General Holocaust Denial Discussion Part II

[Loss Leader]

You may find another relevant example of false confession in the case of the Norfolk four, in which four US Navy officers falsely confessed to a rape and murder.

So, your response to my argument that you're bringing up cases completely unlike the Holocaust is to bring up yet another case completely unlike the Holocaust.

If false confessions can happen in ordinary police interrogations, how then can you defend the claim that false confessions could not happen in postwar trials?

And shift the topic away from cremations during the Holocaust and away from the situations in which statements by Nazis were made so that you can debate the worth of criminal confessions generally.

 

[Sebastianus]

I think you need to read evidence more slowly.

Judge Lukaszkiewicz found no "full" mass graves. He found the empty mass burial pits from which the bodies were removed. This is why you are trying so hard to argue that the bodies couldn't be cremated, remember?

Except, Matthew, that you were defending the position that the graves were not emptied, using the statements of Oscar Strawczynski - a position that is contradicted by Judge Lukaszkiewicz's findings. It seems that you have now changed your mind, and have conceded that the graves were emptied, and that I was correct in affirming that the Treblinka witnesses assert that the graves were emptied. That concludes our little discussion, and we can get back to the subject of cremation.

So, tell me, Matthew: If 1200 sheep or 1600 pigs can be cremated in 9-10 days on a pyre 200 meters long with fuel consisting of 1,000 railway ties, 8 tons of kindling, 400 wooden pallets, 4 tons of straw, 200 tons of coal, and 1,000 liters of diesel fuel, how many Jews can be cremated overnight on a pyre 30 meters long with fuel consisting of perhaps one ton of dry wood and perhaps as much gasoline as can be soaked into the wood?

 

[Sebastianus]

So, your response to my argument that you're bringing up cases completely unlike the Holocaust is to bring up yet another case completely unlike the Holocaust.

Given that the subject being discussed was whether false confessions are possible, it was a highly relevant example.

And shift the topic away from cremations during the Holocaust and away from the situations in which statements by Nazis were made so that you can debate the worth of criminal confessions generally.

Shift the topic away from cremations? Certainly not. The subject of confessions was brought up my Matthew Ellard; I simply responded to him.

I am very happy to talk about cremation. Let's recall what the USDA had to say:

According to a USDA veterinarian who helped during the U.K. outbreak, a 200-meter funeral pyre was used to incinerate 400 cows or 1,200 sheep or 1,600 pigs. Such a pyre required 1,000 railway ties, 8 tons of kindling, 400 wooden pallets, 4 tons of straw, 200 tons of coal, and 1,000 liters of diesel fuel.
[...]
According to a USDA veterinarian, in the United Kingdom the pyres generally burned for about 9 to 10 days before all of the carcasses were incinerated.

Now, that says the pyres generally burned for about 9 to 10 days before all of the carcasses were incinerated. In other words, the goal was to incinerate all the bodies, and this took 9-10 days and 1,000 railway ties, 8 tons of kindling, 400 wooden pallets, 4 tons of straw, 200 tons of coal, and 1,000 liters of diesel fuel.

Now, why should it have been possible to cremate bodies at Treblinka with radically better performance than this?

and away from the situations in which statements by Nazis were made so that you can debate the worth of criminal confessions generally.

Help me out here. Are you claiming that the conditions under which Germans confessed to gassing were less inclined to produce false confessions than the conditions of ordinary police interrogations?

 

[Nick Terry]

Throughout history, many women have confessed to being witches. Do you believe in witchcraft?

Saying that women have confessed to being witches 'throughout' history would be thoroughly misleading, since witchcraft hasn't been a criminal offence for better than 200 years in western societies.

 

[Nick Terry]

Help me out here. Are you claiming that the conditions under which Germans confessed to gassing were less inclined to produce false confessions than the conditions of ordinary police interrogations?

Loss Leader was simply commenting on the continuation of the apples and oranges comparisons.

Ordinary police interrogations are directed at individuals accused of committing crimes. False confessions arise when there are known crimes and a suspect who is railroaded or who for psychological reasons decides to confess falsely. Studies show that very few false confessions are to violent crimes.

Gassing was an organised process involving paramilitary units. Investigators interrogated members of known paramilitary units, such as KL Auschwitz or SS-Sonderkommando Treblinka, either while they were prisoners of war or in peacetime after the members had been returned to civilian life.

Allied interrogators found that German POWs were incredibly willing to volunteer information, even members of the SS, and clearly there was no culture of 'resistance to interrogation', therefore no need to resort to excessive coercion as might be found when combating, say, Al Qaeda terrorists.

Since many members of the paramilitary units were interrogated over the course of investigations, or gave voluntary statements, then investigators could compare and contrast statements, which made it possible to overcome any tendency towards 'omerta' among the members of these units.

As false confessions stereotypically involve individuals or very small groups who have been put through the wringer, then the probability of false confessions decreases the more witnesses there are, in an exponential curve.

Moreover, as false confessions become known because statements are withdrawn, retracted or appealed, the probability of false confessions remaining hidden is also exponentially unlikely the more statements there are.

In the case of Aktion Reinhard, the sum total of statements by German members of the SS, Police, Reichsbahn, civil administration and Wehrmacht who knew something of the purpose of the three extermination camps of Belzec, Sobibor and Treblinka runs into the many hundreds.

This includes among other groups a significant number of veterans of III./SS-und-Polizeiregiment 22, who escorted victims to Treblinka in 1943; local officials in the administrations of counties such as Rawa Ruska which were near to Belzec; and Wehrmacht garrison troops in Chelm near Sobibor, just to give some examples.

38 SS men who served in Belzec, Sobibor and Treblinka, many of whom served in several camps, testified after the war, over a period of 40 or so years. A number of these men, including Franz Stangl, Kurt Franz and Franz Suchomel, gave eyewitness accounts in non-legal situations.

The number of SS men who served at Auschwitz-Birkenau testifying to gassing runs to the many hundreds, spread over a sixty year period between 1945 and at least 2005. As with the Reinhard camps, a number of Auschwitz SS officers and men gave eyewitness testimony in non-legal situations, eg Oswald Kaduk, Josef Klehr, Josef Erber, Klaus Dylewski, Hans Muench and Oskar Groening.

Other SS members of the KZ staffs likewise testified to gassing at Stutthof, Sachsenhausen, Ravensbrueck, Neuengamme, Mauthausen-Gusen.

Several dozen SS and Policemen similarly testified to gassing at Chelmno. One can then add more than 30 separate investigations into units of the RSHA that employed gas vans, involving hundreds more statements. For example, dozens of surviving members of the Order Police company attached to Einsatzgruppe D were interviewed in West Germany and described actions involving gas vans in Southern Russia and the Caucasus.

Another 100-200 men and women employed in the six T4 institutes or in T4 headquarters also testified to gassing. These were true civilian agencies without a paramilitary quality, but the statements were once again given over a period of many decades and thus not all given to one state in one time-frame.

Since the use of gas by the various units and agencies mentioned is documented in a great many cases (eg for the Einsatzgruppen especially C and D, for Chelmno, for BdS Belgrad, for Auschwitz and for the euthanasia program), then the probability of false confessions shrinks even further.

It is already vanishingly low, since important factors such as the number of statements, time-span over which statements are given, as well as the multiplicity of investigating agencies as well as states, not to mention the lack of retractions, all preclude the possibility of a typical false confession to an individually-committed crime.

Indeed, the very notion of false confession is intellectually useless for denialists, because it is a phenomenon encountered where real crimes are pinned to the wrong people by police, or are claimed for their own by attention-seekers with psychological disturbances.

 

[A'isha]

What precisely is the argument you are suggesting? If it is that there is meticulous documentation for the organized state-run gassing and cremation of some 800,000 Jews at Treblinka, then you are mistaken.

A) The Holocaust is far more than just Treblinka, and B) "scant" does not mean "nonexistent". The Nazis own documentation of their crimes was used quite extensively in war crimes trials.

If on the other hand you were suggesting that Treblinka guards gave meticulously detailed confessions, and that unlike witchcraft confessions such detailed confessions cannot be false, then you are again wrong. Witchcraft confessions were often highly specific; you can see discussion of such an example here.

The falsity of witch confessions says nothing whatsoever about the confessions of anyone involved in the Holocaust, because witchcraft and witches bear no resemblance and are not in any way comparable to the Holocaust and its perpetrators.

Are you suggesting that the Jewish Telegraphic Agency was engaged in false reporting?

No, I'm saying that a brief news item which doesn't even quote Rahm directly is not exactly the best source for the specific charges against him, the evidence presented by the prosecution, or what he did and did not confess to.

If I had access to the archives of the Peoples Court in Litmerice (assuming they exist) then I might be able to offer further details, but I do not.

They exist.

You can also find scans of documentation relating to Theresienstadt and Rahm's trial here.

 

[Nick Terry]

The fact that the situations are not identical does not imply that no inference can be drawn between them. The following two arguments connect the experiment to the Treblinka cremations.

1. A higher stack of a denser fuel was put under a single carcass in the experiment than was put under a stack of 20-30 carcasses at Treblinka, but the cremation was still unsuccessful. A stack of 20-30 carcasses is harder to burn than a single carcass is, therefore the Treblinka cremation method could not work.

2. One reason the initial attempt at cremation did not work is that the fuel burned too fast - the pyre was largely burned down in 52 minutes, leaving the pig still intact. This is too fast for successful open-air cremation.

Bushes, branches, twigs, and brushwood burn faster than does the firewood used in the initial attempt at cremation (because they consist of smaller pieces - see the pictures). Adding liquid fuels would only make them burn faster. Therefore the fuel in the Treblinka cremations (consisting as it did of bushes, branches, twigs, and brushwood) would have burned down faster than did the fuel in the experiment. Therefore the Treblinka cremations would not have worked.

Sorry Nick, but the fact that a story was told several times or in several variants does not change a technical analysis of that story. No matter how many witnesses tell me that the cow jumped over the moon, cows cannot jump over the moon. If some witnesses told me that the elephant jumped over the moon, and that the mouse jumped over the moon, could I prove that the cow jumped over the moon by arguing that if mice and elephants can do it, why not a cow? Of course not. It is impossible for a cow to jump over the moon for technical reasons. Technical arguments must be approached via a technical analysis, not mere enumeration of stories.



If it makes you happier to specify that, for instance, Rajchman specified a 50 cm thick layer of bushes and branches, that's fine with me. This has no impact on my argument. Keep in mind, though, that a 50 cm tall bush is not a very large bush.

You specify that Treblinka had "pit furnaces". Do you mean pits excavated below ground level, or are you indicating that the cremating structure had four walls built above ground level, thus forming a pit? As you make reference to Muehlenkamp I will assume the former for the moment. How do you defend the claim that the Treblinka cremating structures has a pit excavated below ground level? Arad, for example, does not mention any pit. Neither does Wiernik, neither does Rajchman. Do you know of any witness statement supporting your claim of "pit furnaces" other than perhaps the testimony of Pavel Leleko?

Indeed. I'm very happy you brought this up, and am eager to talk about it some more - but after I reach 15 posts and become able to make external links. For the moment I'll just ask one question. Do you know how many cremation sites were used in the UK FMD epidemic?

You responded to a post that referred to hundreds of thousands of charred bodies. The quantity of human remains in the pictures of the site when the Soviets arrived is minuscule next to the alleged extermination.

As for adipocere, it almost certainly comes not from cremation remains, but from uncremated corpses. But at Treblinka the witnesses tell us that all of the corpses were cremated. Furthermore they tell us that the cremation remains could be crushed into the finest dust, "like cigarette ash". This contradicts the idea of incomplete cremation at Treblinka.

Indeed, and that's what I responded to. The post you are responding to comes from a response to Wahrheitseeker's reference to Wiernik's description of the first method of body disposal at Treblinka, which allegedly consisted of merely soaking corpses in gasoline. According to Wiernik and Wahrheitseeker, this method was successful for the women but not for the men.



Not quite. Wiernik reports that it was successful for the women, but not for the men.
Disputing the idea that this is possible is what the posts you are responding to were about.



I'm glad you said that. So is it correct to say that a given collection of wood burns faster when soaked with gasoline than when not soaked with gasoline?



The problem with arguing that body fat made a substantial contribution is that the jews in question are said to have been very lean. This may make a sizable difference in open air incineration. Indeed, I recall reading about two attempts at cremation with either napalm or gelled diesel. The one that tried to cremate a cow was a success, but the one that tried to cremate bison was a failure, This difference was possibly attributable to the difference in the levels of fat.

In any event, even with fat carcasses, I have never seen a properly documented case of mass carcass incineration that was self-sustaining in any sense. Can you offer any such example?

You mention the necessity of stoking, and this is indeed well attested in the literature on carcass incineration. But it is not well attested in the witness accounts of Treblinka. Can you give a testimony to the stoking of the Treblinka pyres? or to the addition of further fuel?

It's also unclear how the pyres could have been stoked. It would require heavy machinery, and the excavators allegedly present would not have been suitable (as their buckets hung from cables and therefore could not have been used for controlled pushing). In fact, it's worse than this: the Treblinka cremations are said to have taken place with all bodies above the rails and all the fuel below them, but this design pretty much precludes effective stoking altogether.

Treblinka, Treblinka, Treblinka. Sorry, not playing.

I've done the merry-go-round with countless previous deniers on this. Evidence for mass murder at the extermination camps cannot be reduced to cremation alone; cremation should not be discussed in isolation one camp at a time.

The phenomena being discussed are a clear set of at least five major sites. If there was extermination at Chelmno and Auschwitz, then there was extermination at Belzec, Sobibor and Treblinka. If there was extermination at Belzec and Sobibor, then there was extermination at Treblinka.

The historical evidence (documentary and eyewitness) simply doesn't allow for Treblinka to be an exception to the common pattern of either Aktion Reinhard or the Nazi Final Solution.

If you think the sums and evidence and testimonies don't add up for Treblinka, then you should consider the following possibilities:

• you haven't actually engaged with all of the relevant evidence (which you demonstrably have not)
• you haven't modelled the situation correctly (in this case ignoring the effects of selections for Treblinka I and the Sonderkommandos, train-jumpers, the 'Lazarett', the chaos of the summer of 1942 which left thousands of bodies in the camp forecourt, not to mention unexhumed corpses left at the bottom of graves)
• you seemingly haven't considered the possibility, which is a basic assumption for historical disciplines, that the information which has come down to us is incomplete on issues you'd like to know more about.
• you haven't engaged in proper comparison, even though this is the standard approach to understanding phenomena

For the life of me, I simply do not get why you or any other denier think that the non-revisionists will be convinced by arguments that revolve exclusively around the manner in which cremation took place at one extermination camp.

None of us here are stupid; we all know that if we accepted your argument and reasoning, then something else happened to some unspecified proportion of the Treblinka death toll (that cannot be accounted for by estimates of train-jumpers, selections for Treblinka I or the Sonderkommandos, the 'Lazarett', bodies strewn over the forecourt in summer 1942, or unexhumed corpses at the bottom of mass graves), not the whole sum total. That's all.

Since however we all know there is no evidence of anything else happening to that unspecified fraction of the Treblinka death toll, then the reasoning and the argument hits a brick wall.

The argument is really not helped by the fact that you are unable to specify the proportion of the Treblinka death toll which you think was impossible to cremate. As mentioned already, the Nazis had no problems cremating 7,000 corpses over a period of a few days in Dresden during 1945, using similar techniques (and also personnel who had served at Treblinka: Trawnikis retreating into Germany with SS-Bataillon Streibel).

Similarly, if we accepted your argument and reasoning then the claims made about Treblinka would not affect the other camps, unless you can prove that mass cremation was impossible in all the other cases, or above a certain threshold. Which once again presents us with the problem of explaining why Treblinka would be different to Belzec, Sobibor, Chelmno or Auschwitz. Since there is no evidence that Treblinka was fundamentally different, again, brick wall time.

The rest is just denier ghoulishness.

 

[Matthew Ellard]

Except, Matthew, that you were defending the position that the graves were not emptied, using the statements of Oscar Strawczynski - a position that is contradicted by Judge Lukaszkiewicz's findings.

Try actually reading what Judge Lukaszkiewicz wrote next time instead of making stuff up.

Lukaszkiewicz / "...its walls give recognizable evidence of the presence of a large quantity of ashes as well as human remains"

Lukaszkiewicz /"Numerous human remains were found by these excavations, partially still in a state of decomposition".

Lukaszkiewicz /...one finds countless human bones, often still covered with tissue remains, which are in a condition of decomposition"

 

[Sebastianus]

Let's recall what is at stake in this discussion of false confessions. The question is whether confessions prove, for instance, that some 800,000 Jews were gassed and then cremated at Treblinka. Examining the phenomenon of false confession allows us to understand why that question has to be answered in the negative. It does not prove that extermination by gassing did not take place, but merely raises doubt over whether the confession evidence can be regarded as conclusive.

This is a comparative study. Of course in comparative study not all things are identical, but they don't need to be for the exercise to be intellectually useful.

Studies show that very few false confessions are to violent crimes.

You are referring to the Icelandic study that Jason Myers tried to make hay out of in your white paper, I suppose. It gives you nothing. Not only are the circumstances wildly different, making the figures inapplicable, but the key number - only 7% of false confessions are to violent crimes - doesn't really support your case, because most crimes are non-violent crimes, so this is no surprise. You have committed the statistical fallacy of ignoring the base rate.

Allied interrogators found that German POWs were incredibly willing to volunteer information, even members of the SS, and clearly there was no culture of 'resistance to interrogation', therefore no need to resort to excessive coercion as might be found when combating, say, Al Qaeda terrorists.

Except that we know that in some cases torture was employed, e.g. on Rudolf Hoess. Other measures, such as deprivation of sleep, or simply prolonged imprisonment, sometimes in isolation. These are precisely the measures that break people down and promote false confessions.

We also know of threats - e.g. in the following exchange in the interrogation of Otto Moll:

Q: You know you are as good as a dead man right now?

A: I know that but I am innocent.

Q: You say you are innocent. The chances you have for living are just about as long as your willingness to talk.

Given that threats of this nature sufficed to allow a modest sized police department to obtain in short order four false confessions to rape and murder from US Navy sailors, it's no surprise that they could elicit far more false confessions in the postwar environment, when there was far more institutional support for vilifying the defeated Germans than there ever was for convicting members of the navy of rape and murder.

As false confessions stereotypically involve individuals or very small groups who have been put through the wringer, then the probability of false confessions decreases the more witnesses there are, in an exponential curve.

Never took a statistics class, did you Nick? You are falsely assuming that these events are independent. Even in ordinary criminal cases, we know that a false confession corrupts other evidence. Once someone has confessed, the authorities are able to leverage that confession to obtain more confessions, as well as other forms of evidence. In this connection, Saul Kassin has observed that in cases with even one false confession, what looks like a mountain of evidence often develops, but it's a mountain of evidence that's dependent on the confession itself. In short, it's not a mountain of evidence, but a house of cards.

Incidentally, your "exponential curve" argument also "proves" that witchcraft was real. After all, it's impossible for so many witnesses to falsely confess! Besides, there were witchcraft confessions under many different investigating authorities - truly, the probability that these could all be false is vanishingly small!

A number of these men, including Franz Stangl, Kurt Franz and Franz Suchomel, gave eyewitness accounts in non-legal situations.

Well, if we are to consider testimony in non-legal situations, consider the example of Vietnam veterans who invent atrocity stories for themselves.

This results at least in part from the cultural construction of Vietnam as a bad war. Considering how much more intense a demonization of world war 2 and in particular of the camps took place in Germany, the pressure for false confessions there was accordingly stronger. Imagine that after the Vietnam war the US government had been overthrown by communist powers, and a communist government installed. Imagine that that communist government proceeded to engage in the predictable vilification of their capitalist predecessors, that they promulgated a number of atrocity stories about the Vietnam war, and that decades later they brought many Vietnam veterans to trial for these alleged atrocities. Under those circumstances, it would be no surprise if they obtained a number of confessions, even if the atrocity stories were false. It would also be no surprise if these alleged atrocities were admitted in non-legal environments.

Indeed, the very notion of false confession is intellectually useless for denialists, because it is a phenomenon encountered where real crimes are pinned to the wrong people by police, or are claimed for their own by attention-seekers with psychological disturbances.

The point is that it is not very difficult to get a false confession if you have sufficient means of applying pressure - which need not mean torture. Whether the crime took place has no role in the interrogation room. All that matters is that the interrogators believe it took place.

To say that a comparison is "intellectually useless" simply because the two situations compared are not identical in all respects is to condemn comparisons altogether.

 

[Sebastianus]

The Holocaust is far more than just Treblinka

But the topic under discussion in the post to which you responded was Treblinka confessions, so this is beside the point.

The falsity of witch confessions says nothing whatsoever about the confessions of anyone involved in the Holocaust, because witchcraft and witches bear no resemblance and are not in any way comparable to the Holocaust and its perpetrators.

Of course one cannot deduce the falsity of holocaust related confessions from the falsity of witchcraft confessions. Fortunately I never suggested that one could. Rather, witchcraft confessions illustrate the possibility of extensive false confessions. In context, they were brought up in reply to an attempt to refute solid technical arguments regarding cremation by an appeal to a confession. The discussion went like this:

Sebastianus: the Treblinka cremations could not have worked for these reasons

Matthew Ellard: but we have confessions, so it did happen

Sebastianus: but confessions are not as strong evidence as you think - look at all these cases of false confessions

then ANTPogo jumped in with a non sequitur:

ANTPogo: the fact that witchcraft confessions were false does not prove that gassing confessions are false

and now I have clarified matters:

Sebastianus: obviously not. They show that it is possible that gassing confessions are false.

By the way, disregarding confessions because they involve absurdities (such as the typical holocaust cremation miracles) was argued for even in the period of witchcraft trials. So holocaust studies is actually even less skeptical than was witchcraft investigation.

 

[Sebastianus]

Treblinka, Treblinka, Treblinka. Sorry, not playing.

Well, as there "exists a dialogue" between us, and as you have previously responded to me, your own analysis would say that the refusal to respond "looks rather desperate." Despite having had two weeks to think about it, you find yourself unable to respond to my arguments, and have decided to "beat a very brave retreat".

The phenomena being discussed are a clear set of at least five major sites. If there was extermination at Chelmno and Auschwitz, then there was extermination at Belzec, Sobibor and Treblinka. If there was extermination at Belzec and Sobibor, then there was extermination at Treblinka.

Unfortunately for you, this argument is equally valid in reverse: if there was not extermination at Treblinka and Belzec, then there was not extermination at the other camps.

If you think the sums and evidence and testimonies don't add up for Treblinka, then you should consider the following possibilities:

[*]you haven't actually engaged with all of the relevant evidence (which you demonstrably have not)

What relevant sources regarding the Treblinka cremations have I neglected? Be specific about what they say and how they would affect my arguments.

[*]you haven't modelled the situation correctly (in this case ignoring the effects of selections for Treblinka I and the Sonderkommandos, train-jumpers, the 'Lazarett', the chaos of the summer of 1942 which left thousands of bodies in the camp forecourt, not to mention unexhumed corpses left at the bottom of graves)

Easy to take into account. How many of each of these do you think there were? Unless they add up to 700,000 it's not going to make much of an impact on any of my arguments.

[*]you seemingly haven't considered the possibility, which is a basic assumption for historical disciplines, that the information which has come down to us is incomplete on issues you'd like to know more about.

If you think that the Treblinka testimonies are incomplete on the subject of cremation, then provide a reconstruction of the full event. That reconstruction can then be checked for both cohesion with the witness accounts and technical feasibility.

[*]you haven't engaged in proper comparison, even though this is the standard approach to understanding phenomena

To what well documented cremations should I compare the Treblinka cremations? Unlike you, I have looked through the literature on carcass disposal via incineration - some of which I have cited above - and all comparisons that it offers lead me to reject as absolutely nonsensical the orthodox story of the Treblinka cremations.

For the life of me, I simply do not get why you or any other denier think that the non-revisionists will be convinced by arguments that revolve exclusively around the manner in which cremation took place at one extermination camp.

The reason to focus on one camp is that it is for Treblinka that we have the most detailed and earliest statements about open air cremation. This makes it an ideal subject to discuss.

None of us here are stupid; we all know that if we accepted your argument and reasoning, then something else happened to some unspecified proportion of the Treblinka death toll (that cannot be accounted for by estimates of train-jumpers, selections for Treblinka I or the Sonderkommandos, the 'Lazarett', bodies strewn over the forecourt in summer 1942, or unexhumed corpses at the bottom of mass graves), not the whole sum total. That's all.

My arguments demonstrate that that "unspecified portion" would in fact be the vast majority. Perhaps you did not read the remainder of my arguments, as contained in these posts.

http://www.internationalskeptics.com/forums/showpost.php?p=9467314&postcount=6305
http://www.internationalskeptics.com/forums/showpost.php?p=9470911&postcount=6309
http://www.internationalskeptics.com/forums/showpost.php?p=9486650&postcount=6315

The argument is really not helped by the fact that you are unable to specify the proportion of the Treblinka death toll which you think was impossible to cremate.

Eh? Obviously the detailed figure will depend on the particulars of the assumptions you are making, which can be argued, but my arguments easily show that the proportion would be the vast majority.

If you are referring to the earlier arguments, then they show that it was impossible to cremate any bodies in accordance with the statements of such witnesses as Wiernik or Rajchman. This puts you in quite an awkward spot, as you have to affirm certain events while rejecting as deceitful the major accounts responsible for the creation of the traditional narrative of these same events.

As mentioned already, the Nazis had no problems cremating 7,000 corpses over a period of a few days in Dresden during 1945

Interesting. Before you claimed it was 12 days, now it's "a few". The number of cremations has been rounded up as well. Fascinating.

The fact is that the documentation for the Dresden cremations does not allow an adequate reconstruction of their scale, fueling, or result. Certainly the claim that they were fueled primarily by gasoline is foolish - as anyone with a technical knowledge of the matter would know; the claim that gasoline was a primary fuel at Treblinka is similarly absurd, and the idea that it (rather than some less volatile liquid fuel) was a major secondary fuel is scarcely less so. (If you care to to dispute this, I will happily quote several sources on carcass incineration to back it up.)

The photographs do not show us the complete destruction of the bodies, which would not have been possible with the setup shown. They show flames, sure - but no-one has ever doubted that creating flames with limited amounts of fuel is possible. Recall the experiment of Wilhelm Roth when investigating the claims of Creteur regarding battlefield cremation (quoted after Carlo Mattogno):

The bodies [of the horses] were therefore exposed, after having been only summarily buried, using the precautionary measures mentioned in the description of the exhumation, but with the difference that, instead of calcium chloride, we used tar, which was poured as abundantly as possible on the exposed body parts. Bodies covered with tar, removed from their original location, which were usually a bit moist, were placed on a sort of hearth consisting of large heavy stones. They were then covered all over by dry branches and straw, sprinkled again with tar as abundantly as possible, then sprinkled with petroleum and then set alight. High flames immediately developed, generating dense columns of black smoke, pitch and such intense heat, that one would have thought that the bodies, enveloped entirely by flames, would have been burnt in a short time. But after only half an hour, the fire diminished so greatly that it was necessary to refuel it continually, pouring on more tar and petroleum to prevent it from going out completely. After approximately two hours, the heads, necks and tibiae of the animals were badly burnt, but the great masses of flesh of the trunks were only roasted, covered by a layer of pitch which no doubt prevented the in-depth penetration of the heat. For this reason, many profound incisions were made in the flesh, i.e., the muscles of the hind quarters, after which the abdominal cavities were opened; the viscera -- which had barely gotten hot -- were extracted, and dry branches and straw stuffed inside, in their place; the flesh was then once again sprinkled with tar and petroleum, as abundantly and carefully as possible, and set alight. Again, enormous sooty flames and tremendous heat were generated, but once again, after two hours, only slight progress was observed in the destruction. After five hours of work, carried out on several bodies simultaneously, and repeated at other locations, satisfactory results -- i.e., the charring of the flesh of the bodies – were found impossible to obtain; the only thing that could be done at this point was to load the still conspicuous fleshy parts onto sleds and transport them to high ground.

The initial success in creating high flames did not result in the destruction of the bodies. In conclusion, Roth wrote

Therefore, as the most probable result of Créteur’s procedure, it can be admitted that only the superficial layer of the bodies were charred; it is hard to believe that there was any alteration at all on the interior of the graves, entire cadavers perhaps remaining intact.”

As this example illustrates, the Dresden photos do not prove what you appear to think they prove.

In short, the Dresden cremations are too poorly documented to allow us to overturn what we know about mass cremation from more reliable sources, and the interpretation which you and Muehlenkamp (as well as some earlier authors) have put forward is flatly declared to be impossible by the relevant technical literature on carcass incineration.

using [...] personnel who had served at Treblinka: Trawnikis retreating into Germany with SS-Bataillon Streibel

What is/are the primary source(s) for this claim? I know that Taylor's book makes this claim, but what primary source backs this up?

Similarly, if we accepted your argument and reasoning then the claims made about Treblinka would not affect the other camps, unless you can prove that mass cremation was impossible in all the other cases, or above a certain threshold.

Eh? Have you even read my posts?

As for the other camps, go ahead and apply my arguments to Belzec if you like. All that you need to know is the size and fueling of the Belzec cremation facility. As I don't have access to the trial records, but I have seen it claimed that the staff testified to two cremation facilities measuring 5x5 meters. If that is correct, then my arguments based on the literature on mass carcass incineration would in fact be even stronger for Belzec than for Treblinka.

Now, tell me, Nick: If 1200 sheep or 1600 pigs can be cremated in 9-10 days on a pyre 200 meters long with fuel consisting of 1,000 railway ties, 8 tons of kindling, 400 wooden pallets, 4 tons of straw, 200 tons of coal, and 1,000 liters of diesel fuel, how many Jews can be cremated overnight on a pyre 30 meters long with fuel consisting of perhaps one ton of dry wood and perhaps as much gasoline as can be soaked into the wood?

 

[Sebastianus]

I previously offered an analysis of cremation capacity based on the mass burn site at Epynt. We can also estimate on the basis of length of pyre. Rajchman stated that the Treblinka pyres were 1.5 meters wide, while the pyres used for mass carcass incineration were wider, often with width determined by the length of a railroad tie (sleeper), but I'm willing to write that off and treat them as if they had equal width.

The literature on carcass incineration suggests that 5 sheep carcasses can be burned per meter of pyre length, or per yard of pyre length - both claims are made in the literature. (I have given two references for this and am prepared to give more, but as no-one here shows any sign of having studied the references I have already given there's little point in doing so now.) As previously mentioned, sheep are a reasonable approximation to Jews for the purposes of studying cremation, and in fact would be considerably easier to cremate due to their much higher levels of body fat. (I can give details on the levels of body fat in sheep if anyone wants to challenge me on this point.)

Let's take the higher figure, 5 Jews per yard, or 5.5 per meter. On a 30 meter pyre that means 165 Jews could be burned at once. I'll make the rather generous estimate of a two day burning time, plus one day to build the pyre and one day to wait for the ash to cool and remove it. This means a pyre could be burned every four days, or 30 burns in 4 months of cremation at Belzec and Treblinka.

Accordingly, one 30 meter long pyre could cremate a total of 30 * 165 = 4,950 bodies.

As Nick wants to account for escapes from trains and so on, I'll round the Belzec cremation figure down to 400,000, and the Treblinka one down to 700,000.

Running the numbers, this means that we would need 2424 meters of pyre at Belzec, or 81 pyres each 30 meters long. This flies in the face of all accounts of cremation at Belzec known to me. Nick, can you supply an account of Belzec cremation that fits this technical reality?

At Treblinka, the same calculations show that 4242 meters of pyre would be needed, or 141 pyres each 30 meters long. Again, this technical reality bears no similarity to any Treblinka witness account known to me. Nick, can you supply a counterexample?

These calculations show that even in the best case scenario, when everything goes according to the textbook, the cremations alleged to have taken place at Treblinka and Belzec could not have been achieved, even ignoring the issue of how they could have been fueled.

 

[A'isha]

But the topic under discussion in the post to which you responded was Treblinka confessions, so this is beside the point.

The Holocaust cannot be debunked by viewing it atomistically and then trying to tear down individual pieces.

Of course one cannot deduce the falsity of holocaust related confessions from the falsity of witchcraft confessions.

I didn't say that one cannot deduce the falsity of holocaust related confessions from the falsity of witchcraft confessions, I said that the falsity of witch confessions says nothing whatsoever about the confessions of anyone involved in the Holocaust.

And that includes the possibility of extensive false confessions among the perpetrators of and participants in the Holocaust, since the people and situations involved are so drastically different that any attempt at a comparison between them would be fallacious.

By the way, disregarding confessions because they involve absurdities (such as the typical holocaust cremation miracles) was argued for even in the period of witchcraft trials. So holocaust studies is actually even less skeptical than was witchcraft investigation.

Real historians of the Holocaust (not Deniers) do, in fact, do this all the time. That's why they reference multiple sources, from confessions to various witness statements to documentary evidence, in their works.

 

[Matthew Ellard]

Except that we know that in some cases torture was employed, e.g. on Rudolf Hoess.

You have linked us to a holocaust denial website that failed to include a quote by Sgt Bernard Clarke, explaining what he did. .

"They brought him to us when he refused to cooperate over questioning about his activites during the war. ...................He came in the winter of 1945/6 and was put in a small jail cell in the barracks. We sat in the cell with him, night and day, armed with axe handles. Our job was to prod him every time he fell asleep to help break down his resistance. When Höss was taken out for exercise, he was made to wear only jeans and a thin cotton shire in the bitter cold. After three days and nights without sleep, Höss finally broke down and made a full confession to the authorities"

They kept Hoess awake. So what? He wasn't cooperating and was the commanding officer of Auschwitz. You will next claim the Hoess gave an incorrect figure. We already know that from the IMT.

DR. KAUTFFMANN: Is it true that you, yourself, have made no exact notes regarding the figures of the number of those victims because you were forbidden to make them?
HOESS: Yes, that is correct.
DR. KAUFFMANN: Is it furthermore correct that exclusively one man by the name of Eichmann had notes about this, the man who had the task of organizing and assembling these people?
HOESS: Yes.
DR. KAUFFMANN: Is it furthermore true that Eichmann stated to you that in Auschwitz a total sum of more than 2 million Jews had been destroyed?
HOESS: Yes.

As you know Eichmann confessed to the mass executions to Life Magazine, while having a lovely time in Argentina. No torture required. Are you next going to claim Eichmann was tortured to give the same story?

Eichmann / "I remember clearly the first time he guided me around the camp. He showed me everything, and at the end he took me to a grave where the corpses of the gassed Jews lay piled on a strong iron grill. Hoess's men poured some inflammable liquid over them and set them on fire. The flesh stewed like stew meat. The sight made such an impression on me that today, after a dozen years, I can still see that mountain of corpses in front of me. Hoess may have seen disgust in my face, but I spoke to him sternly: "When I see your corpses, I think of those charred German bodies in the air-raid shelters in Berlin."

 

[Nick Terry]

Let's recall what is at stake in this discussion of false confessions. The question is whether confessions prove, for instance, that some 800,000 Jews were gassed and then cremated at Treblinka. Examining the phenomenon of false confession allows us to understand why that question has to be answered in the negative. It does not prove that extermination by gassing did not take place, but merely raises doubt over whether the confession evidence can be regarded as conclusive.

Eyewitness testimony from perpetrators is only one type of evidence which is under consideration with the Holocaust. We have:

• demographic evidence before/after WWII
• Nazi documentary evidence regarding wartime population movements and population figures per region/camp/time frame
• Nazi documentary evidence regarding intent
• Nazi documentary evidence regarding the circumstances in regions affected by the actions
• Nazi documentary evidence regarding the organisation and staffing of various paramilitary units, including personnel files
• Nazi documentary evidence regarding the use of gas at a variety of installations and camps
• contemporary Polish and Jewish reports, which are still documents no matter what might be pretended
• contemporary German, Polish and Jewish diaries
• contemporary German, Polish and Jewish letters
• eyewitness accounts from Jewish survivors
• eyewitness accounts from non-Jewish bystanders/fellow inmates
• eyewitness accounts from German personnel who came into contact with the extermination sites
• eyewitness accounts from SS officers and men belonging to paramilitary units
• eyewitness accounts from collaborator personnel (above all the Trawnikis)
• contemporary photographs from some sites
• eyewitness evidence breaks down into free-form statements, interrogation transcripts, interrogation statements/affidavits, interviews, oral history interviews, and published/unpublished memoirs, as well as various forms of art/drawing and sketches.
• aerial photographs from the Luftwaffe, RAF and USAAF of a number of sites
• post-liberation site inspections and forensic reports
• post-liberation photographs
• subsequent forensic work at some sites
• recent archaeological research

This is a comparative study. Of course in comparative study not all things are identical, but they don't need to be for the exercise to be intellectually useful

.

Comparisons only work if you

You are referring to the Icelandic study that Jason Myers tried to make hay out of in your white paper, I suppose. It gives you nothing. Not only are the circumstances wildly different, making the figures inapplicable, but the key number - only 7% of false confessions are to violent crimes - doesn't really support your case, because most crimes are non-violent crimes, so this is no surprise. You have committed the statistical fallacy of ignoring the base rate.

Indeed, the circumstances are wildly different. You were the one invoking comparisons with contemporary examples of false confessions when you mentioned the Norfolk Four. My remark was a mere aside, and was not critical to the main point. It was simply a reminder that contemporary false confessions occur frequently with non-violent crimes. This belies the stereotype.

It's also worth reminding you that the study cited by Gudjonsson which identified only 7% of false confessions were confessions to crimes of violence studied a group of convicted prisoners in Iceland, and found that less than 1% claimed to have made a false confession relevant to their conviction. The phenomenon of false confession is not exactly common to begin with. Another crucial variable is age; the Icelandic study found that nearly two-thirds (64%) made their false confessions while under the age of 21.

Take your pick as to which variable shows how irrelevant contemporary false confessions to ordinary crimes are to interrogations of SS officers and men.

Except that we know that in some cases torture was employed, e.g. on Rudolf Hoess. Other measures, such as deprivation of sleep, or simply prolonged imprisonment, sometimes in isolation. These are precisely the measures that break people down and promote false confessions.

We also know of threats - e.g. in the following exchange in the interrogation of Otto Moll:

It's hilarious to see you lecture me on statistics yet so blatantly resort to cherry-picking. I already stated very clearly that many hundreds of Auschwitz SS gave eyewitness evidence over a period of at least sixty years.

In neither of the two cherrypicked cases does your argument stand up. Your quote from Moll dates from after he was already under sentence of death for crimes committed at Dachau. The interrogator knew this, which is why he could visibly berate Moll for being so intransigent. But what was he being intransigent about? Moll was being uncooperative about his personal responsibility and was not denying the phenomenon of gassing at Auschwitz. Moll requested that he be confronted by Hoess, in order to clarify his exact responsibilities regarding extermination at Auschwitz. (This would do nothing to save him from the hangman's rope for his crimes at Dachau, at best it might help him if additional charges were brought and the sentence for his crimes at Dachau was commuted.) Hoess then filled in the details and identified Moll as a key subordinate charged with supervising the extermination process at the Bunker, and not as Moll claimed 'only' in charge of cremating bodies. Moll lowballed the number of bodies that were cremated in that phase, Hoess corrected him.

Hoess-was-tortured is a denier meme so hoary that the beard reaches the ground. It still doesn't get deniers any bananas, because by the time that Hoess was captured, at least 30 other Auschwitz SS officers and men had given statements or been interrogated about the camp. Several of those men gave their statements without even being interrogated - the chief camp doctor Wirths wrote down an apologia which he gave to his defense lawyer and the reestablished Hamburg police. When Wirths was actually interrogated, he disputed the claims of the interrogator that 4 million might have died.

Hoess was maltreated upon capture, but the arresting officer explicitly said that he was not questioned about Auschwitz that night. By Hoess's own account, his being beaten was when he was first captured, not when he was transferred. The only indication of suggestibility was the high death toll he gave in his first statements, which he then retracted. He retracted this while at Nuremberg (but after appearing on the witness stand), and reconfirmed the retraction to the Poles.

Which simply highlights the absurdity of Hoess-was-tortured as a claim, because Hoess was questioned over a prolonged period by three separate states, and he produced manuscripts without being questioned, with plenty of time in between to reflect on things.

For Hoess-was-tortured to be a relevant argument, you'd need evidence that all the other Auschwitz SS men were similarly coerced, not just in the 1940s but through into the era of West German, East German, Austrian and reunified German investigations, and to account for the statements and confirmations made outside of a legal context.

Which cannot be done.

Given that threats of this nature sufficed to allow a modest sized police department to obtain in short order four false confessions to rape and murder from US Navy sailors, it's no surprise that they could elicit far more false confessions in the postwar environment, when there was far more institutional support for vilifying the defeated Germans than there ever was for convicting members of the navy of rape and murder.

This is utter nonsense. For starters, the Allies interrogated 10s of 1000s of Nazis in the 1940s. That is the appropriate baseline for gauging the possibility of coercion. The number of cases where interrogators unprofessionally resorted to threats is minimal.

More importantly the number of units/agencies whose members were interrogated was considerable. And that is the crucial point here. The US interrogator who interviewed the Mauthausen staff in the pretrial investigation (i.e. knowing that they would likely be put on trial) relied on his charm and simply being nice, which worked very well to elicit information from the SS men, simply by asking them to clarify their roles for the record. (More on this in Tomasz Jardim's book The Mauthausen Trial.) Quite the opposite of coercing false confessions.

I really don't think you've twigged that we're discussing corporate entities here. Your Moll example illustrates the point rather well. Moll was a known member of the staffs of Dachau and before that, Auschwitz. He could scarcely deny being on the staff of Auschwitz. He did not deny that the camp was an extermination camp. He did try to deny personal responsibility.

There's a considerable difference between acknowledging that an agency or unit one served with committed crimes, and admitting that you yourself participated. If you want Norfolk Four comparisons, then you need to find examples where subordinates admitted that they participated in the crimes. Then and only then do you have true confessions, rather than denials of responsibility and obfuscations of guilt.

Because that was the norm in Nazi interrogations.

Never took a statistics class, did you Nick? You are falsely assuming that these events are independent. Even in ordinary criminal cases, we know that a false confession corrupts other evidence. Once someone has confessed, the authorities are able to leverage that confession to obtain more confessions, as well as other forms of evidence. In this connection, Saul Kassin has observed that in cases with even one false confession, what looks like a mountain of evidence often develops, but it's a mountain of evidence that's dependent on the confession itself. In short, it's not a mountain of evidence, but a house of cards.

Coming from someone who so blatantly resorted to cherrypicking, it really is hilarious to be lectured about statistics.

Firstly, you need to remember the baseline. Most confessions by ordinary criminals are true. A variable minority are false, either because of psychological disturbance or police coercion. False confessions are only confirmable if they are retracted.

There is a chance that any one single confession of guilt may be false. This would normally be reduced if two confessions emerge, corroborating each other. However, it is known that interrogators have been able to elicit mutually incriminating false confessions, in rare cases. So the probability of false confessions decreases and never entirely diminishes. In simple terms, if there is a hypothetical 50/50 chance of a false confession with a single suspect, then we would decrease this to 75/25 with two statements, and so on.

The number of cases where more than six individuals confessed falsely to the same crime is what exactly?

So when we find that we have hundreds of individuals admitting knowledge of an event, this would by analogy with the confession process (since admitting knowledge is not necessarily confessing to personal responsibility), the chance that all have confessed falsely is slim to none.

This observation would hold true whether or not the interrogations were done by one agency in one place in one time-frame. (The simple gathering of witness statements is done en masse on a routine basis by police, and is known to produce outliers come what may. The classic example would be the interviewing and recording of statements from the many hundreds of people in Dealy Plaza on 22.11.1963, a minority of whom heard more than three shots.)

In terms of raw probability, it does not matter if we found that only one agency did all the interviews in one timeframe. Because the raw probability still allows for the possibility that something weird happened; it's just very unlikely.

Secondly, the interrogations were not actually conducted by one agency in one place in one time-frame. Men who served in Auschwitz were interrogated by among other organisations:

British WCIU in Norway
British WCIU attached to 30 Corps (Belsen trial)
Separate WCIU for prison-based interrogations later in 1945/46
US 3rd Army
US 7th Army
US 1st Army
US interrogation division at IMT
prosecutors at IMT
Interrogation division at NMT (different personnel)
prosecutors at several NMT trials
Polish Main Commission in Krakow
Polish NTN tribunal in Krakow
Polish regional tribunals in Krakow, Katowice and other courts
Soviet NKGB investigators in East Germany in the 1940s
West German state attorney's offices times half a dozen or more
West German Landgerichte including Frankfurt-am-Main
East German Stasi
East German supreme court
Austrian war crimes office
Austrian court in Vienna
etc

So we not only have serial statements within investigations, but parallel statements developed from separate investigations, conducted under a variety of conditions, culminating in very defendant-friendly investigations under West German and Austrian law.

And we have literally zero known cases of a retraction of a statement confirming that a particular site was an extermination camp.

For false confession to be a relevant issue here, you need to overcome:
1) not only scale
2) but also independence
3) while explaining away the absence of any retractions
4) and accounting for all the other forms of evidence.

Incidentally, your "exponential curve" argument also "proves" that witchcraft was real. After all, it's impossible for so many witnesses to falsely confess! Besides, there were witchcraft confessions under many different investigating authorities - truly, the probability that these could all be false is vanishingly small!

No, it doesn't, because witchcraft as a natural phenomenon doesn't exist. You are comparing belief in the supernatural from the medieval and early modern period, with the known fact that 20th Century societies have used poison gas on the battlefield and in executions, to decide on the probability of whether the Nazis used HCN and CO, both known scientifically to be quite lethal to human beings, to murder people.

Well, if we are to consider testimony in non-legal situations, consider the example of Vietnam veterans who invent atrocity stories for themselves.

This results at least in part from the cultural construction of Vietnam as a bad war. Considering how much more intense a demonization of world war 2 and in particular of the camps took place in Germany, the pressure for false confessions there was accordingly stronger. Imagine that after the Vietnam war the US government had been overthrown by communist powers, and a communist government installed. Imagine that that communist government proceeded to engage in the predictable vilification of their capitalist predecessors, that they promulgated a number of atrocity stories about the Vietnam war, and that decades later they brought many Vietnam veterans to trial for these alleged atrocities. Under those circumstances, it would be no surprise if they obtained a number of confessions, even if the atrocity stories were false. It would also be no surprise if these alleged atrocities were admitted in non-legal environments.

Once again you now invoke a phenomenon which requires a much bigger baseline to compare against. There were well over 2.5 million Vietnam veterans, some of whom succumbed to the temptation to falsely claim that they had participated in atrocities while in country; other veterans kept quiet about events which might be regarded as real atrocities.

The proper comparison would be with the 17 million Wehrmacht veterans, or the 1 million Waffen-SS members, who were collectively incredibly reluctant to admit to participating in atrocities and who formed veterans' associations which especially in the case of the Waffen-SS went to extraordinary lengths to downplay and deny the participation of Waffen-SS units in atrocities. Not until the 1990s, when surviving veterans were in their twilight years, did German culture genuinely shift to the point where veterans of WWII could admit publicly that they might in fact have committed atrocities. This came about from 1995 onwards due to the 'War of Annihilation: Crimes of the Wehrmacht' exhibition.

Thus, a proper comparison of like to like (veterans discussing war crime level atrocities committed by military units) finds that German culture of the 1940s to 1980s did not resemble US culture in the 1970s.

Statements confirming extermination were made by a much smaller group of significantly less than 200,000 members of the SS and Police who had served with the RSHA, WVHA, Order Police or smaller forces like the Aktion Reinhard staffs.

The pattern with such men was to assume new identities or flee to Latin America, and otherwise to carry on with their normal lives without admitting anything, until they received a knock on the door, at which point they were interrogated in private by German/Austrian police, then in rare cases put on public trial and found themselves subjected to media attention.

Before and after indictment, these men benefited from considerable assistance, eg by Stille Hilfe and various 'rat line' networks, which aided in smuggling, for example, Adolf Eichmann out to Argentina. While in Argentina, Eichmann decided to set the story straight and was interviewed by a Waffen-SS veteran who badly wanted Eichmann to deny gassing and deny the Holocaust. But he didn't.

If on trial in Germany, a network of senior SS generals and officers routinely testified about background issues like obedience to orders. Their defense lawyers were usually veterans of other war crimes cases, and many of them like Rudolf Aschenauer were certainly right-wing conservatives. In West German and Austrian societies as a whole, there were of course also not insubstantial far-right parties that would have dearly loved the Auschwitz SS to have denied the Holocaust in a credible way.

But that didn't happen. Just a few non-credible handwaving denials from the likes of Christophersen, which were contradicted by genuine SS veterans of Birkenau.

What amazes me is if you want to hold onto your scenario of false confessions caused by the Zeitgeist, then you're essentially arguing that the defendants in NS-trials in 1960s West Germany were lying to their defense lawyers, or that men like Rudolf Aschenauer were in on the conspiracy.

More amazing still is how 50 years after the Frankfurt Auschwitz Trial, not one hint of false confession has emerged about any of the 24 defendants or the 91 SS witnesses who gave evidence at the trial. Not one of them retracted any acknowledgement about Auschwitz as an extermination camp.

The point is that it is not very difficult to get a false confession if you have sufficient means of applying pressure - which need not mean torture. Whether the crime took place has no role in the interrogation room. All that matters is that the interrogators believe it took place.

But interrogators cannot ensure compliance with a false belief for the rest of the suspect's life. This is hugely problematic for West German interrogations in particular since there was no death penalty, and since witnesses and defendants frequently lived for many decades after being interrogated.

The absolute lack of any evidence of recantation or retraction makes your claims about false confession into an amazing example of magical thinking. The sheer volume of special pleading you would have to use to explain away why there are no retractions is truly unbelievable.

And that's basically where the gambit dies. Because false confessions are rare enough as it is, and generally confirmed through retractions.

To say that a comparison is "intellectually useless" simply because the two situations compared are not identical in all respects is to condemn comparisons altogether.

Say wut? No, comparison is a tool designed to establish similarities and differences. Argument by analogy is used in extremely controlled circumstances where alternatives are lacking. You were arguing by analogy.

Equating witchcraft trials with Nazi war crimes investigations, which is what you started off by doing, is sloppy reasoning. Your syllogism went

women falsely confessed under interrogation to being witches
Nazi war crimes suspects were interrogated
Suspects under interrogation may falsely confess
Therefore, Nazi war crimes suspects did falsely confess
Therefore, Nazi war crimes suspects were like women in witchcraft trials

The fallaciousness of the reasoning emerges precisely because we can compare and establish which variables were different. Other than witchcraft suspects and Nazi war crimes suspects both being interrogated, there are simply zero points of similarity.

Your desired conclusion is that Nazi war crimes such as gassing are as false as tales of witchcraft. But the only way to get this into the picture is to assume the consequent and resort to circular reasoning.

That makes witchcraft comparisons totally useless to help prove the falsity of Nazi war crimes.

The same goes for comparisons with modern-day false confessions, with the extra special irony that in high-profile cases like the Birmingham Six, there was a real bombing, but falsely identified suspects, ditto with the Norfolk Four, a real murder, but falsely identified suspects.

In the one Holocaust case where mistaken identity has played a role, the suspect (Demjanjuk) never once falsely confessed to being someone he wasn't.

 

[Nick Terry]

But the topic under discussion in the post to which you responded was Treblinka confessions, so this is beside the point.

Of course one cannot deduce the falsity of holocaust related confessions from the falsity of witchcraft confessions. Fortunately I never suggested that one could. Rather, witchcraft confessions illustrate the possibility of extensive false confessions. In context, they were brought up in reply to an attempt to refute solid technical arguments regarding cremation by an appeal to a confession. The discussion went like this:

Sebastianus: the Treblinka cremations could not have worked for these reasons

Matthew Ellard: but we have confessions, so it did happen

Sebastianus: but confessions are not as strong evidence as you think - look at all these cases of false confessions

then ANTPogo jumped in with a non sequitur:

ANTPogo: the fact that witchcraft confessions were false does not prove that gassing confessions are false

and now I have clarified matters:

Sebastianus: obviously not. They show that it is possible that gassing confessions are false.

Anything is possible. Since you've not established a probability, your possibility is irrelevant. The more we have looked at the phenomenon, the more obvious it is that false confessions affecting all Nazi testimonies about gassing are exceedingly improbable, and to sustain a claim requires excessive dollops of special pleading.

By the way, disregarding confessions because they involve absurdities (such as the typical holocaust cremation miracles) was argued for even in the period of witchcraft trials. So holocaust studies is actually even less skeptical than was witchcraft investigation.

Once again you're assuming the consequent. The issue under debate is whether the Nazis exterminated Jews in death camps using gas of various kinds, and then cremated the bodies en masse. You're going from a known impossibility (witchcraft) to a hypothetical impossibility (mass cremation) which is under dispute. That is why comparisons with witchcraft will never be considered valid evidence in any debate around such a dispute.

Moreover, you're ignoring most of the lines of evidence which exist to corroborate eyewitness testimonies of perpetrators, and overlooking the fact that virtually none of these lines of evidence can be found in medieval or early modern witchcraft cases.

There's a local irony in this entire sub-thread, which is your predilection for citing only the testimony of Jewish eyewitnesses while ignoring the SS eyewitnesses. Matthew Ellard was reminding you of that fact when he started the digression.

Not once since you've gone down the predictable denier witchcraft comparison rabbit hole have you actually cited an SS witness from your supposed topic of discussion, cremation at Treblinka, never mind cremation anywhere else.

The one SS witness you did cite, Moll, actually discussed mass cremation at Birkenau in his testimony quite openly; he simply denied that he was in charge of the gas chamber squad until Hoess contradicted him and showed him up as a liar on that point.

 

[Nick Terry]

Well, as there "exists a dialogue" between us, and as you have previously responded to me, your own analysis would say that the refusal to respond "looks rather desperate." Despite having had two weeks to think about it, you find yourself unable to respond to my arguments, and have decided to "beat a very brave retreat".

The refusal to respond was built in to the previous round of posts to which you replied, then provoking my reiteration of the point that I'm not playing if you reduce things to one camp.

So, fail.

Unfortunately for you, this argument is equally valid in reverse: if there was not extermination at Treblinka and Belzec, then there was not extermination at the other camps.

No, the argument is not valid in reverse, because the linkages between Treblinka and Belzec/Sobibor within Aktion Reinhard, and between the Reinhard camps and Chelmno plus Auschwitz within the Nazi Final Solution, consist of more than micro-details about the manner of mass cremation at Treblinka, or indeed any of the five sites.

Unless all lines of evidence are addressed simultaneously, then the most probable conclusion for any denier 'gotcha' is that the denier is misrepresenting the evidence and has not actually found a 'gotcha'. That is what did for Leuchter, after all: he made a number of assumptions which turned out to be invalid, and as a consequence, the chemical disproof has been progressively sidelined within 'revisionism', since it is not very convincing.

Moreover, when dealing with a small class of five sites it is quite likely that evidence could be incomplete on a crucial aspect. Thus, we have no evidence of the exact quantities of wood or fuel used to cremate the bodies of the victims at any of the five sites. We also do not have complete records of the quantities of coke delivered to the Birkenau crematoria.

Therefore any attempt to estimate these quantities will remain hypothetical and cannot be historical. The question of how much fuel was used to cremate the bodies cannot be answered with anything other than 'unknown'.

The descriptions of the process of cremation may also vary; some sites might be better described than other sites. Enough evidence is available to indicate that Chelmno and Auschwitz used different methods of open-air cremation to BST.

However, we have enough historical (documentary and eyewitness) evidence to link BST firmly together, as well as enough forensic and archaeological evidence to prove beyond a reasonable doubt that mass cremation did indeed take place at all three sites.

Therefore, the only correct approach to take to the not very interesting questions about how much wood? and how much fuel? you are posing is to compare rigorously across at the very least, BST.

What relevant sources regarding the Treblinka cremations have I neglected? Be specific about what they say and how they would affect my arguments.

It's not my job to recount the entirety of the relevant evidence here. I can simply remind you when you are omitting evidence, and watch as your argument collapses as a consequence. So far you've certainly ignored a great deal of the specific pieces of evidence already mentioned in the white paper, including various statements by SS witnesses, but there is much more.

Easy to take into account. How many of each of these do you think there were? Unless they add up to 700,000 it's not going to make much of an impact on any of my arguments.

Not my job to do your modelling for you. But best/middle/worst case is standard practice when doing any kind of modelling.

Other than unexhumed corpses left at the bottom of graves, the other factors would not necessarily amount to much, but would still affect the numbers by several per cent.

If you think that the Treblinka testimonies are incomplete on the subject of cremation, then provide a reconstruction of the full event. That reconstruction can then be checked for both cohesion with the witness accounts and technical feasibility.

Not my job to provide a reconstruction. You're the one making the claims, your burden of proof to account for all of the evidence. I can just sit back and snipe from the sidelines. For anything else, there are plenty of existing summaries, including the HC white paper.

To what well documented cremations should I compare the Treblinka cremations?

Firstly you should evaluate all the evidence for the cremations at the mass extermination camps. Secondly you have a number of examples at lower and upper ends such as Dresden and the FMD cremations. These examples show that mass cremation is not in principle such an overwhelmingly difficult task as you seem hellbent on claiming.

But really, the entire argument is a complete waste of time. If for the sake of argument we were to provisionally accept that the scale of mass cremation at Treblinka allowed for only 200-250,000 bodies to be cremated, leaving more than half a million unaccounted for, then we would naturally try to account for the whereabouts of the half a million.

As however efforts to account for their whereabouts have come up with literally nothing, then we might be inclined to entertain other hypotheses, such as mass UFO abduction or a Bermuda Triangle like effect where trainloads of people just vanished in between Malkinia and Treblinka stations.

If such hypotheses struck us (as they do) as absurd, then we might consider revisiting the original conclusion that 'only' 200-250,000 bodies could have been cremated at Treblinka, and reexamining all of the premises and assumptions that made up the original argument, and looking for extra pieces of evidence (such as actually reading all the witness statements available for the camp), and reconsidering the argument.

The best evidence indicates that the overwhelming majority of the quarter-million Jews deported from Warsaw in the summer of 1942 died at Treblinka. This evidence is independent of the precise wording of statements by Chil Rajchman about how the bodies were cremated in 1943. No amount of fussing over how much wood? how much fuel? will really change that historical conclusion. If however it was shown that 50,000 Warsaw Jews turned up somewhere else, then things would be very different.

Your approach is designed first and foremost to irritate and annoy people, because you're a denier, and that's just how deniers are. Secondly, you relish the thrill of metaphorical grave desecration and enjoy the mental masturbation of spending hours and hours pondering how Jews were cremated. Thirdly, you probably labour under the delusion that you need only negate and not actually revise anything, which further hampers your efforts to establish a credible line of argument.

If there's a serious point to the line of argument, it is to persuade us (and the wider world) that the historical record needs revising. Some or most of the Jews of Warsaw thought to have died at Treblinka actually did not!!!

Except we couldn't really tell them apart from the Jews of Radom, Kielce, Czestochowa, Bialystok or Grodno who are also held to have died at Treblinka. Ash is ash and cremains are cremains, after all.

Unless, that is, someone finds actual historical evidence, like a document or an eyewitness, showing that these specific Jewish communities had a different fate.

Thus, it would cut considerably to the chase if you invested your valuable time searching for the Jews of Warsaw, and familiarised yourself with the evidence for Nazi occupation across Eastern Europe in order to do so, since the current conclusion would be that there is no trace of those quarter of a million people, whereas there are traces of the smaller groups hived off from Warsaw for special purposes or deported at later dates, etc.

Or you could research the Reichsflugscheiben and show that Nazi UFOs abducted the Jews of Warsaw to Antarctica, for long-term freezing, then follow this up with a scientific expedition to locate the frozen remains.

I'm not particularly fussy either way; I just find the debate about cremation completely pointless, and unutterably tedious, since it doesn't go anywhere.

If however you're brave enough to admit that you want to debate cremation because you really enjoy metaphorical grave desecration, then I'm sure we'll tolerate you burbling on, and will simply put your burblings on the subject on ignore.

Unlike you, I have looked through the literature on carcass disposal via incineration - some of which I have cited above - and all comparisons that it offers lead me to reject as absolutely nonsensical the orthodox story of the Treblinka cremations.

Contrary to your jibe, I certainly have looked at the literature on carcass disposal. The comparisons convince me, and have convinced others, that Treblinka was entirely feasible.

The reason to focus on one camp is that it is for Treblinka that we have the most detailed and earliest statements about open air cremation. This makes it an ideal subject to discuss.

Actually it's only from Treblinka that we have any Jewish direct eyeball witnesses to cremation. If you were honest enough to discuss the other two camps alongside Treblinka, then you'd have to take into account SS and Trawniki evidence, too. But you're not honest enough to take into consideration all the evidence, because your main purpose is ridiculing and defaming the descriptive abilities of Jewish extermination camp survivors through misrepresenting them.

My arguments demonstrate that that "unspecified portion" would in fact be the vast majority. Perhaps you did not read the remainder of my arguments, as contained in these posts.

http://www.internationalskeptics.com/forums/showpost.php?p=9467314&postcount=6305
http://www.internationalskeptics.com/forums/showpost.php?p=9470911&postcount=6309
http://www.internationalskeptics.com/forums/showpost.php?p=9486650&postcount=6315

I don't see any demonstration that the number would be the 'vast majority' there, just some leading questions designed to shift burden of proof.

The answer to those questions is, by the way, 'don't know and don't care'.

Eh? Obviously the detailed figure will depend on the particulars of the assumptions you are making, which can be argued, but my arguments easily show that the proportion would be the vast majority.

No you haven't.

If you are referring to the earlier arguments, then they show that it was impossible to cremate any bodies in accordance with the statements of such witnesses as Wiernik or Rajchman. This puts you in quite an awkward spot, as you have to affirm certain events while rejecting as deceitful the major accounts responsible for the creation of the traditional narrative of these same events.

No, I don't have to reject the statements of Wiernik and Rajchman as deceitful. That's your primary error in source criticism. Wiernik and Rajchman gave less than detailed statements which you have chosen to twist and manipulate. There is no reason why I or anyone else should regard their descriptive abilities on one particular point to be decisive.

There is no reason why I should assume that every witness offers a completely perfect description; as we will see later, the evidence from Dresden is not absolutely perfect on similar concerns. Therefore we would conclude that perhaps the exact quantities of fuel and wood used in mass cremations are not actually the kind of details that are noted down by historical eyewitnesses in the 1940s, because they didn't seem terribly important to them.

Other witnesses than Wiernik and Rajchman added further descriptive elements (like durations, size of pyres, supply of wood from outside, blah blah blah) which need to be taken into consideration before reaching any judgement. It's up to you to survey all of the eyewitness evidence, and to remember the forensic and archaeological evidence.

Interesting. Before you claimed it was 12 days, now it's "a few". The number of cremations has been rounded up as well. Fascinating.

Gosh, I rounded up by 2% and used a descriptor rather than a numerator. Shocking!

The fact is that the documentation for the Dresden cremations does not allow an adequate reconstruction of their scale, fueling, or result.

DOH!!!!! That's precisely the same point that could be made about Treblinka.

Certainly the claim that they were fueled primarily by gasoline is foolish - as anyone with a technical knowledge of the matter would know; the claim that gasoline was a primary fuel at Treblinka is similarly absurd, and the idea that it (rather than some less volatile liquid fuel) was a major secondary fuel is scarcely less so. (If you care to to dispute this, I will happily quote several sources on carcass incineration to back it up.)

The very fact that Dresden is often claimed as primarily fuelled by petrol is a good indication why you cannot stretch a handful of witness statements to breaking point for Treblinka.

The common-sense assumption in both cases is that wood and petrol was used in some unknown combination; we have some indicators for the petrol but not for other combustibles.

The photographs do not show us the complete destruction of the bodies, which would not have been possible with the setup shown. They show flames, sure - but no-one has ever doubted that creating flames with limited amounts of fuel is possible. Recall the experiment of Wilhelm Roth when investigating the claims of Creteur regarding battlefield cremation (quoted after Carlo Mattogno):

The photos don't show the finished results.

The initial success in creating high flames did not result in the destruction of the bodies. In conclusion, Roth wrote

As this example illustrates, the Dresden photos do not prove what you appear to think they prove.

Where did I cite the Dresden photos? I referred to the instance of cremation at Dresden which is recorded in a variety of sources. To quote Taylor:

Between February 21 and March 5, when the last pyre was lit, 6,865 bodies were burned on the Altmarkt. Afterward, when the fire cooled down, it was estimated that between eight and ten cubic meters of ash covered the cobbled surface of the medieval square. The SS in charge of the burning had intended to transport the ashes out to the Heath Cemetery in boxes and sacks and bury them containers and all, but municipal parsimony triumphed. In the end the ashes were simply emptied out of their containers and into the prepared pits, thus enabling the valuable sacks and boxes to be reused

This contains information not visible in the Dresden photos, like the fact that the bodies were reduced to ash.

You're falling victim to the snapshot fallacy - a classic heffalump trap for deniers - in your interpretation of the photos independent of other pieces of evidence.

In short, the Dresden cremations are too poorly documented to allow us to overturn what we know about mass cremation from more reliable sources, and the interpretation which you and Muehlenkamp (as well as some earlier authors) have put forward is flatly declared to be impossible by the relevant technical literature on carcass incineration.

No, it's not. The descriptions of the Dresden pyres specifically note the use of bundles of wood and straw underneath the grates, along with straw placed between layers of corpses, with gasoline liberally drenched over the pyre.

If the results were 8-10cbm of ash, then the combination ultimately worked significantly more successfully than when Dolfy and his new bride were doused in petrol only and set on fire a couple of months later.

What is/are the primary source(s) for this claim? I know that Taylor's book makes this claim, but what primary source backs this up?

Interrogations of Trawnikis from the 1970s as far as I know. Wolfgang Scheffler was the first to make the connection in 1984.

Eh? Have you even read my posts?

Yes, and as I've said a few times now, your arguments don't allow us to specify levels or quantify things.

As for the other camps, go ahead and apply my arguments to Belzec if you like. All that you need to know is the size and fueling of the Belzec cremation facility. As I don't have access to the trial records, but I have seen it claimed that the staff testified to two cremation facilities measuring 5x5 meters. If that is correct, then my arguments based on the literature on mass carcass incineration would in fact be even stronger for Belzec than for Treblinka.

Nope, your arguments wouldn't explain away Belzec, either. They don't explain away Sobibor. And they don't explain away Chelmno.

Now, tell me, Nick: If 1200 sheep or 1600 pigs can be cremated in 9-10 days on a pyre 200 meters long with fuel consisting of 1,000 railway ties, 8 tons of kindling, 400 wooden pallets, 4 tons of straw, 200 tons of coal, and 1,000 liters of diesel fuel, how many Jews can be cremated overnight on a pyre 30 meters long with fuel consisting of perhaps one ton of dry wood and perhaps as much gasoline as can be soaked into the wood?

Honestly, who cares? I'm sorry, but your whole shtick is simply tedious.

You're cherrypicking one secondary source about one location, whereas there are multiple examples of the construction of pyres to cremate animal carcasses from recent decades, including an example from the self-same FMD epidemic discussed in the HC white paper, in addition to historical examples such as the cremation (yes, cremation) of nearly 7,000 bodies in 12 days at Dresden.

 

[Nick Terry]

I previously offered an analysis of cremation capacity based on the mass burn site at Epynt. We can also estimate on the basis of length of pyre. Rajchman stated that the Treblinka pyres were 1.5 meters wide, while the pyres used for mass carcass incineration were wider, often with width determined by the length of a railroad tie (sleeper), but I'm willing to write that off and treat them as if they had equal width.

The literature on carcass incineration suggests that 5 sheep carcasses can be burned per meter of pyre length, or per yard of pyre length - both claims are made in the literature. (I have given two references for this and am prepared to give more, but as no-one here shows any sign of having studied the references I have already given there's little point in doing so now.) As previously mentioned, sheep are a reasonable approximation to Jews for the purposes of studying cremation, and in fact would be considerably easier to cremate due to their much higher levels of body fat. (I can give details on the levels of body fat in sheep if anyone wants to challenge me on this point.)

Let's take the higher figure, 5 Jews per yard, or 5.5 per meter. On a 30 meter pyre that means 165 Jews could be burned at once. I'll make the rather generous estimate of a two day burning time, plus one day to build the pyre and one day to wait for the ash to cool and remove it. This means a pyre could be burned every four days, or 30 burns in 4 months of cremation at Belzec and Treblinka.

Accordingly, one 30 meter long pyre could cremate a total of 30 * 165 = 4,950 bodies.

As Nick wants to account for escapes from trains and so on, I'll round the Belzec cremation figure down to 400,000, and the Treblinka one down to 700,000.

Running the numbers, this means that we would need 2424 meters of pyre at Belzec, or 81 pyres each 30 meters long. This flies in the face of all accounts of cremation at Belzec known to me. Nick, can you supply an account of Belzec cremation that fits this technical reality?

At Treblinka, the same calculations show that 4242 meters of pyre would be needed, or 141 pyres each 30 meters long. Again, this technical reality bears no similarity to any Treblinka witness account known to me. Nick, can you supply a counterexample?

These calculations show that even in the best case scenario, when everything goes according to the textbook, the cremations alleged to have taken place at Treblinka and Belzec could not have been achieved, even ignoring the issue of how they could have been fueled.

Garbage In, Garbage Out.

Epynt was a mismanaged cremation, as discussed on p.472 of the HC white paper linked in my sig. A FMD cremation in Scotland, discussed on p.494 of the white paper and available here, was considerably more efficient.

The claim that a 30m pyre could hold only 165 bodies is completely ludicrous when the Dresden pyres held 500+ each, and were considerably shorter (according to erstwhile denier hero David Irving, 20 feet long) than the described pyres at BST.

One key difference between sheep and human beings you seem not to have considered is that sheep have four legs and are therefore not easily stackable, whereas human corpses can irrefutably be stacked like cordwood. The descriptions of pyres for the cremation of human beings as well as the photos from Dresden and also Klooga indicate that multiple layers were the norm, whereas you are hypothesising only one layer of bodies.

It's hard to imagine anything more dishonest than trying to claim that the pyres had only one layer of corpses when all sources contradict such an assumption.

Frankly, your numbers games smack of Leuchter's failed maths in the infamous report, which regularly reduce my students to giggles when they are asked to read the report in one of my courses.

 

[Sebastianus]

Try actually reading what Judge Lukaszkiewicz wrote next time instead of making stuff up.

Lukaszkiewicz / "...its walls give recognizable evidence of the presence of a large quantity of ashes as well as human remains"

Lukaszkiewicz /"Numerous human remains were found by these excavations, partially still in a state of decomposition".

Lukaszkiewicz /...one finds countless human bones, often still covered with tissue remains, which are in a condition of decomposition"

I regret to say, Matthew, that you have entirely failed to understand the issue under discussion. According to the orthodox account, the sequence of events was this:

Bodies of the gassed put into graves in upper camp
All bodies in upper camp taken out of graves and cremated (what happens to bodies in then entry square - those who died on the trains - is often left unclear in the testimonies)
Cremation remains put back in the graves. Many witnesses insist at considerable length that they were all mashed to fine powder; others speak of incompletely cremated body parts.

The issue under discussion was whether all or nearly all the bodies were removed from the graves and cremated, or whether a significant percentage were left in the graves. Judge Lukaszkiewicz specifically supported the former option. As he wrote:

During the work on the terrain, I found no mass graves, which, in connection with the statements by the witnesses Romanowski and Wiernik, leads to the conclusion that nearly all of the bodies of the victims were burned, all the more so since the camp was liquidated early and the murderers had much time.

The Examining Judge of Siedlce, on November 13, 1945, rules in consideration of the fact that with great probability no mass graves are any longer to be found on the grounds of the former camp today, as is to be concluded from the witness testimonies examined so far and from the results of the work carried out at the site

Now, what of your quotations regarding human remains? Well, as I have previously stated, they in no way contradict my position, nor do they support the position you had advanced by quoting Strawczyncki. What you have failed to grasp, even though I have explained it twice, is that the presence of human remains, including uncremated flesh, does not contradict the statement that the bodies were all removed from the graves and cremated. Cremation, contrary to what many suppose, is not annihilation. Even in a crematory oven it leaves considerable remains, as you may find explained in this article. In open air cremation, the extent of the remains is considerably greater; you may see an example in the video which I have already linked twice. You may see yet another example of this in the case of cremation in India, where a considerable environmental problem has been caused by cremation remains being thrown into rivers.

In yet another example, witnesses to the Alamo cremations described the blackened chars of the different anatomical fragments and a few charred heads, arms, and legs that were scattered about. The references to human remains do not imply that the corpses were not cremated.

Again: "human remains" and "bodies not removed from the graves" are not identical concepts. If you persist in failing to understand this elementary point, there is nothing I can do to help you.

Remember, revisionists do not assert that no cremations took place at Treblinka. The mortality from the trains alone accounts for enough bodies that reports of a "large quantity" of cremation remains are no surprise.

Now, Matthew, it's time to answer the questions you have been evading.

 

[Sebastianus]

You have linked us to a holocaust denial website that failed to include a quote by Sgt Bernard Clarke, explaining what he did.

"They brought him to us when he refused to cooperate over questioning about his activites during the war. ...................He came in the winter of 1945/6 and was put in a small jail cell in the barracks. We sat in the cell with him, night and day, armed with axe handles. Our job was to prod him every time he fell asleep to help break down his resistance. When Höss was taken out for exercise, he was made to wear only jeans and a thin cotton shire in the bitter cold. After three days and nights without sleep, Höss finally broke down and made a full confession to the authorities"

They kept Hoess awake. So what?

You should be more careful before you attempt to issue corrections, Matthew. The statement of Bernard Clarke was contained in the link I gave, complete with scans from the book Legions of Death

The statement which you now quote is not from Bernard Clarke, but from Ken Jones. Now, contrary to what you seem to be suggesting, deprivation of sleep was far from the only abuse inflicted on Hoess by his captors. However, that factor alone is a very serious one, far more so than you appear to believe. In his Gulag Archipelago, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn includes an interesting discussion of deprivation of sleep, which is one of the most powerful ways in which a prisoner can be rendered compliant and unable to withstand pressure, and consequently prone to sign whatever statement is put in front of him.

Sleeplessness, which they quite failed to appreciate in medieval times. They did not understand how narrow are the limits within which a human being can preserve his personality intact. Sleeplessness (yes, combined with standing, thirst, bright light, terror, and the unknown—what other tortures are needed!?) befogs the reason, undermines the will, and the human being ceases to be himself, to be his own "I."

[...]

They used to say: "You are not truthful in your testimony, and therefore you will not be allowed to sleep!" Sometimes, as a refinement, instead of making the prisoner stand up, they made him sit down on a soft sofa, which made him want to sleep all the more. (The jailer on duty sat next to him on the same sofa and kicked him every time his eyes began to shut.)

[...]

Sleeplessness was a great form of torture: it left no visible marks and could not provide grounds for complaint even if an inspection—something unheard of anyway—were to strike on the morrow.

[...]

One can say that sleeplessness became the universal method in the Organs. From being one among many tortures, it became an integral part of the system of State Security