General Holocaust Denial Discussion Part II

[Matthew Ellard]

Finally, as Matthew mentioned Caroline Sturdy-Colls' research at Treblinka, I should point out that her publications to date contain no information about her actual findings.

New Information provided by Colls
"One is 26m long, 17m wide and at least four metres deep, with a ramp at the west end and a vertical edge to the east".

"Another five pits of varying sizes and also at least this deep are located nearby".

"As well as the pits, the survey has located features that appear to be structural, and two of these are likely to be the remains of the gas chambers"

So you didn't know she found a very large pit with a minimum capacity of 1,768 cubic metres? Wow, you must be quite surprised then!

You would be a more efective debater, Matthew, if you paid more attention to reading comprehension.

Did I say this was published? I said it was new information provided by Colls. (Please also note that the word effective has 2 "F"s. It will help your reading comprehension)

So are you denying that Colls made these direct quotes about what she found at Treblinka? Are you denying that Colls found a burial 26m long, 17m wide and at least four metres deep?

What do you think that pit was at Treblinka for?

Let us suppose, for the sake of argument, that its volume is 1,768 cubic meters

No. Let's not. Colls' GPR team only penetrated four metres down. Lukaszkiewicz actually excavated other pits that were 7 metres deep.

"Numerous human remains were found by these excavations, partially still in a state of decomposition. The soil consists of ashes interspersed with sand, is of a dark gray color and granulous in form. During the excavations, the soil gave off an intense odor of burning and decay. At a depth of 7.5 meters the bottom was reached, which consisted of layers of unmixed sand. At this point the digging was stopped here"

Now, at 0.3 cubic meters per Jew, the largest pit's alleged volume of 1,768 cubic meters could hold just under 5,900 Jews. So where were the other 750,000 Jews buried?

They didn't bury all the Jews. Nice try. You seem to have forgotten about all the other pits at Treblinka too.

In addition, how would a human weighing 70 kilos have a body volume of 0.3 cubic metres? If you weigh a hundred kilos, your body volume is 0.1 cubic meters or a hundred liters. However the average human has a body volume of 66.4 litres or 0.066400m³. Where did you get the 0.3m³ from?

 

[Nessie]

First of all, your original source said that 100,000 bodies are cremated along the Ganges, not 800,000.

Also you're confusing Auschwitz with Treblinka. My comparison was with Treblinka. I originally made incorrect assumptions about Treblinka but I'll correct them with this updated comparison.

I originally said 800,000 bodies were cremated over five or six months at Treblinka whereas the actual figure is 870,000 people murdered at Treblinka over an eleven month period. All the bodies that were cremated were cremated within a 13 acre space.

By way of comparison 100,000 bodies are cremated along the Ganges. I don't know how much of the Ganges is used for funeral ghats but the Ganges river is 1,569 miles long. Let's say that only one percent of the Ganges river is used for cremations. Let's also say that all the ghats are contained within 300 feet from the shore on one side of the river only. So one percent of 1,569 miles multiplied by 300 feet gives us an area of 570 acres.

570 acres of space for 100,000 Hindu cremations a year. Compare that to Treblinka where 870,000 cremations on only 13 acres. More than eight times as many bodies cremated within a little more than two percent of the space?

So to sum up: I don't agree with you that the best comparison is with Hindu funeral pyres. But I do agree that it's a good comparison in that addresses the same topic--burning bodies--and it's unrelated to the historical record. But the source you provided doesn't give me any reason to be less incredulous about about the death camp cremations.

That is the problem I'm having here is that none of the resources that are available that I can find regarding the incineration of carcasses or the cremation of human remains describe processes would come close to destroying all the bodies that were destroyed at the death camps.

I think it is a comparison worth further study as to my knowledge it is the best example of continual human cremations on one site.

I do not think I will be able to do that study as I cannot find specific data for the size of the ghats and the number of bodies cremated at each one. If we did know that we would have a very good idea of what can be done with constant cremations on one site.

We would need to make allowances for the ghats not being used for mass cremations on the size of those at Birkenau and Treblinka II.

 

[Nessie]

........

Regarding what Nessie has written about cremations in India, CaptainHowdy has already indicated the problems of this line of argument. The reason the alleged cremations at camps like Belzec and Treblinka were not possible is the tight confines in which they had to take place. If it were contended that the Germans cremated a million bodies across the entirety of eastern Europe, then the particular arguments I have made would not apply, at least not in the particular form in which I have made them. But the alleged cremations at the Reinhardt camps took place under very tight restrictions in terms of time, space, and fuel; for this reason they could not have occurred as alleged. To say that they would have been possible if they were spread out over an entire subcontinent is really no argument at all.

The comparison I am looking for is the size and number of remains cremated at the ghats and what that helps to show is possible.

The Indian example does bring another point to mind: where did all the wood come from?

It is imported, with the wealthy using sandalwood and the poor dung. There are not so much concerns about deforestation as the carbon emissions form burning all that wood.

In India, entire forests are cut down to supply wood for cremation. Where were the forests that were cut down to fuel the alleged cremations at Belzec and Treblinka? Certainly the Soviets, who were always very interested in giving detailed descriptions of alleged German atrocities, never documented the felling of large forests to fuel the cremations. Nor are there photos of huge deforested areas where trees were felled to fuel the alleged cremations. Nor do the aerial photos of Treblinka support the idea of deforestation on the scale which would have been necessary to fuel the alleged cremations.

You have not taken into account that in India wood is needed every year for 7 million cremations and that has been going on for decades if not centuries. Treblinka II operated for just over a year. Why would that mean mass deforestation visible from the air? I am not convinced by your incredulity.

Now, with respect to Auschwitz, Nessie states that "1.25 million were killed at Auschwitz over a roughly a 3 1/2 year period would average out at around 360 a day". First of all, the math is badly wrong: 1.25 million over 3.5 years is just under 1000 dead per day, not 360.

3 1/2 years = 1275 days. 1.25 million/1275 = 980. Sorry, my maths has been found wanting again.

Second of all, the alleged killings at Auschwitz did not proceed at anything like a constant rate. I have addressed specifically the great surge in killing which allegedly took place in 1944, when the killings allegedly reached 10,000 per day, with some sources claiming even higher figures.

Let's take the aerial photo of May 31 as an example. As Carlo Mattogno explains in his book Auschwitz: Open Air Incinerations (chapter 9), over 184,000 Hungarian Jews arrived at Auschwitz between May 17 and May 31, 1944. Orthodox holocaust history has it that the large majority of these were gassed. That means that over the 15 day period leading up to May 31, some 8,000-10,000 Jews were gassed per day. Now, on the aerial photo of May 31 we see only an insignificant plume of smoke, coming from a very small region. We do not see huge piles of bodies, or huge pyres, or anything that indicates a body disposal operation on the scale alleged. The massive task of body disposal could not have been averaged out over time as Nessie supposes, because it had plainly been essentially completed when on May 31.

There were crematoriums there, supplemented by open air cremations. Hence only on occasions were plums of smoke seen. Then as you say there was not a continually cremation of 1000 bodies a day. So again aerial photos would not show the same activity.

One final point: nearly all posters here seem unable to correctly paraphrase my arguments. When they find my arguments inconvenient, they prefer to respond to arguments which roughly resemble mine, but have been altered in such a way as to make them much weaker. It has become to tiresome for me to respond to all such statements, but I do need to point out that such a practise of altering ones opponents' arguments can never succeed in refuting anything. In fact, it rather resembles the kind of arguments one hears from creationists, who finding it inconvenient to respond to the actual position of evolutionary biology, prefer to attack strawmen of their own construction (along the lines of "so you think the eye just appeared out of nowhere by chance? That's absurd."). Needless to say, such misrepresentations of the arguments of evolutionary biologists do not refute evolutionary biology. Nor are my arguments refuted when posters here misrepresent them.

Evidence that claim please.

 

[Nessie]

Well, I agree that the negation of "the Jews were killed and later cremated" is not "they continued on alive to other destinations." However, I would extend the argument as follows:

The body disposal problem was not solvable at Treblinka or Belzec via open air cremation, period, due to space limitations and limited access to the site (only a single road) to trucks for delivering fuel. To solve the body disposal problem onsite with crematory ovens would have required a gargantuan cremation facility with hundreds of muffles. How could such a construction project have gone unnoticed by all of the witnesses, generated no paperwork, and left no archaeological trace? To solve the body disposal via rendering would have required massive rendering plant capacity, and the construction of such enormous factories would have left a mark archaeologically (even it they could have fit on the site). To dispose of the bodies via composting would have required too much space. As for the idea that the bodies were buried and primarily left on site, this is also contradicted by the archaeological evidence.

In sum, the body disposal at Treblinka or Belzec could not have been solved on site at all. We can conclude from this that the people sent to Treblinka must have continued to other destinations. We cannot say from these considerations alone whether they continued alive or dead. But which is more plausible? That the witnesses told the truth about mass killing in gas chambers and then told outrageous lies about cremation while suppressing the truth about the shipping of the bodies off site, or that the witnesses' entire extermination narrative was dishonest? How much credibility does the extermination narrative have once it's conceded that the story told by all the witnesses is false?

To add the final touch of believability and evidence to that narrative, please evidence where the Jews were sent to.

What is more credible? Mass killings on sites where there is evidence mass killings took place? Mass lying by witnesses? Mass disappearance of Jews to no one knows where?

 

[MaxMurx]

One question about the cattle cars used fo transportation. Regarding the numbers of transported persons and incredible amount or rolling stock must have been used. Question: How many of those exist until today? Answer: None. According to the official newsletter of the Department of Railways of the German Technical Museum in Berlin, published in the "Memorial Preservation Forum" 35 German cattle cars presently are displayed in Holocaust memorials (Germany: 11, Poland: 8, France: 3, Belgium: 1, UK: 1, Israel: 1, USA: 9, Mexico:1. None of them is authentic. In most of the cars the original numeration of axles and fuselage had been removed and replaced by another (bogus) inscriptions "to prepare the non clarifiable problem if those ever had been used to transport Jews". The displayed cars however were obtained from old East German, Belgian, French and Polish rolling stock of post WWII time.

Question: Why is no original rolling stock preserved and why is it necessary to replace original markings by bogus markings? Will be those mentioning the fabrication of evidence be called "deniers"?

http://www.gedenkstaettenforum.de/n...s_symbolisches_objekt_in_kz_gedenkstaetten-1/

 

[CaptainHowdy]

No, I specifically said that it's invalid "to use the documents about animal carcass disposals in 21st Century Britain due to FMD and BSE epidemics to try and show that the Nazi's mass cremation of their human victims' remains was an impossible event". That doesn't mean that no conclusions can be drawn from those documents, but that their direct usefulness for the purpose of investigating the Nazis' crimes is severely constrained by the factors I've previously described, and Sebastianus' particular conclusions are unwarranted and unsupported by those documents.

And far from saying that none of that knowledge is applicable, I referred you to the sources and studies that Muhlenkamp cited, which do in fact include those things you mention.

Sebastianus complained that people were not paraphrasing his arguments correctly; please don't do that to me.

I thought that you were rejecting any information source that did not directly address mass cremation of human remains using open air incineration. If that was not your intent, I apologize for the misunderstanding. However, I don't comprehend why documents about animal carcass disposals in the 21st century Britain due to epidemics would be totally unsuitable for comparison purposes whereas something like the Lothes and Profe experiments as cited by Muhlenkamp would be acceptable.

Any resource that addresses the general topic of disposing of bodies with fire be it a description of Hindu funeral pyres, an arson investigation textbook or a sales brochure for crematoriums might have useful information. There is a minimum and a maximum for both temperature and time that is required to cremate human beings. Any discussion of burning bodies must reflect those ranges in order to be plausible.

That's why other methods are required, and my point is that not all methods are equally valid or useful.



I told you: the studies and experiments they actually cite. I didn't detail them because I don't want to run afoul of Rule 4, but I'd be happy to actually go through Muhlenkamp's footnotes and list them for you.

I've been going through the footnotes and trying to find all the references to independent resources that he cites. So far I haven't found that any of those resources support the fuel to kg of carcass disposal rates that would be required to make death camp disposal rates realistic.

 

[Loss Leader]

Will be those mentioning the fabrication of evidence be called "deniers"?

Are any of those railroad cars claimed by their museums to be authentic cars that transported Jewish prisoners? Or are they all set up for demonstrative purposes?

When the Lincoln society puts on a reenactment of a speech he gave locally, should I run up and yell, "This isn't the real Abraham Lincoln! He's a fake!"

 

[A'isha]

In addition, how would a human weighing 70 kilos have a body volume of 0.3 cubic metres? If you weigh a hundred kilos, your body volume is 0.1 cubic meters or a hundred liters. However the average human has a body volume of 66.4 litres or 0.066400m³. Where did you get the 0.3m³ from?

He got it from the modern mass carcass burial guidelines, and that number includes sufficient soil excavation to provide for several meters of backfill depth for the burial pits/trenches on top of the volume requirements for the carcasses themselves.

In other words, it's not saying that each carcass is .3 m³ if measured by itself, but that .3 m³ worth of dirt per carcass needs to be dug up in order to have enough space for the carcass plus enough backfill and cover to ensure that there's several meters of dirt between the carcass and the ground level.

It's the equivalent of taking a standard grave size at a normal, regular cemetary, 60 inches by 74 inches by 32 inches, and saying that since each burial in a grave requires the excavation of 2.3 cubic meters of dirt, that's how much volume a human body has and therefore the maximum capacity of any mass grave containing human corpses should be calculated using 2.3 m³ per corpse.

At 0.066400 m³ per human body, the 1768 m³ pit could hold 26,626 corpses just by itself if the Nazis didn't care about any backfill to ground level and just mounded the 1768 m³ of excavated dirt on top of the bodies filling the pit.

 

[MaxMurx]

Are any of those railroad cars claimed by their museums to be authentic cars that transported Jewish prisoners? Or are they all set up for demonstrative purposes?

When the Lincoln society puts on a reenactment of a speech he gave locally, should I run up and yell, "This isn't the real Abraham Lincoln! He's a fake!"

You probably don't know the difference between a museum and a "show", a "reenactment", "quotation" and "fabrication".

I have no problems with those cars being displayed and clearly marked to be "symbolic", not originals. My question however is why that is necessary at all, considering the hundreds of thousands of originals which still should exist.
.

 

[MaxMurx]

Are any of those railroad cars claimed by their museums to be authentic cars that transported Jewish prisoners? Or are they all set up for demonstrative purposes?

When the Lincoln society puts on a reenactment of a speech he gave locally, should I run up and yell, "This isn't the real Abraham Lincoln! He's a fake!"

The core problem in this discussion is "authenticity". If you accept all bogus evidence how can you dare to criticize those who ask questions about reality?

Which questions would YOU ask if the Lincoln reenactor would claim to be the real one having come back with some kind of time machine?

 

[Loss Leader]

The core problem in this discussion is "authenticity". If you accept all bogus evidence how can you dare to criticize those who ask questions about reality?

Which questions would YOU ask if the Lincoln reenactor would claim to be the real one having come back with some kind of time machine?

So, basically, museums aren't claiming the cars are authentic. Nobody is pointing to them as evidence. Nobody has accepted these particular cars as evidence. But, somehow, this means that someone has accepted bogus evidence.

 

[CaptainHowdy]

Well, I agree that the negation of "the Jews were killed and later cremated" is not "they continued on alive to other destinations." However, I would extend the argument as follows:

The body disposal problem was not solvable at Treblinka or Belzec via open air cremation, period, due to space limitations and limited access to the site (only a single road) to trucks for delivering fuel. To solve the body disposal problem onsite with crematory ovens would have required a gargantuan cremation facility with hundreds of muffles. How could such a construction project have gone unnoticed by all of the witnesses, generated no paperwork, and left no archaeological trace? To solve the body disposal via rendering would have required massive rendering plant capacity, and the construction of such enormous factories would have left a mark archaeologically (even it they could have fit on the site). To dispose of the bodies via composting would have required too much space. As for the idea that the bodies were buried and primarily left on site, this is also contradicted by the archaeological evidence.

In sum, the body disposal at Treblinka or Belzec could not have been solved on site at all.

I agree that the death toll at these camps is excessive beyond belief. The aspects of cremation that would be necessary for the death camps to achieve what they achieved isn't corroborated in any of the independent sources I have found. I've been following the footnotes in the Muhlenkamp essay if the source is independent of the historical record. By independent of the historical record I mean a source that is not a reference to eyewitness testimony or to another Muhlenkamp or Mottagno essay. The footnotes I've seen thus far might support one piece of data that Muhlenkamp uses but not the whole argument. All the various and diverse cremation resources I've found generally are consistent with each other. None of them are consistent with Muhlenkamp. So I agree that the number of people sent to the death camps could not have been killed and their bodies disposed of onsite.

We can conclude from this that the people sent to Treblinka must have continued to other destinations. We cannot say from these considerations alone whether they continued alive or dead. But which is more plausible? That the witnesses told the truth about mass killing in gas chambers and then told outrageous lies about cremation while suppressing the truth about the shipping of the bodies off site, or that the witnesses' entire extermination narrative was dishonest? How much credibility does the extermination narrative have once it's conceded that the story told by all the witnesses is false?

I've been assuming that Holocaust deniers accept the fact that Jews were sent from various places around Europe to one of the death camps. I conclude this because Holocaust deniers are asked what happened to all the Jews who were sent to Treblinka if they weren't killed and the deniers don't have an answer. If the evidence that Jews arrived in Treblinka wasn't rock solid, the answer would be to deny that Jews were sent to Treblinka in the first place.

So we all agree that Jews were sent to Treblinka. I don't know what happened after that. I don't believe that it is possible that all the eyewitnesses would make up a story about extermination if there wasn't a shred of truth to it. But I don't believe it's possible that hundreds of thousands of bodies were disposed of at the camp.

 

[EtienneSC]

Where does MGK say that their book on Treblinka has been partially superseded? Can you link me to where they say that?

This was my opinion, based on a partial reading and the overall length of MGK's Extermination Camps of AR compared to their earlier AR books. However, Mattogno says as much in relation to their previous work as a whole in the section 2.4 "Scope and significance of our response" (starting on page 89), where he describes the HC critique as:

stimulating us to extremely profitable new discoveries. This latter point relates in particular to the introduction of a conspicuous mass of new documents, brought together in our presentation of many new arguments still more solid than those published by ourselves in the past. (MGK, Extermination Camps of AR (2013), page 90).

I link to the document in my signature below.

So the children sent to Treblinka died due to "war work". Was that after the 266,000 overcoats were taken off them at Treblinka? What war work were these children doing at Treblinka? What food was sent to feed these 800,000 "workers" at Treblinka?

You seem to be inviting me to speculate, which would add nothing. The deportation of French children was at the request of the French government to prevent families being broken up, not at the request of the Germans. The lack of food supplied from the West is consistent with local supply, or indeed starvation later on, as well as gassing at the AR camps. Many children and young people survived the Shoah - 200,000 were living in Israel alone in 2012 according to a local Welfare organisation.

Oddly, Franciszek Zabecki, the Treblinka station master didn't notice or record food trains coming in each week nor trainloads of Jews leaving Treblinka. Why is that? How many trains have you identified leaving Treblinka with Jewish workers, to support your "theory"?

Zabecki recorded trainloads of Jews leaving or transiting through Treblinka in August 1943 in the context of the revolt there: "On 18 August 1943, a transport of Jews ‘PJ 201’ (32 wagons) went to Lublin from Bialystok via Treblinka. On 19 August, the transport ‘PJ 203’ (40 wagons) went to Lublin from Bialystok via Treblinka."
(Kues (page 725 of Extermination Camps of AR, citing Zabecki)
MGK have some references to trains, but is certainly a poorly documented account. For example, they refer to a report of greetings sent to Warsaw in September 1942 by deported Jews from Bialystok, Brest-Litovsk, Kosov, Malkynia, Pinsk and Smolensk (page 119). They refer to later trains bypassing the AR camps but passing 4 miles from Treblinka (page 348-9).

And the gold teeth sent from Treblinka to the SS in Warsaw? Dead people don't need overcoats or teeth. (or underpants or shoes or children's aprons or any of the other "profit items" the SS detailed in existing documents as taken from the Jews at Treblinka. Would you like to see the document?

Yes, I'd like to see the document or have some reference to it. Mattogno discusses a document referring to gold and dental prostheses on pages 907-915, but it may not be the one you are thinking of. He comments on some documents referring to clothing:

If the documents [.....] actually report on confiscated Jewish
property, then they prove at most that the SS, within the framework of operation Reinhardt, confiscated a small portion of Jewish belongings in Treblinka either arbitrarily or because the maximum permissible luggage
weight was exceeded. (Treblinka, page 160)

 

[CaptainHowdy]

Try this logic.

Sebastianus says "If something is impossible then it didn't happen"
Sebastianus then asserts that cremation of 800,000 bodies at Treblinka is impossible based on the eyewitness accounts description of method, although these eyewitnesses did not offer technical explanations.

However Sebatianus asserts the same victims were resettled in Russia but refuses to offer any details because we will apply his own logic to his assertion. Holocaust deniers can't state where the jews went. That's why I quoted the holocaust deniers, MGK, saying they didn't have a clue.

I can supply twenty eye witnesses, both German and Jewish victims who confirm that the cremations took place. I can see the 1946 forensic evidence that the 20,000 square meters of ash at Treblinka was human ash. I even have the photos. The 800,000 Jews never left Treblinka. Sebastianus must offer his alternative theory in detail of how the Jews left Treblinka, how they went to Russia, how they were fed on the train, etc to allow us to apply his "impossibility" theory to his assertion. Sebastianus won't do this because he can't and he know that there is not a scrap of evidence that any Treblinka Jew resettled in Russia. (He also hasn't bothered to explain where the 20,000 square metres of human ash at Treblinka came from anyway. I thought you understood this gap)

Where the Jews went if they weren't killed is a history question. Whether or not cremating 800,000 Jews within a space the size of Treblinka within a certain time period is a question that is answered scientifically. Locating missing Jews doesn't change the length of time that is required to cremate a human body at a given temperature. Experimentally proving that the Treblinka cremations could indeed be accomplished the way the eyewitnesses say they were accomplished wouldn't locate missing Jews nor would it cause more Jews to go missing.

If somebody wants to say the Holocaust didn't happen then the question of where the Jews went might have some relevance. But linking theoretical performance of a specific cremation technology and Jewish emigration patterns is really truly apples and oranges.

 

[Matthew Ellard]

I have no problems with those cars being displayed and clearly marked to be "symbolic", not originals. My question however is why that is necessary at all, considering the hundreds of thousands of originals which still should exist.

Why on earth would the post-war Deutsche Bahn have kept "hundreds of thousands" of 80 year old, wooden, fixed axle, rolling stock that don't comply to current standards?

7,000 BR52 Kriegslokomotiven (steam engines) were built during the war. Would you like to guess how many exist today?

 

[Matthew Ellard]

He got it from the modern mass carcass burial guidelines, and that number includes sufficient soil excavation to provide for several meters of backfill depth for the burial pits/trenches on top of the volume requirements for the carcasses themselves.

At 0.066400 m³ per human body, the 1768 m³ pit could hold 26,626 corpses just by itself if the Nazis didn't care about any backfill to ground level and just mounded the 1768 m³ of excavated dirt on top of the bodies filling the pit.

Thanks for that.

As ground penetrating radar does not read below 4 metres Colls said its depth was a minimum of 4 metres deep. As other excavated pits, at Treblinka, were 7 metres deep, I would say your 26,000 bodies is conservative. In addition we have not factored for small children's bodies.

 

[Matthew Ellard]

You seem to be inviting me to speculate, which would add nothing.

You said you found it possible that the Jews died of war work like Soviet POWS. I pointed out that the Jews included children who couldn't work and that there was no work to be performed at Treblinka anyway. It is not even plausible.

Zabecki recorded trainloads of Jews leaving or transiting through Treblinka in August 1943 in the context of the revolt there: "On 18 August 1943, a transport of Jews ‘PJ 201’ (32 wagons) went to Lublin from Bialystok via Treblinka. On 19 August, the transport ‘PJ 203’ (40 wagons) went to Lublin from Bialystok via Treblinka."

That's Treblinka railway station, not the camp. They didn't go via the camp. There was only a single rail line going from Treblinka to the Treblinka camp.

Yes, I'd like to see the document

I have linked the document, in full, above.

 

[Nessie]

I agree that the death toll at these camps is excessive beyond belief. The aspects of cremation that would be necessary for the death camps to achieve what they achieved isn't corroborated in any of the independent sources I have found. I've been following the footnotes in the Muhlenkamp essay if the source is independent of the historical record. By independent of the historical record I mean a source that is not a reference to eyewitness testimony or to another Muhlenkamp or Mottagno essay. The footnotes I've seen thus far might support one piece of data that Muhlenkamp uses but not the whole argument. All the various and diverse cremation resources I've found generally are consistent with each other. None of them are consistent with Muhlenkamp. So I agree that the number of people sent to the death camps could not have been killed and their bodies disposed of onsite.



I've been assuming that Holocaust deniers accept the fact that Jews were sent from various places around Europe to one of the death camps. I conclude this because Holocaust deniers are asked what happened to all the Jews who were sent to Treblinka if they weren't killed and the deniers don't have an answer. If the evidence that Jews arrived in Treblinka wasn't rock solid, the answer would be to deny that Jews were sent to Treblinka in the first place.

So we all agree that Jews were sent to Treblinka. I don't know what happened after that. I don't believe that it is possible that all the eyewitnesses would make up a story about extermination if there wasn't a shred of truth to it. But I don't believe it's possible that hundreds of thousands of bodies were disposed of at the camp.

Where the Jews went if they weren't killed is a history question. Whether or not cremating 800,000 Jews within a space the size of Treblinka within a certain time period is a question that is answered scientifically. Locating missing Jews doesn't change the length of time that is required to cremate a human body at a given temperature. Experimentally proving that the Treblinka cremations could indeed be accomplished the way the eyewitnesses say they were accomplished wouldn't locate missing Jews nor would it cause more Jews to go missing.

If somebody wants to say the Holocaust didn't happen then the question of where the Jews went might have some relevance. But linking theoretical performance of a specific cremation technology and Jewish emigration patterns is really truly apples and oranges.

So your tactic now is to claim it does not weaken your case and it is not something we should bother with by asking "where did they go if they were not killed?"

I say it ruins the claims of the denier/revisionists not having an evidenced explanation of an alternative destination for the Jews.

 

[Sebastianus]

First, the question of the whether there's any evidence that decomposed bodies burn much more easily than fresh bodies. ANTPogo has still not offered any empirical evidence for this claim. If you have any such evidence, ANTPogo, you should present it; if not you should admit that you do not.

ANTPogo does quote a passage from Muehlenkamp on the energy content of decomposition byproducts. It does not, however, refute any of my arguments, and it illustrates Muehlenkamp's total ignorance of decomposition beyond what he scratched together with a few google searches.

First among Muehlenkamp's errors is that he relies on sources about decomposition on the surface when he should be studying decomposition in deep mass graves. He uncritically parrots categories (his stages of decomposition) that do not apply there. In fact, his stages of decomposition are not even some kind of general truth about decomposition on the surface, but only the way in which one source has decided to break things up. In particular his much beloved "phase of butyric fermentation" is not much mentioned in the actual published literature on the subject.

The fact that ANTPogo can cite a energy value of 16 MJ/kg for glycerol as evidence that energy content does not decrease with decomposition is proof that he knows nothing about this subject. Human fat has an energy value of ~39 MJ/kg. As 16 is quite a bit less than 39...

Muehlenkamp's utter ignorance is also revealed by the fact that he refers to

the fat's breaking down into glycerol and fatty acids [249] (namely the butyric acid [250] that leads to this stage also being characterized as butyric fermentation)

as though butyric acid [butanoic acid] is the main fatty acid involved; in reality it is not, but just one of the principal volatile fatty acids (aka short chain fatty acids). This means that it is important in forensics, for instance because it has a strong smell and is relevant to detection by cadaver dogs. But this tells us nothing about burning decomposed bodies, and in absolute terms butanoic acid is a rather minor factor.

As for "this stage also being characterized as butyric fermentation", first of all this is not a standard term accepted in the literature generally. Second, when the term is used it has to do with butyric acid's role in creating a smell, nothing more. Third, all of this discussion of stages is meant to apply to decomposition on the surface, not decomposition in deep mass graves. To learn about how bodies decompose in mass graves, you need to look at how bodies decompose in mass graves. Study, for instance, the condition of the bodies exhumed from the graves at Katyn - an example which has the added benefit of being located in sandy soil in Poland, just like Treblinka or Belzec. Muehlenkamp avoids doing this, because the data refute his tendentious speculations about decomposition.

Now, on the matter of burial space, ANTPogo writes:

I see, from Carcass disposal: a comprehensive review that there's quite a large disparity in volumes required per carcass as listed in various sources.

For example, it says "Based on the information in Table A2, estimates of the required excavation volume to accommodate mature cattle carcasses include 1.2 yd³ (McDaniel, 1991; USDA, 2001a), 2 yd³ (Agriculture and Resource Management Council of Australia and New Zealand, 1996), 3 yd³ (Lund, Kruger, & Weldon), and 3.5 yd³ (Ollis, 2002)."

That gives a range of .9 m³ to 2.7 m³ required per cattle carcass, neatly illustrating the problem with relying on modern public agency guidelines about animal carcass disposal.

I never asserted that 0.3 cubic meters per body was a strong upper bound, but only that it was a reasonable estimate. The true value could be somewhat higher or lower. For example, one of the main Buchenwald witnesses claimed (see Nuremberg document NO-1253) that during the last weeks of the camp's existence there was no fuel for the crematorium, so that burial pits had to be dug; these were 15 meters long, 6 meters wide, and 4 meters deep, and held 400-600 bodies. That's 400-600 bodies in a volume of 360 cubic meters. With the higher figure of 600 bodies that's 0.6 cubic meters per body, and with the lower figure of 400 bodies that's 0.9 cubic meters per body. In either case, it's quite a bit higher than the estimate of 0.3 cubic meters per body which I offered.

And at the lower number there, .9 m³ per cattle carcass (since 1 cattle carcass is equivalent to 5 sheep carcasses according to "several sources") means that a pit of the dimensions being described could hold just a shade under ten thousand sheep carcasses, a 166% increase over your calculated number, and only 60% of the volume per carcass as the figures you cite.

Mathematics is not your strong point - this is not a 166% increase, but a 66% increase (rounding to 67%, actually). But I'm happy to take the lowest number here, if you like. Let's assume 5 Jews per 0.9 cubic meters; that means that 1,768 cubic meters could hold roughly 9,800 Jews. So where were the other 750,000 buried? The pits that Sturdy-Colls has reported are totally inadequate for the alleged burial, even if we assume that every bit of disturbed soil corresponds to a burial pit. Of course, we know that not all of the pit volume at Treblinka represents graves - consider the large bomb crater reported by Judge Łukaszkiewicz, or the digging carried out by local "treasure hunters".

 

[Sebastianus]

Actually, a closer look at Carcass disposal: a comprehensive review (I think I got the title wrong in my previous post; my apologies!) reveals just how misleading it is to reference the guidelines it describes in the context of the Nazi mass burials.

I've mentioned before how the guidelines in these documents recommend things that the Nazis quite simply did not have to bother with. For example, the burial pits and trenches described in Carcass disposal are actually dug deeper than is required for the carcass volume, because the pits and trenches are supposed to have a layer of cover from backfill sufficient to prevent the problems associated with masses of bodies buried too shallowly. The per-carcass volumes take that additional soil volume into account, and are not the actual full carcass capacities of the pits and trenches. That's why Sebastianus' documents talk about excavated volume per carcass, because more soil is being dug up than is required merely to provided room for carcasses, but also to dig up the recommended amount of backfill and cover soil. This also explains why there is such variance in the excavated volumes that I mentioned in my earlier post: different sourced and studies recommend different amounts of cover and backfill, which changes the recommended excavated volume per carcass.

Given that I already pointed to the effect of the overburden on the grave capacity in my previous post, it's hard to understand what you think you're refuting. But I don't see why the Germans would have avoided covering graves with a layer of fill. It's entirely standard practise. The Soviets at Katyn and Vinnytsia covered their mass graves with a fairly thick layer of soil. Why wouldn't the Germans do the same?

In one of the studies cited in the appendix, for instance, the volume of the overall burial pit was calculated based on a pit depth of 3.5 meters, with carcasses filling 1.5 meters and backfill filling the remaining 2 meters, for an overall volume required of .3 m³ per sheep carcass. Within that 1.5 meter depth of carcasses, though, one cubic meter of pit space is described as holding 8 to 10 sheep carcasses.

What that means is if the Nazis didn't worry about such niceties as recommended backfill depth, and instead crammed the pit to the ground-level brim with corpses and mounded the excavated dirt on top of the pile before tamping it down, the 1768 m³ pit at Treblinka could have held not 5,900 sheep carcasses, or 9,800, but almost eighteen thousand.

The study you cite has already been discussed here. Holocaust deniers are way ahead of you on this. The paper reports that for drought affected sheep that had just been shorn ("off-shears"), the carcass mass contained 8-10 sheep per cubic meter. The authors give the value of 0.3 cubic meters of total excavation volume per sheep, in agreement with the estimate I offered. They suggest that other sheep will probably require more space than the drought affected off-shears, meaning that the carcass mass would take up more than one cubic meter per 8-10 ordinary sheep. You can look at some of the sheep in question in this image, although the pictured may not have been recently shorn, which means that they may appear larger than the sheep which fit 8-10 per cubic meter of carcass mass. But even if we ignore this factor, the pictured sheep are plainly quite a bit smaller than humans. Therefore we can take the figure of 8-10 bodies per cubic meter as an upper bound, even if we assume that the pits were filled to the brim.

Given the (seriously overgenerous) estimate of 10 bodies per cubic meter, and assuming all the pits were graves and were filled to the brim with bodies, we can still see that the pits found by Sturdy-Colls are nowhere near adequate for the alleged burials. The pits she describes appear to have a total surface area of perhaps 2,500 square meters. If we assume vertical walls and a depth of 4 meters, that gives us 10,000 cubic meters of burial space, which at 10 bodies per cubic meter gives us a total burial capacity of 100,000 bodies. But supposedly over 750,000 bodies were buried at Treblinka. Where did the other 650,000 go?

One additional problem: if the pits were filled to the brim and then mounded over with soil, there should be testimonies to this. But as far as I am aware none of the Treblinka "death camp" witnesses describe such a thing.

In addition, the recommended burial guidelines are for pits with carcasses that are not packed together as closely as they could be.

One set of guidelines mentions such a concern, yes. But let's look at a concrete example, such as the mass burial site at Great Orton from the 2001 UK FMD epidemic. The burials there looked like this. Were they not making efficient use of burial space?