General Holocaust Denial Discussion Part II

[Nessie]

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The historical starting point to this debate came when revisionists asked cremation professionals about holocaust cremation claims, and found that said professionals supported revisionist claims. Perhaps the first such case was Ivan Lagace, who testified at the Zundel trial. As Lagace did not fully understand the particular design of the Auschwitz crematory ovens, some of his statements are erroneous, but his testimony is still worthwhile as an example of how a cremation professional reacts when confronted with holocaust cremation claims.

Another cremation professional to discuss holocaust cremation claims is found in this video, in the segment beginning at 31:35. Again, the discussion is not as detailed as one might hope, but the interview is still valuable for the opportunity of seeing a professional's response to the claims made about cremation during the holocaust. It's also worth watching the witness claim about gassing and pit cremation starting at 28:50 (cremation part starts at 30:15).

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It is very interesting that here you are favourable towards witnesses who make errors, lack detail and do not fully understand what they are talking about.

 

[MaxMurx]

The cremation remains you are mentioning are more than 5,000 years old. The article is comparing mid neolithic burials to late neolithic burials as is clearly described in the paper's abstract. It has nothing to do with modern forensics

1. The paper has no abstract.
2. The findings are mainly compared to experimental cremations of the present time in the absence of other cremation sites on French territory.
3. That is why it is important in the present discussion.

 

[A'isha]

ANTPogo contends that decayed corpses burn much more easily than fresh corpses. He cites no empirical evidence in favor of this claim,

See Muhlenkamp's references.

and ignores the fact that the decay of carcasses in the aftermath of Hurricane Floyd made the bodies harder to burn.

Because they were both at a different stage of decay when burned than the corpses at Treblinka, and waterlogged due to flooding caused by the hurricane, meaning that comparing the two situations is entirely useless.

He also contends that the fact that at Epynt decayed carcasses were also found to be more difficult to burn than fresh carcasses is irrelevant, because conditions at Epynt were not ideal.

Yes.

Suboptimal conditions would make both decayed and fresh carcasses harder to burn, but they would not make decayed carcasses more difficult to burn than fresh ones when formerly they had been easier to burn.

Not all stages of decay are the same, and the the difficulty of burning the Epynt carcasses was because of a number of factors, and cannot be simply reduced to "they were decayed, therefore all decayed bodies are always harder to burn."

In addition to these two examples showing the greater difficulty of burning decayed carcasses, one might add the leading "sonderkommando 1005" witness Leon Wells, who (as Carlo Mattogno points out in his recently published work linked above) wrote that the combustibility of corpses

Again, not all decay is alike. This was, in fact, one of Muhlenkamp's major points in his response to Mattogno's nonsense.

ANTPogo's statement that the "burial site the Epynt carcasses were exhumed from was dug in boggy, peaty ground (and deep enough to go into the underlying rock layer)" is simply wrong; the peat was only a shallow surface layer. The statement that the pit went down to rock is also wrong.

Peat only forms in wetland conditions. In order for there to have been even a "shallow surface layer", the ground would have to be damp, boggy, and (just as described) muddy.

In fact, wells were drilled to 20 meters, far greater than the depth of the pit. The actual base of the burial pit was a layer of crushed stone that was placed in the bottom of the pit for the purpose of establishing proper drainage for leachate from the carcasses. The fact that such provisions for drainage were made refutes the argument that the poor drainage of the clay soil at Epynt is the reason that the decayed carcasses burned more poorly there.

As the report notes, drainage issues and groundwater contamination were some of the reasons the carcasses were exhumed and burned (the burial pit was being permeated with ground and surface water from the wet environment).

When trial pits were dug at the sites to between a depth of 3.5 to 4 meters, the peaty soil layer was "underlain by weathered to highly weathered red marls and mudstones".

Hence the "mud and stones" which were described as mixed in with the carcasses when they were exhumed and which complicated the cremation.

The argument that the plan for a 10 meter wide pyre shows incompetence cannot be sustained unless ANTPogo can show that the width in practise was no greater than 10 meters.

No, because the width of the pit being in the plan is not what shows incompetence, it's that the width of the pit was in the plan and yet they still didn't think to obtain machinery which could properly stoke a pit of the width that they planned for which shows incompetence. It's like planning a dinner party knowing you'll have 20 people show up, and yet only having enough food and place settings for five.

As for ANTPogo's other statements, I cannot see what argument he is trying to make. Pointing to the fact that some cremation took place at a site cannot prove that it was an extermination camp.

Pointing to the fact that some cremation took place at a site, no. Pointing to the fact that a whole lot of cremation took place at sites where the Nazis transported people who never left those sites, on the other hand, is a pretty big clue that something akin to extermination was going on there.

 

[MaxMurx]

Another interesting book is: Faigrieve SI; Forensic Cremation - Recovery and Analysis; CRC Press; Boca Raton, London, New York, 2008.

http://de.scribd.com/doc/117732067/Forensic-Cremation-Recovery-and-Analysis-Malestrom

 

[EtienneSC]

Readers of this list may be interested to hear that the long-promised rebuttal of the Holocaust Controversies critique of their work on the Aktion Reinhardt camps (Sobibor, Belzec and Treblinka) is now published online and can be downloaded here:
http://codoh.com/library/document/3052

As it is over 1,500 pages, no doubt it will take some time to absorb, despite the quota of cut and paste.

We have the beginnings of a response from the Holocaust Controversies team in the form of two blog posts here.

 

[Matthew Ellard]

The article above is very interesting. To my understanding it asks for proper archeological investigations of Holocaust sites .......

That's why Colls team has been performing further forensic archaeological investigations at Treblinka.
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-16657363

......if those can be human cremation residuals at all. If those sites would have been investigated properly, that question never would be asked again.

1945 / Treblinka / Justice Lukaszkiewicz "During the inspection, which I made with the assistance of an expert in forensic medicine, it was determined that the ashes are without any doubt of human origin"

Third I have German parents, born in 1919 and 1920. Both died at the age of 81. According to Goldhagen the Germans of that period were deep rooted anti semites, even willing executioners. ..... Therefore I asked and will continue to ask: "What about the dignity of the alleged perpetrators?

No one here is blaming your parents or every German. Most Germans are lovely friendly people. ( From memory "collective blame" was the premise for the famous 1961 film Judgment at Nuremberg and that is a separate issue to the matter at hand)

 

[Matthew Ellard]

It is very interesting that here you are favourable towards witnesses who make errors, lack detail and do not fully understand what they are talking about.

It is also interesting that Sebastianus has not set out all the eyewitnesses that Holocaust deniers have sourced of Jews arriving at their resettlement locations or German guards taking them there. I asked him twice. Sebastianus is giving us his personal opinion on why he doesn't trust German and Jewish eyewitnesses to the holocaust, but avoiding explaining why he can't find one eyewitness to support his "resettlement theory". To me that is the point for discussion.

Sebastianus? Can you explain why you can't source one German or one Jewish eyewitness concerning their resettlement in Russia?

 

[Matthew Ellard]

1. The paper has no abstract.

ABSTRACT
An archaeological excavation carried out on the site of Reichstett-Mundolsheim, near Strasbourg, produced a circular pit dated to the beginning of the Late Neolithic period which contained a simultaneous primary cremation of eleven individuals. The large number of individuals compared to the size of the structure, the high fragmentation of the bones and the modifications received by some of them because of fire complicated of course the identification of each skeleton; however, several observations relating to the behavior of the various anatomical areas during the cremation could be made. We propose a discussion of certain aspects : the resistance to fire of the various anatomical areas, the problem of our theoretical references concerning weight, and the processes of dislocation of the articular connections, knowing that the type of pyre and the cremation process play a fundamental role in the fragmentation and final arrangement of the bones. The results indicate a very great variability in the state of the anatomical connections and in the conservation of the bones, whereas the conditions of cremation are the same for all the skeletons. So it is difficult to identify the etiology of the alteration of the anatomical connections. Lastly, it appears that natural processes of destruction can cause certain phenomena which we may interpret as significant funerary features.

http://bmsap.revues.org/870?lang=en

 

[Matthew Ellard]

Sebastianus holds out that if he doesn't think the cremation of bodies is physically possible then it didn't take place. Using that logic....

Sebastianus is now going to set out in detail his theory of how the Jewish victims were resettled in Russia. Sebastianus is going to detail the trains that took them, the guard units that took them, the food they were allocated and fed on the way, the German officer eyewitnesses that administered the resettlement camps, what villages the Jews were sent to, what food they grew or were sent at the camps, what cold weather clothing was sent to replace the 266,000 overcoats taken off them at Treblinka... etc etc

 

[CaptainHowdy]

CaptainHowdy mentioned the example of crematory ovens in connection with the incineration of bodies. This is a good direction for this discussion to develop, although of course cremation in an oven differs greatly from open air cremation. In speaking of cremation in ovens, we are leaving the Reinhardt camps and focusing our attention on Auschwitz and Majdanek.

I have already explained that aerial photos show that while open air cremation did take place at Auschwitz-Birkenau, its scale was quite modest. The Auschwitz open air incinerations might have been capable of incinerating perhaps dozens of bodies per day, but they certainly did not incinerate thousands of bodies per day. This means that if the flurry of extermination alleged to have taken place at Auschwitz really occurred, then the bodies (up to 10,000 per day) must have been disposed of almost entirely in the crematory ovens. For an explanation of how the system supposedly worked, and for an intuitive look at the problem of cremation capacity, the video Auschwitz: the surprising hidden truth is highly valuable.

Birkenau had 46 muffles for cremation - five triple-muffle ovens in kremas II and III, and an 8-muffle oven (in 2 x 4 configuration) in krema IV and V. By 1944 the 6 muffles of the main camp were no longer in service. There is also agreement on both sides of the holocaust debate that krema IV was no longer in service in 1944. This reduces the maximum number of muffles available to 38.

Now, how many bodies could these ovens have cremated, and how much fuel would it have taken? And what about the need for repairs?

Let's start with the issue of cremation capacity. How long does it take for a crematory oven to burn a body? We might start by looking at the performance of modern crematory ovens. For instance, the top of the line model from Matthews Cremation advertises a capacity of up to 15 cremations in 18 hours

An interesting fact I came across on the wikipedia article on cremation is that

​

The time required for cremation varies from body to body, and, in modern furnaces, the process may be as fast as one hour per 45 kg (100 lb) of body weight.

Because there is so much variation in the size of individual bodies, it might be more useful to look at the problem from the perspective of how much body mass can be disposed of per hour instead of length of time required to burn one body. We could avoid getting bogged down in debates over how many babies vs how many adults were incinerated and how many well fed vs how many emaciated Jews were burned. It would also allow us to account for the fact that Nazis burned more than one body at a time while much of the cremation literature assumes bodies are cremated individually.

I cannot verify the source of the 45 kg/hour claim so we need to take it with a grain of salt. But that statistic does seem to be line with other info I've seen about top of the line incinerators being able to completely burn one body in about two hours.

 

[CaptainHowdy]

Sebastianus (and others) have linked to various studies or government reports about cremating remains that support the argument that the death camp cremations were not possible as described by witnesses. Does anybody know of a similarly independent source that contains information supporting the claims of the eyewitnesses? I'm sorry if this has already been provided and I simply missed it.

 

[MaxMurx]

ABSTRACT
An archaeological excavation carried out on the site of Reichstett-Mundolsheim, near Strasbourg, produced a circular pit dated to the beginning of the Late Neolithic period which contained a simultaneous primary cremation of eleven individuals. The large number of individuals compared to the size of the structure, the high fragmentation of the bones and the modifications received by some of them because of fire complicated of course the identification of each skeleton; however, several observations relating to the behavior of the various anatomical areas during the cremation could be made. We propose a discussion of certain aspects : the resistance to fire of the various anatomical areas, the problem of our theoretical references concerning weight, and the processes of dislocation of the articular connections, knowing that the type of pyre and the cremation process play a fundamental role in the fragmentation and final arrangement of the bones. The results indicate a very great variability in the state of the anatomical connections and in the conservation of the bones, whereas the conditions of cremation are the same for all the skeletons. So it is difficult to identify the etiology of the alteration of the anatomical connections. Lastly, it appears that natural processes of destruction can cause certain phenomena which we may interpret as significant funerary features.

http://bmsap.revues.org/870?lang=en

Thanks. I have the PDF version. The PDF version has none.

http://bmsap.revues.org/pdf/870

 

[EtienneSC]

Sebastianus holds out that if he doesn't think the cremation of bodies is physically possible then it didn't take place. Using that logic....

Sebastianus is now going to set out in detail his theory of how the Jewish victims were resettled in Russia. Sebastianus is going to detail the trains that took them, the guard units that took them, the food they were allocated and fed on the way, the German officer eyewitnesses that administered the resettlement camps, what villages the Jews were sent to, what food they grew or were sent at the camps, what cold weather clothing was sent to replace the 266,000 overcoats taken off them at Treblinka... etc etc

MGK devote 157 pages to this in their latest work (pages 645-802). Perhaps we could engage directly with that - as it is hardly above criticism- rather than a second hand summary.

 

[A'isha]

Sebastianus (and others) have linked to various studies or government reports about cremating remains that support the argument that the death camp cremations were not possible as described by witnesses.

They've done no such thing, since the cremations of animal carcasses for public heapth reasons described in their sources are not comparable to the Nazi cremation of human corpses in order to try and conceal evidence of genocide.

Does anybody know of a similarly independent source that contains information supporting the claims of the eyewitnesses? I'm sorry if this has already been provided and I simply missed it.

Did you check out the sources and studies cited by Muhlenkamp?

 

[Dcdrac]

you cannot compare carefuly controlled mass cremations of diseased animals under tight supervision with the desperate attempts by the Nazis to destroy the evidence of their crimes, the two are not even remotly compareable.

 

[Nessie]

The best comparison is with the funeral ghats on the Ganges, how many remains are cremated there, how long it takes and how much wood is used.

http://edition.cnn.com/2011/09/12/world/asia/india-funeral-pyres-emissions/index.html

Seven million Hindus are cremated each year using wood from 50 to 60 million trees and 500 to 600 kg of wood per person. Though many cannot afford that and so are left with partial remains. Using a more efficient method with grills has been found to reduce the wood use to 150 to 200 kgs and the burn time to 2 hours per body.

So around 1.25 million were killed at Auschwitz over a roughly a 3 1/2 year period would average out at around 360 a day, but we know it was many thousand some days and there were crematoriums. I do not see a reason to be incredulous about using outdoor pyres to cremate/partially cremate some of the remains.

 

[Loss Leader]

Therefore I asked and will continue to ask: "What about the dignity of the alleged perpetrators?

What, if anything, did your parents do to oppose their government's policies? What did they do to protest the Nuremberg laws? What did they do to shelter or protect German Jews? Did your parents patronize Jewish businesses? Did they employ Jews? Did your father serve in WWII? If so, in what capacity? How did he use his position to save any Jewish person from persecution?

If you believe their memories are being done a disservice, please show evidence that they deserve better.

 

[CaptainHowdy]

They've done no such thing, since the cremations of animal carcasses for public heapth reasons described in their sources are not comparable to the Nazi cremation of human corpses in order to try and conceal evidence of genocide.

Animal models are used in nearly any field to answer questions that cannot be easily answered with human models. They can be used here as well. Where they are imperfect, we can look to studies of cremation and fire forensics. The motive behind the burning of bodies doesn't change the physics of burning bodies.

Did you check out the sources and studies cited by Muhlenkamp?

Yes, some of them. I'm still trying to digest the chapter on "Burning of the Corpses." As part of that I've been checking the footnotes. Unfortunately many of the footnotes are to Mottagno or Muhlenkamp's earlier writings. There are also alot of references to Jewish or German eyewitnesses and court cases. The few independent sources (which, by the way, are references to studies of animal carcass disposal) contain incomplete information. This is not a criticism of Muhlenkamp. Many of the resources that are available for animal carcass disposal don't have all the information we need.

But overall Muhlenkamp makes a pretty good case for the following facts:

1. Open air cremations like those described by the witnesses can be used to dispose of bodies.
2. The fuel the eyewitnesses say was used by the Nazis will work.
3. It's possible to burn large amounts of bodies simultaneously.
4. It's possible to burn bodies relatively quickly.

The independent research that Muhlenkamp footnotes, however, doesn't support the argument that the Nazis could have burned as many bodies as they did as quickly as they did in the area in which they did it using the method and the fuel that they used.

 

[CaptainHowdy]

The best comparison is with the funeral ghats on the Ganges, how many remains are cremated there, how long it takes and how much wood is used.

http://edition.cnn.com/2011/09/12/world/asia/india-funeral-pyres-emissions/index.html

Seven million Hindus are cremated each year using wood from 50 to 60 million trees and 500 to 600 kg of wood per person. Though many cannot afford that and so are left with partial remains. Using a more efficient method with grills has been found to reduce the wood use to 150 to 200 kgs and the burn time to 2 hours per body.

So around 1.25 million were killed at Auschwitz over a roughly a 3 1/2 year period would average out at around 360 a day, but we know it was many thousand some days and there were crematoriums. I do not see a reason to be incredulous about using outdoor pyres to cremate/partially cremate some of the remains.

Seven million Hindus aren't cremated along the Ganges. That number is probably all the Hindus in India or maybe even around the world that are cremated. If all the victims at Auschwitz were dispersed across India or around the world, there wouldn't be any reason to be incredulous.

Your first sources said roughly 100,000 Hindus are cremated annually along the Ganges using an average of 300 kg of wood per cremation. Try scaling that up to 800,000 Hindus. Instead of one year, say it was about five or six months. Instead of spreading out along the Ganges, restrict it to one 13 acre plot. And collect the 240,000,000 kg of wood from the surrounding forest. Do you still not see a reason to incredulous?

 

[Aulus Agerius]

What, if anything, did your parents do to oppose their government's policies? What did they do to protest the Nuremberg laws? What did they do to shelter or protect German Jews? Did your parents patronize Jewish businesses? Did they employ Jews? Did your father serve in WWII? If so, in what capacity? How did he use his position to save any Jewish person from persecution?

If you believe their memories are being done a disservice, please show evidence that they deserve better.

I agree. My grandparents were German. My grandfather was conscripted (the reasons vary depending on the telling - some say a refusal to marry the daughter of some Party official, others his habit of privately listening to the BBC). He was sent to Russia, but had the good fortune to be wounded before Stalingrad. He was invalided out of the army, only to be called up again after Normandy. Finally, as Germany collapsed, he (and many others deserted. Their sergeant was supposed to shoot deserters, but turned a blind eye to soldiers who disappeared. After the war, my Grandfather married (she was half-Jewish as it happens) and left Germany (so he said, because he there were too many "Party people" still around).
That, I would think, is a fairly normal story for a German male of comparable age: no great heroism and no great evil. Neither one of the relatively few directly involved in the genocide, nor one of the few who actively resisted the regime.
I do not see that declining to disturb the fragmented remains of genocide victims does any kind of disrespect to the "alleged" perpetrators: their guilt has been proven beyond reasonable doubt. Disturbing the remains would not convince the holocaust-deniers. Judging by their arguments here, nothing short of a time machine would do that.