General Holocaust Denial Discussion Part II
- Thread starter SnakeTongue
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Dcdrac
Philosopher
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A view on the Luechter Report
http://books.google.co.uk/books?id=...=onepage&q=leuchter report is rubbish&f=false
http://books.google.co.uk/books?id=...=onepage&q=leuchter report is rubbish&f=false
TSR
Illuminator
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Popeye the Sailor Man.
And the gas chamber that ArmEntrout talked to him about: was it ever even built?
No?
Why not?
... and Muchos Nombres was handed his *** by Rich Green, such that his starting point of "On chemical-physical grounds, the attested mass gassings with prussic acid in the alleged "gas chambers" in Auschwitz could not have taken place" changed to " I am convinced that chemistry is not the science which can prove or refute any allegations about the Holocaust 'rigorously'"
Except for the teeny tiny fact that his most relevant assertions have been refuted.
Please feel free to cite one that has not -- I'm already in a confrontation mood tonite...
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Loss Leader
I would save the receptionist., Moderator
Completely irrelevant to his Holocaust noodlings.
Completely irrelevant to Leuchter's Holocaust research*.
*"Research" meaning "desecration of a historic artifact by a moron and his wife".
Who cares what one guy thinks of one other guy? It doesn't mean that Leuchter knew what he was doing.
I'm sorry. If you were right, I'd agree with you.
It is curious how Tommy's trying to defend Leuchter without actually discussing the contents of his report, or how he was laughed out of court, or how, as I already said, he had to lie to the guy who was doing the tests for him. Problem is, I was wrong about that. I misremembered what I had read. That should've been pointed out by someone willing to engage me. But hey, as long as we're talking about authority figures' views on Fred to determine his credibility...
http://www.nizkor.org/faqs/leuchter/leuchter-faq-22.html
Oddly enough, that site also covers several other recent claims.
There were not enough Jews in Europe to account for the number of 6 million victims.
http://www.nizkor.org/faqs/leuchter/leuchter-faq-13.html
Which means that the "facts" certain parties have recently presented, regarding the weight of cremated remains, are wrong.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cremation#Ash_weight_and_composition
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leuchter_report
Of course, when read the article and see his number of false claims, it's pretty clear he's a crook, charlatan, and liar. Tommy seems to be using the report as something of a playbook.
It's also amazing how the holocaust case relies mainly on witnesses one second, and mainly on faked documentation the next.
Tommy, care to discuss #5483? Do I have your views right?
http://www.nizkor.org/faqs/leuchter/leuchter-faq-22.html
Oddly enough, that site also covers several other recent claims.
There were not enough Jews in Europe to account for the number of 6 million victims.
http://www.nizkor.org/faqs/leuchter/leuchter-faq-13.html
After a person is cremated, quite a small amount of ash remains - it fits in a small urn, or a box. This means that ashes of thousands of people fit into one truck. The ash was either scattered around in fields, buried, or - in Auschwitz, for instance - dumped into a river.
Which means that the "facts" certain parties have recently presented, regarding the weight of cremated remains, are wrong.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cremation#Ash_weight_and_composition
Which means that Tommy's figures which work out to bodies at about 9lb/4kg each were probably a smidge off.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leuchter_report
Of course, when read the article and see his number of false claims, it's pretty clear he's a crook, charlatan, and liar. Tommy seems to be using the report as something of a playbook.
It's also amazing how the holocaust case relies mainly on witnesses one second, and mainly on faked documentation the next.
Tommy, care to discuss #5483? Do I have your views right?
They were shot according to the report, real or not, for spreading rumors against the German army. Not as part of a process of putting them in a ghetto.
Underway? On December 16? It had ALREADY HAPPENED on December 15, Nick, according to a German (undoubtedly spontaneous) eye witness. I've read plenty of those Ereignismeldungen UdSSR Nick. You can usually find the following recurring themes:
* Shootings of intellectual jews: former communist party leaders, lawyers and schoolteachers (despicable sure). Somehow an exception is made for jewish doctors as they are needed by the Germans to keep epidemics under control.
* Inciting the local populace to progroms, progrom = DIY program for the locals to get rid of jews.
* When the locals are not in the mood for progroms, ghettoisation is the preferred procedure.
* Plenty of times you read that the non intellectual, ordinary working jews (especially those in agriculture) are important for the German war economy.
Those reports hence RARELY insinuate the shooting of ALL jews. Exceptions maybe being 101 and 106 making mention of the shooting of over 30.000 jews, thought to refer to the Babi Yar thingy. Babi Yar which also has the recurring themes similar to Kharkov:
* Germans hanging up posters saying "all joos be here by this date and at this place".
* Literally tens of thousands of jews actually show up on a single street corner, actual witnesses among the local non jewish populace of such a massive event - who undoubtedly must have been there - are surprisingly rare and a believable one is even more rare.
* Jews go marching along, the shootings occur over the course of two days, yet no one can logistically explain where the thousands or so not yet shot spent the night.
* Despite the jews being in the tens of thousands and the Germans probably being vastly outnumbered, despite shots of daylong execution undoubtedly having been audible, the jews are good folks, don't scatter in panic and undress on a cold rainy September day to be shot nicely in turns in neat groups of ten or so people in a huge ditch, piling body upon body.
* "Eye witnesses" dropping pretend dead, buried under several bodies.
Contrary to Kharkov where a couple of hundred people are unearthed, there is however exactly ZERO evidence for ANY dead body at Babi Yar.
WRONG Nick. Your German star witness still remembered quite clearly in 1964:
I still know exactly today that it was on 15.12.41 when I saw in Kharkov how a trek several kilometers long of Jews in long rows with handcars and luggage moved from the city eastwards to the tractor factory. (...) I estimate the number of Jews who on this day were led from Kharkov to the tractor factory at ca. 15 000 persons. (...) The reason why I know exactly that the Jews were led to the tractor factory on 15.12.41 is that at that time there were posters in German and Russian language hanging everywhere in the city, on which the Jews were called upon to gather at a certain place of the city in order to be taken away. I no longer know today what service had issued these posters. But I still remember exactly that 15.12.1941 was mentioned as the day of gathering.
That Ukrainian execution site tourist however says it was on January 7 the next year. You'd think that if 15.000 people got together somewhere, the rest of the populace or an "eye witness" would be able to tell what date it was right?
That it implies "all the jews" is your inference, from the context of the other Ereignismeldungen UdSSR, shooting all intellectuals save medical doctors (doctors in history wouldn't be spared) seems more likely.
Make that mass grave, singular. Said corpses were not undressed - a popular German method - as far as I can see. They are reported to have been shot in the back of the head - a popular Soviet method.
Considering the Germans are CONSISTENTLY reported to have made their victims undress before shooting them (for unclear reasons other than propaganda), it seems the evidence points away from the Germans, doesn't it? Who would it point to then?
Yet they did NOT keep a tab on when exactly 15.000 people were led away on a single day, something people undoubtedly would have seen, hence it is "somewhere between December and February". How gullible do you think I am, Nick? You're the historian, provide me the EXACT date these people were missing, December 15, January 7, or something else, as long as you make up your mind. Surely, if it happened, it is not a question too hard to answer right?
Fine, get me consistent witnesses on the date at least and I'd bother you a lot less.
Evidence starts with a SINGLE date and a number varying less than a factor three between 10,000 and over 33,000.
Nick, please be consistent, if by the time of its capture this fell to 10-12,000, this means the Germans shot 3,000 to 5,000 non jews by mistake. Oopsie. Considering there is documentary evidence of 10,000 jews in the very specific "December", care to enlighten me of documentary evidence as to exactly WHEN there were 0 jews in Kharkov?
It can't be that hard for historians to provide complete data on EXACTLY WHEN between December and January 15,000 people went missing over the course of a single day. Too much to ask?
Nick Terry
Illuminator
Your posts are now too unwieldy to reply to en masse. I will only respond if you stick to the headings laid out, in separate posts. Further responses on this subject may be moved to the separate gas vans thread which deniers gave up on some months ago.
There are no such documents. Cite them if you believe they exist.
Absolutely wrong regarding documentary evidence; the '97,000 processed' document ties in directly with Chelmno. You blew it, because you made a demonstrably false assertion. Look around here for the separate gas vans thread.
Nobody much cares that the gas vans themselves have not survived, because nobody sensible expects that out of more than a million vehicles in Nazi Germany and Wehrmacht/SS vehicle parks, the 20 or so gas vans could be found intact when so much else was being destroyed in 1944-45. The material evidence available = the results of gas vans - bodies dumped into graves (and then exhumed and found to be consistent with asphyxiation, as in several easterly sites in the Soviet Union), or found to be cremated. In the case of Chelmno, not only are the ascertained mass graves more than big enough to have accommodated the victims, there is sufficient trace evidence to confirm the documentary and witness evidence that this was a site of mass cremation. In the eyes of anyone reasonable, of course.
The fact that gas vans left quite a few documentary traces is also why nobody really cares that the vans themselves didn't survive. The principle of piping exhaust fumes into a sealed van makes complete sense, no matter what is claimed by way of 'technical impossibility'. Moreover the reported use of the vans was for appropriately sized groups of victims. The limitations of gas vans are quite clear to all concerned. They were a transitional murder method.
Asking why we don't have the vans when we have so much other evidence on the vans is basically identical to a creationist asking why a transitional fossil isn't available. It's a god-of-the-gaps argument to negative evidence. And arguments to negative evidence are only convincing when we would absolutely expect there to be evidence (i.e. for a van to survive and be located in the chaos of 1945), which is clearly not the case here.
Absolutely wrong on the death toll of 152,000 not being based on documentation. The figure of 152,000 is based on the Korherr report's statistic of 145,000 plus 7000 documented deportees from the Lodz ghetto in 1944. There are of course numerous supporting documents, including the aforementioned '97,000 processed' report.
Is it? You read Polish, do you, and have read through all the relevant investigations in full?
The Polish Main Commission never, by the way, estimated 1.3 million dead at Chelmno, that was a figure produced immediately after liberation (IIRC, by the Soviets, who promptly moved further west and never did a full investigation) before the Polish commission had a chance to fully investigate. That commission estimated 340,000 dead in 1946, because it did not yet have access to the full range of documents which became available not long afterwards, and based this estimate on multiplying the lifespan of the camp by the commonly reported size of transports. The error was that while the camp continued to exist until April 1943, it saw extremely few transports after September 1942.
This is basically handwaving waffle. After your double fail on the documents, you now seemingly conflate the 1945 investigation with recent archaeological investigations, which quite satisfactorily established grave dimensions and found countless objects and evidence of human remains, cover-up efforts (caustic substances in some pits). The summary of the research on the Chelmno museum's website is clear and thoroughly convincing. Neither you nor any denier guru can deal with the full implications of what is described without cherrypicking the investigation or misrepresenting it.
So innumerable you cannot even list one.
None of this deals honestly with the central point made earlier by TSR and reiterated by myself.
If a witness says there were mass graves and the dimensions of mass graves can be established, then they are corroborated by physical evidence on this point.
If a witness says there were mass cremations and these sites have emptied mass graves but evidence of cremains and human detritus, then they are corroborated by physical evidence on this point.
Your lame analogies with Biblical exegesis fall considerably short of dismissing the significance of the corroboration of witnesses by physical evidence, or indeed the significance of corroboration of witnesses by documents, documents by physical evidence, or any other form of corroboration.
Corroboration is corroboration, bust. What that means is you cannot dismiss one category of evidence and invent a fanciful story about what happened just because if viewed in isolation, one piece of evidence could indicate something else. Like virtually every denier, you are constantly falling foul of the fallacy of possible proof, and resorting to coulda-woulda-shouldas.
Evidence of cremation never exists on its own with these sites. So it cannot be interpreted on its own. It has to be interpreted together with the documents and the eyewitness testimony. Those categories of evidence must in turn be examined honestly, and an alternate explanation provided otherwise nobody sensible will listen to you.
That's why your handwaving about "well cremation could mean this" is risible, and your bare-assertions about Chelmno the Transit Camp are laughed at. Because you're visibly ignoring other evidence. Simon666 has been doing the same thing, and it's the standard denier modus operandi.
In the case of Nazi crimes, there is a clear time-line in which evidence relating to the camps is uncovered. Denial makes various claims to disrupt the time-line, but doesn't seem to be aware that there is one. Yet the implied claim is of a massive conspiracy to fabricate the evidence; whether asserted directly or implicitly. Most of us would like honest, open, explicit claims, which means back up you conspiracy claims coherently. It's not as if we haven't seen the denier dance from people before.
Since you have raised Chelmno as an example, let's look at this camp more closely.
We find that there were multiple wartime reports written virtually from the get go about Chelmno being an extermination camp. One report came from a Jewish escapee, whose flight was noticed and recorded in a contemporary diary in another ghetto. Meanwhile, the local Polish underground was simultaneously and independently reporting on Chelmno as a death camp. These reports were summarised, synthesised and transmitted to the outside world, which then publicised the existence of the camp in mid-1942, with further public and secret reports (especially from the Polish underground) through to the end of the war, as one would expect given the closure and reopening of the camp.
In 1945, the site is overrun, and the Soviets capture a few policemen who served in the camp. Some survivors who escaped emerge from hiding. The locals surrounding the camp are interviewed. There is enough evidence to finger the site as another death camp, and there is an exaggerated report in early 1945. Then a Polish commission does the real legwork, interviewing witnesses who helped repair the vans in nearby garages and finding out all sorts of interesting facts about the camp, only some of which were learned by looking at the site, since staring at the ground usually stops revealing very much fairly quickly.
Separately to the Polish war crimes commission investigation of the site itself, contemporary documents from the German civil administration, SS as well as the Lodz ghetto authorities, plus contemporary diaries, are uncovered and processed in Poland. Key sources relating rather directly to the Warthegau and Chelmno are found in Himmler's papers captured by the Americans not the Poles, and come to light in the Nuremberg successor trials. Meanwhile, the British capture one of the policemen belonging to Sonderkommando Bothmann, and he gives a perfectly consistent testimony entirely independently of anything done in Poland.
All this is further synthesised in the trial of Arthur Greiser, Gauleiter of the Warthegau, where yet more evidence not previously seen by the Polish commission under Bednarz is presented, and put into circulation, either being republished over the next 20 years or made available for other investigations.
As western historians dig deeper into the files, they find other documents in the SS records and also in the personnel files in the Berlin Document Centre. A key find is the '97,000 processed' document which is utterly explicit on the use of gas vans at Chelmno. This is known to historians by the 1960s. Analysis of materials already in circulation, such as the Korherr report, allows historians like Hilberg as well as West German courts to specify a significantly lower death toll on the basis of documentary evidence, already by the same decade.
By the 1960s, the Zentrale Stelle in Ludwigsburg inaugurates renewed war crimes investigations both of the staff of Sonderkommando Kulmhof as well as of the Lodz Gestapo. More documents are uncovered, and numerous witnesses are interviewed or reinterviewed. The cases go to trial and produce guilty verdicts and fairly comprehensive written judgements, all on the basis of the legal system of a democratic state. This happens long before any 'anti-denial' statutes have been introduced, yet not a single defendant avails himself of the services of any revisionist, because that would have been a completely pointless waste of time.
Then historians continue their research, and find yet more materials directly related to Chelmno, as well as to the context of the Holocaust in the Warthegau. By now the literature is pretty massive. Most of it is flatly ignored by Guru Mattogno in the relevant 'Holocaust Handbook' comic-book.
By the 1990s and 2000s, local museum authorities in Poland conduct archaeological investigations, as mentioned above.
To sum up: Chelmno has been claimed as an extermination camp in the worldwide media since June 1942. There was clear and convincing evidence from wartime reports to make this claim, which was not then convincingly denied or refuted by wartime German counter-arguments. Indeed, the Nazis said literally nothing about Chelmno in public during the entire war. The claim was confirmed by evidence generated by at least three separate nation-states in 1945-1949. Then it was reconfirmed and elaborated on by yet another separate nation-state, West Germany. The 'owners' of the site reinvestigated in recent years and found tons of interesting material which confirms what was already known.
Since deniers want to claim a big hoax then the only honest way to approach the evidence is chronologically, to demonstrate how every single piece was fabricated or misunderstood, how every single separate investigation was a fraud, and why.
Because it really doesn't take much effort to ascertain that all the above investigations happened, they're all written up in various ways, lots on the internet, which is why deniers will forever be asked questions like:
- how was it possible that witnesses could give corroborating accounts to entirely independent investigations at the same time in 1945?
- if you assert that these investigations were not independent, where is your evidence for this claim?
- how was it possible that the West Germans could persuade so many witnesses to testify about Chelmno without using torture or any visible means of coercion?
- if you assert that there was some form of arm-twisting, where is your evidence for this claim?
- if you assert that the witnesses were possessed by a hysterical zeitgeist where is your evidence for this claim, because it sounds made up?
- how can you explain the fact that witnesses reporting on extermination also report mass cremation and we find physical evidence of mass cremation including oversized mass graves visibly emptied of bodies but still containing human remains and all manner of personal property coming from the people we know to be victims?
That's only six questions, not 36 questions.
These questions will not be answered by cherrypicking, nitpicking or another blatantly fallacious method of argumentation. Because we on the internet and at JREF are wise to the mark of woo, and can spot incoherent argumentation a mile off.
Oh, by the way: your poor performance with documents relevant to Chelmno mean you're not really in a position to play the show-me game any more. I have summarised easily verifiable points about the sequence of knowledge, investigations and historical research. Some of them are written up in the critique in my sig, which cites most of the relevant literature.
It really is up to any would-be revisionist to know the relevant literature and sources, and if they don't then they can be laughed at. Which is what happened when you were so demonstrably ignorant of the 97,000 processed document and the Korherr report. Both are on relevant websites, can easily be googled, are discussed all over the place including in free online materials, and basically, that means you flunked the test long before it became a matter of sending you to the library.
But rest assured, to the library (and archives) you'd eventually have to go. If you want to short-circuit that and discuss Guru Mattogno's drivel because he provides you with a cribsheet of silly talking points and vaguely tells you about some of the above, then we can do that, but his book omits vast swathes of relevant materials, misrepresents things he does discuss, and is all told a steaming pile of horse manure.
And that still won't save your bacon. In the end, you'd still have to be sent to the library, because in the final analysis, if this ever comes to a genuine joust, then it'd be in either a properly academic context or in a courtroom, no other arenas are really imaginable, and ignorance is no defense in either academia or in court.
And it's not really a defense on serious internet forums. You clearly aren't familiar with modern historical research on the Holocaust from the past 20 years in the kind of depth and breadth that is really required to debate the subject seriously. There are obvious gaping holes in your knowledge. Those need to be filled before the debate can proceed on the level you would like. In the meantime, I and others will simply point out the fallacies of reasoning in your 'arguments'.
Course, you could just skip ahead and read Michael Alberti's excellent book on the Holocaust in the Warthegau and Peter Klein's thought-provoking study of the 'Gettoverwaltung Litzmannstadt'. Might save everyone some time and bother if you did.
Do you actually even read German, by the way? That's a question you really ought to answer, lest everyone conclude you can't read the language.
For Simon to be convinced, he would also need a clear story as to WHEN that mass grave for 15,000 people was made, WHERE it was as and HOW it was done (shootings or gas vans, undressing or not, burying or cremation at minus 15). All I can see so far is a few hundred clothed people at most in a ditch. There seems to be no evidence thousands of people disappeared in the first place. No one can produce a coherent story starting with date of events, number of victims, location of the mother of all ditches or even murder weapon.
Nick Terry
Illuminator
More arguments to incredulity. The fact is that deported Jews were made to send postcards to their home communities before being killed, this happened e.g. in Treblinka during the Warsaw ghetto action, and was also done with Dutch Jews being made to send correspondence to the Jewish Council in the Netherlands. Slovak Jews similarly were made to write (censored) letters and postcards back to Slovakia.
These postcards survive and are thus historical evidence, as are the contemporary comments in minutes of meetings of the Jewish Council of the Netherlands and internal correspondence of the Slovakian Jewish resistance and Jewish council.
Both in the Netherlands and Slovakia, the decreasing number of postcards caused anxiety and led some to conclude that the other deportees - the ones from whom nothing was ever heard from again - were dead. This was explicitly the case in Slovakia, because other reports reached the country, because the mail was intermittent, and arrived in wodges which then showed a massive discrepancy between the number of deportees to the relevant region, and the number of postcards. When in the summer of 1943 the postcards stopped coming entirely, this was obviously an extremely bad sign.
Dealt with in chapter 3 of the critique in my sig. Graf's arguments are drivel. These two in particular
and
simply misunderstand the context. Erntefest happened in the Lublin district, which is where the Sobibor camp had just revolted (which left documents). Camps for armaments industry in the Lublin district were not liquidated in Erntefest, specifically Budzyn which was a Heinkel plant. Other districts in the Government-General were not affected by Erntefest, because their surviving Jewish forced labour camps worked for armaments industry, and because the action was carried out to address a largely imaginary 'security threat' posed by keeping large numbers of Jewish forced labourers in the Lublin district, which was the province most affected by the rising tide of partisan warfare in the Government-General. Himmler ordered the action because he was paranoid and because he could order the action, since the workers in Trawniki, Poniatowa and Majdanek worked for crappy SS firms making what was comparatively speaking tat, whereas killing off workers for Heinkel, HASAG and other arms firms meant causing them grief.
while this
is a wonderful illustration of denier double standards. The problem is, there's no confirmation of this transfer. Krakow would have meant Plaszow, and we don't find 25,000 Jews arriving from the Lublin district in Plaszow or any camp in Krakow or indeed in the Krakow district in November 1943. Or anywhere else for that matter.
So we can dismiss this isolated wartime report, even if we assume that M&G are citing it correctly, which given their track record is not a given.
One wartime report does not outweigh quite substantial quantities of other wartime reports, much less the rest of the evidence.
But the thing that really gets me about M&G's drivel on Erntefest is why on earth would the SS have demonstrably deployed five whole battalions of policemen if all they were doing is transferring 42,000 prisoners? The relevant camps had at least 3 battalions' worth of guards, easily enough to transfer a prisoner force of that size if they were really going somewhere else. Unfortunately, the deployments are fairly well documented.....
It's been shown repeatedly. In things called history books. Which you apparently refuse to read. If you have read any history books, you seem to be totally incapable of parsing them for their sources and noting down what evidence exists.
As explained already, your unwillingness to read properly doesn't then absolve you from the responsibility of knowing and understanding all the relevant evidence before making your assertions.
I've already recommended multiple online sources which don't require you to go to the library, and already specified that you'd have to account for all the sources mentioned in them.
Indeed, I'll challenge you simply to list the documentary sources found in Pressac, Pelt, Browning, Longerich x 2 and the critique. First you need to establish the extent, then you need to show us that the very large number of documents which are discussed in these free online works can all be explained away. All of them, because it's when you put documents together that you actually write history.
And because your gambit was 'overwhelming lack of documentary proof', you cannot resort to forgery allegations. Nobody in the mainstream believes the silly denier forgery allegations anyway, but if you have to resort to forgery claims then you lose, instantly. Because the issue is what evidence do mainstream historians regard as proof of extermination - if some document is so damaging to your beliefs that you have to play the forgery card, then you'll never understand why people disbelieve denial.
And the issue is what evidence do mainstream historians know about regarding the whole of the Holocaust, since mainstream historians don't reduce the Holocaust to a single camp or to gassing alone.
Go on, show us that the six online works mentioned rely on a mere 100 Nazi documents which are thought to be probative of extermination but in all 100 cases historians are wildly mistaken.
Or will you concede that there are clearly more than 100 documents of that kind which you'll find in these six works.
If you concede that, then 'overwhelming lack of documentary proof' was a lie, wasn't it?
LSSBB
Devilish Dictionarian
You make this statement in bold, then go on with nothing to back it up except some examples of attempts to exert influence. As with your earlier reference that is a laundry list of Jews in a variety of positions of influence, no context or documentary proof of Jews Control Everything is given. You are able to post your conjectures on here: "Jews Control Everything" negated. Jewish ability to manipulate or fabricate history texts, witness accounts, and documentary evidence of the Holocaust still remains pure conjecture.
Nick Terry
Illuminator
You're still cherrypicking what I've been writing. And the 305 Jews were shot during the ghettoisation phase. Not before, not after.
As we'll see below, you misread the witness.
Are you sure there's zero evidence? Have you actually read the relevant ChGK protocols from Kiev, walked the site today, seen the 1941 colour photos? No, you haven't.
Your gloss on the Ereignismeldungen is pretty hilarious. You've not read them, you've cherrypicked them. Tell you what, why don't you list all the shooting actions described in the 195 reports. You don't seem to have got much past early August 1941.
<facepalm>
this quite clearly refers to the ghettoisation in the machine tractor factory, not to the liquidation of the ghetto. Nothing is said in your quote about a shooting at all.
Since the action took place over several days, and involved Jews being removed from a relatively isolated part of town to a killing site, no you'd not expect that dates would be given in unanimity by witnesses testifying at the earliest, 14 months after the events.
That doesn't however detract from the facepalm of watching you misread and misunderstand a testimony about ghettoisation as a testimony about a subsequent mass murder which happened several weeks later.
1. Not when the entire Jewish population of Kharkov documented as relocated into the tractor factory ghetto vanishes from all subsequent records.
2. Not when SK4a and other kommandos had long transitioned to a policy of total extermination in the military zone
Genickschuss was also a popular Nazi method, which is why there's one of those lovely compound German words to describe it.
Therefore, the method alone cannot be used to determine whodunnit. You've yet to present any evidence that this might be an NKVD grave. Obviously, that would generally require you presenting documentary evidence regarding NKVD operations in the Kharkov region (which exists, not least 'cos Ukraine is independent of Russia and has opened up its KGB records), and that you eliminate all the other grave sites around the region to be able to match documented victims to the corpses.
Don't bother trying, because enough is known about NKVD operations to be quite sure which grave is which.
No, the Germans didn't consistently make their victims undress. This was after all January 1942 with temperatures down to -15 celsius. The action took place over a period of time, the final batches might have been killed more hurriedly for whatever reason. Frankly the film stills don't really suggest people in heavy clothing anyway. Can you really say they're not mixed up with some in underwear?
It's funny, your kind whines about how Jews went passively to slaughter and here we might actually have some evidence of non-compliance, as in Jews refusing to undress but being shot anyway... ever think about that? No, you didn't, did you.
The final catch: the SS had a habit of recycling grave sites and 'adding' political prisoners executed over subsequent months to the same graves. This happened in Babi Yar, which is where political prisoners arrested by the Kiev Gestapo (KdS Kiew) were buried. I presume you concede that the SS would have shot at least some partisans and commissars. These victims were not always forced to undress.
The city administration didn't need to report daily. And you've not explained how it was that the city administration counted all the Jews moving to the ghetto in December, yet there is no trace of Jews in a ghetto in Kharkov by the end of January.
According to whom and when did they say this on the basis of what evidence?
The documents and witnesses place the start of the mass shootings at the start of January 1942. Clearly, some Jews died before this date (at least 305 as we know by mid-December 1941) and some after this, in final clear-up searches and so forth.
Why is an exact date critical here? They are present and accounted for in documents in mid-December 1941. By the end of January 1942, there is no more trace of them. Given that most institutions tend to report or count on a monthly basis, this is a completely reasonable, and normal, time-frame.
I can narrow it down further, see below, but my point was that we can be certain of the disappearence of the Jews from the records after the end of January, since that is when their non-appearance in the city administration records starts and is maintained consistently thereafter.
You're bothering me a lot less than you think, because you're offering such a textbook demonstration of the utter stupidity of denier 'methods'.
If you want to read more witnesses on Kharkov, then look up the judgements in Justiz und NS-Verbrechen, count up all the named SS and Wehrmacht witnesses, look at the Verbrechen der Wehrmacht book and notice the witnesses and diary entries cited in this book, look at Dieter Pohl's Die Herrschaft der Wehrmacht and notice the sources, and look at the USHMM Encyclopedia of Camps and Ghettos and notice all the witnesses quoted along with the other sources.
Honestly, when will you people get it through your skulls that you need to read something other than what you lazily google then misread on the internet.
But we know the time-frame and we know the action took place over several days. The timing is clarified to a pretty precise time-frame by the fact that the report of Police Battalion 314 states that the ghetto stopped being guarded on January 7, 1942.
There are, by the way, cases where (smaller) graves were exhumed and the witness evidence was so fragmentary that we will never know when the victims died. But since the grave was exhumed that is a secondary issue.
Why, if physical evidence is supposedly the most critical thing, do you not remember that archaeologists usually have massive problems dating things more precisely than a period of many years? In this case, we are down to a span of about a week, not a matter of dating something within a decade or even century.
As for the factor of 3, says who? The Drobitski Yar memorial people say it's 30,000, but there's no reason to accept this. The documentary evidence indicates just over 10,000 Jews present in Kharkov in mid-December 1941. I personally go with the documents. Isn't that what historians are meant to do?
There is a clear minimum figure here. The realistic range has a floor of 10,000 and a ceiling of 12,000, allowing for Jews killed in later roundups from hiding, possible deaths from starvation and other brutalities before the documented ghettoisation in mid-December 1941, et cetera. Compared to the range of numbers available for the Setif massacre in Algeria, that is pretty damn good.
Sigh. Look, the Soviet report said 15,000 based on estimating numbers in opened mass graves. There is no indication that they counted all the bodies, otherwise there would be an exact number. The report clearly states that 500 bodies were exhumed and 215 autopsied. Considering how truly unpleasant exhuming and counting 10,000+ bodies would be, then it's no surprise they didn't do it. Accordingly, they overestimated the number of the dead, which is why historians prefer documentary sources, because when you get into telephone-number-land, they're by far the best way to go. When you are the Soviet Union faced with exhuming literally dozens of mass graves in the same region, containing many 10s of 1000s of bodies (especially Soviet POWs), then you're really very unlikely to devote the time and attention that we can manage with a smaller atrocity like Srebrenica.
As for shooting non-Jews 'by mistake', I've already mentioned that the Einsatzgruppen had a habit of adding to mass graves when they moved on to mass-executing partisan suspects, political prisoners and communists. Indeed, SK4a went on in 1942 and early 1943 to mow down more than 5,000 'communists' in the region between Kharkov and Chernigov, actions which are copiously documented.
Well, since Police Battalion 314 stopped guarding the ghetto on January 7, 1942, it would seem most logical to pinpoint January 7, 1942 as the exact date when the ghetto was liquidated, as in there were no more substantial batches awaiting execution. The fact that we don't find any trace of them in other reports at the end of January 1942, and they've vanished from the population headcounts, would generally be considered excellent corroboration of the inference based on the police battalion report. Sort of like a shortstop and longstop.
Honestly, I don't see what the problem is here. There are countless situations in the historical record for the 20th Century where we know that in x month y thing happened, and have no further clarity on exactly what day that thing happened. And nobody much cares, since narrowing things down to a month is pretty good.
There are of course cases of events which aren't narrowed down to more than a season, simply because the sources are so vague.
This is absolutely brilliant in comparison with medieval history, where we still have trouble assigning birth and death dates to some kings, even, and can only guess within a lengthy time span as to the dates of manuscripts, or when certain events happened.
Nick Terry
Illuminator
Simon, I see you've offered some more handwaving in response to a tiny fraction of the above. The fact is that readers of this thread can see you're handwaving, strawmanning, arguing from incredulity, arguing from ignorance, misinterpreting evidence, and generally not doing a very good job of explaining what happened, much less coping with the sum total of evidence placed on the table, or potentially available to be place on the table. Aulus Agerius has seen straight through your obfuscation routine. You're not convincing him with your 'I'm not convinced' act.
And it's utterly transparent that you are indeed playing Hitler's willing defense lawyer. The problem is, your jury doesn't believe you.
Read the text below and explain it to me:
The following is what the " NEW CATHOLIC ENCYCLOPEDIA" says about the Holocaust:
As suggested by its Greek origin (holos "whole", and kaustos "burnt") the word designates an offering entirely consumed by fire, in use among the Jews and some pagan nations of antiquity. As employed in the Vulgate, it corresponds to two Hebrew terms: (1) to holah, literally: "that which goes up", either to the altar to be sacrificed, or to heaven in the sacrificial flame; (2) Kalil, literally: "entire", "perfect", which, as a sacrificial term, is usually a descriptive synonym of holah, and denotes an offering consumed wholly on the altar. At whatever time and by whomsoever offered, holocausts were naturally regarded as the highest, because the most complete, outward expression of man's reverence to God. It is, indeed, true that certain passages of the prophets of Israel have been construed by modern critics into an utter rejection of the offering of sacrifices, the holocausts included; but this position is the outcome of a partial view of the evidence, of the misconception of an attack on abuses as an attack on the institution which they had infected. For details concerning this point, and for a discussion of the place which the same scholars assign to the holah (holocaust) in their theory of the development of the sacrificial system among the Hebrews, see SACRIFICE. The following is a concise statement of the Mosaic Law as contained chiefly in what critics commonly call the Priests' Code, concerning whole burnt-offerings.
...
Anybody miss anything?
http://www.newadvent.org/cathen/07396b.htm
The following is what the " NEW CATHOLIC ENCYCLOPEDIA" says about the Holocaust:
As suggested by its Greek origin (holos "whole", and kaustos "burnt") the word designates an offering entirely consumed by fire, in use among the Jews and some pagan nations of antiquity. As employed in the Vulgate, it corresponds to two Hebrew terms: (1) to holah, literally: "that which goes up", either to the altar to be sacrificed, or to heaven in the sacrificial flame; (2) Kalil, literally: "entire", "perfect", which, as a sacrificial term, is usually a descriptive synonym of holah, and denotes an offering consumed wholly on the altar. At whatever time and by whomsoever offered, holocausts were naturally regarded as the highest, because the most complete, outward expression of man's reverence to God. It is, indeed, true that certain passages of the prophets of Israel have been construed by modern critics into an utter rejection of the offering of sacrifices, the holocausts included; but this position is the outcome of a partial view of the evidence, of the misconception of an attack on abuses as an attack on the institution which they had infected. For details concerning this point, and for a discussion of the place which the same scholars assign to the holah (holocaust) in their theory of the development of the sacrificial system among the Hebrews, see SACRIFICE. The following is a concise statement of the Mosaic Law as contained chiefly in what critics commonly call the Priests' Code, concerning whole burnt-offerings.
...
Edited by LashL:
Edited for compliance with Rule 4. Please, do not copy and paste lengthy tracts of text from elsewhere. Instead, quote a short passage and cite a link to the source.
Anybody miss anything?
http://www.newadvent.org/cathen/07396b.htm
Last edited by a moderator:
You do realize that the time when that text was "new" was in 1910, don't you?
Nick Terry
Illuminator
The problem is, you haven't proven any lies at all. Your hypothesis is irrelevant, because winged unicorns don't exist, whereas HCN and CO are lethal to human beings, and there is nothing intrinsically fantastical or impossible about either being used to kill people.
Your 'methodological' claim that lies are more successful when mixed in with as much truth as possible doesn't help us identify which parts of a witness testimony are supposedly lies and which parts are truth.
It is, frankly, entirely implausible, because you are in effect conceding that the relevant witnesses were actually at these camps, and have abandoned any method which could demonstrate that Wiernik, Tauber or whoever were not in fact imprisoned as Sonderkommandos at extermination sites.
If Wiernik, Tauber etc were indeed at these sites, then their testimony is going to be worth listening to. And if they confirm that property was plundered, that hair was cut before or after death from the victims (depending on the camp), that gold teeth were extracted, that there were specific SS men involved who we know were at those camps, that transports arrived from specific places of origin, that there were revolts, that there were reductions of the Sonderkommando in size, that there were expansions of the Sonderkommando in size, that the buildings were a certain layout, that there were gastight doors, and so on - then if these things are documented, depending on which camp is being discussed, there is more and more credible evidence that they were there.
And that becomes a problem for revisionism, because there are NO witnesses who tell a contrary story which fits your innocuous explanation. Not a single person who was at Treblinka said it was a transit camp where property was plundered and Jews shipped east. Thus, your reinterpretation of documents about property plunder can be tested against the witness evidence, and found wanting.
Indeed, that just highlights a further problem, which is that you don't have a single witness or source identifying any such transit at all. All the vague handwaving about 'transit' is from misinterpreted documents and cherrypicked hearsay wartime reports. Not a single witness from any Nazi institution has come forward since 1945 to report on the things you and your ilk have fantasised about.
Of course, you can now try to prove the next thing.....
... with something more than handwaving and cherrypicking. No, I'm not going to cut you any slack, because your blatant double standards are on display yet again. I want hard evidence of torture of all SS men and other Nazis who testified to gassing and extermination camps.
Not just in the 1940s, but in the 1960s too, when the SS men were living in West Germany, a state without the death penalty, without plea bargaining.
Plenty of Nazi witnesses testified to mass murder without being on trial, without being in fear of their lives, yet they tell the same story as those who were on trial.
It's also unrealistic given the crimes Kaltenbrunner, Hoess, Kramer and others had committed which did not involve gassing/extermination, to think that gassing/extermination was even necessary to get a conviction, or would be the thing that tipped the balance. These men ran the RSHA, which executed 100s of 1000s of non-Jewish prisoners, or Auschwitz, where more prisoners died than in any other KZ even according to Guru Mattogno.
Kaltenbrunner and co also denied things. Kaltenbrunner for example denied under interrogation knowing anything about 'Erntefest'. A semi-plausible denial because that operation was carried out by an SSPF not in his immediate chain of command. He also implausibly denied knowing anything about Auschwitz until 1944, which is contradicted by correspondence between Himmler and himself from early 1943, not known at the time of Nuremberg.
I'll simply repeat my request: please demonstrate, with evidence, that ALL the SS witnesses from Auschwitz were coerced/tortured/bribed/whatever you want to claim, into giving false testimony from 1945 to the 1990s. Clearly, you've not done this yet. We'll wait.
Do we? Where is this falsification? I see no such thing in the revisionist oeuvre. I see a load of nitpicking, cherrypicking and vague handwaving which has hitherto covered about 250 witnesses, a fraction of the sum total of witnesses to gassing/extermination. These criticisms are not regarded as conclusive by anyone in the mainstream who's looked at them. For starters, the criticisms aren't even consistent. There's no coherent theory of witness testimony in revisionism, except to dismiss anything that deniers dislike.
Because you've not proven they actually did this.
Wrong. Documents demonstrate mass shootings of Jews to a seven figure number, with something between 2/3rd and 3/4s of the 2 million estimate being tied directly to documents, the rest overwhelmingly to forensic evidence of exhumed intact mass graves, and corroborated by wartime underground reports, diaries, letters, and other contemporary sources. The gaps in the documentation stem from the destruction of records.
Contemporary documents make it perfectly clear that large numbers of Germans knew about the shootings of the Jews, and they never discuss it in terms of 'partisan warfare' but as a matter of extermination. The news leaked all over Germany. Catholic functionaries knew. The anti-Hitler resistance knew. Ordinary Germans wrote about it in their diaries. There were court judgements referring to extermination policy as a fact. Nazi officials discussed it in their official correspondence as a matter of fact. Heck, officials in Lithuania even corresponded with each other over the precise locations of mass graves, while other officials in Galicia complained about the smell from the graves.
These shootings took place from Sosnowitz and Lodz in the west of Poland all the way to the Caucasus, in 1000s of cities and towns. There are literally 100s of 1000s of witnesses to mass shootings. Those mass shootings reduced the Jewish population of town after town to zero. The witnesses reported that reduction to zero, again and again.
Deserters were interrogated by the Swiss about the mass shootings. Wehrmacht prisoners talked freely about the mass shootings in British and US captivity in bugged conversations and in interrogations. The Soviets took down vast numbers of statements from non-Jewish Russians, Belorussians, Ukrainians, Estonians, Latvians, Lithuanians and Poles about what happened inside the Soviet Union. The Poles did the same in western Poland. The Allies gathered more testimonies. The the West Germans systematically interrogated a rather significant percentage of the entire administration, police and other service personnel stationed across Eastern Europe.
Not a few witnesses later stated that when they heard the news of Katyn, they disbelieved German propaganda because of what they had seen with their own eyes being done by the Nazis to the Jews - this includes, by the way, Franz Josef Strauss, who in the summer of 1941 was stationed with 2nd Panzer Division in a reserve position at Lwow, before going to the front, and witnessed mass executions of Jews there.
which brings us to...
Nope. Katyn was one of 55,000 investigations carried out by the Extraordinary Commission. It is patent nonsense to say that the other 49,999 are all automatically frauds, especially when there is such a vast quantity of evidence from non-Soviet sources confirming what happened.
I must admit, I'm greatly amused by the Katyn gambit since your Gurus Mattogno and Graf have been photographed hobnobbing with 'Katyn revisionists' who claim the Nazis dunnit. Funny how birds of a feather flock together, isn't it?
But the biggest problem is you haven't explained why everyone other than deniers accepts Katyn as a Soviet crime yet accepts Nazi crimes. There is a clear consensus on Katyn in the mainstream, just as there is a clear consensus on the Holocaust.
That's because with Katyn, we have a Nazi accusation which was denied by the Soviets, who then took the exact same witnesses and exact same forensic evidence principles, and twisted them to turn it around against the Nazis. Then the Russians eventually released documents which showed it was in fact the NKVD. There was contradictory evidence from the get-go, whereas there was never any contradictory evidence regarding other Nazi crimes and other sites.
The Nazis did not accuse the Soviets of perpetrating Auschwitz, Chelmno, Treblinka, Sobibor, Belzec, Majdanek or Maly Trostinets. They didn't accuse the Soviets of perpetrating Ponary, or Rumbula, or Bronnaia Gora, or Babi Yar. They did accuse the Soviets of perpetrating Katyn.
Thus, there are obvious, clear differences between Katyn and all the other sites, which is why nobody in the mainstream is moved by the constant whining about Katyn. Heck, I'll be teaching about Katyn next Friday....
We also won't be seeing anything like Srebrenica for:
- the mass murders in the Balkans from the Russo-Turkish War to the 2nd Balkan War
- the mass murders in Serbia, Croatia and Bosnia from WWII
- the mass murders in Greece during WWII or in the Civil War after 1944
- the mass murders in the Russian Civil War
- the mass murders of the GULag from 1921 onwards
- the mass murders of the Great Terror in 1937-39
- the mass murders in the Congo in the 19th Century under Belgium
- the mass murders in the Congo from the late 20th Century war
- pretty much any mass murder in Africa before or after independence from colonial rule
- the mass murders of the Great Leap Forward in China
et cetera. There is no social need to exhume all the mass graves from the slaughters of the 20th Century because the relevant societies recognise the crimes happened, no intellectual need because these crimes are handily proven from all manner of sources and because exhuming all the bodies is a time-consuming and expensive exercise whose costs outweigh the benefits, no legal need because the perpetrators are dead and gone, no political need because there is no constituency to agitate for such things, no diplomatic need, because basically every one of the major world powers is responsible for a series of mass graves, and if they're in denial (like Turkey) then it's not worth the upset to push for largescale exhumations.
Most of all, there is no present-day need to exhume all the mass graves because they were largely already exhumed. Nazi crimes resulted in the largest number of exhumations and mass grave examinations in human history, in the 1940s. These sites are graveyards now. There are memorials stuck on top of many of them. There is no convincing reason why the evidence we have from the 1940s and from all subsequent research isn't enough.
It's only where graves have been left unmarked or unmemorialised that we find a social, political or media pressure to investigate them. Which is what has happened in Spain in the past 10-15 years, exhuming the graves of Republican victims from the Spanish Civil War, since the victors commemorated their victims and marked all their graves, but never allowed the losers to do the same thing.
The reason that Yahad in Unum is touring the East European countryside to relocate graves is to ensure that they are commemorated and marked, just the same as all the other already marked mass graves. That's because the Jewish communities of Eastern Europe were substantially wiped out. Where there were enough survivors, they did what every other society did and moved bodies to cemeteries (if in a manageable number), or erected a memorial stone.
I think you're ignoring just how many Poles and Soviet citizens perished at Nazi hands in WWII, and just how many memorials there are across Eastern Europe. In 1939-1940, forces of the SS, Police and ethnic German militias (the Selbstschutz) slaughtered up to 100,000 Poles across the length and breadth of Nazi-occupied Poland. All the grave sites were examined after the war, the investigations of the Palmiry killing site outside Warsaw found 1,700 bodies, could identify victims in many cases by name, and the graves were then marked.
At Wielka Piasnica near Wejherewo outside Gdansk, the Selbstschutz and SS had a killing site where 12,000 Poles, mostly members of the intelligentsia and upper classes, were shot and buried. That one was visited by a Sonderkommando 1005-type operation so that only a few hundred bodies were located, despite exhuming grave after grave. There was a question in the Sejm asked about that one a few years back.
In countless other cases, the Nazis shot 100s or 1000s of Jews in western Poland during deportations, leaving a grave behind, which was then exhumed and marked after the war. There are dozens of such sites in Rzeszow province, where 10s of 1000s of Jews were shot and killed locally during deportations to Belzec. In the smaller towns off the main rail lines, the Nazis didn't even bother to deport the Jews, they just executed everyone on the spot. So there are now books which include photo essays showing all the memorials and grave sites.
Poles interested in local history write about this stuff all the time. The Nazis had a Stalag at Chelm for Soviet POWs, about 30,000 Soviet POWs died there, many were shot and murdered. The site was one of many visited by Sonderkommando 1005 who burned the bodies. There's a memorial there now (see this forum thread for pictures).
Indeed, why don't you visit that forum, it has an entire section on WWII graves in Poland. Go tell them that they're doing it all wrong, and that every one of the graves needs to be exhumed and DNA-tested. Make sure to focus on graves with Poles and non-Jews. See what reaction you get. Then you might realise how offensive and obnoxious your routine actually is.
Since you've not identified anything suspicious, deceitful or 'downright fraudulent', much less shown that this characterises the totality of the eivdence, back at ya. It's really time you deniers showed us some real evidence of conspiracy, instead of all the waffling and handwaving.
You just don't get it, do you? The reason why deniers are ignored and reviled is they spout a conspiracy theory without anything like real proof. People can spot that a mile off. It's not like there aren't plenty of other loony conspiracy theorists inventing fanciful stories, and failing to convince people of their beliefs. You just made the mistake of picking a conspiracy theory about millions of deaths, instead of one death, like JFK's assassination, and picking one which is essentially a vehicle for antisemitism and incitement to racial hatred, which is why some of your brethren get clobbered in certain countries. Instead of defaming the CIA, you defame entire peoples.
I'm still waiting for your parsing of the six online works for all the Nazi documents they cite, and your non-forgery-based explanation for why all of the cited documents don't prove extermination. As usual, 'all' being the operative word.
MGK seem to be taking their sweet time to reply to us, and when they do, we predict it'll be same-old, same-old. You are in fact quite wrong to say that the Browning and Longerich reports have been refuted or debunked. There isn't a single revisionist publication which addresses all the evidence in those reports. I don't think very much of denier responses to Pressac and Van Pelt, and I especially don't think very much of the way that deniers isolate Auschwitz from everything else when they are advancing general claims.
For denial to be coherent, it'd have to address themes like
- wartime reports
- investigations and trials
- witnesses
across all the camps and all the things they want to deny. Because as we see with your rhetorical blether, you make general assertions about Soviet nefariousness which need to be tested empirically against the data-set. And you're not doing that. Gurus like MGK need to be showing how all the wartime reports can be explained, accounting for all the recipients, all the sources, and showing in a convincing manner how this all started. They need to be showing that all SS men were tortured and providing actual evidence, not mere supposition. They need to explain how all the Jewish and non-Jewish witnesses worked out what to say and how they knew what to say. Case by case, item by item.
And revisionism hasn't done that. You've currently got a series of incoherent, shallow and often contradictory hypotheses - like "plot for retribution against decade-long oppressors" - and not provided any evidence for this.
The catch is, you can allege a Jewish "plot for retribution against decade-long oppressors" but we know that the evidence was gathered also by the British, French, Americans, Dutch, Belgians, West and East Germans, Austrians, Czechoslovaks, Yugoslavs, Poles and Soviets, to name most of the obvious ones. And that evidence ended up in Sweden and Switzerland. This is really, truly, a world-beating conspiracy you're proposing, and you cannot seem to keep your conspirators straight.
You don't even seem to know very much about who might have been involved, or what was entailed. I'm quite sure that I've mentioned several things above which you never heard about before.
swright777
Muse
- Joined
- Feb 10, 2012
- Messages
- 897
No, that is what they say about a holocaust, not THE Holocaust.
hol·o·caust [hol-uh-kawst, hoh-luh-] noun
1. a great or complete devastation or destruction, especially by fire.
2. a sacrifice completely consumed by fire; burnt offering.
3. ( usually initial capital letter ) the systematic mass slaughter of European Jews in Nazi concentration camps during World War II (usually preceded by the ).
4. any mass slaughter or reckless destruction of life.
Pay particular attention to definition #3 above.
Loss Leader
I would save the receptionist., Moderator
What in the world does any of that matter? Words are repurposed and given new meanings all the time. Frequently, the new meanings are nothing other than imperfect metaphors. Neil Armstrong was not an "astro"naut. He didn't travel to the stars. He didn't even travel to our star. He went from our planet up to our moon.
If we say that somebody is "toast," we say that they have been destroyed or defeated. But the use of "toast" in this manner was invented by Bill Murray in the movie Ghostbusters. The original line was, "Let's turn this chick into toast," meaning, "Let's burn this woman until she is crispy like a piece of toast." Do you have any difficulty understanding the words, "he's toast"?
Do you have difficulty with the words bread, scratch, cash, Benjamins or lettuce? They all mean money, but none of them actually have any root in greek, latin or hebrew having anything to do with money.
Definitions are nothing other than creations by people out of convenience for concepts they're trying to express. They gain popular acceptance through largely unknown means. They don't change underlying facts. Ever.
Nick Terry
Illuminator
Bwahaha. The 'numerous' instances cited amount to 2 cases in spring 1943 when transports from the Warsaw ghetto uprising were *selected* at Treblinka II with the prisoners sent on to Majdanek where they were *registered* and thus *documented*. Majdanek is not 'the Russian East' or 'occupied Soviet territories' but was in the Lublin district. M&G quote from mainstream publications, reflecting the fact that mainstream historians know there were some few selections on arrival at Treblinka and Sobibor for camps in the Lublin district or the Treblinka I labour camp (who were then shipped back to Treblinka II in spring 1943 and killed).
None of this gets you a banana much less a cigar, since the claim being made by M&G and other 'transit camp' fantasists is that the Jews went through Treblinka etc on the way to the occupied eastern territories. I.e. past the border of the Generalgouvernement.
And there is literally zero evidence for this. If for the sake of argument we assume that the train records you believe existed were destroyed, then this would not prevent someone finding a documentary trace at the point of arrival. Much like we do find documentary traces of arrival via Treblinka at Majdanek. So that's one way you could test your hypothesis.
So that means every single surviving file from the occupied eastern territories - the Reichskommissariat Ostland, Reichskommissariat Ukraine, Army Groups North, Centre, A and B. And there are a rather a lot of those files. But historians have been through them, seen the monthly reports from different levels of command, seen the records, and there isn't a single trace of deported Jews who could possibly have come from Poland via Treblinka or another death camp. None. Nada. Zilch.
By all means, feel free to embark on a major research program looking through all the files - because that is what you would have to do to prove your hypothesis. But since historians have already looked and not found anything, it seems like a waste of time, personally. I can *personally* assure you that there is absolutely no way that you will find any Polish or other Jews in Belorussia or central Russia who came via Treblinka etc, having researched this region *myself* in exhaustive detail. The only transports to these regions were either killed at Maly Trostinets, are known from the records of the Minsk ghetto (and arrived in 1941), or were demonstrably not sent via a death camp (two transports went from Warsaw to Bobruisk and Smolensk to work as slaves for an SS command in a 'backchannel' deal).
But you know, maybe the Nazis cleverly managed to cover up the transit camps and located them in a region for which we might not have as many documents. Maybe the Nazis moved all the 'transited' Jews around to avoid them showing up anywhere in the records. In which case, you could present to us an eyewitness - a German belonging to one of the army groups on the Eastern Front, or working for the civil administration, or an SS/Policeman, or a Soviet citizen of whatever nationality - who can testify credibly to the arrival of Jews from Poland in places where nobody thought they went, or having travelled through place that nobody thinks were transit camps.
Nigh on every single German who was in the occupied eastern territories is now dead. A few remain, young kids who were at the frontline, not the best people who might have seen 'transited' Jews in rear areas. So time has run out to find a civil administrator or SS man or Wehrmacht general who might testify to what you want. Still, knock yourself out - go through all the veterans' association magazines, war crimes trials proceedings, memoirs, reminiscences and all the other vast reams of material on the occupied Soviet Union generated from 1945 onwards by Germans, and please present us with even a single witness who offers credible evidence of 'transited' Jews.
Why did not one single German come forward with credible evidence of 'transited Jews' after 1945? Such evidence would have powerfully exculpated Germany. It could have overturned the Holocaust. It could have acquitted people accused of war crimes. It could have restored German honour. It's not like there weren't numerous pro-Nazi activists in West Germany in the 1950s, 1960s, 1970s, or 1980s. Why couldn't the NPD, Nation Europa, or any other right-wing organisation find and present even one witness talking about 'transited' Jews? They blethered about pretty much everything else - and they denied the Holocaust. Why didn't they prove 'transit'? There were 100s of 1000s of veterans of the occupied Soviet Union alive and able to talk - IF they had seen something.
Why didn't any of the Nazis in hiding in Latin America testify to 'transit'? Heck, why didn't Eichmann testify to 'transit' to Willem Sassen when he was a free man and wanted to set the record straight?
Why, after 1991, have we not heard from a single Russian, Ukrainian, Belorussian, Estonian, Latvian, Lithuanian, Pole or Romanian with credible evidence of 'transited' Jews?
Face it. You have precisely nothing here. Excuses about why documents have vanished and why witnesses might have been silent don't cut it - there is ZERO credible evidence for 'transit'.
Aulus Agerius
Thinker
- Joined
- Jun 16, 2012
- Messages
- 161
You've missed the point. I don't care if you're convinced. You continue to confuse history with the pop-culture idea of a criminal trial. History isn't Herr Hitler being tried on CSI or Law & Order.
Real life and real history are not rhetorically convenient. Real life is messy. It leaves loose ends. People forget things. They remember things differently. It's well known that even a short time after an event, eye witnesses will differ about details. Suppose that two witnesses report that a gang robbed a bank. One says that that all the robbers had fair hair. Another says that one of them had brown hair. This conflict isn't going to cause anyone to disbelieve the overall account: that a gang robbed a bank. For the same reasons your attempts to play defence counsel for the Nazis fail. The absence of a neat story explaining the mass execution does not destroy the explicit witness evidence that it happened.
Even when holocaust deniers do appear and court and even with a favourable burden of proof, they are still unconvincing (like Irving). As Dr Terry said: your jury is not convinced.
- Status