General Holocaust Denial Discussion Part II

[Nick Terry]

16. Cremation

Settle down, Mr. Terry. 1.3 bodies per hour is a rather generous estimate based on countless documents for all varieties of cremation ovens, both contemporary and modern. It's difficult to know where to begin on this issue. You haven't really refuted anything, only referred to "a dozen Nazi documents" that I'm sure are not as damning as you would imply.

I suppose I'll start with a few introductory details for our readers:

- On January 5, 1927, engineer Richard Kessler performed an experiment on coke-fueled cremations that resulted in a cremation time of no less than 55 minutes per body, per muffle.
- In the Westerbork camp, it was recorded that, out of hundreds of recorded cremation times for cremations taking place between June 23, 1943 and March 31, 1944, the average cremation time for adult corpses (averaging 70 years of age) was 50 minutes.
- During this period of high infant mortality at Westerbork, many newborn babies were cremated, as well. In some instances, a baby (averaging one-year of age) was cremated with an adult corpse. This brought the average cremation time from 50 to 57 minutes -- a notable 7-minute increase.
- The hands-down most efficient of all cremation ovens ever installed in German concentration camps (including Auschwitz-Birkenau) were the Ignis-Huttenbau ovens located in Terezín; hundreds of cremations were recorded in relevant detail. The average cremation here was 36 minutes. The shortest on record was a mere 31 minutes long.
- A diagram published by Prof. P. Schlapfer in 1936, cited by Mattogno, shows that even with a fully pre-heated oven (also known as "thermal equilibrium"), coke (fuel) consumption averages no less than 37.5 kg per cremation.
- Coke consumption at the Gusen concentration camp is also in-line with these figures. 677 corpses had a total consumption of 20,700 kg of coke; 30.6 kg per corpse.

Now, consider the registered natural deaths at Auschwitz in comparison to the coke deliveries received:

- Between March 15 to October 25, 1943, 607 metric tons of coke and 96 m³ of wood were delivered to Auschwitz-Birkenau. This is equivalent, in terms of fuel, to 628.5 metric tons of coke.
- During this period, there were 16,000 registered inmate deaths.
- Coke consumption per corpse averages out to (628,500 ÷ 16,000 =) 39.3 kg.

This figure, 39.3 kg per cremation, is perfectly in range for an appropriate estimate as to what these cremation ovens may have been capable of in processing only the recorded deaths at Auschwitz, with consideration of all known circumstances. The fanatical claims made by Believers are not-so-realistic:

1) According to Roberto Muehlenkamp, a mere 3.5 kg of coke (roughly one-tenth the amount commonly used by any other cremation facility) was enough to cremate 'exterminated' Jews at Auschwitz.
2) Multiple cremations occurred in a single muffle, in order to save coke, without increasing overall cremation time.

I can only describe the "3.5 kg of coke" assertion as sheer stupidity. The notion that multiple cadavers could be inserted into a single muffle in order to increase efficiency is equally ridiculous in it's implications: allegedly, a half-burnt corpse already inside the oven was used as fuel source for the next corpse that would be inserted mid-way through the cremation of the first (this frantically rapid pace is how Believers attempt to justify the "3.5 kg" nonsense to fit the relatively small coke deliveries sent to the camp, based on available records). The claim is that, since human fat is more combustible than other human elements, all moisture would first be evaporated from Corpse #1, which would turn it into an all-out fatty fuel for Corpse #2. This ludicrous assertion flies in the face of one important fact: fat contains water -- if fat remains, so does the water it holds. Skinny corpses run out of both fat and water rather evenly. Obese corpses will certainly burn faster and with more energy, but there is absolutely no reason to assume average-sized or even slightly overweight people would have enough fat on them to evaporate all water, burn on their own and then serve as a fuel source for other corpses with nothing but a 3.5 kg "spark" to get it all started.

Believers are compelled to disregard the cremation records at Westerbork, mentioned earlier, showing an average 7-minute cremation time increase whenever an infant or baby was included with an adult corpse (just imagine adding another full-grown adult).

Sadly this spam from Mattogno's drivel falls flat for the following reasons:

1. First and foremost, the coke delivery records to Birkenau crematoria in 1943 are incomplete. The file is not a complete record. I have checked it myself. Indeed, the file contains delivery receipts to other buildings in the Auschwitz-Birkenau complex, and one can see both from the sequential numbering as well as the gaps in dates that there were hundreds of deliveries for which we have no receipts.

Therefore, the "coke delivery argument" is destroyed; it cannot be used to prove how much or how little coke was supplied.

While some commentators, including both Van Pelt and Mattogno, have taken the discussion of coke delivery receipts in Pressac (1989) at face value, Pressac himself noted in 1993 that the file was an incomplete record. Mattogno's incessant repetition of the coke delivery argument when he has cited from the file and presumably knows the records are not complete, is one of a thousand examples of his intellectual dishonesty.

2. The incomplete record regarding how much coke was delivered means that the numbers cannot be contrasted with Mattogno's arbitrary estimates of coke consumption per body, or with the 'theoretical' 3.5kg calculation. How much coke was consumed to burn the bodies of the victims at Birkenau in 1943 (or 1944) cannot be known, and is unknowable. Supply is not an issue, because the coke receipts file suggests very large deliveries on a routine basis, and Auschwitz was located in the middle of a coal field, with substantial quantities of coke supplied not only to the crematoria, but also to industrial facilities, for fuel for other buildings, etc. The extant delivery slips for 600 tons in 1943 adds up to barely more than a single trainload.

Your comparison of registered inmate deaths with coke deliveries produces pure nonsense; even Guru Mattogno concedes 20kg/corpse, whereas your dubious maths has produced 40kg. If Gusen using the older Topf ovens averaged 30kg while burning corpses who were exclusively adult male KZ prisoners, then pretty clearly the actual coke requirements to burn male and female prisoners in a new type of oven should be less. A lot less.

The 'registered inmate' gambit fails in any case, because Jewish prisoners stopped being given death certificates for even deaths from 'natural' causes in March 1943, with only some categories excepted from this rule (eg Theresienstadt family camp inmates).

Comparing babies added to single adult corpses at Westerbork is completely irrelevant to the situation in Birkenau, because there were only 593 deaths in Westerbork in 1943, i.e. an average of 1.6 per day; the crematorium simply didn't operate on many days, nor did it have to run for very long. In June 1943, the crematorium there burned 68 bodies, operating on a mere 9 out of 30 days. Each day of cremation saw between 6 and 13 bodies burned. Durations varied. Every cremation was from a 'cold start', and usually lasted for only a fraction of the day, meaning that the thermodynamic efficiencies of continuous operation never came into play, whereas the Birkenau crematoria were intended to run for the majority of the day, and to benefit from increased fuel efficiency because of their essentially continuous operation.

Witnesses who stoked the Birkenau crematoria such as Tauber note that when the crematoria were starting up, cremations took longer. This is to be expected. Equally to be expected is a faster, more efficient throughput during continuous operations, as the ovens were heated to the required level and maintained at a high heat, rather than stopping and starting as we see at Westerbork.

So, dismissed. Try to compare apples and apples, not apples and oranges.

3. The throughput of the Birkenau crematoria was manifestly more than 1 body per muffle in an hour. This can be established from multiple contemporary German documents. The official aim was to cremate 2 bodies simultaneously every half hour, for 4 bodies/hour, as spelled out in a 1941 Erlaeuterungsbericht and in the '4756' cremation capacity document. There are other documents from Topf proving that cremation capacity was tending towards these numbers. Pruefer wrote in September 1942 that the 15 muffle crematorium would have a daily capacity of 800. Shortly thereafter, he wrote from Buchenwald having installed the triple oven-two generator type that capacity was 1/3 greater than expected. Fritz Sander wrote very explicitly about multiple-body cremation in September 1942. This document pretty much destroys the warblings of deniers single-handedly, but it's hardly on its own. The ZBL wrote to Stutthof about the Topf ovens in mid-1942 saying they could burn a body in 1/2 hour. Et cetera.

Therefore, it is a certainty that cremation capacity was better than 1 or 1.3 bodies/hour. How many more is irrelevant, for reasons to be explained.

3. Up to March 1943, open-air cremation was used. By this date, a quarter of a million had died or been killed at Auschwitz. The Birkenau crematoria began operating in March 1943 over a staggered period through to June 1943. Several broke down for shorter or longer periods. When in early August 1943, the camp was faced with a large number of Jews from Silesia to be murdered, open-air cremation was reactivated. The same thing happened from May 1944 to at least August 1944 when the largest contingents of deportees, the Hungarian Jews and the Jews from the Lodz ghetto, arrived.

Therefore the precise number who needed to be cremated in the Birkenau crematoria is not something that can be known, nor is it a number that really matters, since a substantial number were demonstrably cremated in the open.

For most of 1943, from March, there were at least 2 crematoria in Birkenau operating, and this was sufficient to set up an alternating rhythm for the transports, since there was very rarely more than 1 transport a day of Jews to be selected. The number of victims selected from each transport tended to average much less than 1,000, so that the 'official' capacity was considerably in excess of requirements. In May 1944, the other crematoria were reactivated, with one breaking down quickly, and being supplemented/replaced by extra open-air cremation sites.

Since the Auschwitz death toll was at least 50,000 lower than the 1.1 million calculated in the early 1990s, based on reevaluating the evidence and taking new sources into consideration, the 'bottleneck' is of course further reduced. The number of victims cremated in the 4 new Birkenau crematoria in 1943-44 was probably somewhere between 500-600,000, with the balance cremated in the open, and some 10s of 1000s cremated in Krema I, and 500 corpses left uncremated on-site at the time of liberation.

The arguments above are mine, and not the work of Pressac, Pelt, Zimmerman or Muehlenkamp, who have all made arguments I disagree with. Just in case you start to splutter certain denier cliches.

I'd finally add that most sane people find cremation discussions thoroughly ghoulish. Pen-and-paper calculations purporting to bring 100s of 1000s of people back to life without then showing what happened to them are pseudoscientific, nihilistic and ultimately quite obnoxious.

 

[Natan]

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.

I read something like that when I began reading the critique in your signature. I was wondering about the interpretation. I thought it was insinuated the Nazis forged letters of thousands of people to their loved ones. Now they were standing with a gun to their head, giving them a pen. From hilariously incredible to at least somewhat credible I suppose.

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. The problem is, your jury doesn't believe you.

Ah, I see, you manage to address that, but as to this:

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.

To start even with something as simple to a historian as a date, crickets are chirping.

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.

To extend your analogy, this is more like the witnesses not even agreeing on the date of the robbery with the precision of a month, the amount of money stolen varying from 305 dollars to 15,000 dollars or way over 33,000 dollars, the money having been buried by the robbers or blown away on hookers or cocain, without a trace either way, without clarity that any money is missing in the first place, and the robbers having threatened with machine guns or flame throwers. I don't care whether you're convinced or not or whether you even care whether I am convinced or not. All I know is, personally, I am not convinced. Witness evidence as to whether it happened is worth only as much as the words of the witness, in this case, not worth a nickel.

 

[Nick Terry]

10. I Know You Are But What Am I

Indeed, I made a passing reference to Allied atrocities without fully reviewing the issue. Bacque presents some interesting circumstances and, based on what I've read, I do believe the Allied powers were capable of committing such atrocities, particularly after conducting my own investigation of the amassed Allied corruption entailed within 'the Holocaust'. Without delving into this much further, it is worth noting that there are contemporary statements from authoritative figures regarding the deliberate starvation of German POWs. One such statement comes from Senator Homer E. Capeheart of Indiana in an address before the US Senate on February 5, 1946:

Shall we move on?

Since when was a speech by a senator direct evidence of what might be going on in Germany? You can surely find something more direct and better to cite. I'm once again forced to point out your double standards and laziness. Not because I want to deny that German POWs died in Allied captivity, but because you make such a fetish out of evidence with the Holocaust that it's truly hilarious to see you shoot yourself in the foot time and again with other events.

If you actually searched properly you'd easily find that after Bacque's book, historians identified a high level of mortality in the Rheinwiesenlager, where between 3 and 10,000 German POWs died. But this was a far cry from the 1 million Bacque had claimed on the basis of misreading documents. The mortality was undoubtedly the product of a lack of organisation, especially the lack of proper shelter, since deaths from exposure were common. But it's important in that context to note that these camps were closed by the end of September 1945, i.e. before the start of winter, which would have seen mortality shoot up through the roof, as we can see in so many other cases of mass internment.

I can present a half-decent summary of the chronology and geography of the so-called 'Holocaust'. My issue is with the fact that every piece of 'evidence' I had heard of during my time as a True Believer has curiously turned out to be either falsified, plain nonsense or a misrepresentation of available data.

Please present your 'half-decent' summary of the chronology and geography of the Holocaust, then let's see what misunderstandings you have about it. Which are likely to be legion, judging by your track record so far.

As for the evidence for that chronology and geography being 'falsified, plain nonsense or a misrepresentation of available data', baloney. You've still got your Nazi documents homework to do. Let's see how you cope with that.

When you refer to the 'gassing' of psychiatric patients, Mr. Terry, I really hope you aren't referring to the alleged 'mass gassings' at Hartheim castle which, upon investigation, had absolutely no features that suggest the room in question would have ever been used as a 'gassing' chamber. Purely for the entertainment of our readers, I'd love for you to illustrate just how exactly this 'chamber' functioned.

Holocaustians love to focus on Germany's euthanasia program which works as a perfect prequel to concentration camp 'gassings'. Those evil Nazis just couldn't get enough! They leave out the fact that euthanasia programs via lethal injection and other methods, quite like the program that existed in Germany during this period, are still practiced in various developed countries today.

The last time that deniers seem to have bothered fussing over Hartheim was when that proven charlatan Leuchter visited more than 20 years ago. Unfortunately for denial, excavations have been conducted there at the turn of the millennium, which found great quantities of ash, human remains, and items connected with Mauthausen (from where some of the victims were transferred). Plus parts from the crematorium.

Pretty much all of the T4 centres have been poked and prodded in recent decades archaeologically, and the archaeologists have found all sorts of interesting things, such as a couple of centres where you can still see the results of chimney fires from the crematorium being stuffed with too many corpses (something reported by witnesses separately), and many other little tidbits that seem to have caused Guru Mattogno to tear his hair out and go into a screaming fit in his latest piece of drivel, Schiffbruch.

For more, see Guenter Morsch/Bertrand Perz (eds), Neue Studien zu nationalsozialistischen Massentoetungen durch Giftgas (2011) which also points to a good dozen studies of the individual centres as well as much else researched in recent years.

The use of CO gas in T4 is documented, I'm afraid. The Nazis also managed to leave behind a very large proportion of the patient files, and the paper trail linking the victims to transfers to the T4 centres is quite extensive. These were, after all, psychiatric patients, so please let's not have any rubbish about 'transit centres'. T4 killed them, and T4 killed them using bottled CO gas. The centres were closed down, the crucial elements removed, asylums returned to a 'normal' use (or continued using lethal injections), with the exception of Hartheim, which continued to 1944, then was cleaned up (a process which is also documented).

If you had actually read any of the literature on Nazi euthanasia, you'd be aware that this was entirely involuntary, decided upon by doctors on the basis of often extremely cursory scrutiny of patient files, and bears no resemblance to the debates over voluntary euthanasia in the current era. Yet the comparison is raised all the time, since there is a major ethical debate over voluntary euthanasia. So the 'Holocaustians' draw precisely those comparisons you mention, they don't ignore them. They just draw a rather different conclusion, and don't try to obfuscate the issue with handwaving and lying, like some people around here.

The euthanasia program was pretty much the first thing handed over to German courts even before the establishment of West and East Germany in 1949, because the Allies did not assert jurisdiction over crimes committed against Germans. The German prosecutors pursued the case with considerable vigour, just as they pursued unpleasant Nazi sh-head field marshals like Schoerner for hanging and mowing down German youths in the fake Wagnerian opera of 1945.

And you want to apologise for the Nazi scum that decided killing the defenseless was justifiable as a cost-cutting measure?

11. Did Someone Say Conspiracy?

Per your request:


You can't polish a turd, Mr. Terry. Put it down and wash your hands.

The sole turd visible seems to be in your lap, since American governmental circumspection in publicising Katyn first as a wartime ally then as a Cold War opponent of a power which pretty rapidly acquired nuclear weapons, is a looooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooong way from evidence of US hoaxing of the Holocaust. As in, not even in the same ball-park. If you seriously believe the recent news story (which has been hyped and spun journalistically, because that causes more controversy) is evidence of conspiracy, then you are even more deluded than I had previously thought.

I'm not really sure how to get through to you on this. What people want, including me, is some direct evidence from deniers about your fantasy hoax conspiracy. So that means the evidence has to relate directly to the things you think were hoaxed.

A refusal to pass on evidence sent in by American POWs about Katyn is NOT direct evidence of hoaxing the Holocaust. Heck, the State Department did not pass on the Riegner telegram to Jewish organisations in the summer of 1942 for several months, until forced to by its transmission from London through other channels. The British government sat on the Police Decodes until 1997.

So the exact same behaviour can be found with the Holocaust!

 

[Nick Terry]

12. Attacks on Nuremberg


I challenge you to cite the evidence presented at any of these trials that proves the alleged crimes were committed.

The allegations of Nuremberg critics being "politically partisan" haven't been sustained, whatsoever. Were these judges, lawyers, senators, congressmen and other authoritative figures secretly part of pro-Nazi organizations? Support your claims, Mr. Terry. Accusations of political partisanship are particularly ironic when used against those acknowledging injustice because, in the case of the International Military Tribunal (IMT), for example, all of the prosecutors and judges were appointed by the four Allied Powers and, in the United States, by a fervent Zionist, Colonel David Marcus.

The critics of Nuremberg had plenty of reason to express discontent. The legal framework for the IMT, defined within the London Agreement, was effectively an impediment to any semblance of real justice at the trials:

- Article 3 decreed that the Tribunal and it's members may not be challenged.
- Article 26 ruled out contestability of the verdicts.
- Article 13 gave the Court the ability to determine it's own rules of procedure.
- Article 19 dictated the Tribunal's ability to refuse admission of any evidence it deemed unnecessary or irrelevant.
- Article 21 declared "judicial notice" would be taken for "facts of common knowledge"; such 'common knowledge' was derived from prior claims made in Allied 'evidence' (documents, files, reports and protocols produced in the American, French, British and Soviet trials).

Here are some noteworthy elements of the IMT, outlined by Germar Rudolf in "Dissecting the Holocaust":

My "Nuremberg fixation" comes from it being the proverbial "birth of the Holocaust". The foremost leaders of military and political affairs in the Third Reich were tried at the IMT, with the exception of, perhaps, several of the most influential members who curiously "committed suicide" months before the trial began (including Adolf Hitler, Joseph Goebbels and Heinrich Himmler).

Injustices at other post-war trials are clearly marked. For these trials, "automatic arrest" was imposed on all Germans who held leading positions in the Nazi Party, the state or the economy. The American trials, in addition to numerous examples of maltreatment and deprivation, exhibited a variety of features that can only be described as unjust:

Numerous Allied post-war trials were characterized by unjust traits including psychological and sometimes physical abuse employed against several leading Nazi figures including Oswald Pohl and Rudolf Hoess, in British prisons. Soviet trials had been ongoing since 1941, with authoritative German critics declaring them "unlawful" on a number of counts.

The first thing to do is simply repost what I wrote since you simply didn't respond to half of it at all, and instead just repeated the same blether about IMT.

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.

And I reiterate: your claim that Nuremberg was "the birth of the Holocaust" is obvious nonsense. For starters, IMT focused on the full range of Nazi crimes; there wasn't really an exclusively Holocaust-focused trial until the Eichmann trial in 1961. The term didn't even come into vogue until after that moment.

Contemporary presentations, as well as subsequent commentary, make it clear that the IMT frequently submerged the specificity of the fate of the Jews into the fate of all occupied peoples. This is explicitly the case in the Soviet presentation, and also visible in the French case. The US presented various briefs on multiple war crimes . The Holocaust was one item on a lengthy shopping-list of offences. Yet that's never acknowledged in the sub-Werner Maser witterings from deniers about the trial.

The Nazis were accused of the following war crimes and crimes against humanity at IMT:

- executions of (non-Jewish) civilians in western Europe, the Balkans, Poland and the Soviet Union
- hostage reprisal shootings with 100:1 ratios
- murder of intelligentsia in Poland (AB-Aktion)
- murders of POWs, including Allied airmen
- the Commissar Order
- the Commando Order
- ill-treatment of POWs, in particular Soviet POWs
- forced labour, ie mass deportations to Germany of foreign labour, coupled with ill-treatment of forced labourers
- the 'Hunger Plan' in the occupied Soviet territories
- plans to destroy Leningrad and Moscow rather than accept surrender
- forced requisitions of agricultural produce coupled with lowering of rations in occupied territories (such as Poland)
- economic plunder of the occupied territories
- theft and robbery of artwork, cultural artefacts, libraries
- scorched-earth measures and wanton destruction of property
- deportations to concentration camps of 'political' prisoners
- murder and ill-treatment of all categories of prisoners in concentration camps
- persecution and murder of the Jews
- involuntary euthanasia
- Germanisation, including ethnic cleansing/expulsions, the kidnapping of children, racial discrimination and repression in annexed territories, along with imposition of conscription on foreigners in annexed territories

The crux here is whether these things happened or not. Legal considerations, such as whether hostage shootings were valid under international law, are irrelevant. The question is: did hostage shootings happen? The conventional answer is 'yes'. The denier answer also seems to be 'yes' because you claim that they weren't illegal and start bringing out the violins to whine on behalf of long-dead Nazi scum.

But that's a distraction from the issue at stake here. Your claim, the denier claim, is that the Holocaust was hoaxed. Your implied claim is that IMT had something to do with that hoax.

1) If so, then how can you distinguish between all the other Nazi crimes and the Holocaust here? Is it just the Holocaust that was hoaxed? Or will you trot out soap 'n' lampshades and a few irrelevancies, ignoring obviously crucial issues like, was there a Commissar Order? What did Einsatzbefehl Nr 8 say? Actually Einsatzbefehl Nr 8 says 'all Jews' among Soviet POWs were to be executed. Is that now another document on the denier forgery bingo list?

2) If IMT has something to do with the 'hoax', then what new elements did it actually present?

All of the crimes charged at Nuremberg had been aired in one form or another before the trial. They had been reported already during the war. They had been under investigation in some cases since 1943 (in the liberated Soviet territories) and definitely since spring 1945. They were being prosecuted separately in zonal trials or in the trials of all affected occupied countries. The Norwegians, Danes, Dutch, Belgians, French, Italians, Austrians, Yugoslavs, Greeks, Czechoslovaks, Poles and Soviets all held trials, as did Hungary and Romania of their own former rulers for various crimes. The Germans themselves joined in soon enough with state level courts active before the foundation of the two Germanies.

There isn't a single thing at IMT which was not aired elsewhere. In the overwhelming majority of cases, the same issues came up in different countries, often at the same time, independently. There simply isn't anything which IMT "innovated" or evolved which wasn't in some form of circulation already.

And that makes denier whining about Nuremberg irrelevant.

 

[Nick Terry]

17. Leuchter

Similar cyanide traces to those numbers detected in alleged 'gas chambers' were found in the samples collected from inmate barracks; were prisoners 'gassed' in the comfort of their own beds? A rampant typhus epidemic swept through the camp in summer of 1942 and regular delousing of camp facilities (performed with hydrogen cyanide) was a practical measure to reduce the spread of disease. The bodies from victims killed by typhus, which was killing more than 300 inmates per day during this period, were a dangerous carrier for lice spreading the deadly disease. For this reason, morgues throughout the camp that housed the highly-infected corpses, including those later alleged to be 'gas chambers', would have been exposed to slightly greater amounts of the cyanide delousing agent due to a greater necessity for fumigation. In either case, concentrations from the delousing chambers (which explicitly used hydrogen cyanide for disinfestation of clothing and other materials) should be astronomically higher. The quantities detected by Rudolf and others are perfectly in range of this explanation (0.1-2.7 mg/kg for inmate barracks, 0-7.0 mg/kg in morgues/'gas chambers', 1,000 to 13,000 mg/kg in delousing chambers).

The ventilation system in alleged 'gas chambers' is a relevant issue when considering overall cyanide exposure that is frequently undermined by Believers. Consider:

Mr. Terry claims these buildings, these 'gas chambers', were exposed to only a half-hour of cyanide gas per day. Believers are once again required to invent theories that shave off extra minutes for the 'extermination' process. They would have us believe the actual 'gassing' was complete in 10 minutes and ventilation took only 15-20 minutes. This is an unbelievable assertion.

For clarification and a considerably greater amount of available documentation, let's focus on Morgue I of Krema II:

A. Airflow

1) With optimal airflow, the ventilation system in Morgue I would have allowed a maximum 9.41 air exchanges per hour.
2) The ventilation intake is located only 2 meters away from one of the outlets on the same wall and is positioned unevenly between both outlets, one being 3.5 times as far as the other, creating a 'ventilation short circuit'.
3) Rudolf accounts for this impediment to airflow efficiency and calculates a maximum air exchange rate of approximately 5 per hour, assuming an empty chamber.
4) With immense over-crowding of tightly-packed victims during a 'gassing' process, the lower air-extraction orifices would have been highly obstructed; leading to a substantially lower air exchange rate.
5) This brings us to a generous estimate of no more than 2.5 air exchanges per hour.

B. Zyklon-B

In order to meet the requirements for a 10-minute 'gassing' process duration (which is an average of inconsistent 'eyewitness' claims ranging from "immediately" to "2 minutes" to "15 minutes"), sufficient quantities of Zyklon-B must be introduced into the 'chamber'. Since Zyklon-B pellets have released only 10% of their carrying capacity within the first 10 minutes of exposure to warm, dry air, a minimum of 20 kg of Zyklon-B would have been necessary in order to ensure the distribution of lethal quantities to all areas of the 'chamber' within the 10 minute timeframe.

Bringing it into perspective:

1) Zyklon-B deliveries to Auschwitz were consistent with the quantities shipped to other camps solely for delousing purposes.
2) J.C. Pressac attempts to justify this to favor the 'gas chamber' hypothesis with a claim that only 2-5% of the total deliveries were used for gassings.
3) This leaves roughly 0.8 to 2 kg of HCN available for each gassing which, only after the Zyklon-B pellets had fully outgassed, would have reached sufficiently lethal quantities. This process would have taken more than an hour.
4) Such a long gassing period is in stark contrast to the assertions made by principal witnesses such as Commandant Rudolf Hoess and SS Private Pery Broad, who claim gassing times of 3-15 minutes and a mere 4 minutes, respectively, in addition to the average claim of about 10 minutes for other witnesses.
5) If we conform to the times set out by these witnesses, the above-mentioned quantity of at least 20 kg of Zyklon-B would be required per gassing. This comes out to roughly 20 tons of Zyklon-B for all Auschwitz 'gassings', comprising at least 50% of the total quantities delivered between 1940-45 and a significant majority of the quantities received during crucial periods for delousing operations (1942-43).

C. HCN Exposure and Sample Data

It is completely unfounded in any category of evidence, including testimony, that Zyklon-B pellets were removed from the alleged 'chamber' before completely outgassing. In fact, the testimony of Henryk Tauber, Miklos Nyiszli, Michal Kula and Filip Mueller state explicitly that pellets were only withdrawn after they had completely discharged. This means that not only would 20 kg of Zyklon-B be required to meet the 10-minute timeframe as alleged by 'eyewitnesses' but these pellets would continue releasing HCN for several hours, making it impossible to effectively ventilate the chamber nor diminish the formation of iron-cyanide compounds in the 'chamber' walls.

This is important for several reasons:

1) It would take at least 2 hours of ventilation for HCN concentrations to reduce to about 2 g/m³; safe enough to enter with a gas mask.
2) There are numerous sources that claim 'chambers' were cleared without the use of gas masks.
3) The humidity in this environment would have likely reached 100% and temperatures would have been rather high during the panicked, crowded conditions of the 'gassing' phase. After the 10-minute mark, once the victims were no longer producing body heat and ventilation was activated, the temperature would have gradually cooled. This would lead to even greater condensation and absolutely ideal conditions for the formation of Iron Blue.
4) No 'scrubbing' procedures, as outlined below, could have been performed during this period.

D. Hosing Down and Whitewashing

It doesn't get much more typical of Believer assertions than to say "they washed away the evidence". Not only would "hosing down" be an entirely futile task, as HCN is not water soluble, but this would actually aid formation of Iron Blue for any subsequent 'gassing' phases since an increase in moisture is highly beneficial to HCN ad/absorption.

Claims of "whitewashing" can be attributed to one unreliable 'eyewitness', Daniel Bennahmias, in his book that wasn't even published until 2003. He expects us to believe that after each and every 'gassing', Sonderkommandos climbed over thousands of dead Jews to quickly hose down and then paint the soaking wet walls. There is no evidence to substantiate this claim, whatsoever:

1) We should expect to find, according to the number of alleged 'gassings', at least 500-700 layers of paint on these walls.
2) There have been no reports of enormous paint orders to the camp.
3) Both Leuchter and Rudolf specifically addressed that there was no visible coating on any of the walls.
4) Rudolf's first sample is from the ceiling of Morgue 1, showing similar concentrations to the rest of the building.
5) Close-up photographs of the ceiling plainly show there is no coating present

If anyone other than me read the above, it's a fair certainty that they will have dismissed the waffle when they read the absolute gem that 'HCN is not water soluble'. This is utter nonsense. It is HIGHLY soluble in water.

The washing down of the chambers after use obviously disrupted and inhibited the accumulation of cyanide traces, and essentially prevented the formation of Prussian Blue.

The fact is also that there are no portions of the ruins of crematoria II-V which were not exposed to the elements for at least 43 years at the date of the earliest test (Leuchter), and thus to substantial quantities of water. As the 'critical' crematoria II and III were below ground, there isn't even any way of preventing the entire chamber from flooding in the event of especially heavy rainfall, or from absorbing significant quantities of water from snowfalls. Film footage from February 1945 indicates a deep layer of snow on the ruins of crematorium III, which would melt, and go... down.

So this blows the entire 'chemical disproof' out of the water, pun intended. The delousing chambers were certainly not washed down after use, nor were prisoner barrack walls washed that anyone can determine.

Whitewashing is, unfortunately for you, documented. You may get the chance to read more about this next year. It was not done after every gassing, and there would thus not be '500-700' layers of whitewash in a gas chamber in any case, since these would have to be divided over 5 sites (Kremas II-V/I-IV, Bunker V).

The non-observance of layers of whitewash points to something rather critical that is evidently ignored here; the crematoria were dismantled, and photos point to the stripping of the walls. In many places, down to the concrete underneath, in others the top layer of plaster appears to have been removed, and surfaces are rough.

Rudolf's own experiments with fumigating bricks found a quite remarkably low level of cyanide in a 16-hour test, then saw a larger leap after 24 hours. This does rather suggest that contrary to the image presented by deniers, cyanide absorption, as well as Prussian Blue formation, takes time.

The oft-cited 'church fumigation' was clearly prompted by the introduction of a new type of paint in the 1960s which reacted swiftly to the gas, and produced a mystery, since 10s of 1000s of buildings have been fumigated all across Europe sometimes on repeated occasions, and the only buildings which show Prussian Blue are delousing chambers used for prolonged periods on a continuous basis. (Stutthof's delousing chamber was also used as a gas chamber on a few occasions, and was set up in such a way that it could be used; the oft-photographed Majdanek delousing chamber was misidentified as a gas chamber, and was not so used; there were up to 7 sites at Majdanek which have been identified as gas chambers, and only some of them actually were).

Repeating the already


Your claim of 'at least 20kg of Zyklon' used per gassing is simply nonsense. Zyklon came in discrete sizes of tins, and witnesses (not least of which was Hoess) report on the quantities used, noting that more was used in cold weather. You've multiplied the quantities by a factor of 3 to 4.

You also greatly underestimate the lethality of HCN, which is fatal after exposure of only 300mg/cubic metre after about 10 minutes. Once that much cyanide is in the room, then a person will die unless they can get out. It takes 3500ppm to kill a human being inside of 1 minute. The reported usage suggests far lower concentrations which resulted in a lengthy struggle to avoid the inevitable, since the gas will spread inevitably across a room. It would only have taken 151.2 grams to outgas and spread across the 504 cubic metres of an empty chamber, which is about 2.5% of a 6kg gassing. Only a tiny proportion of the Zyklon needed to outgas for a lethal concentration to be achieved, and since the victims weren't going anywhere, this could be done essentially at leisure. There was no need, and no point, in aiming for an overdose.

But it's nice to see you're in keeping with moron deniers like Froehlich (40kg) and Carlos Porter (a 'ton of pure cyanide').


Honestly: why do you guys bother with Leuchter and Rudolf any more? Leuchter's arguments were shot down in court nearly 25 years ago. The idea has been in circulation for coming up on a quarter of a century. Tens of thousands of people who are not deniers have considered the claim and rejected it. There are some very obvious stumbling-blocks with the argument, and it simply doesn't convince anyone who isn't already willing to be convinced because of their prior belief in denial or their antisemitism. The argument has been repeatedly refuted, controlled for, and analysed. It doesn't stand up.

It certainly doesn't help that deniers like you continue to misrepresent the historical evidence, especially the witness evidence, and conjure up thought-experiment numbers when there are real numbers to be tested and compared against the science. Witnesses report much lower quantities of Zyklon being used per gassing - you have to test those figures. The documentation on transports indicates far fewer gassings per chamber - you have to factor in those figures, not exaggerate the numbers by anything up to a factor of 4.

And above all, if you resort to easily disproven lies about the science, such as claiming HCN is not water soluble, then you destroy your credibility entirely.

 

[Nick Terry]

20. Gas Chambers and Forensic Evidence

1) No, they haven't, Mr. Terry. It's going to be very exciting to see what they pull out of the end of that "Road to Heaven". I have a feeling we won't be hearing about this any time soon.

This is a marvellous example of how deniers clutch at straws. The mass graves at Sobibor have long been identified, retraced and sized (archaeologically, back in 2000, twelve years ago, by Kola). More work was done by Haimi et al including using aerial photography which immediately showed the locations of the mass graves due to the richer colour of the grass (as it is evidently still being fertilised by the ash underneath).

Haimi et al have located postholes of the 'Schlauch' pointing to where a gas chamber was. We already know that the gas chambers were removed since there isn't a standing building. The only open question is how much in the way of remains survive, which need not be very much at all, but is likely to be more than deniers can cope with. And no, I don't think they will go silent because of some failure to find x - every time that has been predicted, there is further news on the archaeological front.

2) You forgot one thing: those photographs were supposed to show mass graves of 'exterminated' Jews. Oops.

Que? We were discussing your silly claim that half-incinerated corpses of prisoners found at Majdanek could have been autopsied for cyanide poisoning. It's well known that Majdanek was largely emptied of Jews in November 1943 with only a few brought in later (and some more in sub-camps like Budzyn). Therefore there's no reason for anyone to identify the corpses as Jews. If they have, then they are wrong, simple as that.

If your silly point is to claim that in 1944, the Soviets pointed to the corpses as exterminated Jews, then this is flagrant nonsense, as the Soviets demonstrably did not single out Jews for especial attention in how they presented the camp.

 

[Nick Terry]

15. Ausrottung

The judge at the Irving trial openly acknowledged the fact that these words had multiple meanings that depend entirely on the context.

At the IMT trial in 1946, Alfred Rosenberg adamantly contested the meaning that was being imposed upon his own written words while being accused of 'extermination' references:

For the word "ausgerottet/ausrotten", some of the best examples come from a variety of German Bibles (believe it or not) published during this time period that were also translated into English. There are at least two dozen uses of "ausgerottet/ausrotten" in at least ten different versions of German Bibles during this period, all of which have been translated into the English versions (King James, New King James, International, New International and American Standard) as "cut off" or "uproot".

Some examples:


Remember that most Germans were, in fact, Christian.

Can you at least try to keep up; you've got to explain away all the uses of Ausrottung, Vernichtung, Liquidierung and Toeten plus a whole host of other words (Todesurteil comes up quite a few times in connection with the Ausrottung or Vernichtung of the Jews).

It seems fairly clear that you cannot even cope with the Longerich report, much less what else has been published in the past 20 years (Longerich only really scratched the surface of the uses of the terms in Nazi discourse).

14. Extermination Plan

I'll stick to the relevant details. Believers have had a much longer history of access to all sources, in general, and still have yet to produce evidence of Hitler's involvement (let alone his direct order) for the 'Final Solution'. Taken from the beginning of Browning's "Documentary Evidence" segment of his report:

You're conflating the issue of a Hitler order with the issue of evidence of Hitler's involvement.

If there ever was a formal written order from Hitler, it was destroyed. The consensus is that any formal decision was signalled verbally to Himmler. Himmler may well have written a formal order for key SS personnel, but that too is gone.

None of this has stopped historians reconstructing the decision-making sequence or from identifying Hitler's paw-prints over the basic decision, since the existence of a Fuehrer order is referred to retrospectively, while Hitler himself made his views pretty plain on repeated occasions from 1941 to 1945 in a variety of less formal situations (speeches, private meetings, his political testament).

The Irving thesis of 1977, that Hitler knew nothing and it was all Himmler behind Hitler's back, has long been destroyed and is entirely untenable. If you were actually familiar with the literature you'd know this. If you had more than a handwave here, you'd be pointing to coherent denier articles or books which deal with every single piece of evidence put into play by Broszat, Browning, Fleming, Longerich, Kershaw and other historians. The list of such pieces of evidence is not reducible to a single item.

There's not been a single denier response to Longerich's report for the Irving trial (or the subsequent book The Unwritten Order) in its entirety. Just a couple of nitpicks which barely address more than 1 source at a time.

So: back to the online library with you. Let's see your coherent criticism of the Browning and Longerich reports, and see whether you are actually even vaguely familiar with the more recent literature.

A derail, whining about how hard done by deniers are, was snipped for a later response.

 

[Nick Terry]

4. CODOH

I've already challenged Mr. Terry (and others) to share which arguments they believe will have their users 'banned' on CODOH. Did he forget I asked?

Actually CODOH has rather explicitly banned discussions of 9/11 and other conspiracy theories as 'off topic', despite the evidently sizable number of revisionists who might like to discuss them.

But the issue isn't what topics might be 'banned', it's how discussion is conducted that leads to the usual cycle of post-deletion then warnings then badgering then bannings. As EtienneSC said today on CODOH forum:

I find the way the rules on challenges for evidence are enforced gets in the way of debate at times, as in the Sernicki mass grave thread. You raise the standard very high in such a way to deter contributions from anyone who does not have access to archives. It would be best if these rules were clarified to identify what counts as evidence or justification, or if there were a way to flag up unjustified statements without getting in the way of what would then become hypothetical discussions.

The game is rigged at CODOH, and if the moderators decide they don't like you or you're posing too much of a threat, then you are extremely liable to be booted out of the door.

Adding to the madness, Mr. Terry marginalizes internet forums of lesser popularity as 'fringe beliefs' despite the numerous forums in existence for almost every intellectual field, irrespective of popularity, with participants of all levels, often very high levels, of education. The members of this aforementioned site, CODOH, many of whom are experts in their respective fields, share vast knowledge of various complexities for an objective consideration of evidence. Furthermore, there are numerous long-standing, intelligent 'Believers' on CODOH such as 'Balsamo' and 'Hans' who are well-known at the forum.

Revisionism is a fringe belief, end of story. The fact that CODOH forum has only 663 members when it is very nearly 10 years old speaks volumes. Those are the numbers we'd expect from fringe beliefs. 9/11 Truth is also a fringe belief, but its forums have never really gone past 1000s of members; they're easily 10-20 times bigger than CODOH forum, yet 9/11 Truth is completely rejected in the mainstream.

As for CODOH members being experts, pull the other one. Friedrich Paul Berg is the sole self-appointed revisionist expert on diesel engines, and has been wittering on about this since the 1980s. He has his own website. The other members are amateurs even by denier standards. A few have written essays for CODOH website. One made a series of videos and now doesn't post much. And one member, Laurentz Dahl, is now auditioning for the role of Guru-in-Waiting when Mattogno and Graf pop their clogs at some point in the next 10-30 years. CODOH forum has basically produced one person who has 'graduated' beyond the forum format to a sustained level of activity. There are fewer than a dozen second-stringers capable of writing even an essay. The rest of the members make up a big echo chamber of elderly cranks patting each other on the back, with only a few exceptions who seem smarter than that. And those members often eventually vanish, like Patrick McNally Jr, or ASMarques.

The real point is why you exalt internet forums at all. They are clearly not venues where truth can be decided conclusively. Most people post on forums for recreation, or to exchange information casually and quickly; they work quite well for passing on news stories, discussing new things, and having pointless arguments that can run for 1000s of pages. This format is not even up to blog standards. Forum posts are rarely going to be the equal of essays written for blogs, websites or 'print' publications. The sense that forums are not the same as essays put out elsewhere is practically built in to the WYSIWYG browser system.

There are several massive threads on JREF about global warming, or fringe theories in physics. Are those threads where those issues are being "decided"? No, they're not. Those issues are going to be resolved elsewhere, as part of a massive range of discussion, not least in science itself; in the case of global warming, in politics (actual parliamentary hearings or debates), and in the collective media - the mainstream media for certain. Internet media, whether the blogosphere or forums, are one tiny sliver of a very wide-ranging spectrum of media and outlets for discussion.

Despite Mr. Terry's assumptions, JREF is by no means the "holy grail" of internet forums. The culture bias here tends to favor skeptics-of-skeptics; the Michael Shermer type. When I come to JREF, I expect to be grilled by disbelievers of any independent investigation that contradicts a government or media-sponsored statement on an issue. The true reason Mr. Terry makes such extravagant claims about the Revisionist forum is that he has been a member since 2007, has been repeatedly demolished on several key topics, dodges 'gas chambers' entirely and is now afraid to admit he's lost the battle.

I'm really not sure who you're trying to fool here. Anyone can click onto CODOH forum and see that it's yet another rambling internet forum with thousands of disjointed threads where conversation starts and stops as soon as participants lose interest, where the same subjects repeat themselves over and over. This is nothing unusual; it happens in "mainstream" forums too. Those are just forum dynamics.

The fact is that there are a number of forums where Holocaust evisionism can evidently be discussed freely, including this one. Skeptics Society Forum is another. Jerzy Ulicki-Rek from CODOH forum has just signed up to spam various arguments. A few other CODOH veterans have posted there, just as a few other CODOH members have posted here. You can find a bunch more at the reincarnated RODOH forum, including Friedrich Paul Berg.

CODOH is thus pretty demonstrably only one battlefield, and it's the denier stronghold, which is rigged in such a way that anyone such as myself seeking to post there will be badgered constantly. I never signed up to that forum in order to 'debate deniers' on their home turf, but to make occasional comments and ask a few questions. Which is what I have done.

My not posting at CODOH forum would only be relevant if there was some kind of organised 'tournament' where individuals or teams of people agreed to meet at certain online sites to debate a subject, perhaps under specific rules, and this 'tournament' format became recognised as an acceptable means of resolving a contentious issue.

But in fact we see that fringe forums like the 9/11 Truther forums, David Icke forum and also CODOH don't play by such rules. You never see the majority of hardcore revisionists posting on other forums. If they do, they go elsewhere (to RODOH in the case of Friedrich Paul Berg). Most revisionist authors never even set foot on forums.

So there's nothing significant about refusing to debate on CODOH forum. Hannover refuses to debate on JREF or anywhere else, so he's quite clearly a hypocrite on this issue. If he and other members of the peanut gallery had the courage of their convictions and ventured out to debate as you have here, then their criticisms might carry more weight. But if they did venture out as you have, and found themselves debating properly as we have been doing, then the precise venue is of secondary importance.

The final thing is whether internet forums are the sole possible outlet for any individual's arguments. Mattogno and Graf have never to my knowledge slummed it on internet forums. Are they 'cowards' for never venturing forth? I have slummed it on internet forums because I enjoy the fact that it's a more relaxed format, and can type fast, meaning it doesn't take a huge amount of effort to write even lengthy replies. I also find it helps concentrate my thinking on certain issues. I much prefer forums to blogs because they're more interactive.

But I am also an academic. I write lectures, conduct seminars, give conference papers, write reviews and journal articles, write expert reports and write books. Ultimately I don't need to be on the internet at all.

And if I vanished tomorrow from all forums, but continued to publish on the Holocaust, then no amount of jeering from CODOH would ever matter. There are people on CODOH who jeer at Deborah Lipstadt, or other historians, but where is the rule, written or unwritten, that says that any academic *has* to venture out onto the internet to reply to fringe critics who are not their peers and have no academic standing? There isn't any such rule, and there isn't any such rule no matter whether the topic is the Holocaust, 9/11, astrophysics, creationism or any other fringe theory.

2. Indoctrination

Mr. Terry fails to acknowledge nor refute the premise that a one-sided perspective to the 'Holocaust' is imposed upon Western society from youth until adulthood. Tall tales of 'gassings', photographs of piled bodies at Bergen-Belsen -- these are what people remember. Many people believe the 'chambers' poured gas directly out of the shower heads, as was claimed by various witnesses and depicted in propaganda films. Others remember the vast array of claims pertaining to artifacts such as bars of soap allegedly made from the fat scooped out of dead Jews. The lack of knowledge pertaining to the 'Holocaust' by the general public is astounding while their opposition to any challeges against it remains constant.

The similarities of Christianity and other theistic religions to the Holocaust are illustrated by President Barack Obama's speech to the United Nations General Assembly last month:

Muhammed = Jesus = Simon Wiesenthal

The impressive extent of pro-Holocaust curricula illustrates the lasting impact of a confirmation bias coupled with an exclusively pro-Holocaust set of resources. Because of this limitation, mainstream historians have found it easy to sift through records and exploit abnormalities and ambiguities that can be presented as indirect and vague confirmation of certain testimonial claims within an immeasurable mass of highly unreliable 'eyewitness' statements.

The fact that schools exist, in other words, does not necessarily mean they are teaching the truth when opposing views are literally being banned. You mention peer reviews yet neglect the fact that all "peers" are required to sustain the 'extermination plan' hypothesis or risk their future mainstream credibility and, most likely, their career. I don't doubt most Holocaust historians truly believe in the H-tale as they, like most of us, have been persuaded by a curriculum that is utterly one-sided. I also have little doubt, however, if evidence favoring the Revisionist perspective were given an equal opportunity to be shared in academic circles, that many modern historians would change their current views or simply admit to their long-held suspicions regarding the mainstream account that they may have been unwilling to share out of fear of persecution. They don't have the incentive nor the adequate resources to do so, currently. Studies, books, lectures and all other forms of Revisionist work are simply not allowed in the academic community.

For this reason, we may conclude that the quantity of information is irrelevant to the quantity of evidence. We can go back to the religious example, again; there are numerous distinguished schools of theology. The amassed quantity of academic contributions these institutions possess doesn't add credibility to their claims.

snipped from #4: Mass propaganda is repeatedly underestimated by Terry, who can not seem to understand how decades of indoctrination for most of the Western world might influence our willingness to accept something as controversial as Holocaust Revisionism and, hence, the popularity of CODOH. Is there anyone reading this now who hasn't been exposed to at least a dozen hours of Holocaust propaganda in their lifetime? How much of the 'Holocaust' story did each of us fully understand before we accepted it as true? Is there anything as taboo as "denying the Holocaust"?

Calling something propaganda or indoctrination doesn't make it so. You are assuming the consequent here; you start with your conclusion that the Holocaust is a hoax, then assume that anything to do with the Holocaust must be 'propaganda' or 'indoctrination'. This is an essentially circular argument.

You haven't actually established that there is anything genuinely different about the Holocaust compared to other pieces of historical knowledge, whether you are referring to general knowledge, how it is taught in schools, or how it is dealt with at university level.

Unfortunately, there isn't any difference. Schoolkids are raised in a society that regards the American War of Independence, Napoleon, the American Civil War, WWI, Stalinism and the Vietnam War as historical facts. The same could be said for events and phenomena in ancient, medieval, and early modern history. So are schoolkids "indoctrinated" about these events? No, they're not. They're simply taught about them.

They're also taught about them, depending on the curriculum and sometimes country, in subjects other than history. In the UK, English literature courses routinely feature WWI poetry or include All Quiet on the Western Front or other WWI classics. Or foreign language students are shown films about past events in French/German/Russian history, or a Latin American movie when studying Spanish, or whatever. Historical events tend to seep out into the wider culture, at which point they are essentially embedded in our societies. The Chinese are not going to forget the rape of Nanking any time soon, and indeed we find that no fewer than 5 dramatised movies have been made about it in the last six years along with 3 feature length documentaries.

HBO makes drama series about ancient Rome. The BBC produces dramas about the Borgias, Tudors, and WWI/the 1920s, with huge audiences. Novelists write historical fiction routinely. And the Holocaust has long been one of many such topics. Quentin Tarantino has shifted from making a Nazi war movie (Inglourious Basterds) to a film set in the Deep South of the slavery era. There are numerous American Civil War movies, or films set in the same era, including of course Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter.

Point being, we grow up in cultures which have accepted a whole host of past events as significant, interesting historical facts, and which will use the past to generate dramas, films, novels, music, poetry etc, and which will discuss past events as part of the social conversation as well as in the media. That's how we are as societies.

Your problem is distinguishing the Holocaust from the rest of these past events in how they're handled at school level, in universities and in the wider culture. You can undoubtedly point to differences, but it's pretty clear that there are also American Civil War museums and also lots of references in the media to the Vietnam War (past month, 49,000 vs 29,000 for 'Holocaust' in Google News Archive). The similarities massively outweigh the differences.

Therefore, each of us gets the chance to become quite immersed in certain past historical events, and most of us get exposed to a fair range, especially if we develop a general interest in history of whatever kind. And virtually all of this is voluntary. The number of hours a schoolkid might be exposed compulsorily to any subject is fairly limited, and this certainly includes the Holocaust.

I personally never once studied the Vietnam War at school or university, but have read dozens of novels and memoirs from that war, seen most of the films, and read a substantial quantity of scholarly literatue on the conflict and its various aspects. I've also identified where primary sources can be found online, read a bunch of them, and looked in greater detail at Malmedy. I've actually lectured on the Vietnam War twice, and taught it in seminars, along with supervising dissertations.

Some of what I have read or watched on Vietnam could be considered - at a stretch - to be antiwar or pro-war "propaganda". People do have viewpoints after all. But to call all of it 'propaganda' would be ludicrous.

Ditto with the Holocaust. Calling something 'propaganda' or 'indoctrination' suggests bad faith, and you can't demonstrate that.

1. Jews Control Everything

The overwhelming disproportion of Jewish influence in every facet of the media industry has been fully evident. It is the impact of Jewish media and other sources of pro-Holocaust propaganda, not the "size of the Jewish community" nor the "number of Holocaust museums", that most greatly correlates to the number of Believers. I've cited an abundance of examples in my reply, above. Mr. Terry is a cheerleader for the 'Holocaust' and must continue to rely on ad hominem attacks, occasionally labeling anyone citing the observable Jewish media influence as an "antisemite", for he knows such a massive influence would be devastating to his assertions that the 'Holocaust' storyline has been sustained on rock-hard facts and stone-cold evidence, alone. Unlike the issue of 'gas chambers', which is now generally avoided by Believers, altogether, the question of mass propaganda is dismissed with accusations of antisemitic intent.

Mr. Terry seems to underestimate the full extent by which restrictions on the expression of Revisionist views have been implemented at all levels of organization in civilized societies. He does not acknowledge the impact of such restrictions. Currently, in thirteen European countries, scientists, authors and historians can be imprisoned for conducting an investigation that contradicts a 'systematic extermination' policy by the Germans. Despite the fact that many of these presentations come from distinguished intellectuals in their respective fields with no history of antisemitism, education pertaining to Holocaust revisionism is banned on university campuses worldwide.

A recent example of how Jewish interest groups are lobbying for the suppression of free speech pertaining to Jewish issues is with a resolution passed by the California State Assembly last month, HR 35: "Relative to anti-Semitism". The bill defines, in broad terms, criticism of the State of Israel as "antisemitic" and encourages universities to more aggressively crack down on such popular dissent.

The resolution was passed by state legislature without public discussion. After a passing reference to "Holocaust Denial", here is a list of some examples of what has now been marginalized as "anti-Semitic":

Another indication of the ongoing suppression of free speech on relevant topics is available on the ADL website. It is a featured 9,000 word publication by Hillel, the Foundation for Campus Jewish Life, entitled: "Fighting Holocaust Denial in Campus Newspaper Advertisements: A Manual for Action". The purpose of the entire manual is to coach Jewish students on methods to suppress, censor and control debate on 'the Holocaust'.

These are not isolated examples. The relentless attempts by the Jewish community to stifle dissent on relevant Jewish issues has been wholly apparent throughout recent decades.

I'm going to assume that your continued myopic reliance on US examples means you're American. It seems you missed the fact that I was talking about the global situation which clearly extends way beyond the borders of the US. Your invocation of the usual cliched denier mantra ignores the fact that revisionism is not criminalised in far more European countries than it is; indeed, worldwide, denial is not a criminal offence in the majority of countries as well as measured against population shares.

http://rationalwiki.org/wiki/List_of_countries_where_Holocaust_denial_is_legal

Your claims about Jewish media control have been shot down already; citing an article written by 3 (!) Pakistani university employees (none with even a doctorate) writing in a vanity journal who repeat information seemingly lifted from an unsourced website doesn't even begin to prove 'Jewish influence'. And it especially doesn't begin to prove it on a global or "Western" basis.

I'm British. If I recall correctly, 00063 is Swedish. We live in countries where there is neither a tradition nor a current reality of Jewish media ownership. We also live in countries where major newspapers like The Guardian or Aftonbladet are widely considered to be anti-Israel. Indeed, anti-Israeli sentiment is widespread across much of Europe, yet no matter whether there are anti-denial laws or no anti-denial laws, there is a European consensus about what happened between 1939 and 1945 in our history: the Holocaust happened.

Your claims of Jewish media control or influence even in the United States are risible. Hollywood certainly has benefited a lot from Jewish producers, owners, directors and artists. So if Jews control Hollywood why is it that the overwhelming majority of Holocaust movies seem to be made in Europe? Most of these films are at the arthouse, minority-interest end of the blockbuster spectrum, which is why you guys still drone on about Schindler's List nearly 20 years after it was a hit.

I'm not sure what you hope to gain by whining about resolutions in California against antisemitism. If you want to admit that Holocaust denial is antisemitic, it'd save us some time watching you contort yourself into knots denying the undeniable. Fine with us. Politicians pass all sorts of resolutions and yet it won't shut down websites in the US which promote anti-Zionism or other views which are listed in the resolution.

I'm also not sure what you think it proves that a Jewish student organisation dislikes Bradley Smith's campus newspaper advertisement campaign. Advertising in student newspapers is not generally recognised as a successful method of selling your ideas to academics. CODOH and B.S. have the freedom to promote their ideas through their own outlets. Private corporations have the freedom to tell them to sod off. The First Amendment prohibits government from interfering.

You're just sore because the marketplace of ideas has clearly rejected Holocaust denial despite a 30 year PR campaign, and despite more than 15 years of the delusory belief that "the internet" would provide some sort of magical breakthrough. Judging by web traffic reports, it hasn't.

3. The Inability of Revisionism to Get a Hearing

No, it isn't. There are hundreds of well-established academics who want to debate the 'Holocaust' appropriately and who have staked their credentials on their support for this issue. I've heard of no one wanting to debate "flat-earth theory", Mr. Terry.

Furthermore, if someone were to organize a debate on flat-earth theory, they wouldn't risk being expelled from their academic institution, or worse, imprisoned.

You're massively underestimating the extent to which different disciplines in universities are besieged by crankery. Physicists and astrophysicists have to put up with endless reams of crank physics claiming to rewrite the theory or relativity etc; earth scientists and biologists have to put up with IDiots and creationists, and yes, there are still some nutters who espouse flat-earth theory. We have many other examples - 9/11 Truthers think they can rewrite the principles of structural engineering, chemistry and other sciences and whine because nobody will listen to them.

The mere existence of a group of cranks is not a sufficient reason to allow them to invade universities and "debate" with academics. Academic standards have excluded flat-earth theory from all relevant courses, and the notion that flat-earthers could change this by petitioning universities to let them in if they mount a big enough PR campaign is obvious nonsense.

Currently, you can find a wide variety of professors who believe in one or more crank ideas who have secured tenure in the US. There are, after all, quite a few 9/11 Truther professors, some retired, some not. A few of them lost their jobs because of the disrepute into which they brought their institutions. There are currently three (3) Holocaust deniers in US universities, and a couple of others who are retired. There has never ever been a Holocaust denier in a British university teaching post, yet we also have a few nutters espousing other nonsense.

So from where you hallucinated 'hundreds of academics' who - if I follow you correctly - want to start talking about revisionism, is beyond me. They seem to be a figment of your imagination.

Your assertion earlier that if only modern historians became aware of revisionism, they'd change their tune, is absolutely hilarious. I mean, no, really, it's side-splitting. Please, nominate the one revisionist book which would suffice to convert a Russianist or French history specialist to the belief that their colleagues in the Third Reich/Holocaust field have got it all wrong.

Do you honestly think that the relevant specialists don't know about the basic revisionist claims? Having discussed this with quite a few professors of modern European history, and especially with historians of modern Germany, I can assure you that they do know. And yet they still reject the claims made by deniers. They all know that if there was even the slightest shred of credible evidence for Holocaust denial, they could write a stunning book which would overturn established thinking - and professors relish trying to do just that. They may not always succeed, but academia places a premium on novelty and originality. That's what gets the real kudos and rewards.

While academics are aware of revisionist ideas, they're also aware that revisionism has scarcely even tried to engage academia through the proper channels. I count barely 40 university teachers since 1945 who have ever espoused Holocaust denial, and they have nearly all been in the wrong disciplines. The standout characteristic of academic cheerleaders for denial is their blithering incoherence. This covers morons like Austin App, Revilo P. Oliver, most of the IHR's editorial board, Mohammed Siddique and Daniel McGowan perfectly. Academic revisionists do not tend to write scholarly-looking books, they tend to write op-eds and make YouTube videos like Prof. Siddique, or sound off in magazines. Other academics know that writing journalistic articles or making YouTube videos isn't scholarship. Those academics ought to know the same thing. Merely making an argument and putting 'PhD' in your byline doesn't magically create academic credibility.

Therefore, what passes for revisionist scholarship has appeared in obviously non-academic outlets and in recent years been spammed all over the internet. In all honesty, I get the impression that revisionists more or less gave up trying to infiltrate academia about 25 years ago, at some point in the 1980s, because it was apparent that the quality of revisionist arguments and scholarship was so poor that they couldn't hope to bluff their way in to the party.

The other problem is revisionists are impatient. They rush into print with the urgent news, and never bother to construct a carefully formulated study which matches up to the usual expectations of academia, i.e. a minimum 3 years spent writing a major project. Nor have revisionists got the brains to try revising things step by step. They all have to start blethering about politics or Jews or repeating hoary old cliches or declaring victory before they've even finished the introduction.

For example, Germar Rudolf could arguably have written a scientific paper on Prussian Blue formation without mentioning WWII or the Holocaust, and maybe he'd even have been published in a journal after peer review. Then he could have cited the neutrally-worded, abstract-focused or purely lab-experimental paper in his work on Auschwitz. But the muppet went ahead and started commenting on architecture, historical document analysis, testimony analysis and other things for which he possessed not the slightest qualifications, training, experience or feel. The muppet actually went into print about the Holocaust without ever stepping foot in an archive, despite nobody knowing who he was so he could easily have done the work and shown 'em. But he didn't. He leapt into print after endorsing a silly pseudoscientific argument and repeating the same core fallacies which Leuchter had spewed out a few years earlier.

And that was 20 years ago! Face it, revisionists live in the past - you guys are now a sort of weird 80s/early 90s retro cult. I swear, there are probably more devotees of Batcave-style goth music on the planet than there are actual Holocaust deniers.

The real voice of 'Holocaust' history belongs to those who wrote it: mostly Jewish people. Jews make up the majority of Holocaust historians. A simple visit to the Wikipedia article for "Historians of the Holocaust" makes this clear (I'm still not able to post URLs).

We have predominantly Jewish 'Holocaust' historians, predominantly Jewish world media, a universal ban on opposing views and mandatory "Holocaust education" for Americans:

Just remember: any teacher who disputes 'gas chambers' gets fired.

It seems I have to repeat what has already been said: the majority of historians who have addressed the Holocaust are not Jews. The number of prominent historians of the Holocaust listed in a Wikipedia category bears absolutely no resemblance to the sum total of historians or even the sum total of frequently cited or recommended historians whose work is used at university level.

The simple fact is that the largest cohort of Holocaust historians are Germans. Europeans make up another significant cohort, and only a very small number of those are Jewish. In Britain, where there is a long tradition of studying the Third Reich, non-Jews make up the majority of academic historians who have written about the Third Reich and Holocaust. Because the Holocaust is studied in its own right but also as part of national history (in France, Germany, Poland, Russia etc) then the claim that the majority of Holocaust historians are Jews is complete nonsense.

In North America (Canada and the US), there are sizable numbers of non-Jewish Holocaust historians of considerable prominence as well as a large number of Jewish historians. Christopher Browning has a far bigger rep and impact factor than virtually any other US historian of the Holocaust, just for starters. Only in Israel do we find a solidly Jewish cohort of Holocaust historians, and Israeli historians make up a decided minority of all such historians.

You don't seem to realise that the Holocaust is treated routinely as one of many events in WWII in a particular region. For example, only a few weeks ago a book was published on Poland in World War II, The Eagle Unbowed, by Halik Kochanski, whose name alone points to the blindingly obvious fact that she is of Polish origin (a British Pole, as it happens). The book covers both military, political, diplomatic and occupation history, and it has a chapter on the Holocaust in Poland. The same could be said for Tadeusz Piotrkowski's Poland's Holocaust, which explicitly addresses the Jewish Holocaust in several chapters but covers all other ethnicities as well. Piotrkowski is obviously, Polish.

There are nearly 18,000 books on Poland in WWII according to worldcat.org; even subtracting multiple editions and translations, the bibliography is immense. Most are written, obviously, by Polish or Polish-origin historians. A very significant number will include discussion of the Holocaust alongside the discussion of the fate of Poles or other ethnic groups in Poland during WWII. Since Polish historiography is incredibly regionalised and localised, this means that there are literally thousands of studies of individual counties and towns which discuss the Nazi occupation as a whole and include the Holocaust as part of that discussion. Some of the local authors then go on to write books specifically about the Holocaust, for example Franciszek Kotula, a Polish ethnographer from Rzeszow.

The same goes for France, Belgium, Holland, Luxembourg, Denmark, Norway, Germany, Austria, Italy, Yugoslavia, Czechoslovakia, Greece, Bulgaria, Romania, Hungary, Estonia, Lithuania, Latvia, Belarus, Ukraine and Russia.

This means that thousands of historians have reviewed the relevant literature and sources for the Holocaust, and it appears in far more books than might be obvious from searching only for 'Holocaust' in any catalogue.

The same applies to histories of the camps. It's patently obvious that the majority of historians who have written about Auschwitz are Polish, and there are a large number of non-Jews from elsewhere who have been prominent, too. Histories of KZs are overwhelmingly written by Poles and Germans.

I'd addthat in no way do Jewish historians get to assert their views uncontested in the relevant academic fields. The major controversy between Jewish and Polish historians over Jedwabne and the ongoing controversies over Polish-Jewish relations in WWII prove this handily, as do contestations of 'uniqueness' by both Jewish and non-Jewish historians, who both then tell certain Jewish historians their interpretation is wrong. The same thing can be said of reactions to Goldhagen's Hitler's Willing Executioners, which saw many other historians, whether non-Jews or Jews, point out that Goldhagen's ultra-intentionalist stance was evidently influenced by his being the son of a Holocaust survivor.

Don't forget, these "historians who have done extensive archival research on Nazi Jewish policy" obtained their credentials through exhaustive indoctrination that does not permit the Revisionist perspective to be heard. If they aren't looking for certain implications, based on a pre-conceived notion of what is true, those implications may not be seen. This is known as a "confirmation bias". The viability of the 'Holocaust' story depends on this.

Let's have a look at a relevant declaration published by committee of 34 French historians in France's largest daily newspaper, "Le Monde", on February 21, 1979:

Indeed...

And on the same subject: 'confirmation bias' is ruled out because the Holocaust is viewed from multiple perspectives by historians of different backgrounds. The same applies even for the narrower issue of Hitler and decision-making, because Kershaw and others write biographies of Hitler (a bigger subject than the Holocaust) while Browning and others focus on the origins of the Final Solution. The notion that there are "pre-conceived" notions in that specific field is risible, because the literature on the origins of the Final Solution has been characterised since the late 1970s by many authors asserting specific interpretations or arguments in order to distinguish themselves from other historians, stand out, and get kudos. The debate has even stretched to historians firmly arguing for either a very early moment of decision to a very late one (spring of 1942), since the issue of what constitutes a 'decision' was rapidly relativised and came to be seen as a continuum.

The end-results have as mentioned been examined from multiple perspectives. Historians write about Nazi occupation of specific towns, counties, regions or countries; they also write about the Holocaust in those specific towns, counties, regions or countries. They further write about Nazi institutions such as the RSHA, Order Police, Waffen-SS; and about individuals, whether Nazis or non-Germans. They look at the period using economic history, political history, and social history methodologies, and yet every single method or perspective still finds the Holocaust there, just where it's supposed to be, no matter whether the historian is Jewish or non-Jewish, or what their politics are.

5. Flaws of Revisionism

"...revisionism cannot agree on the absolute basics"? Nick Terry does not seem to realize that it is useless to propose a hypothesis and assume that any forthcoming evidence must be supportive of our preconceived expectation, disqualifying that which is not, even going as far as to ban opposing views that might refute our assertions. Does this sound familiar?

If we want the truth, we should gather evidence, suggest ideas and progress a search for the most plausible theory according to what we know. That is how historical revisionism and science work together.

To acknowledge Mr. Terry's first example, a letter referring to a "Vergasungskeller" within Krema II, he is correct that Revisionists have had extended debates amongst each other as to the true meaning of this reference. This has led to a very plausible explanation as outlined by Samuel Crowell:

Terry's subsequent bullet-points of documents that "don't prove extermination" or "were forged" is aimed to suggest that Revisionists are so utterly confused that they can't possibly be accurate.

This is an indirect ad hominem on Mr. Terry's part. Consider:

(1) To believe in the 'Holocaust', we are required to assume an implicit 'extermination' reference in documents that have an otherwise clean context.

(2) Revisionists haven't proclaimed an unchanging certainty as have Believers in 'systematic extermination'. By comparison, there are several theories to how exactly dinosaurs became extinct; Mr. Terry might conclude none of these theories are valid (or, perhaps, the dinos were 'gassed'?).

(3) some documents were, in fact, forged while others flat-out contradict an 'extermination' policy (Shlegelberger letter, Luther memo)

Nice try labelling my observation of utter confusion and massive self-contradiction within revisionism as 'ad hominem'. Noting that revisionists contradict each other and themselves is a straightforward fact. It's not ad hominem, explicit or implicit.

The underlying problem with revisionist arguments is the inability of deniers to decide whether they will go with an underdetermination argument ('not enough evidence' or 'evidence misinterpreted') or an overdetermination argument ('evidence hoaxed'). We see this oscillation in Tommy1234's posts quite clearly, since sometimes he argues that there is an 'overwhelming lack of documentary proof' and sometimes he argues, in the same post, that 'documents were forged' or that witnesses were liars.

Revisionism tries to have its cake and eat it at the same time when it advances these two mutually contradictory approaches. It is a direct result of the spurious attempt to dismiss witnesses and concentrate on documents, and it is a direct result of the fact that all revisionist literature has been written with an a priori conclusion in mind, that the Holocaust didn't happen. Indeed, there is barely a single piece of writing of article or book length which argues that the Holocaust/extermination/gassing didn't happen which doesn't also use the term 'revisionist'.

The self-identification of all relevant authors with a discredited and fringe school of interpretation is quite hilarious. Mainstream historians don't label themselves or identify themselves. They certainly don't call themselves 'exterminationists', 'Holocaustians', 'Believers' or the many other epithets stuck on them by deniers. A historian will say they are a historian, end of story. They are not even under any obligation to describe themselves as intentionalists or functionalists, although a number of them have adopted those labels. They're also not even under any obligation to call themselves a 'Holocaust historian'. I don't even think of myself as fundamentally or exclusively a 'Holocaust historian', because my doctorate was not about the Holocaust and I teach Central and East European history of the modern era. I usually call myself an East Europeanist.

Within revisionism, the only recognisable 'schools' are the same as might be found elsewhere, national ones. German revisionists have a fairly distinctive way of arguing and display common biases and emphases; US revisionists usually identify strongly with the Barnesian tradition of revisionism in diplomatic history, et cetera.

There aren't any schools at the level of individual document interpretation. When we find deniers contradicting themselves and unable to produce clear agreement over what the Vergasungskeller was, then this bears no resemblance to differing schools of interpretation of how the dinosaurs became extinct. In actual fact, there is a strong scientific consensus over the Cretaceous Extinction. Moreover, the hypotheses proposed regarding the Cretaceous Extinction are not mutually exclusive; a recent survey showed how a meteor impact, volcanism and marine regression could have worked in concert.

This is not the case with denier disagreements over what the 'Vergasungskeller' was, which consist of mutually exclusive explanations, which in fact directly contradict each other in terms of how they handle the evidence. Some deniers have lamely proposed that there was a delousing chamber in the basement, yet this contradicts the obsession with Prussian Blue and the Leuchter-Rudolf nonsense. 'Carburetion chamber' doesn't explain all the features of the room. 'Air raid shelter' is unsourced and relies in part on quote-mining 'hostile' witnesses.

The resulting debates within revisionism bear a strong resemblance to the kook fights we have seen within 9/11 Truth circles over no-planes vs thermite vs controlled demolition theories. These are all 'short blanket' explanations, which do not address or explain all of the evidence, but only explain part of the evidence. They can be used ad hoc, but if abused in this manner, produce the spectacle of David Irving contradicting himself in the space of a matter of minutes, arguing that the morgue of Krema II was first an air raid shelter then a delousing chamber, depending on what bits of evidence he needed to explain away next.

The contradictions within revisionism speak to very fundamental issues; if documents are forged, then there is a big conspiracy being posited. If the documents are not forged, then the conspiracy would potentially shrink in size. The problem is these explanations are advanced ad hoc. By now, we ought to have had a revisionist work tracing the evolution of the conspiracy and outlining who did what when, identifying what was forged and who was tortured and who was coached to lie. But it doesn't exist. All we have are ad hoc comments made off the cuff that x source was forged or y witness bribed/tortured. Then the denier author moves on to the next thing and uses a different explanation, claiming that the document "doesn't prove extermination".

The next problem is that where hoaxing is alleged, the hoaxers are either misidentified or are also mutually contradictory, or the claimed hoaxing was actually impossible. Rassinier, Harwood and Hoggan all claimed that Raphael Lemkin was the first to discuss gas chambers in 1944. Not only was Lemkin not the first to do this, he didn't even discuss gas chambers at all! Butz said that the hoax was invented by 'New York Zionists' because he looked only at the New York Times. But it is quite clear that the reports came out of occupied Europe. So all these gurus were flatly wrong. There is no argument here. They advanced nonsensical arguments.

The same goes for more recent deniers. Crowell claimed that all testimonies for the Reinhard camps bore a strong resemblance to a 1945 statement by the Trawniki guard Leleko. But there were dozens of earlier statements. Crowell was flatly wrong to argue in this way.

These contradictions get funnier when you see how revisionists change their tune over time. The Wannsee Protocol was declared a forgery by Rassinier, Staeglich, Bohlinger/Ney, and in the early writings of Rudolf and Graf. These days, Rudolf and Graf plead agnosticism on the issue. The Anne Frank diary was a major target for denier forgery claims until the past decade or so, with big-name gurus like Faurisson writing whole books on the subject. Nowadays deniers rarely claim it's a forgery, while some of them have explicitly stated it's not a forgery, yet some internet denier will undoubtedly spam a load of out-dated crap about Anne Frank's diary being a forgery.

Unfortunately, all revisionist literature is pooled on VHO, Neuschwabenland and other websites, with no discrimination and no guide to the would-be reader which parts have been superseded or abandoned, and which parts still form part of revisionist doctrine.

It's simply an incoherent mess. It would be surely in revisionism's interests to weed out a lot of the older rubbish from their arguments, and recognise or admit publicly that certain authors in the past repeated nonsensical arguments, or indeed actually forged or altered documents.

Certainly, there are many claims which are basically nothing more than Denier Bullflop Bingo, cliches which are so stupid they neither stand up to the most cursory scrutiny nor do they help convince anyone other than utter morons, such as the Auschwitz 'swimming pool' gambit, or the 'if Auschwitz was 4M now 1M why is it still 6M?' nonsense. And THOSE stupid claims certainly do appear in guru literature, spouted by the likes of Faurisson, Mattogno and Graf.

It might even be better, from a PR perspective, to abandon the term 'revisionism' entirely. What good has come from that term? Simply using it is enough to raise people's hackles. Simply invoking the names of proven liars and discredited hacks like Faurisson is enough to turn people off.

There is in fact nothing much in the revisionist oeuvre which couldn't be recreated in a clean text without needing to cite the 'authority' of past deniers. After all, it's not like revisionists have really covered a lot of ground; they just repeat the same fixations over and over. The same points, sources, witnesses are repeatedly discussed by the same authors, with Mattogno repeating himself a dozen times in some cases.

You could boil down the sum total of revisionist arguments to a single book, and not leave very much out.

A revisionist 'reformation' and overhaul of the doctrine is pretty much the only way any of the ideas stand a chance to gain a wider hearing, at this stage of the pseudo-debate. If I were inclined towards denial, I'd nuke revisionism and leave the site for morbid.

 

[Nick Terry]

Despite his vast knowledge of WWII, Mr. Terry has been unable to present a single authenticated document that outlines or even refers to an 'extermination plan'; not a single one, out of millions of archived documents, with hundreds of thousands pertaining directly to Germany's Jewish policy and deportation. This lack of incriminating paperwork is admitted by Mr. Terry and his Hoaxter clique who acknowledge their total lack of sustaining evidence and attempt to justify it with excuses such as:

There you have it, folks: the reason why Mr. Terry cannot produce decent evidence. It really starts to get interesting once we break down his lame excuses:

(1) the "destruction of documents" pertaining to 'extermination' has never been proven.
The Nazis, like other governments that might face a post-war audit, had destroyed documents including the Luftwaffe records (which aren't relevant to the 'Final Solution') as previously mentioned by Mr. Terry. The sole piece of evidence we have pertaining to extermination, in order to make the assumption that a lack of documentation is due to all of it being vanished, is the same coerced testimony that introduced the spectrum of other now-demolished 'Holocaust' canards. If 100% of the original, authentic German documents were able to be so effortlessly obliterated, it is difficult to explain the so-called 'incriminating speeches' and mass of 'code word' documents that were so carelessly left behind.

(2) an "erasure of the crimes" is the most obvious excuse for any unfounded accusation.

(3) "a small number of survivors escaped the land and lived to testify" just isn't true.

I've replied to this separately because you've quote-mined something I wrote and are misrepresenting it as referring to the whole of the Holocaust rather than just the Aktion Reinhard camps. I wrote in the critique:

The achievements of historians, journalists and judicial investigators in reconstructing events at Belzec, Sobibor and Treblinka are all the greater because of the extensive destruction of documents by the Nazis, the dismantling of the camps and attempted erasure of the crimes, and the small number of survivors who escaped the camps and lived to testify.

So quite why you bother to blether about the number of Auschwitz survivors is a little beyond me. You'll actually find me making a point to EtienneSC regarding precisely this issue - the sheer number of Auschwitz survivors makes it very hard for revisionists to explain how come they were all deluded and/or lying.

But this is not nearly as true for the Reinhard camps, where we have far fewer survivors, and in total, about 300 probative witnesses (survivors, SS, visitors, Trawnikis, and Polish villagers in the immediate vicinty).

You're likewise misrepresenting the point by conflating the destruction of documents with the destruction of all documents. I stated apropos the Reinhard camps that:

In the case of the Aktion Reinhard camps, the destruction of files is a documented fact, as we know from Odilo Globocnik’s final report on Aktion Reinhard to Heinrich Himmler. (4024-PS)

Thus, all the documents from SS-Sonderkommandos Belzec, Sobibor and Treblinka have been found in the files of other institutions. The railway records were culled from Gedob, the Trawniki files captured elsewhere, the SS personnel files in Berlin, et cetera.

There are no known files of documents 'from' Belzec. Everything is found in other files. Those finds include numerous documents referring to a general policy of extermination of Polish Jews, which is why historians have consistently used the Hans Frank diary every since the 1940s as a prime source on the Holocaust in Poland and on Aktion Reinhard, to name but one example.

The erasure of the crimes is likewise proven from contemporary Nazi documents; the existence of Sonderkommando 1005 as well as its purpose is crystal clear, as is their involvement in exhuming and incinerating bodies at various sites. The coverup of BST is also proven from documents about the Ukrainian pseudo-farmer stationed at Treblinka, plus contemporary underground reports, and receives solid indirect support from a common-sense reading of Globocnik's final report as well as the documented dismantling of the Treblinka camp (lots of freight waybills dismantling reported barracks and so forth).

Repeating the denier nonsense spam about compensation claims simply makes you look ignorant. Compensation claims were filed by non-Jews as well, and the procedures required every victim to file a separate claim for each item being claimed for, which generated multiple claims per claimant.

As to your 'unable' nonsense, I'm still awaiting your summary of all the documents referred to in the six online works. Since I wrote part of one of these, I am once again going to refer you to something I have already done. Asking me over and over to reprove something I've already done is blatantly obvious time-wasting.

Before we discuss the documents, we have to make sure you have actually noticed all the relevant Nazi contemporary documents, since it appears that you are not even reading anything which cites them - especially as MGK and other gurus have a noticeable habit of ignoring troublesome documents. As it appears you have a rather narrow idea of what would be relevant evidence, the only solution to this blinkered view of historical evidence is to force you to consider all the Nazi documents cited in the six works. Write them out and put them in a timeline. Then you might realise why historians reject your 'no documents' nonsense and find it hilarious.

And no, I don't play the 'best evidence' game. If you want to focus on Nazi documents, let's discuss lots of them. Together. Because that's how historians do it with any subject you care to name.

 

[Nessie]

CODOH, neither open nor a debate

http://www.skepticforum.com/viewtopic.php?f=39&t=18034

My experience was correcting Hannover and him misunderstanding one of my posts was enough to be banned. Or to me accurate blocked from posting anymore so it looked like I had fled the place.

 

[Nick Terry]

8. Historical Method

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.

Oh boy, Mr. Terry. Now you've really outdone yourself.

I've reposted what you 'responded' to because you never even bothered to address the fist paragraph, which I will repeat one more time:

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.

I then noted that

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.

and all you bother to cherrypick from a range of different source types are the local underground reports:

The "local underground reports", including the above-mentioned Onyeg Shabos archives, produced by a fervent Zionist, is one of your first references. Prior to that, you cite "secret messages smuggled out of camps". What "secret messages", Mr. Terry?

Well, if you'd actually read anything substantive on the Holocaust, you'd know what secret messages I was alluding to. Ever read the Auschwitz Chronicle properly? Of course you haven't.

Local underground reports would, by the way, refer to the undergrounds near to Belzec, Sobibor, Treblinka, Chelmno, Auschwitz etc. Oneg Shabes was in the Warsaw ghetto. The local underground reports came from the Poles. So that makes the well-poisoning attempt about 'Zionism' futile.

Perhaps Mr. Terry was referring to the British Police Decodes he published a report on in 2002. Let's see what he, himself, had to say about these extensive decodes which featured detailed, candid insight for the Third Reich's greatest secrets:

On account of the fact that these decodes, comprising what is probably the most detailed, verifiable and generally reliable account of German activity during this period, are utterly absent of any 'Final Solution' or 'gassing' references, Mr. Terry spends the rest of his report reciting 'evidence' from other sources that the British, according to Mr. Terry, had simply 'failed to address' ("a British misunderstanding") during this period. He refuses to concede the fact that the British had no reason to accept these ludicrous and contradictory claims of 'mass gassings' based on the detailed Intel they had obtained.

This Hoaxter nightmare had already been confirmed by Professor Sir Frank Hinsley in 1942:

Considering that the article was entitled 'Conflicting Signals' and argued rather explicitly against the interpretation of Richard Breitman in Official Secrets, what makes you think I care whether the Decodes revealed gassings?

It's patently obvious that no such information was transmitted by radio, only the strengths of KZs in 1942 to January 1943 (when the method of transmission evidently changed), and only for Auschwitz where it's been known since the war that large numbers of Jews were registered while the discrepancy between the numbers deported and the number registered were gassed.

Likewise, my article explicitly argued that there were too few signals intercepted corresponding to days when the SS did transmit reports of mass shootings (as seen in the matching German files) for the British to think more of the Decodes than they demonstrably did - namely telling Churchill about executions of Jews, he then gave a speech, the Nazis got suspicious, and changed the code and reporting procedures!



The very fact that I showed (a tiny fraction of) what was available from other sources was precisely my argument! The British eventually concluded that extermination was going on because of the cumulative weight of information from the Polish government in exile coupled with other sources. The Decodes not only did not really play any role in this, they couldn't have played any role in this due to the obvious restrictions on what was being transmitted. And so the Decodes were neither the 'magic bullet' claimed by Breitman nor the 'acid test' of wartime knowledge sometimes claimed by ignorant deniers.

I say damn both sides on this one. I am my own person on this. I am not beholden to what other people say nor do I have to accept obviously flawed arguments, whether they come from ultra-intentionalists or from revisionists.

At least Mr. Terry admits "there are gaps" and "witness testimony fills in those holes". Yet despite these acknowledged "holes", he is firm in his stance that Revisionist writers don't deserve a voice in the academic community.

As long as revisionists refuse to answer some exceedingly simple questions, such as 'what actually happened to them?' and 'where is your evidence for this colossal conspiracy?', then they're going to be denied any voice outside the control freak echo chamber of some backwater corners of the internet.

You've not yet indicated what is an acceptable methodology for ALL historians of ALL periods to do when they are confronted by gaps in ONE type of documentary record. Gaps in documentary records are not unique to the Holocaust. Stop pretending that they are.

In the case of the Holocaust, we have copious Nazi documents which for example prove mass deportations TO Belzec, Sobibor and Treblinka as well as Chelmno (and no further; with no hint of 'transit'). The scale is confirmed beyond reasonable doubt by other corroborating Nazi documents. The key document confirming the numbers is the Korherr Report. This was demonstrably edited, as seen from another Nazi document, to replace the term 'Sonderbehandlung' with a euphemism 'transported to the Russian East'. Yet the editing was incomplete and 'Sonderbehandlung' shows up over the page all the same.

1) Since 'Sonderbehandlung' was by 1943 used exclusively within the SS to refer to executions, there is very little doubt what was meant.

2) this becomes even more clear when the documents from Chelmno are considered, which include not only another 'Sonderbehandlung' reference in a letter from Greiser to Himmler in may 1942, written up in such a way that it cannot mean 'resettlement' or any other spurious explanation, because the document goes on to talk about the extirpation of Poles with tuberculosis. Strike 1. Then there is a document referring directly to Chelmno identifying the method used - gas vans - and stating quite clearly that 97,000 had been processed (from the rest of the document, quite evidently killed) at Chelmno since December 1941. Strike 2.

3) Then we find that all four sites contain emptied mass graves with large amounts of cremains and other detritus.

So far we've got a 100% confirmation for 1 of 4 camps: Chelmno used gas vans, this is proven from Nazi documents alone. By extension and logical inference, since the Korherr Report (once returned to its original state before the hamfisted edit) talks about 'Sonderbehandlung' in connection with the camps of the Generalgouvernement, and we know from the Hoefle telegram that these included Belzec, Sobibor and Treblinka, we are perfectly entitled to conclude that BST were extermination camps, probably using gas, since we know from Nazi documents that Auschwitz also used gas.

4) this is confirmed by a sensible reading of the Hans Frank diary, known since the 1940s, and its copious references to the destruction of the Jews in his territory, which we know from numerous other sources was the main source of victims for BST. That the boss-man of the district talks repeatedly about Vernichtung (usually in contrast with the need to balance against economic requirements, which led to the sparing of the minority of forced labourers) is excellent evidence of extermination.

5) finally, we have another Nazi document stating explicitly that the files from the camps have been destroyed. So we know we're very unlikely to find any blueprints a la Auschwitz. We also know because of the documented chain of command that any assistance from other agencies is unlikely, since things seem to be done in-house by SSPF Lublin, not as at Chelmno, with assistance of the RSHA.

Going on these Nazi documents alone, all that we would not know is the precise method of killing used at BST. Everything else - deportation to specific sites, cremation - can be confirmed from Nazi documents + physical evidence.

That is where the wartime reports, which are contemporary documents not from the Nazis, reports of wartime escapees (Krzepicki, Wiernik, Strawczynski) and post-liberation witness statements come in. They fill the gap.

The 'gap' isn't very big, because we can conclude from the deportation documents + physical condition what happened there. There is no reasonable doubt to be had on the basis of Nazi documents + physical evidence about their fate.

And that is being quite austere methodologically. In fact, it's being extremely austere. The epistemological status of contemporary non-German documents is a lot higher than deniers seem to believe. Those are documents, bust. They're not Nazi documents, but they're still documents. And there are a lot of them, especially for Belzec, Sobibor and Treblinka - considerably more than I discussed in the critique.

It's no different to having a guitar drop out of a song; the bass and drums continue. Or even having one of two guitars drop out of a song; the rest of the ensemble continues.

We're never going to have a Nazi document saying that BST had gas chambers. One has not come to light hitherto, and is unlikely ever to come to light. Yet despite this gap, the world has been quite convinced since the 1940s on the basis of the rest of the evidence what those camps were.

So for a denier to come along and go 'but there is no document saying x' is quite pointless. We know that, yet people haven't decided as a result to disregard BST as extermination camps.

One reason why is because there are explicit gassing documents for Auschwitz and Chelmno.

Another reason why is because there are explicit gassing documents for T4, which is where the personnel for the Reinhard camps came from, as is documented.

A third reason why is there are contemporary non-Nazi documents specifying the methods.

A fourth reason why is that the SS and other Germans admitted it after the war

A fifth reason why is that the survivors testified in great detail about it.



All I have done is follow the chain of evidence from the 'top', i.e. Nazi documents, to the 'bottom', i.e. survivor testimonies. If I have a Nazi document, great. If I don't, history doesn't evaporate into a puff of smoke. I can turn to other contemporary documents. And I can turn to witness statements, applying common-sense criticism.

One last point: the gap in the Nazi record means that there are no contradictions between the Nazi documents and non-Nazi documents. Both fit together because they are compatible. The omissions in the Nazi record, caused as we see by the deliberate destruction of files by Globocnik in 1943/1944, damn them.

It beggars belief, by the way, that if these camps really were innocuous transit camps, that the Nazis wouldn't have held on to such evidence and thrust it straight into the faces of their Allied captors, instead of burning half the files and committing suicide. After all, it's not like we don't know from Nazi documents that they monitored the Allied and neutral press, and knew all about the reporting of the extermination of the Jews outside of Germany. The Nazis knew about all those stories, and did absolutely nothing to contradict them.

Any "revisionist" with the slightest shred of honesty would have to concede as an absolute minimum that the Nazis were the greatest PR incompetents in the history of mankind, and deserved everything they got for their utter stupidity in handling these accusations.

 

[Nick Terry]

7. “Story Keeps Changing”

Mr. Terry completely ignores the fact that in a field that hasn't had the opportunity to develop there will always be a larger proportion of mistakes. Revisionists are the first to reconstruct the events during this period with consideration of all evidence, including evidence that suggests a deliberate falsification of the historical record. The questions asked by Revisionists such as, "if not 'gas chambers', then what?", are being asked for the very first time. Mainstream institutions instantly concluded "gas chambers" and refused to consider other probabilities, while Revisionists are forced to 'make mistakes' by proposing various theories as to the true nature of these allegations.

Wow, talk about shooting yourself in the foot. Don't you guys love to harp on about how there were reports of 'steam chambers' and 'electric chambers', and aren't you citing some witnesses below who were evidently not well informed or did not have sufficient technical knowledge to know that these were gas chambers not vacuum chambers?

Mainstream institutions during WWII didn't instantly conclude 'gas chambers'. The preponderance of the evidence pointed that way. Some of the erroneous interpretations were repeated into the postwar era, based on earlier, incorrect reports produced by hearsay, poor vantage point or easily understandable confusion.

The issue which is nowhere explained by any denier guru much less by Tommy1234 is what does it mean that there were errors. Deniers insinuate that an inconsistent story is proof of a hoax. Explain the logic to me. Rather than being evidence of a hoax, the errors refute the possibility of a hoax entirely.

I'd encourage everyone to read the segment on 'steam chambers' in Chapter 1 of the critique linked on Mr. Terry's sig before continuing. While highly elaborate, considering that Mr. Terry and his Believer clique are literally at the forefront of the Believer army, their arguments pale in comparison to many of the original points made in the literature they have aimed to refute. Let's take into consideration the fact that Nick Terry & Friends have severely under-played the extended sources and detail of 'steam chamber' references:

You ought to be ashamed of yourself, Mr. Terry. This is a blatant disregard for the number of intricate details in the report. Let's take a look at the integrity and general background of the highly-regarded Polish underground resistance group that first introduced these "steamy" claims, starting with a brief biography of the creator of the group "Onyeg Shabes", Emanuel Ringenblum:

The archive Ringenblum was responsible for as a leading member of Onyeg Shabes accounts for thousands of documents in the widely-accepted 'Holocaust' record which 'Nick Terry & Friends' regard with the utmost authority. What these Super-Believers fail to adequately address is the fact that not only were 'steam chambers' a significantly more popular claim than 'gas chambers', initially, but that reports including such references were sent to London and other locations on multiple occasions. Some of these reports were later published. Our Believer friends deny such reports were used to spread misinformation about Germany, instead claiming it must just be due to a misinterpretation on the part of the Polish underground that these downright stupid claims of 'steaming' turned out to be nonsense, after all. When we consider the sheer detail of these reports, evidence of fraudulent intent becomes obvious. Perhaps this was the winner of the "anonymous writing contest" mentioned above?

Taken from what became the "Official Report Submitted to the Polish Government", originally written on November 15, 1942 and sent to the Polish government in-exile in London on January 6, 1943:

As everyone can easily read the critique for themselves, they can see where you are dishonestly omitting key points in my argument, specifically the fact that Oneg Shabes took down clear-cut testimonies regarding gas chambers, and the fact that the Polish underground, relying on separate sources, kept on referring to gas chambers. The transmission of the OS report of November 1942 to the outside world was THE source for a number of repetitions well into 1943. In other words, the error can be traced back to a single source, and moreover that single source is a 'secondary' one because steam was introduced at the stage of compiling and writing a summary report. By contrast there are multiple sources which exist both in the OS archive as well as many which never went anywhere near Oneg Shabes specifying gas chambers at Treblinka.

Nick Terry & Friends attempt to justify the total absurdity of these 'steam chamber' assertions with the fact that claims of 'gas chambers' were also circulating. If we accept either of these, we must then consider the entire spectrum of ludicrous claims that were floating around during this period. The bridge between 'steam chambers' and 'gas chambers' was (you guessed it!): "vacuum chambers". Abe Kon, former Treblinka prisoner, stated on August 17, 1944:

This account is confirmed by the first official Soviet report concerning Treblinka, from August 24, 1944:

We witness the evolving storyline develop into the modern-day carbon monoxide gassing claims with a subsequent report by a Polish-Soviet commission only a month later, September 15, 1944:

On September 26, Samuel Rajzman testified upon interrogation to his account of the 'chambers' used at Treblinka. Having claimed to have spent ten months at Treblinka and admittedly becoming familiar with the 'gas chambers', Rajzman is a perfect illustration of the level of inconsistency we can expect from the Holohoax:

Leading up through October of 1945, witnesses such as Szymon Goldberg still hadn't figured out which story they liked better:

...neither had Henryk Reichman:

...nor Stanislaw Kon:

An administrative member of the Zionist-led Oyneg Shabes organization, Rachel Auerbach, describes in her published work from January, 1946:

How utterly terrifying. It's a good thing none of it is true.

One last example from the Polish underground before moving on; this time, we have a tale of "time-delayed" gassings from the resistance group "Armia Krajowa" on September 8, 1942:

None of this spam from the Gospel According to Mattogno addresses the question I posed in the critique, which you rather stupidly alluded to earlier: how did these witnesses know what to say? Did they invent everything themselves?

The fact that some witnesses confused pumping in CO with pumping air out ('vacuum') is irrelevant. Those witnesses all agree that people arrived at Treblinka, were herded into a building, then an engine was switched on, and a short time later the people inside the building were dead. Since none of the descriptions are especially technically detailed, then we conclude that they never saw the engines or if they did, were too technically ignorant to know how the system worked. Why on earth do you presume that provincial Jews of the 1940s would know very much about engines? Yet other witnesses reported the process correctly, and this was elaborated and explained in further detail by subsequent SS and Trawniki witnesses.

What we can clearly see is ever-increasing unanimity among witnesses about the process. If they get one element wrong, then this simply begs the question of how on earth if they were being coached or if they were being encouraged to invent the story, they opted for these errors? Because there is no consistency in the 1944 statements to the Soviets, which are in any case later than the lengthy pre-liberation accounts of Krzepicki, Milgroim, Strawczynski and Wiernik.

And the selfsame 1944 investigation had Wiernik's manuscript! If this was 'hoaxed', then every one of the witnesses would have simply repeated what Wiernik wrote. Then we might notice a monotone repetition of 100% identical statements, instead of the Rashomon-style confusion we would normally expect in such a situation.

As usual with conspiracy theories, yours seems to rely on the conspirators being simultaneously diabolically clever and unutterably stupid. And that's not plausible.

Your repetition of more Mattogno spam from September 1942 was also dealt with in the critique. Fail, again.

Have a look at some bragging admissions made immediately after the war by partisan Bruno Baum, a Jewish Communist and Auschwitz inmate, who eliminates any uncertainty about the origin of 'Holocaust' assertions:

And a communist of this era would not use 'propaganda' in the same sense as a denier does today. Of course the camp resistance was the main source of news regarding Auschwitz - there are dozens of weekly, monthly and other reports from the camp resistance! But they're so detailed that they cannot be casually dismissed by spamming Denier Talking Point Cliche #125.

Explain away, Mr. Terry.

The nutty professor continues his rebuttal by making the mistake of implying that Moshe Peere's laughable 'testimony' is one-of-a-kind. Rather than indulge myself in posting the hundreds of what is often downright hilarious claims by "eye" witnesses (I'll do a few of those later), I'll once again refer to the eye-opening documentary by Eric Hunt, "The Last Days of the Big Lie", which outlines the sheer absurdity of some highly-regarded, allegedly incriminating testimony and the manner it has been manipulated by Jewish media-moguls such as Steven Spielberg. The documentary is available for free viewing on the Holocaust Handbooks website. Go see it.

And now you're lying again. I wrote nothing about Moshe Peer being 'one of a kind'. I wrote in fact the following

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.

which is why when you replied here with another list of spammed Denier Talking Points

25. What Actually Happened

Our old friend should really get a kick out of these last-minute testimonial favorites:

the only response is to repost what you sidestepped regarding #18, Witnesses:

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.

Your grab-bag of denier cliches cited just 12 witnesses, and even those 12 are hardly all loonies a la Moshe Peer; you have little more than your incredulity with many of them. Some of them are obviously not telling the truth and are ignored by historians.

That applies especially to latterday witnesses from Buchenwald, with Rosenblat denounced by none other than Deborah Lipstadt, long before Rosenblat became a denier talking point. Indeed, he became a denier talking point because the mainstream denounced him as a fraud. There's only one reference to his story on CODOH I can find, before he was denounced by historians.

And in case you're confused, the media =! historians. Which is why no historian has cited 'genocide by bear'.

I must confess to being surprised why you'd think this:

Stephanie Seltzer, president of the World Federation of the Jewish Child Survivors of the Holocaust, claims to have seen Jewish males in Warsaw "executed after being forced to expose themselves to German police who were looking for circumcised men."

is in any way unbelievable, since trouser inspections were quite common in wartime Europe and especially in occupied Warsaw where there were not only large numbers of Jews in hiding, but also numerous executions of Jews for going into hiding.

I'd strike that one off the list the next time you spam it, as it only makes you look foolish trying to include it.

and as usual, why do you cite hearsay as if it were direct witnessing?

Elie Wiesel, in his published work, tells of one account in Babi Yar, Ukraine: "Later, I learned from a witness that for months after the massacre, the ground did not stop trembling and that from time to time, geysers of blood spurted up out of the earth.".

this is Wiesel reporting someone else. It's incidentally hardly implausible - and it's EXCEEDINGLY boring, because even if one of many Babi Yar witnesses offered an embellished story, the others didn't say the same thing, and there are numerous Nazi documents confirming what happened there. That's something which virtually everyone who has read a proper Holocaust history book will know, so it once again makes you look exceedingly foolish.

Look, just stop cherrypicking. Don't think people here can't spot that you're cherrypicking, and don't think it does anything more than expose your dishonesty.

 

[cjnewson88]

<snip>

Good posts Nick.

 

[000063]

...
I'm British. If I recall correctly, 00063 is Swedish. ...

British Overseas Territories, legally. Living, currently, in a large town Oop North, grew up in the Caribbean. Problem is, even in countries without a large Jewish-owned media presence, HD is still generally a joke. Not that being Jewish owned means Jewish total control, as I pointed out, which would be physically impossible. I also pointed out the attempt to conflate Jewish control of Hollywood with total media control while ignoring the very media this discussion is being conducted in.

You're just sore because the marketplace of ideas has clearly rejected Holocaust denial despite a 30 year PR campaign, and despite more than 15 years of the delusory belief that "the internet" would provide some sort of magical breakthrough. Judging by web traffic reports, it hasn't.

"Whoa. Wait a minute, Doc.... This is heavy."

Seriously, they get a highly unregulated medium, and don't do any better.

I also like how they the Ebil Joos can control every medium, but can't stamp out HD itself, despite the immense power they wield.

The underlying problem with revisionist arguments is the inability of deniers to decide whether they will go with an underdetermination argument ('not enough evidence' or 'evidence misinterpreted') or an overdetermination argument ('evidence hoaxed'). We see this oscillation in Tommy1234's posts quite clearly, since sometimes he argues that there is an 'overwhelming lack of documentary proof' and sometimes he argues, in the same post, that 'documents were forged' or that witnesses were liars.

As clearly shown when I summed up his claims a few posts back and he avoided confirming whether I had done so correctly.

 

[000063]

...
And the selfsame 1944 investigation had Wiernik's manuscript! If this was 'hoaxed', then every one of the witnesses would have simply repeated what Wiernik wrote. Then we might notice a monotone repetition of 100% identical statements, instead of the Rashomon-style confusion we would normally expect in such a situation.

As usual with conspiracy theories, yours seems to rely on the conspirators being simultaneously diabolically clever and unutterably stupid. And that's not plausible.
...

To be fair, They might've just deliberately introduced errors into the false witness testimony, to make it look realistically confused. Of course, by definition, that's admitting that the testimony seems realistic. I think the word I'm looking for here is "non-falsifiability".

 

[Natan]

As we'll see below, you misread the witness.

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.

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.

Fine, I confused the liquidation of the ghetto with the actual shooting. The story doesn't become any more believable.

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?

Really?

[...]In my opinion the executions of Jews at Kharkov took place at the beginning of the year 1942. At least I never was present at such an execution before. The Jews in Kharkov had been gathered in a ghetto somewhat outside the city and were guarded by us. One day, it was certainly after Christmas 1941, I was commanded to seclude an area also outside the city of Kharkov. Under what leadership I was then I no longer know. We were taken to hilly terrain where we had to form a huge seclusion ring that the civilian population was not allowed to enter. Into this area the Jews from the ghetto were taken with trucks. The Jews had to undress and to lie down nearby or right inside crevices in the earth. The crevices were natural ones and not tank ditches or other dug-outs. In these pits the Jews were shot by the SD. The number of Jews shot in this area is not known to me, but I think that it was a larger number because the shootings lasted several days. I didn’t see members of the police being part of the execution detachments. [...]

Deposition of Viktor T., former member of Sonderkommando 4 a, 25 June 1960 ZStdLJV, 4AR-Z 269/60, Volume 1, page 1-18, quote page 16 and following

http://holocaustcontroversies.yuku.c...n#.UIB0lq7k-Sp

Even at Babi Yar which happened in September, the narrative goes that the jews had to undress before being shot. Reason unclear.

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.

I actually DID see the "1941" colour photos. The show a grant total of five (5!) bodies, lying in the streets of Kiev, none at Babi Yar. They show some POWs working in a ravine. They show the clothes of at most a couple of hundred people lying around. In one photo where the Germans are overseeing the POWs allegedly covering up a supersecret massacre site, two ordinary Ukrainian women can be seen casually standing around a German soldier, showing them the workers in the ravine. Frame 20 allegedly shows "Ukrainan women (in all probability) tried to learn about the fate of their relatives, who possibly resided in nearby barracks." They are at most a few tens, some of them are smiling in the picture, as is a soldier walking by. For those of us wanting to know what Nick is referring to:

http://www.deathcamps.org/occupation/byalbum/list00.html

That sure convinced me 33,000 people were shot at Babi Yar.

 

[Natan]

By the way, I went searching for Johannes Hähle a bit and upon one revisionist site it was remarked most if not all of his other photos were in black and white. Then by sheer coincidence I came across this interesting non revisionist website:

But whoever saw the Wehrmacht exhibition in Berlin – opened first in 1995, stirring a great debate, following which it was reorganized in 2000, and since then is open in the Deutsches Historisches Museum –, may remember, that some of the pictures were on display in black and white, under the name of Johannes Hähle.

(...)

As a honest war correspondent, Hähle handed over all his photos to the Propagandakompanie. According to the records of the PK, on 30 September 1941 he delivered 108 photos with the title "“insatz im Osten”, and on 13 October 7 further photos entitled “Umfassungsschlacht ostw. Kiew”. However, the Baby Yar film roll was not among them. Neither two other rolls, whose existence was discovered only much later.

The Spiegel’ question concerning the authorship and date of the pictures were answered much later by the director of the Archiv des Hamburger Instituts für Sozialforschung, Reinhard Schwarz, who recognized in them the photos of two further rolls by Johannes Hähle preserved by them. The pictures were hitherto unpublished, and Schwarz assumed that the copies uploaded to the net were made when the photos were lent some years ago to Kharkov for a city history exhibition.

The three rolls which Hähle never handed over to the PK had a long way to the archiv of Hamburg. The widow of Hähle sold them in 1954 to the Berlin journalist Hans Georg Schulz, who tried to publish them a number of times, but he was always refused by the editors who supposed that they would sensitively affect the German public. Finally the widow of Schulz sold them in 2000 to the institute of Hamburg who exposed the black and white copies of some of the color photos on the Wehrmacht exhibition. All the pictures of the roll – and not only the ten ones which now appeared on the Russian sites, but twenty-nine – were finally published in color on the Aktion Reinhard Camps site. We also take them over from there together with their captions.

So Johannes Hähle was also at Kharkov where another 33,000 (or 15,000 or 305 or whatever) went missing like at Babi Yar, I guess 33,000 is a popular number like 6,000,000. I find the phrasing a bit weird, did the colour versions appear first on deathcamps.org or did that blogger find them there first? I hope none of <SNIP> at deathcamps.org were involved in some creative editing, such as "restoration" of black and white pictures into colour. Something that is not objectionable if at the very least mentioned.

http://electronics.howstuffworks.com/question184.htm

 

[Border Reiver]

That sure convinced me 33,000 people were shot at Babi Yar.

How about Einsatzgruppen Operational Situation Report #101?

 

[Natan]

Possibly the black and white originals of what is described by Dr. Terry as colour photos:

http://www.deathcamps.org/occupation/pic/bigbabijar03.jpg
http://www.deathcamps.org/occupation/pic/bigbabijar04.jpg
http://www.deathcamps.org/occupation/pic/bigbabijar05.jpg
http://www.deathcamps.org/occupation/pic/bigbabijar11.jpg

Interestingly, number 4, NOT at the link below, shows solid proof of a little coloring alright.

http://www.deathcamps.org/occupation/babi yar.html

 

[000063]

The biggest problem with HD is that the second you try to put their hand-waves into any coherent context, they look silly. All I had to do is summarize Tommy's claims and the implications of them, and they promptly looked ridiculous, even before you actually address the factual validity.