And his entire section is entirely wrong. If he had studied decomposition rather than wishfully interpreting what he found with a google search, he would have found handy references like
which would have informed him that
which radically contradicts his picture of decomposition.
It's also both a cherrypicked quote commonly cited in works about mummification, and hardly definitive considering that works discussing forensic decomposition (which is Rodriguez' area of expertise) explicitly warn that no single factor affects decomposition rates.
And as for the fact that adipocere will burn, this does not refute anything. No-one has said that decomposition byproducts cannot burn, just that they may be harder to burn than the contents of the fresh corpse.
And this is the actual argument at hand, unrelated to the red herrings in your post and false claims about Muhlenkamp's actual arguments.
Mattogno asserted that the loss of moisture in a corpse would be counterbalanced by the loss of flammable fats and other components during decomposition. Muhlenkamp shows that Mattogno deliberately overstated that loss and understated the actual flammability of decomposition products so he could then overstate the fuel required to burn them.
The final question needs to be resolved empirically, which is why I cited the fact that according to Carcass Disposal: a comprehensive review, decomposition made carcasses harder to burn in the aftermath of hurricane Floyd (no, not because of the waterlogging, but in addition to the waterlogging),
No, because of the waterlogging combined with the recent decomposition stage of those waterlogged carcasses.
and that decomposed sheep at Epynt were harder to burn than fresh sheep.
Because of that whole host of other factors previously detailed.
Meanwhile, ANTPogo has cited precisely zero empirical evidence for his claim that decomposed bodies burn more easily.
Neither I nor Muhlenkamp have asserted that
any decomposition in
all circumstances makes decomposed bodies burn more easily, but that bodies exhumed at Treblinka would have suffered enough water loss during decomposition while retaining enough flammable decomposition products to reduce Mattogno's purported fuel requirements for the mass cremations the Nazis carried out using those corpses.
Really, anyone with a little common sense knows that ANTPogo's position is absurd. A grave is essentially a specialized form of a landfill. If ANTPogo is right, putting organic substances in a landfill for a year ought to increase their flammability. If this were true, we would see incineration plants "seasoning" the organic waste they plan on burning in a landfill for a year before burning it. Of course, they do nothing of the sort, because a year in the landfill can be expected to make it not more flammable, but less. Or if you keep a compost pile: if you wanted to burn some waste, would you put it in the compost for a while first? If ANTPogo is right, you ought to. Why not try it and see just how well it works?
Of course in real landfills, the methane is often captured and burned. It's not the decomposing material that burns well, but the gas it gives off. Somehow ANTPogo thinks that the fact that decomposing materials give off methane makes them easier to burn. This would suggest that since rotting wood gives off methane, rotting wood is easier to burn, and does not lose energy content. But anyone with experience burning wood knows that's not true, and anyone with a grasp of basic science knows the same.
And this is nothing but a strawman. Muhlenkamp himself called out Mattogno for misrepresenting in this fashion, as you did, his comments about methane and other decomposition products in relation to cremation.
You have done very little to address what Muhlenkamp actually
wrote at the links I provided.
ANTPogo continues by complaining that 0.3 cubic meters per human body is not an upper bound for the density of burials. Since I never claimed it was, it's not clear what he imagines he's proving.
Then what was the point of
your statement that "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?"
It certainly looks as if you were claiming that 5,900 corpses, at .3 m
3, was all that the pit in question could hold.
And is there a particular reason you're addressing me in the third person rather than directly?
Of course it is not impossible, but it is inconsistent with statements of the Treblinka witnesses.
How so?
Incidentally, it's worth looking at
the one picture that supposedly shows a mass grave in Treblinka. It appears to be covered with planks of wood, on top of what appears to be tar paper or cardboard or some such material. There appears to be at least a meter of cover on top of the bodies (if there are any bodies. The image isn't clear enough to tell.) The image really can't be used to prove anything, but if we follow the orthodox historians and say that this is a photo of a Treblinka mass grave, then it does show that at least one of the mass graves was
not filled to the brim.
Why are you under the impression that this is a completed pit ready to have the remaining space backfilled, and not one still being filled with corpses?
Especially since it's pretty clear that the "covering" of wood planks and canvas-looking material is to provide support for the laborers filling the pit with corpses to walk across when placing corpses - you can even see one of them standing on a plank in the pit itself.
But the beginning of the cremations is dated to March 1943, while by December 1942, 713,000 Jews had, according to the orthodox account, been killed at Treblinka. Extending this based on the transport figures given by Arad (rescaled according to the Hoefle telegram) shows that if exterminationists are correct that Treblinka was an extermination camp, then the number of Jews buried before cremations began would have actually exceeded 750,000.
The mass-scale cremations are dated to February/March 1943, but there were cremations starting in late 1942, and transports continued to arrive after the mass-scale cremations started.
ANTPogo also claims that no-one had said that the pits announced by Sturdy Colls are not all those that exist in the camp. This appears to be a concession that they are totally inadequate for the alleged burial.
No, it's to point out that archaeological work at Treblinka is only in its beginning stages, making the deniers' definitive statements about what was impossible to have happened there a
teensy bit premature.
They brush right past the implications of it, I notice, and do not take that into account when calculating burial densities at each site.
And 750,000 was a capacity in sheep carcasses, while 460,000 includes carcasses of cattle.
Except even according to their own calculations, the presence of cattle carcasses does not really increase the number of "sheep-equivalent" carcasses.
Great Orton had something like a third of its capacity left unused. Birkshaw had
half its capacity left unused. And yet their calculations are based on the used capacity.
All of this has already been addressed: the burial sites in general
here, and
Birkshaw forest in particular here.
They have an awful lot of variability in their calculations, considering they (and you) are being so definitive with the conclusions. At these pages, they state that there were 495,000 sheep-equivalent corpses in a 5.1 hectare "burial area" (with the pits themselves taking up 1.4 hectares), and claim that therefore the bodies buried at Treblinka would have required a 7.4 hectare burial area (with the pits themselves taking up 1.96 hectares).
This is a
massive reduction of their earlier stated claim that since Great Orton, with 575,077 sheep-equivalent carcasses buried in 55 hectares, that Treblinka's bodies would have required
72.7 hectares! That's ten times the above number for the overall "burial area", and
forty times the above pit area! How, exactly, do you expect anyone to take their "Treblinka has to have been this big or the Holocaust never happened" numbers seriously with that kind of insane variability?
And even their smaller numbers aren't exactly the definitive upper bound - there's a whole lot of assumptions that go into their calculations, and even they admit that they
may have overstated the burial volume by a factor of three (which means that their calculation for burial area at Treblinka could, by their own margin of error, be as small as .65 hectares!)
The more actual mass graves are studied, the clearer it becomes that the burial claims at Belzec and Treblinka are refuted by the archaeological evidence.
If the denier blog you keep citing is any indication,
hardly.
Don't be shy, ANTPogo. Go ahead and tell us precisely which sources and studies Muehlenkamp references that refute my arguments concerning cremation.
He actually uses the a lot of the same sources Mattogno does (since, remember, he's specifically addressing Mattogno's claims): Wilhelm Heepke (who in turn references Lothes and Profé), Richard Kessler, and reference to Hindu funeral pyres, as well as Bruce V. Ettling's "Consumption of an Animal Carcass in a Fire", R.D. Lund, I. Kruger and P. Weldon's "Options for the Mechanised Slaughter and Disposal of Contagious Diseased Animals – A Discussion Paper", and a number of tables referencing everything from wood heating values at a woodburning company's site to the burning of carcasses at the IAEA's website.
Why should Belzec and Treblinka have been able to bury a similar quantity of carcasses in such a dramatically smaller area? It's not as though Japan has so much land that they don't bother to use it efficiently.
Why not? The British managed it at Great Orton and Birskshaw, according to the numbers at the denier blog you cited. And, using their own calculations based on the UK burials, Treblinka could have done it in a tenth of the space or less.
