General Holocaust Denial Discussion Part II

[Nick Terry]

Good answer. I considered that to be an unreasonable challenge but you handled it well. You sidestepped the actual challenge however by finding works of fiction that incorporate Wiernik-like phrases instead of memoirs written in Wiernik's style that were published as true but turned out to be phonies. The challenge with meeting the challenge is finding non-Holocaust memoirs that have been written in Wiernik's style. I don't know how one would go about doing that except by looking at random memoirs and reading a few pages.

It wasn't a very good answer at all.

EtienneSC originally made the ludicrous point that the use of rhetoric by a witness stating that the events were beyond belief was "typical of a fraud". That was a fairly straightforward assertion on his part, which has since collapsed because there is no proof that such phrases are "tells", as you acknowledge above.

I don't think Wiernik's book can be completely dismissed but his emotive writing style does detract from it's credibility.

Wahrheitseeker summed up the credibility issue perfectly when he said that "Wiernik's account earns credibility as aspects of it are interrogated by examining other sources and its context".

What is left over after that process could well be considered the literary froth typical of a certain type of memoir. Telling the froth from the substance is what the entire discussion is about; simply noting that there is froth would be like complaining that a cappuccino isn't coffee because of the milky froth and chocolate sprinkles on top.

 

[Nick Terry]

My argument is only that if Wiernik is unreliable, his memoir is not evidence that cremations occurred. That is significant as he is a primary eye-witness, but it's only a part of a larger jigsaw, as we might agree.

Wiernik's memoirs aren't actually needed to prove cremations. One crucial test for all pieces of evidence in a complex scenario such as this one is whether they are truly indispensible. Literally everything of significance that Wiernik says can be confirmed from another source, almost always many times over. One can remove this or that source relating to Treblinka almost at will and still arrive at the same basic conclusions.

Your argument ignores this convergence of evidence, and creates a virtually circular syllogism:

Wiernik is a primary witness to Treblinka cremations
If Wiernik is unreliable, then his testimony is not evidence for cremation
(skips over actually proving unreliability)
Therefore there were no cremations at Treblinka

Your starting premise, that Wiernik is truly crucial to the whole story, is simply flawed.

 

[Nick Terry]

A biography of Hilberg would be interesting given the cultural currency of his work. I always had him down as a monomaniacal Zionist, but he is probably a more complex character.

If you thought Hilberg was a monomaniacal Zionist, you've simply understood nothing about the man. His autobiography The Politics of Memory is a perfectly good starting point; undoubtedly someone will write a proper bio of him since he has left fairly extensive personal papers at the University of Vermont where he spent most of his academic career.

No, I'm sorry, I have to come back to this piece of insanity: how on earth could you think that Hilberg was a Zionist? It's a claim straight out of Rassinier, and he was bat guano crazy...

Non-academics? Several revisionists started as academics and then had their reputations trashed by those with their own "political axes to grind". Robert Faurisson we have discussed. You think Vidal-Naquet & Georges Wellers were apolitical? Then there is Roger Garaudy, who had a major reputation as a communist scholar who converted to Islam (there was an excellent recent documentary about him by Algerian journalists). In the USA there was Arthur Butz, who taught engineering. It is ridiculous, when those who have written on revisionism - Germar Rudolf, Henri Roques and others - are refused degrees, which are a prerequisite to academic status, to then use their status as "non-academics" against them.

Merely having a degree isn't enough here; I was speaking of people who have held down proper academic jobs, preferably in the right discipline. Nearly all of the academic revisionists have been in the wrong disciplines entirely, such as Arthur Butz and Robert Faurisson. They are writing ex cathedra and their status as associate professors or professors means very little other than to impress the credulous and gullible.

One noticeable feature of the majority of credentialled revisionists is they mostly lent their names to the JHR masthead and produced nothing substantive. People like Charles Weber and Robert Countess were tenured academics but never wrote a whole book. So they don't really count, although Weber did produce a short pamphlet for the IHR.

Non-academic revisionists who have written books or pamphlets:

(I have italicised the names of those known to be definitely dead)

1. Maurice Bardeche (self-admitted fascist),
2. Paul Rassinier (school teacher),
3. Gaston Amaurdruz (self-admitted fascist),
4. Peter Kleist (SS, NSDAP),
5. Hans Grimm (NSDAP),
6. Friedrich Grimm (NSDAP),
7. Heinrich Haertle (NSDAP),
8. Heinz Roth (SA),
9. Erich Kern (SS, NSDAP),
10. JG Burg (survivor of Transnistrian ghettos),
11. Richard Harwood (National Front),
12. Udo Walendy (NPD),
13. Franz Scheidl (multiple doctorates, supposedly),
14. Emil Aretz (Ludendorff movement),
15. Thies Christophersen (SS-Sonderfuehrer, own Neo-Nazi party),
16. Wolf-Dieter Rothe (schoolteacher, I believe)
17. Friedrich Schlegel,
18. Willibald Mattern (lovely pamphlet about 'Jesus and the 6M')
19. Wilhelm Staeglich (NPD),
20. Ingrid Weckert (Kameradschaften, associate of Michael Kuehnen),
21. Ditlieb Felderer (mad Jehovah's Witness with porn and scat fetish),
22. William Grimstad (antisemite funded by Saudi government, also an occultist),
23. Pierre Guillaume (La vieille taupe),
24. Hans Wahls (nominally 'Zeitgeschichtliche Forschungsinstitut Ingolstadt', in practice this is a pseudoscholarly think tank a la the IHR),
25. Carlo Mattogno (has a masters-level qualification),
26. Enrique Aynat (associated for a while with CEDADE, has law degree)
27. Walter Sanning,
28. Mark Weber (National Alliance, has MA in history),
29. Bradley Smith (failed novelist),
30. Fred Leuchter (BA in History, not an engineer),
31. Carlos Porter,
32. John Ball,
33. Michael Collins Piper,
34. Stephen Challen,
35. David Irving,
36. Alexander Baron,
37. Henri Roques (rigged doctoral committee)
38. Gerd Honsik (NDP, Volksbewegung),
39. Herbert Pitlik,
40. Wolfgang Froehlich (engineer),
41. Steffen Werner
42. Roland Bohlinger (Ludendorff bewegung).
43. Johannes Ney (sometime WWII U-boat commander),
44. Cedric Martel,
45. Joaquin Bochacha,
46. Siegfried Ellwanger Castan,
47. Pierre Marais,
48. Georges Theil (Front National)
49. Jean-Marie Boisdefeu,
50. Jean Plantin (masters level, was going on for doctoral-level)
51. 'King Arthur' (unknown pseudonymous Dutch crank),
52. Oleg Platonov (has doctorate and own pseudoscholarly institute)
53. Juergen Graf (schoolteacher),
54. Germar Rudolf (nearly completed a doctorate in chemistry),
55. Samuel Crowell (grad school dropout),
56. Thomas Kues (has an MA),
57. 'Don Heddesheimer' (whoever he actually is),
58. Harold Kreig (US Army LtCol, supposedly)
59. Victor Thorn (all-round conspiraloon),
60. Santiago Alvarez (rewrote Marais, otherwise a web guy),
61. Alexander Calder (new pamphlet in German)
62. Carolyn Yeager (sometime member of the ANSWP)

revisionists who have written books or pamphlets, who have held down academic teaching jobs at some point:

1. Austin App (English literature),
2. Harry Elmer Barnes history and sociology, tenured),
3. David Hoggan (history, untenured),
4. James Martin (history, lost tenure due to own stupidity),
5. Arthur Butz (electrical engineering),
6. Charles Weber (Modern Languages/German presumably)
7. Robert Faurisson (French literature),
8. Serge Thion (Southeast Asia area studies),
9. Rolf Kosiek (physicist turned far right publicist),
10. Roger Garaudy (philosophy),
11. Fredrik Toeben (philosophy),
12. 'Thomas Dalton' (if we believe him, no confirmation of his actual discipline)

Academic supporters of revisionism who have produced articles, videos or some other form of grunt would include:

1. Revilo P Oliver (classics)
2. Robert Countess (theology, primarily, also taught history)
3. Werner Maser (history, flirted with denial in his last works)
4. Hellmut Diwald (history, fellow traveller and right-wing hero)
5. Joachim Hoffmann (history, MGFA, wrote foreword for Grundlagen zur Zeitgeschichte)
6. Walter Beveraggi Allende (economics, solely on JHR masthead, believer in Protocols of Elders of Zion)
7. Kaukab Siddique (English literature, media studies, a Muslim)
8. Alexander Berkis (history, solely on JHR masthead)
9. Hideo Miki (history, solely on JHR masthead)
10. Costas Zaverdinos (mathematics, JHR masthead + an article or two)
11. James Fetzer (philosophy, all-round conspiraloon, recently came out in support of revisionism)
12. Kevin Barrett (African languages and literature, PhD, sometime adjunct, 9/11 Truther, fellow traveller of revisionism)

I am fairly certain I have registered almost all of the book and pamphlet authors; the proportion of non-academics to academics is approaching 6:1.

I may have missed a few of the tenured cheerleaders the IHR rounded up from the internationale antisemitique, but I do not believe there have ever been more than 30 people who have ever held down an academic job who have endorsed revisionism. Of those academic revisionists, not more than 11 are still alive, and they are overwhelmingly retired or of pensionable age.

There are approximately 750,000 faculty in US higher education, a number which admittedly includes adjuncts, whereas we can find at best, three academics who currently hold down jobs who have ever endorsed revisionism. One of those is Arthur Butz, who would have been forcibly retired in most European university systems a long time ago as he's supposedly now 80 (born in 1933); even if the birthdates which circulate on the internet are wrong, he is well past conventional retirement age at 65.

As a cohort, it's also very clear that revisionist authors have distinct political biases; skewing significantly to the extreme right with many having been overt members of far-right parties. While far from all revisionists have such political leanings, the number who do is utterly disproportionate compared to the electoral strengths of the relevant parties in the respective countries. And almost all of the "unaffiliated" revisionists are essentially antisemites, who got into the whole shebang as a vehicle to promote their Jew-hatred. That much is screamingly obvious, and is beyond reasonable dispute, I'm afraid. As for the supporters and hangers-on, just look at the dominant tone of debate at CODOH forum: it's totally antisemitic, to the point of causing 'moderates' frequent discomfort.

For several years now all serious revisionist books have appeared through The Barnes Review, which is the latest incarnation of Willis Carto's Liberty Lobby, and which also publishes American Free Press. To say that AFP/TBR is far right would be like saying the Pope is Catholic; the sole difference is that AFP/TBR is also now a major peddler of conspiracy theories, having actively promoted nearly every single major piece of lunacy since the start of the 9/11 Truth Movement. This is why one of TBR's recent revisionist titles was authored by serial conspiracy theorist Victor Thorn, and why James Fetzer has slowly gravitated towards the revisionist camp, via his association with Veterans Today. Quite a few 'name' revisionists of various calibres, like Juergen Graf, Nicholas Kollerstrom and Fredrick Toeben, have also endorsed 9/11 conspiracy theories.

Most revisionist authors are dead or completely inactive; the whole cohort is horribly skewed towards pensionable age. Hardly any of these people are under 60.

I would reiterate that I've just counted revisionists who have made it to writing books or pamphlets - something longer than an article. Walter Lueftl, for example, doesn't make the cut because his 'report' was essentially just article length; he is of course a non-academic so adding him would skew the profile in the direction I claimed. Ditto for Friedrich Paul Berg, Paul Grubach or other revisionists one might name.

One could obviously counter and say that many of the pamphleteers I have listed have not been cited much; but that would simply confirm my point that revisionism isn't very coherent, when most of its erstwhile authors have produced drivel so embarrassingly bad that it cannot be cited or used in any way, shape or form today. If we applied a 'citation index' approach then the list of relevant revisionists would shrink drastically, but we'd still find that significant parts of the oeuvre were produced by non-academic amateurs. For over a quarter of a century, revisionist demographics has been delegated to Walter Sanning, who is ritualistically invoked when deniers feel the need to cite something that vaguely looks like a scholarly study on demographics. Nothing has been produced to surpass it whatsoever, and there is no discernible coherence to the few 'new' demographic arguments advanced by deniers since 1984.

Naturally, you try turning things around and ask:

You think Vidal-Naquet & Georges Wellers were apolitical?

Not in the same way that Harwood was as a National Front cadre when he wrote Did Six Million Really Die?

You're also rather missing the point about the comparison between academia and revisionism: Vidal-Naquet was not a specialist historian of the 1940s or Holocaust when he intervened in the Faurisson affair. Indeed, the majority of critics of revisionism have not been academic historians of 20th Century Europe. Most professional historians have simply ignored denial.

Wellers was more of a specialist but essentially self-taught, an example of the 'survivor historian' generation which includes the likes of Hermann Langbein, Jules Schelvis, H.G. Adler, Szymon Datner and others. Some of the survivor historians got formally qualified by studying for doctorates and then took up teaching posts; this would include (using the broadest definition of survivor) people like Raul Hilberg (emigre), Saul Friedlander (survived in hiding), Henry Friedlander and Israel Gutman (both Auschwitz survivors).

Most of the survivor-historians are now dead or retired; the overwhelming majority of scholars working on the Holocaust were born after the war, most now long after the war, and there have been several generations now. Those scholars were formally trained and entered academia from the 1970s onwards, by and large. Their students are in many cases now professors or well advanced in their careers in academia. And there are hundreds of them; thousands if you include the very many scholars who produced a PhD and published something, but who have now left academia for other careers.

By contrast, Faurisson retired from teaching almost 20 years ago.

My basic point here is that revisionism has simply never been large enough to produce a coherent school; there are not enough active researchers with either informal or formal expertise to sustain anything like peer review; and there is evidently little quality control if TBR can be persuaded to put out drivel by conspiraloons like Victor Thorn.

Moreover, there are few parallel endeavours worth the name to give the whole thing any sense of collective momentum. TBR puts out whining about Allied crimes, ancient history/Kennewick Man, anti-Roosevelt hysteria and other assorted rubbish, none of which possesses the slightest scholarly merit. While some revisionists have jumped on (and perhaps now off) the 9/11 Truth bandwagon, that movement has more or less hit a brick wall, and its methods are ridiculed. Occasional contacts with Katyn deniers in Russia are ideologically uncomfortable for most revisionists although Mattogno and Graf have met with them; Katyn denial has zero resonance outside of Russia. For political reasons due to the overwhelming right wing and antisemitic biases of most revisionists, there has been no effort to link up with more left wing skeptics of recent atrocities like Srebrenica.

Most of all, the revisionist project is completely, utterly fixated on the Holocaust and Holocaust alone, with nary a writer capable of researching modern German history or modern European history to anything like a respectable level. There were plenty of articles about non-Holocaust themes in the old JHR and some continue to appear in Inconvenient History, but what is striking about these pieces is they are worse researched than the Holocaust articles, which is often really saying something since most of the Inconvenient History articles cite no archival references at all.

Looking over the sum total of revisionist authors, there are barely a couple of dozen who have ever set foot in an archive for any purpose whatsoever, and really, when it comes to archival work you're really only talking Mattogno and Irving; the rest have usually done less archival work than undergrads might do for an honors thesis or final year dissertation. A very small number of amateur revisionists evidently troll archives to find the odd source for their blogs (like The Black Rabbit of Inle), but that isn't coherent and produces nothing of substantive value.

The other big problem now faced by revisionists is keeping abreast of the literature, which is not an optional extra if you are aiming to produce scholarship. Things were seemingly easier in the 1980s when less was being produced, but even back then most of the work being done was ignored. Today the avalanche is overwhelming. Moreover, when revisionists do cite recent studies it is patently obvious that they've not digested them properly and are avoiding all the manifold implications of the books in question.

This has actually become quite comical of late, when Mattogno discovers yer another article from the 1990s or early 2000s and writes a 'response' to them 10-15 years after the fact. Thus he went into hysterics recently about a 1997 article by Christian Gerlach, in 2013. He wrote about another 1997 article by Karin Orth approximately 12 years after it was originally published and after it had accumulated probably a hundred citations in other works. We even have the spectacle of Mattogno writing a brochure about the 2nd edition of Hilberg (originally dating from 1985) in 2008, five years after Hilberg published a still further expanded 3rd edition, which Mattogno completely ignored.

All in all, it's quite safe to describe revisionism as a steaming pile of mostly shoddy pseudoscholarship with a political axe to grind, mostly written by Jew-haters.

This is the guy who confessed to killing 25 million Jews that Hilberg selectively cites, right? I bet having an Allied soldier standing on your testicles does wonders for your literary style!

A moment's reflection would suggest that an Allied soldier wasn't standing on Gerstein's testicles when he wrote his report, since writing a report with some literary tendencies would generally be considered incompatible with having someone stand on one's testicles.

The problem is when two or more people tell the same or similar lies.

But that presumes that you've correctly identified the lies.

You have to look for non-verbal testimony, don't you? The main problem with your method thgat you say "We have enough evidence". Who fund archaeological study when you tell them you know everything important alreasy?

Archaeologists are busily digging up all manner of sites from all epochs all around the world, including many sites which have seen violence, in a quest to find additional evidence.

Historians continue to research the same sites - whether of the Holocaust, the WWI trenches explored by combat archaeologists, or American Civil War battlefields doesn't actually matter here - using written records as well as the results of past forensic and archaeological investigations, as appropriate.

In all such cases, we had enough evidence shortly after the events in question to say 'they happened'. This has never stopped historians or archaeologists from doing more research in a quest to refine knowledge and to seek out answers to new questions.

The subdiscipline of conflict archaeology is barely 30 years old having originated with battlefield archaeology. It seems a little crazy to propose that we didn't know about WWI, the ACW or the Holocaust before conflict archaeologists started getting grants in order to explore battlefield and atrocity sites using their new techniques and methods of finding things out about the past.

If you said "Our sources strongly suggest..." (which is the most that they seem to justify), you would motivate funders who are invested in the thing ideologically to pay for the necessary studies and settle the matter. The argument that there are not many revisionists, so what they say isn't true or isn't important, is not a serious argument.

On the contrary, it is a very serious argument. Revisionists do not amount to a significant enough political or social constituency in Poland or worldwide that can successfully pressure for 'new investigations' along the lines you seem to want. The same thing applies to 9/11 conspiracy theorists who have been calling for a 'new investigation' for more than a decade, and they are now howling in the wilderness, despite having much more support and popularity than revisionism.

As I have pointed out, there have been fewer than 30 academics ever who have endorsed revisionism; the 9/11 Truth Movement mustered several times that number in a fraction of the time, yet it still couldn't generate enough momentum to be taken seriously.

By contrast, the Holocaust is a globally accepted historical fact - the one head of state inclined to support revisionism just stepped down, if you didn't realise - and so is the fact of mass murder at sites like Treblinka. The acceptance of that historical fact is based on things like the investigations in the 1940s, subsequent war crimes trials, the confessions of the perpetrators, historical research, and because the facts fit the wider picture of what is known about the world.

Saying that the Holocaust is an accepted historical fact doesn't mean that we know everything about it, any more than we know absolutely everything about WWI; we may sooner or later run out of significant new things to say about the French Revolution or the American Civil War, but there still seem to be people working on those subjects and finding fresh things there too. Moreover, the example of the ACW, which was in full bloom 150 years ago, indicates that we are likely to be researching WWII and the Holocaust for a considerable time to come; there will be WWII buffs well into the future just as there are still ACW buffs. So this means there will be museums, memorials, university courses, school classes, tours, trips, TV programs, movies and lots and lots of books about all these things.

There will also be archaeological work done - on a schedule determined by the academics who supervise such work, and no other. That is why in the past 15 years, Belzec, Sobibor, Treblinka and Chelmno have all been investigated using new archaeological techniques, while some of the same archaeologists (Andrzej Kola) have been off to investigate Soviet mass graves at Kiev and Kharkov, because there were Polish victims there. In Germany, essentially all the T4 institutes and many of the concentration camps have been investigated by archaeologists in the same time frame.

The results of these investigations complement and supplement the work done by historians using written records. The Holocaust is perhaps becoming a field of study which utilises physical evidence as well as geographical techniques like GIS in a way that is not arguably the case for the study of Stalinist atrocities, or other mass atrocities where little to no forensic or archaeological work has been done. This does not mean, however, that all work on the Holocaust will follow this route, nor should it.

It does mean that the clamouring for 'new investigations' is essentially being met, without kowtowing to the bizarre agendas of a handful of cranks.

Accordingly, the death camps represent less than 50% of the Holocaust, and Auschwitz is less than 20% of the Holocaust.

this was quoted from me, just to clarify for other readers.

"10%" is late Pressac territory, 20% is the Hilberg/Piper figure. 10% was a typo then, you're backtracking, or what?

I stated quite clearly that barely 10% of the Holocaust's victims died in Kremas II-V. Less than 20% died at Auschwitz. Of the just over 1 million victims of Auschwitz, not more than 600,000 died in Kremas II-V; the rest died in the Bunkers, either in 1942-3 or when Bunker V was reactivated in 1944, while at least 100,000 died of malnutrition, maltreatment, in sub-camps or Monowitz, or in the Auschwitz main camp, with obviously quite a few of the dead being non-Jews.

The 10% figure was mentioned, of course, apropos the infamous 'no holes, no Holocaust' nonsense. That argument would apply to an even smaller percentage, since it doesn't even affect Kremas IV and V. The number who died in Kremas II and III is certainly under half a million.

I am proceeding here on the basis of Hilberg's 5.1 million total.

What I have acknowledged is that the "holocaust by bullets" is under-researched by revisionists. As you say, they have concentrated on the major camps. I know of nothing other than a few remarks by Faurisson on Father Desbois and the work projected by MGK that they will supposedly work on after their response to you and your co-researchers.

This is pretty much unresponsive to what I wrote, which was:

"I've already addressed the basic fallacy of this in the longer post, and also made several remarks in previous posts which you have not responded to. Aktion 1005 is better documented than you seem to realise, in that there are not only references to this action in a 'bald' sense (in personnel files and other reports), but also explicit documents from KdS Litauen about 1005's operations in Lithuania."

I was responding to your comments about 1.5 million cremated by Aktion 1005 and stated that this would be a considerable exaggeration. It is no response at all to postpone discussion until after your gurus come up with some more lies and distortions.

 

[EtienneSC]

There certainly is a fallacy of the excluded middle, which is another way of saying false dilemma. Invoking the law of the excluded middle from logic is a classic example why formal logic does not always work very well on inferences from human behaviour; including the interpretation of texts and descriptions produced by inevitably fallible human beings.

No. In logic, false dilemma arises from an incomplete enumeration of contrary attributes (e.g. red, blue, green); whilst excluded middle is a property of contradictory attributes (e.g. colored/not colored). The Wikipedia author has confused them under the same name. The fault you identify above is indeed a limit of formalization, which is inapplicable in situations of conceptual change such as occur in intellectual history. However, I gather that I was being accused of false dilemma.

But that's what you're doing, in order to 'debunk' Wiernik. The very fact that you continue to belabour a discussion of a single witness is grossly unscientific. [.....]

Then why aren't you practicing what you say is common sense? Specifically, why aren't you comparing Wiernik systematically with other eyewitnesses to Treblinka and with other sources about Treblinka?

These are fair points. It would be better if I review say, the relevant bits of Hilberg and Arad's book rather than keep the Wiernik ball in the air indefinitely. The obsession with Wiernik is probably an effect of Denierbud.

Was Wiernik there or not? Yes or no?

If this is directed at me, my view is he was there at Treblinka I, perhaps elsewhere in the area, based on your statement that this is corroborated.

I take the points that there was an original Polish edition and that amongst secular Jews - or Jews acting in a secular capacity - not all are Zionists. All the same, you also refer to a Yiddish edition which presumably was aimed at Jews. More generally, there may well be an ideological component to these narratives in terms of splits (religious/secular, zionist/assimilationist) within Jewry. This would be so even for works composed in extremis.

The claim about the maps is bogus, [.....]
If nothing else, you should seriously think twice before repeating any claim made by Mattogno, Graf, Kues or any other denier, lest you find that someone already examined the claim and found it to be as bogus as that one was.

Noted.

Heck, just assessing the sum total of documents that explicitly mention Belzec, Sobibor, Treblinka, Einsatz/Aktion Reinhardt or which refer to Globocnik's tasking or connect by a bare step or two with the camps would be a start. That's never happened within revisionism and I doubt it ever will.

Graf's Giant with Feet of Clay is a global assessment of Hilberg. Rassinier also wrote a shorter assessment.
BTW, I'm still interested in the 10%/20% contradiction in your last two posts.

Arguments regarding formal logic have no place in this thread and will not be approved going forward. The Fallacy of the Excluded Middle appropriately summed up the logical mistake alleged to have been made by the poster and there need be no further discussion about it.

Posted By: Loss Leader

 

[Cyrix686]

Was NT asking about an assessment of Hilberg? Maybe he was, I thought he was observing that Revisionism refuses to study Belzec, Treblinka and Sobibor as a set. Speaking of, "set" though Graf's book when "set" against another work using compare and contrast putting it up against something like, say a proper book, Peter Longerich's Holocaust, (2010) absolutely looks poor.Skimming through it, it strikes me that it is the usual unreadable Revisionist fare, cheap, nasty, whining. So good luck to you if that is where you get your version of History. Intrinsically, it is no wonder to me that it is given away free on Revisionist sites. Who would part with money for it?

 

[EtienneSC]

[.....]
[62] [.....]

Very good. Major omission:
[63] Vincent Reynouard.

Your belief system has come to a sorry pass when you claim that comparing witness testimonies isn't critical thinking. Seriously, listen to yourself.

OK. It is critical thinking, but not necessarily of a high order.

This has been an educational exchange of views with you all. Over and out from me for now, barring any loose ends from the above discussions.

 

[Nick Terry]

<snip>

My general conclusion was that they perhaps show cremation to be possible in principle, but not as described by the primary eye-witnesses (e.g. Wiernik's Year in Treblinka). As the eye-witnesses are the primary evidence in the absence of substantial forensic investigations as proposed by Caroline Sturdy Colls, the denier argument appears to still have weight. No doubt matters look differently if you start from a position of basic credulity, but I no longer do so.

The arguments bundled up in these sentences have been criticised from a great many directions in the last page or so. The main problem is you've been ignoring other witnesses and other types of sources about cremation at Treblinka, exalting Wiernik above all other evidence, and you have therefore created a strawman.

If your argument was 'there is only witness testimony for the fact of mass cremation at Treblinka' then it fails utterly, because there is clearly a range of other types of evidence for this fact. I presume you realise deep down that your argument did not adequately address the full range of evidence , because it doesn't take much to be confronted by the fact of diggings and investigations in the 1940s, or even photos of the camp site.

The eyewitnesses, at best, are the primary source of information we can access to describe how the cremations unfolded. The results of the cremations were plain to see in 1944-45 and in subsequent decades. No archaeological techniques in use back then or today can ever reconstruct the circumstances of the cremations; this is why the fuss-making over whether the witnesses described the course of the cremations accurately is rather futile. The end-results of the cremations left traces which were examined and recorded in the 1940s, and which can be reexamined in a variety of ways today using non-invasive techniques like GPR, aerial photography, bore probes, and so on.

In terms of classic historical methodology, however, the fact of mass cremation at Treblinka is recorded in contemporary underground reports which have the status of classical documents. Their brevity on the details is irrelevant here, as is the fact that they are Polish underground reports and not "Nazi documents". The reports are contemporary pre-liberation sources. They are documents. The status of historical document, contrary to Faurissonian inanity, is not reserved for Nazi reports.

The convergence between the contemporary reports, pre-liberation and post-liberation eyewitness accounts, including confirmation from the SS perpetrators, plus the 1940s site inspections, including photos, as well as other accounts of visiting the site which include independent confirmation, is already significant enough. It clearly sufficed for the world to accept Treblinka as a site of mass extermination.

But it isn't even a full accounting of the evidence available; in the 1980s/1990s Luftwaffe aerial photographs became available which were of considerable assistance in determining the actual layout of the camp, and which also showed a clearly deforested and desolate area precisely where everyone said the mass graves/pyres had been located. By comparing the 1944 photo with one from 1940 (figure 6), the impact of the intervening years is clear. The photos provide powerful corroboration of the other evidence regarding what transpired at the camp. In a similar fashion, the recent aerial photos of the Sobibor site (see here for a discussion) show grass growing greener on the areas where mass graves were identified than on other parts of the memorial site.

Given all this evidence, the fixation on one eyewitness account is almost comical. Moreover, the critique chapters on mass graves and cremation presented almost all the evidence I have just mentioned, plus further sources, across four highly comparable camp sites.

These are fair points. It would be better if I review say, the relevant bits of Hilberg and Arad's book rather than keep the Wiernik ball in the air indefinitely. The obsession with Wiernik is probably an effect of Denierbud.

I'm not sure that will necessarily get us much farther. Hilberg and Arad wrote in 1985 and 1987 respectively, if one is talking about the commonly-available editions. Neither author discussed several important key issues in as much detail as the critique has, nor did either of these historians address methodological issues such as the analysis of eyewitness testimony as explicitly as we did. Certainly, Arad's chapter on cremation is rather short and does not include all of the eyewitness testimonies nor does he discuss the many other non-eyewitness sources I have mentioned above.

If this is directed at me, my view is he was there at Treblinka I, perhaps elsewhere in the area, based on your statement that this is corroborated.

I have already criticised you for confusing the two Treblinka camps. Wiernik describes what we know as Treblinka II, the extermination camp. This is the camp located on the site visible in the aerial photos linked above. Wiernik describes personnel - both German and Ukrainian - who are documented as having served at that camp. It is beyond reasonable doubt that Wiernik was at Treblinka II, because the scenarios for him writing such an account in Warsaw or after escaping Treblinka I labour camp don't work.

There are also accounts by escaped prisoners from the Treblinka I labour camp, specifically Abraham Broide (account ended up in the Bialystok Judenrat archive) and Israel Cymlich. These accounts don't identify the Treblinka II personnel but are very accurate on Treblinka I personnel (who are also documented), and they contain various inevitable inaccuracies based on the fact that they weren't at Treblinka II. Cymlich is the more scrupulous in identifying the sources of his information, the mark of a good witness. Because Treblinka I was hardly any distance - a few kilometres - from Treblinka II, survivors of Treblinka I are eyewitnesses to cremation - at a distance.

The Germans guarded the secret of the death camp well. At a later stage, all this was to leak out - but meanwhile, smoke was billowing from the pits and the terrible smell of burning human bodies spread through the air. All we knew was that the corpses were completely burned; nothing specific, however, was known about the methods of mass kiling.
People said that the newly arrived victims were told to undress under the pretext of going to take a bath, which actually was a barracks with an electrified floor. Some claimed that this barracks was in fact a gas chamber. After the killing, the floor slid out and the corpses were thrown into pits, which doubled as furnaces.

(Cymlich pp.38-9, account completed 10.6.1943 in hiding at Falenica)

I take the points that there was an original Polish edition and that amongst secular Jews - or Jews acting in a secular capacity - not all are Zionists. All the same, you also refer to a Yiddish edition which presumably was aimed at Jews. More generally, there may well be an ideological component to these narratives in terms of splits (religious/secular, zionist/assimilationist) within Jewry. This would be so even for works composed in extremis.

The Yiddish edition was published in New York in late 1944 by the Bund, just the same as the English edition was. There were numerous Yiddish-language newspapers in New York especially, representing multiple political tendencies and attitudes towards Zionism. On an issue like news of mass murder, however, there was a considerable degree of unanimity, since one did not have to be a Zionist to be enormously concerned about what was happening to relatives who would belong to a specific landsmanshaft; Jews who emigrated from Warsaw would be hugely concerned about what happened to the Jews of Warsaw, ditto for other communities. This was in large part because the Yiddish-reading and speaking Jews of the US were first generation immigrants.

Wiernik himself stayed in Poland until the 1950s, emigrating first to Sweden and only thereafter to Israel. It is known he belonged to the Bund before WWII, which would fit with his profession as joiner and carpenter. The fact that he mentions God four times confirms him only as a non-communist, since Bundists were socialist but not necessarily militant atheists. The Bund won more than 60% of the Jewish vote for the Warsaw municipal council elections before WWII. Essentially what this confirms is Wiernik's account: he was a Jewish craftsman with an essentially proletarian identity, highly typical of a significant proportion of the Warsaw Jewish community, and given his craftsman skills more likely to survive than a trader or merchant.

Graf's Giant with Feet of Clay is a global assessment of Hilberg. Rassinier also wrote a shorter assessment.

This is totally unresponsive to the lines you were ostensibly replying to:

Heck, just assessing the sum total of documents that explicitly mention Belzec, Sobibor, Treblinka, Einsatz/Aktion Reinhardt or which refer to Globocnik's tasking or connect by a bare step or two with the camps would be a start. That's never happened within revisionism and I doubt it ever will.

As a piece of advice, you should assume that the dedicated readers of this thread are quite well aware of which denier wrote what text, and stop bothering trying to promote revisionist texts or videos, since it's a short step from what you've been doing to the spam routine we've seen from other deniers.

BTW, I'm still interested in the 10%/20% contradiction in your last two posts.

I've answered this above. There is no contradiction since the 10% referred to the victims of Kremas II-V, the 20% to the victims of Auschwitz as a whole.

Edited by Loss Leader: 

Edited for Rule 11 in accordance with mod box above.

 

[CaptainHowdy]

Academic supporters of revisionism who have produced articles, videos or some other form of grunt would include:

1. Revilo P Oliver (classics)
2. Robert Countess (theology, primarily, also taught history)
3. Werner Maser (history, flirted with denial in his last works)
4. Hellmut Diwald (history, fellow traveller and right-wing hero)
5. Joachim Hoffmann (history, MGFA, wrote foreword for Grundlagen zur Zeitgeschichte)
6. Walter Beveraggi Allende (economics, solely on JHR masthead, believer in Protocols of Elders of Zion)
7. Kaukab Siddique (English literature, media studies, a Muslim)
8. Alexander Berkis (history, solely on JHR masthead)
9. Hideo Miki (history, solely on JHR masthead)
10. Costas Zaverdinos (mathematics, JHR masthead + an article or two)
11. James Fetzer (philosophy, all-round conspiraloon, recently came out in support of revisionism)
12. Kevin Barrett (African languages and literature, PhD, sometime adjunct, 9/11 Truther, fellow traveller of revisionism)

I am fairly certain I have registered almost all of the book and pamphlet authors; the proportion of non-academics to academics is approaching 6:1.

How is religion relevant here?

 

[FluffyPersian]

Firstly, as you point out, he did have a comparative basis for his revisionism, albeit in imaginative literature, which contradicts your point about not making comparisons in other fields. That some others do not follow his methods indicates his originality. The deflating nature of his interpretation of Rimbaud's education is similar to his deflating achievement in showing the agenda of holocaust narratives.

I wanted to come back to this.

In the academic world, the quality and quantity of citations are an important measure of the quality of a paper or book. Roughly, this is a way of measuring how much and at what level of visibility a paper/book has been discussed or extended.

If someone's work is ignored by his peers in the field, as is the case with Faurisson, that's certainly not a sign of originality. It's a sign that the field finds little value in the work, either because it's low quality, irrelevant, or, yes, unoriginal.

As for your description of Faurisson's "deflating" the established history of the Holocaust as an "achievement," that seems far from clear given everything that's been discussed in this thread.

 

[Nick Terry]

How is religion relevant here?

Because it identifies the actual motivation of the denier (Kaukab Siddique) in question. Siddique is an Islamist first and foremost. For the same reasons I identified political party membership of other deniers and noted on two other occasions a religious background or affiliation. I could also have identified Kevin Barrett correctly as a Muslim, instead I just noted he was a Truther, everyone here pretty much knows he's a Muslim. EtienneSC previously noted that Garaudy was also a convert to Islam.

Islamic Holocaust denial, overlapping heavily with Arab Holocaust denial, is a clear subset of the whole phenomenon.

The discussion, to remind you, was about my point that Holocaust denial is largely the product of non-academics who are politically motivated. Both statements correlate very well: there are academics who are politically motivated as well as non-academics who are politically motivated. There are examples of both who are not overtly affiliated to a political tradition, but they are almost invariably antisemitic, which is a form of sub-politics or metapolitics, and very often leads the author to make essentially contemporary political statements, usually about Israel and Zionism.

That generalisation certainly applies to EtienneSC's hero Robert Faurisson.

 

[Nick Terry]

Very good. Major omission:
[63] Vincent Reynouard.

Wow, Reynouard has been a busy little hack since I last noted his publications. His first pamphlet on Oradour didn't qualify him for the list (as it denied/downplayed a non-Holocaust war crime), even though I was well aware of his role as chief spambot on the internet for revisionist propaganda.

To be fully in keeping with the list, you should have noted that Reynouard is a sedevacantist, i.e. from the same anti-Vatican II traditionalist Catholic tradition as Bishop Williamson (if not necessarily the same micro-denomination).

OK. It is critical thinking, but not necessarily of a high order.

While you're probably not coming back to follow up on this, the statement here is meaningless.

Comparing witness testimonies with each other and with other evidence is the historical method, and necessarily involves critical thinking. The amount of critical thinking will vary; different journalists, writers and historians can be better or worse at it than others, no matter what the subject. So there are as many cases of 'uncritical' source criticism, and many more of 'critical' source criticism.

Claiming this process of critical source evaluation isn't 'necessarily of a high order' vis-a-vis this topic is just another attempt at well-poisoning, but really it's sour grapes at the achievements of conventional historiography.

Since there is no clear revisionist method of source criticism that can be applied to the Holocaust or other subjects than the Holocaust, and which can produce any reliable account of the past, telling us what actually happened, then there is nothing you can propose which would be genuinely different or which would involve truly 'high order' critical thinking.

The main point is using source criticism to tell us what actually happened - this is why questions such as 'was Wiernik actually there' really matter, and why deniers are so routinely asked for evidence to corroborate their rather weak alternative explanations.

 

[CaptainHowdy]

Because it identifies the actual motivation of the denier (Kaukab Siddique) in question. Siddique is an Islamist first and foremost. For the same reasons I identified political party membership of other deniers and noted on two other occasions a religious background or affiliation. I could also have identified Kevin Barrett correctly as a Muslim, instead I just noted he was a Truther, everyone here pretty much knows he's a Muslim. EtienneSC previously noted that Garaudy was also a convert to Islam.

Islamic Holocaust denial, overlapping heavily with Arab Holocaust denial, is a clear subset of the whole phenomenon.

The discussion, to remind you, was about my point that Holocaust denial is largely the product of non-academics who are politically motivated. Both statements correlate very well: there are academics who are politically motivated as well as non-academics who are politically motivated. There are examples of both who are not overtly affiliated to a political tradition, but they are almost invariably antisemitic, which is a form of sub-politics or metapolitics, and very often leads the author to make essentially contemporary political statements, usually about Israel and Zionism.

That generalisation certainly applies to EtienneSC's hero Robert Faurisson.

My gut reaction is that you are correct. However I cannot take the position that being a follower of Islam interjects a political motivation into the writings of a non-professional historian Holocaust denier without taking the position that being Jewish interjects a similar political motivation into the writings of a non-professional historian writing about the Holocaust. That is not a position I am prepared to take at this time.

 

[Nick Terry]

My gut reaction is that you are correct. However I cannot take the position that being a follower of Islam interjects a political motivation into the writings of a non-professional historian Holocaust denier without taking the position that being Jewish interjects a similar political motivation into the writings of a non-professional historian writing about the Holocaust. That is not a position I am prepared to take at this time.

Siddique isn't just an Islamic activist, he is an anti-Zionist. His anti-Zionism has led him to fall down the rabbit hole and embrace lunacy, i.e. Holocaust denial. The causal chain goes Islam > anti-Zionism > Holocaust denial.

Holocaust denial is a minority belief, i.e. the majority of anti-Zionists (if that is their primary identity) don't believe it, and probably the majority of Islamists don't believe it or care about it, never mind the majority of Muslims. But we can find little clusters of people who have been led to embrace denial because of their political identities. Just as we can find correlations between belief in 9/11 conspiracy theories among certain far left and far right groups, as well as among certain Islamists.

Siddique edits an online magazine dedicated to Islamic issues called New Trends. He written a few articles for that magazine spouting denier nonsense, and he has also made some YouTube videos on the subject. He is an Islamic activist and he is a Holocaust denier. His Holocaust denial has also been couched explicitly in contemporary Islamic terms. Eg here (with more examples and discussion)

"For Muslims, it's important that they listen to views opposed to those of the victors of the Second World War. The emergence of Israel as a terrorist entity implanted by force of arms in the heartland of Islam is directly connected to the Jewish version of WWII. The attack on Darfur is coming out of the Jewish Holocaust Museum."

Note that Siddique doesn't just object to USHMM for promoting the Holocaust, he objects to USHMM because they got heavily behind the campaign to publicise Darfur. I.e. he sees USHMM as smearing Muslims, rather than putting the spotlight on human rights violations and atrocities.

The linked exchange is well worth reading, as it provides ample insight into the mind (if it can be called that) of Kaukab Siddique, associate professor of English and wackjob.


Your attempt to create a false equivalence with the opinions of Jews fails rather drastically, because you aren't comparing like with like. To find the Jewish equivalent of Siddique, you'd probably need to look at people who have hung around on the fringes of the Jewish Defense League. Because Siddique isn't really representative of mainstream Islam.

Most Islamists don't really care about the Holocaust and just ignore it. They might even prefer to use Nazi analogies every time Israel retaliates against Hamas rocket attacks and kills a Palestinian civilian. Most mainstream Islamic leaders probably utter a lot of doubletalk and waffle when pressed on whether they might join in an ecumenical celebration of Holocaust Memorial Day in Britain, but they don't start touting David Irving, Fred Leuchter or Germar Rudolf. Ahmadinejad, however, touted the deniers rather publicly, while also threatening Israel rhetorically. Siddique is like Ahmadinejad, only he's a tenured radical at an American university.

You probably could if you dug deep enough find a Jewish associate professor of some humanities subject with a track record of pro-Israel activism spouting rubbish about the Holocaust. And their pro-Israel track record would make what they say politically motivated, because their primary identity would be as political activists.

The same would not apply to a rabbi who happened to mention the Holocaust in a religious service, or to a local Jewish community leader making a speech on a Holocaust Memorial Day which was all fluffy and ecumenical. If the Jewish community leader was a major supporter of AIPAC and banged on about another Holocaust being threatened because of Iranian nuclear weapons program, then duh, the invocation of the Holocaust would be politically motivated. Just as it was when Menachem Begin resorted to Holocaust comparisons in 1982, and just as it was when Netanyahu responded to Ahmadinejad's denial of the Holocaust by piling on the Holocaust rhetoric himself.



The absolute most that one can deduce from someone's ethnic identity is that it may cause them to put a nationalist spin on things. The best way to illustrate this is comparing with Ukrainian attitudes to the Holodomor. That is now nationally enshrined as a major object of commemoration in post-Soviet, post-Orange Revolution Ukraine. The Holodomor is considered to be an act of Soviet (i.e: Russian) genocide against the Ukrainian people. However, Russians do not agree. Nor do many historians outside of Ukraine. Nor do quite a few Ukrainians, including a number of Ukrainian-origin historians, especially in North America. Some are especially critical of the nationalist myth-making, just as there are and have been mainstream Jewish critics of the myth-making that comes along with some forms of Holocaust commemoration (for example, Peter Novick).

The situation with the Holocaust is somewhat different to the situation with the Holodomor. The Germans - as a state, society, on the regional, local and personal level, in the media, in culture and in their scholarship - collectively agree with the Jews that yes, they committed genocide against the Jews back in the 1940s. And so both societies commemorate and remember the Holocaust, intensively.

Everyone else sane agrees with both of these ethnicities. However, everyone can recognise that some Jews inside Israel as well as outside Israel have a particularist spin on the Holocaust, while others do not. There is a Jewish or Israeli nationalist take on the Holocaust in the same way that there is an Irish nationalist take on the Potato Famine. In both cases, Jews and the Irish have also produced some coldly objective scholarship questioning earlier nationalist myths.

We're discussing history, for God's sake. There isn't any aspect of history that isn't subject to some form of nationalist mythologising or influenced by national-ethnic spin. But all of that can be corrected for, because there are always people of a different background looking at the same stuff.

Political or nationalist bias can and does lead to pseudo-history or pseudo-archaeology, or to its acceptance. Indian nationalists argue vehemently against the archaeological record to claim that Hindus always lived in the subcontinent. A Russian mathematician, Fomenko, erased the Middle Ages to reorder history to suit his nationalist requirements. Greeks have been known to play up rather shabby tombs as "pyramids" and claim that they are the ones who invented pyramids, not the Egyptians. Black nationalists and Martin Bernal similarly claim that ancient Egypt was essentially a black Nubian society and thus, they gave birth to civilisation. A nutty Royal Navy officer wrote a book claiming that China discovered the New World before anyone else, and his nonsense had some extra appeal in China.

Holocaust denial is pseudo-history. That is a very different beast to the mythologisation of actual history.

 

[Sebastianus]

The arguments bundled up in these sentences have been criticised from a great many directions in the last page or so. The main problem is you've been ignoring other witnesses and other types of sources about cremation at Treblinka, exalting Wiernik above all other evidence, and you have therefore created a strawman.

Did you watch the video which EtienneSC linked, Nick? You will find that it discusses Rajchman on equal footing with Wiernik. The complaint of one of HDOT's myth/fact sheets against denierbud's One Third of the Holocaust was that it discussed Wiernik but ignored Rajchman, the other direct witness to cremations. This criticism is not applicable to the video which EtienneSC linked.

There are also accounts by escaped prisoners from the Treblinka I labour camp, specifically Abraham Broide (account ended up in the Bialystok Judenrat archive) and Israel Cymlich. [...] Because Treblinka I was hardly any distance - a few kilometres - from Treblinka II, survivors of Treblinka I are eyewitnesses to cremation - at a distance.

As the revisionist position is not that there were no cremations at Treblinka, but that there were far fewer than is generally claimed, these indirect witnesses to cremation, even if they are truthful, are compatible with either the traditionalist or the revisionist position.

As a piece of advice, you should assume that the dedicated readers of this thread are quite well aware of which denier wrote what text, and stop bothering trying to promote revisionist texts or videos, since it's a short step from what you've been doing to the spam routine we've seen from other deniers.

How is this complaint about "spamming" compatible with the fact that you, Nick, link to your writing in your signature, or with the fact that you frequently link to your blog? These behaviors could equally be described as spamming.

 

[Nick Terry]

Did you watch the video which EtienneSC linked, Nick? You will find that it discusses Rajchman on equal footing with Wiernik. The complaint of one of HDOT's myth/fact sheets against denierbud's One Third of the Holocaust was that it discussed Wiernik but ignored Rajchman, the other direct witness to cremations. This criticism is not applicable to the video which EtienneSC linked.

You're replying to a criticism I made of EtienneSC for not discussing more than Wiernik. If he linked to a video that discussed more than Wiernik, this doesn't mean HE discussed more than Wiernik, any more than if a student wrote an essay and wittered on about one fact based on a particular citation, they then 'discussed' all the other facts in the cited work.

The whole point of the argument on this issue was how many sources does one need to take into consideration on a particular topic, in this case cremation at Treblinka. There are evidently more sources than just one witness, and those sources plus other sources contain more information than just discussing cremation at Treblinka.

And no, I didn't watch the video because I don't 'do' YouTube-style videos.

As the revisionist position is not that there were no cremations at Treblinka, but that there were far fewer than is generally claimed, these indirect witnesses to cremation, even if they are truthful, are compatible with either the traditionalist or the revisionist position.

No, they're not compatible with a revisionist position, because indirect witnesses also report trainloads of people entering, but not leaving. This comes back to the actually-read-the-whole-source and actually-read-more-than-one-source points I mentioned above.

How is this complaint about "spamming" compatible with the fact that you, Nick, link to your writing in your signature, or with the fact that you frequently link to your blog? These behaviors could equally be described as spamming.

Other deniers have linked to denier websites and videos in their signatures, and I doubt you will find anyone really complaining about that. My sig links to a resource just as other people's sigs sometimes do.

What has been complained about, and not just by me, is when a denier spams specific links which seem 'relevant', largely without commentary, and thinks that magically waves a wand and vanishes some issue under discussion. Usually, the spam-link is not actually very relevant and doesn't provide an adequate response to the point under discussion. There are 1 or 2 denier members of this forum who have made a habit of this.

At the other end of the spectrum there are proper citations supporting an argument. That is why I cite certain anti-denial blogs or other web pages, but on the whole I try to put things in my words, as can be seen from the bulk of this thread.

EtienneSC was beginning to degenerate from a citation style to a spam routine. This applies especially to his linking of videos, which are intellectually beneath contempt and not worthy of consideration. Thus up-thread on this page we find him ending a post with a link to the video "Auschwitz: the surprising hidden truth".

Then, he linked to Mattogno and Graf's Treblinka, in the process of making an argument. Wahrheitseeker responded in #6253 without objecting to this link/citation, I likewise responded in #6256 without complaining.

My comment was prompted because EtienneSC ostensibly replied to a point I was making with a handwavey reference to a denier work. I had written, and I was quoted by EtienneSC as saying the following remark:

Heck, just assessing the sum total of documents that explicitly mention Belzec, Sobibor, Treblinka, Einsatz/Aktion Reinhardt or which refer to Globocnik's tasking or connect by a bare step or two with the camps would be a start. That's never happened within revisionism and I doubt it ever will.

to which EtienneSC replied

Graf's Giant with Feet of Clay is a global assessment of Hilberg. Rassinier also wrote a shorter assessment.

This was a complete non-sequitur, and so I pointed out that this remark was totally unresponsive to what I had just written.

It was unresponsive because I wasn't discussing Hilberg at that momeent; I was discussing the sum total of documents referring to the Reinhard camps, Aktion Reinhard and Globocnik, and noting that revisionism hasn't ever offered a comprehensive assessment of all of these contemporary Nazi documents.

Graf's Giant with Feet of Clay certainly doesn't offer any such assessment. EtienneSC should know this, if he has actually read the book in question, and compared with the documents which are routinely discussed in these debates, or which are routinely cited by relevant historians like Arad, or which were discussed in the HC critique.

Graf in fact alleges at several points in his body of work, in earlier writings as well as in 'Giant with Feet of Clay' there are no documents of any kind whatsoever ('keinerlei deutsche Dokumente der Kriegszeit gibt', p.72 of German edition of Giant) surviving for Belzec, Sobibor, Treblinka or Chelmno, which is what we skeptics call a flat-out lie.

In this context, EtienneSC's non-sequitur about Graf's work on Hilberg basically amounted to pointless spamming.

 

[Sebastianus]

I believe you are using the above video, by holocaust deniers, to state that burning bodies at Treblinka was impossible. Is that correct? How do you account for the successful cremation of cows using that method.

This is not a correct assessment of the argument given in the video in question. Just to mention the most obvious point, the video pointed to the fact that the witnesses claim that 2000-3000 bodies were burned at once on one pyre 30 meters long, 1.5 meters wide, and 50 of 70 centimeters off the ground. The video states that this would mean a stack of 20-30 layers of bodies, which it argues could not be cremated via the method described, or anything remotely resembling it.

Thus the attempted refutation fails.

 

[Sebastianus]

I didn't watch the video because I don't 'do' YouTube-style videos.

What is the definition of "YouTube-style video"? Are all videos posted on youtube YouTube-style videos, orthodox holocaust documentaries included? If you don't watch a video, how can you tell whether it is a YouTube-style video?

No, they're not compatible with a revisionist position, because indirect witnesses also report trainloads of people entering, but not leaving. This comes back to the actually-read-the-whole-source and actually-read-more-than-one-source points I mentioned above.

You spoke of witnesses from Treblinka I. Such witnesses could not be direct witnesses to trainloads of people entering, but never leaving, Treblinka II. Therefore as far as that is concerned they are at most witnesses to a rumor, not witnesses to an event. But the matter at hand was their witnessing of cremations, and on that point there is no question that their statements are compatible with either the orthodox or the revisionist position.

videos [...] are intellectually beneath contempt and not worthy of consideration. Thus up-thread on this page we find him ending a post with a link to the video "Auschwitz: the surprising hidden truth".

If you don't watch "YouTube style" videos, how can you determine whether they are worthy of consideration or not? Are you making the a priori assertion that all video content is beneath contempt? How would you defend this claim?

In the end, given that holocaust controversies has spent considerable time responding to the video One Third of the Holocaust, your assertion of video worthlessness rings hollow. In the work which you link in your signature you state that

Despite Graf’s challenges to us and despite the limited responses from Mattogno and Kues to previous criticisms, faced with the scale of critique, MGK might feel the sudden urge to think up excuses in order to avoid responding to us. Mattogno had earlier chastised Holocaust Controversies as being “held in no account by Holocaust historians” and its writers “have published nothing in printed form.” Such an excuse came about after Mattogno had already responded to some of our blog posts, and so seems rather desperate.

The position you took in this passage is that if someone has responded to any work by a given author or group of authors, he thenceforth has no right to dismiss any work of the same author(s). Applying the same principle to the holocaust controversies group, we see that since holocaust controversies has responded to One Third of the Holocaust, they are therefore required to respond to any video by the same author, including Auschwitz: the surprising hidden truth.

You are therefore hoist by your own petard.

I was discussing the sum total of documents referring to the Reinhard camps, Aktion Reinhard and Globocnik, and noting that revisionism hasn't ever offered a comprehensive assessment of all of these contemporary Nazi documents.
.

Which documents do you have in mind, precisely? The ones you mentioned in your white paper as "Globocnik’s letter of October 1 and the Lublin meeting of October 17", or others?

Graf in fact alleges at several points in his body of work, in earlier writings as well as in 'Giant with Feet of Clay' there are no documents of any kind whatsoever ('keinerlei deutsche Dokumente der Kriegszeit gibt', p.72 of German edition of Giant) surviving for Belzec, Sobibor, Treblinka or Chelmno, which is what we skeptics call a flat-out lie.
.

By "we skeptics" I suppose you mean yourself. Let's see just how skeptical you are being. First, your reference is wrong; the quote is from page 92. Second, Graf mentions a document about Belzec on the very same page (pages 91-92, actually). Therefore your reading of the quotation cannot be correct. How can Graf be telling a flat-out lie when he contradicts that lie on the very same page? If you checked the English translation, you would have found what I believe is the correct reading: "no wartime German documents have survived from these three camps." (p. 72 of the English edition). That is, Graf is distinguishing between documents from the camp and documents that are merely about the camp. Whether it is correct that no documents from these camps survive does depend on the precise definition of "from" which you are using, but it is certainly true that there are no camp archives from the Reinhard(t) camps in the sense that there are camp archives from Auschwitz or Majdanek.

Plainly Nick Terry, speaking on behalf of "we skeptics", was not being very skeptical - or very perceptive.

 

[Matthew Ellard]

This is not a correct assessment of the argument given in the video in question.

The video offers as a "debunking" a video of a bonfire, with no metal rails, and with no gap underneath for air. The footage was stolen from an archaeological video about dark ages solo burials. Now compare this video to the cremation method used at Treblinka.

witnesses claim that 2000-3000 bodies were burned at once on one pyre 30 meters long, 1.5 meters wide, and 50 of 70 centimeters off the ground. The video states that this would mean a stack of 20-30 layers of bodies, which it argues could not be cremated via the method described, or anything remotely resembling it.

There is no comparison. Did you actually bother to look at the video?

 

[Loss Leader]

What is the definition of "YouTube-style video"? Are all videos posted on youtube YouTube-style videos, orthodox holocaust documentaries included? If you don't watch a video, how can you tell whether it is a YouTube-style video?

I would guess that all videos, except for primary sources, would be unappealing to the professional historian. At most, they might point the historian to a primary source. Since videos are generally someone else's conclusion, they're probably not very interesting except as evidence of that person's conclusion.


c.f. Shoah Project videos of Holocaust survivors (which are primary if not contemporaneous) and the video of Martin Luther King's "I Have A Dream" speech (which is primary and contemporaneous).

 

[Sebastianus]

Matthew Ellard: your previous position was, as I understand it, that the argument of the video was that cremation was impossible under all circumstances when the height of the animals off the ground was some given value. You suggested that the cremations that took place during the UK foot and mouth epidemic of 2001 refute this claim. I pointed out that this was not the argument of the video; rather the emphasis was on the number of bodies allegedly cremated on a 30 meter long, 1.5 meter wide pyre.

You now appear to be making a different argument:

The video offers as a "debunking" a video of a bonfire, with no metal rails, and with no gap underneath for air. The footage was stolen from an archaeological video about dark ages solo burials. Now compare this video to the cremation method used at Treblinka.

This argument has no relation to your previous argument. If I understand you correctly, you are arguing that the Treblinka cremations succeeded to an extent impossible in the first two cremation experiments shown in the video for the following reasons:

1. mass cremation is easier than individual cremation
2. burning bodies on rails is more efficient than burning them on a pyre
3. cremation is more efficient with a trench underneath for air circulation, and such a trench was present at Treblinka

Is this a correct summary of your current argument?