in open court. The IMT transcript is quite unambiguous here; the Nuremberg court did not prevent the relevant defendant from vigorously contesting the charge. And of course, the judges then recognised the successful defense by dropping the charge from the judgement.

There is no such thing strictly as British law, but English and Scots law and the English rules of evidence were applied at the Manstein trial. The French criminal system is not adversarial but inquisitorial and so the comparison is less close. The English rules of evidence seem fairly developed as described by Paget and included considerations of duress as well as hearsay. He also describes interpretation of evidence as a significant aspect of the defence case. As a result, the verdict of the Manstein trial (guilty, but on greatly reduced charges) was significantly different to the earlier trials. So much so that it gave rise to the 'myth of the clean Wehrmacht' which the holocaust narrative has had to contend with ever since.

Another significant aspect of the earlier trials was the failure of the defence to cross examine witnesses.

I have to advise you that I will have limited time to carry on this discussion in the immediate future, educational though it is.

 

[Mondial]

You've missed the point entirely. It doesn't matter what one person thought of the Nuremberg trials. It doesn't matter if that person was Chief Justice of the United States, or even the fact that he was a pretty good one. It doesn't matter if that person had the finest legal mind of the century.

It doesn't matter if the Nuremberg trials ever successfully convicted even one person. It doesn't matter if the laws and rules they used would have been wildly unconstitutional on US soil.

The only thing that does matter is the evidence: the evidence adduced at those trials; the evidence of the trials themselves; the evidence of the defenses and words of the accused; and more. That evidence is what historians partially rely on. That evidence, and all of the other evidence that exists, is what convinces the rational mind.

It mightn't matter to you but the obvious double standards and blatant hypocrisy displayed at Nuremberg disturb a lot of people. Accusing defendants of torture while some of them were tortured themselves. Accusing defendants of ethnic cleansing while at the same time ethnic cleansing of over 10 million Germans was going on in eastern Europe. One standard for the Allies and one for the defendants. Nuremberg was a show trial. You talk a lot of "evidence". What about the charges that were absurd? Is this what you call evidence? Some of the ridiculous charges against defendants at Nuremberg are compiled in MADE IN RUSSIA THE HOLOCAUST by Carlos Porter. It is free online. Introduction is here. www.cwporter.com/intro.htm

 

[Loss Leader]

It mightn't matter to you but the obvious double standards and blatant hypocrisy displayed at Nuremberg disturb a lot of people. Accusing defendants of torture while some of them were tortured themselves. Accusing defendants of ethnic cleansing while at the same time ethnic cleansing of over 10 million Germans was going on in eastern Europe. One standard for the Allies and one for the defendants. Nuremberg was a show trial. You talk a lot of "evidence". What about the charges that were absurd? Is this what you call evidence? Some of the ridiculous charges against defendants at Nuremberg are compiled in MADE IN RUSSIA THE HOLOCAUST by Carlos Porter. It is free online. Introduction is here. www.cwporter.com/intro.htm

So, you continue to miss the point.