And the experience of those thousands of years says it can't be done in the manner alleged to have happened at the Reinhardt camps.
You might as well argue that "jumping is natural, people have been jumping for thousands of years. Flying is just an extended form of jumping. Therefore stories of witches flying are perfectly believable."
You can't save a ridiculous comparison with another bad analogy. That's simply doubling down. You know the saying, when in a hole, stop digging? That's what you should do with the witchcraft 'comparison'. It's not convincing anyone. Look at ANTPogo's bored reaction to your tedious witterings.
Witchcraft accusations involve the supernatural, and were made in medieval and early modern times within European societies.
Cremation is a natural phenomenon. Mass cremation has certainly been used on thousands of occasions in
recent history, including dozens in 1942-45 by the Nazis, but also other cases. A claim of mass cremation therefore cannot be treated as equivalent to a claim of witchcraft.
The real problem is you're ignoring your own concessions when cornered - you apparently accept that mass cremation took place at these sites, because that way you can handwave away the physical and archaeological evidence, factor in the indirect witnesses to flames visible over long distances. You apparently only dispute the scale.
Therefore, your analogy goes far beyond a mere apples and oranges comparison. It actually ends up in different universes - because the supernatural realm is not currently recognised in science, whereas even you accept there were mass cremations at these sites, just not 'as big'.
This isn't the last example of your utter intellectual incoherence in this latest reply.
Trying to bluff your way through your error only makes you look even more stupid, Nick. Balderdash like "assigning probabilities is a means of very abstractly simulating the chance of non-independence of testimonies in everyday situations such as police investigations" only proves to anyone with some rudimentary knowledge of statistics that you know nothing.
Knowing nothing about statistics is not a crime; we're all ignorant of something. But making up nonsense as you just did proves not only a total ignorance of statistics, but also a lack of integrity and honesty.
You cannot multiply probabilities like you did unless you know the events are independent. All you did was assert that separate interrogations are "certainly" independent events. This is obviously false, and if you knew what independent actually means in this context you would have realized it. Can you even define independence in the context of probability and statistics, Nick? This is material from day one of your generic Stat101 course, but you clearly have not learned it.
Along with redefining apples and oranges comparisons into the Twilight Zone, you've also created more circular arguments.
Essentially, you're equivocating between definitions of independence - admittedly I used the word in two different senses, but if we change that then we can see where you're going wrong.
In conventional situations, multiple testimonies are regarded as more reliable than a single testimony. For most things if we hear the same story from four or five people separately then it is beyond most ordinary doubts. But it is not unknown for four people to collectively play a prank on colleagues or strangers, and lie. Rare, but it does happen.
In police investigations, interrogators routinely elicit true confessions from suspects, both single suspects and multiple suspects to collective crimes. Police interrogators also elicit false confessions, either because the suspects are psychologically unbalanced or because they have been coerced.
We know that false confessions are uncommon, so there is an overall probability based on historical experiences.
If you are a prosecutor who is being kept in the loop about an investigation into a gang rape, you might well receive four confessions from members of the gang who carried out the rape, perhaps before the DNA evidence comes in. In such a scenario, you are more than entitled to place considerable, but not absolute trust, in the results of the interrogations, and to regard them as separate pieces of corroboration, as you await further evidence
However, if one of the confessions is then retracted, the situation changes. The assumption of independence, which we make routinely on an everyday basis when assessing the reliability of testimony, is exposed as fraudulent.
Your equivocation over the meaning of independence predetermines the conclusion. It is especially problematic because it does not allow us to distinguish between a freely given confession and a coerced one. It generalises the possibility of a false confession to poison the well of all confessions.
The assumption of independence is defeasible; it can be defeated by the production of other evidence. And that is essentially how the world works. If police elicit four confessions to a gang rape and then the DNA evidence comes in, confirming all four men as rapists, then we were certainly justified in relying on the confessions as strong proof that the gang rape was performed by those four men. Each of the confessions was as we would normally expect, given freely and separately.
If the police elicit four confessions from a gang rape and murder, then only one of the men is linked to the crime via DNA evidence, and the other men retract their confessions, as happened in the Norfolk Four case you linked to, then independence did not exist.
Your problem is you're trying to pyramid the possibility of multiple false confessions in a situation where there is no indication of false confession.
Until you produce evidence of a retraction, then everyone else is entitled to regard the admissions by SS men of mass extermination at the Reinhard camps or elsewhere as strong evidence in their own right. Probability plus defeasibility, however, still allows for the possibility that this conclusion could change. If you produced a deathbed confession from Kurt Franz, that would change
everything.
Moreover: we also have to estimate the probability of such a hitherto unknown retraction coming to light. That probability is
extremely unlikely.
You cannot therefore deny independence on the mere possibility of collusion; first
you have to prove collusion. This burden of proof rests squarely on your shoulders, and it cannot be done with arguments by analogy.
Ah, yes. "We're British by God. Nothing like that could happen with us!" Soviet Russia - sure, false confessions. Communist China, or North Korea - absolutely. But surely not with westerners. Not with British intelligence specialists practised in the techniques of sustained and merciless investigation.
(That's one of those irregular verbs: "I engage in sustained and merciless interrogation, you extort false confessions by force.")
LOL, your ignorance of the evidence for the AR camps is quite amazing sometimes. Literally all of the 38 SS men who served in Belzec, Sobibor and Treblinka avoided Allied interrogators entirely, and were interrogated by West German detectives and prosecutors. The overwhelming majority of SS men serving at other extermination sites were similarly interrogated by the West Germans and Austrians.
But the point also stands for the British and Americans. Allied interrogators found German POWs were very willing to talk during wartime, so did not need to resort to third-degree methods on a routine basis.
The British and Americans then interrogated
10s of 1000s of war crimes suspects after 1945; that is the key baseline. The number of cases where interrogators resorted to coercion is very small; as measured by allegations of maltreatment.
One might add that East Bloc societies also managed to police crime and conduct interrogations without always needing to rely on coercion and fabrication. The famous examples primarily stem from domestic political show trials rather than criminal cases.
The USSR and Poland also interrogated 10s of 1000s of Nazi war crimes suspects. The overwhelming majority, including witnesses to nasty crimes you wish never happened, were not sentenced to death, and were fairly rapidly repatriated by the mid-1950s. The number of retractions or denials of crimes previously admitted to was minimal, chiefly concerning a series of belated conveyor-belt trials (Waldheimer Prozesse) aimed by the Soviets at various Wehrmacht personnel. Polish war crimes trials were widely acknowledged as extremely fair, and frequently produced very limited sentences for the accused, or acquittals.
Because the West Germans did not recognise the validity of East Bloc sentences, numerous SS men were reinterrogated after 1955, and some were reprosecuted. Given the prevailing climate of the day after the Korean war, a climate which assumed that communist societies could extract false confessions at will, as well as the Hallstein doctrine and the complexities of West German/Austria Vergangenheitsbewaeltigung, it is truly remarkable that we don't find mass retractions from these repatriated SS men.
So not only is it false to equate western societies with the East Bloc when it comes to coercion of statements, it is also false to assume that the East Bloc did this to Nazi war crimes suspects on a routine basis. Because Soviet interrogators came from a culture that had legitimised third degree methods, then the most that can be assumed without other direct evidence confirming coercion is that it's best to be cautious, and corroborate the East Bloc source with a western source. Which is never a problem.
The basic conclusion is that you need
actual evidence of coercion before claiming that it might be a factor. Anything else is merely well-poisoning, and fallacious evidentiary reasoning.
This actually gives us a fine look at the retraction issue. People make retractions when they think it can benefit them to do so. That was not the case with "Nazi war criminals." But look at the circumstances around the retractions in this case: the Korean war ended, the prisoners went home, they were threatened with court martial, and they issued retractions.
Now, imagine the same circumstance in the second world war: suppose that the war had ended in a treaty, and that German prisoners who had confessed to the existence of gas chambers were returned to Germany, which was still ruled by the National Socialists, and threatened with court martial. Do you think that under such circumstances there might be some retractions?"
Or consider the opposite circumstance: suppose that the Korean war had ended with the United States being invaded and conquered by Communists, and that the US government was replaced with a communist regime that regarded its capitalist predecessor as evil, and which sent US soldiers to prison for their use of biological weapons during the Korean war. Under those circumstances, can we really be confident that the confessions would have been retracted?
Oh wow. First you cite the US confessions to biological warfare in Korea as an example of coerced confessions. Now you cast doubt on the retractions and are practically suggesting that the US really did use biological weapons in Korea, because the returning POWs were threatened with court-martial if they didn't retract. Could your argument possibly get any more self-contradictory?
Your what-if-the-Nazis-had-won counterfactual is a cute indicator of your ideological predilections, but nothing more.
The key point about retractions is - either they exist or they don't. In the case of Nazi war crimes investigations and interrogations, we don't find them where you want to find them. We don't have any examples of retractions of witness statements by SS men who served at the Aktion Reinhard camps.
You have nothing, basically.
Denying specific aspects while admitting the general framework is perfectly common in false confessions. Consider the example of the convicted witch
Anna Ebeler: who despite admitting to witchcraft denied having foresworn the virgin Mary and insisted that she had only rarely had sex with the devil.
Has Mr Statistics got any better data than a single anecdote, or is this yet another example of cherrypicking with apples and oranges on the side?
Your Anna Ebeler example dates from 1669, nearly 300 years before Kurt Franz was interrogated leisurely by West German detectives. We also find your source was selectively cited. From the same p.215 of the article by Lyndal Roper in Witchcraft in Early Modern Europe: Studies in Culture and Belief, edited by my colleague Jonathan Barry along with Marianne Lester and Gareth Roberts:
This freedom was in some sense apparent rather than real: witches who confessed and then revoked their confession embarked on a long and hideous game of cat and mouse with their interrogators, as they were reinterrogated and tortured until their narrative was consistent.
We
know that torture was used in early modern witchcraft cases; we know nothing of the sort with the interrogations of Kurt Franz in 1960s West Germany.
