A few points:
1. Captain Howdy has correctly explained what I was saying about eyewitness testimony. There is no contradiction.
2. On the "first time in history" argument - I would say that in a interesting way both this argument and its opposite are fallacies. Obviously you cannot negate all events on the basis of their being umprecedented; an argument like "no-one had gone to the moon before Apollo 11, therefore it didn't happen" is clearly wrong. On the other hand, the argument "no person has ever been able to jump to the moon or even come close, therefore your claim that you jumped to the moon is false" seems pretty strong to me. The important thing is that there has been dramatic progress in rocket technology, but not in jumping, at least not to the point that would put the moon in reach. The point of all this is that whether the fact that a claimed event is unprecedented is an valid argument against it depends entirely on the particulars of the case in question. In the case of mass burial or cremation, I think that the argument that the claimed holocaust events are unreal because they are totally out of line with the historical experience of mass burial and cremation is quite a good one, because there is not any case of technological progress that would make the tasks of cremation and burial easier for the Germans than for everyone else before and after. Of course one must take the particulars of the case into account, but an argument based on comparison with well documented historical examples is fundamentally sound, and it is clear that no-one on this board is able to refute these arguments.
3. MadMurx indicated that the largest grave at Katyn held 3,000 bodies, and that the total numbers of bodies in the 7 main Katyn graves was 6,000. I think that this is incorrect. As I understand it, what happened was this: after the Katyn graves were found there was a preliminary excavation, which showed that they did indeed hold Polish officers. On the basis of this preliminary investigation the estimate of 3,000 for the largest grave was made (12 layers of 250 bodies). This number was only an estimate, based on excavating an area along one side of the grave. This number was then announced in Goebbels' initial broadcast about Katyn on April 13, 1943. At that time the Germans assumed that they had found the bodies of the entire group of Polish officers held (and killed) by the Russians - some 12,000 bodies; this number too was announced in broadcasts to the public. As the excavation proceeded, however, it emerged that the site actually held fewer bodies than anticipated - a little over 4,000 in total. As it turns out, Katyn was only one of three main sites used to bury the Polish officers, so that while the Germans had anticipated 12,000 bodies, they found only 4,000. The higher number continued to be used in publicity, because issuing an official correction on a point like that doesn't fit in very well with the dictates of war propaganda (this would have been true on either side of the war). However, the official report gave the correct figure of just over 4,000 bodies.
In summary: 3,000 bodies in the largest Katyn grave was a preliminary estimate, not an actual figure. I don't know where the number 6,000 total bodies in the 7 main graves comes from, and I am not aware of any evidence to support it; to my knowledge the correct figure is a little over 4,000.
4. Concerning the challenges to supply the name of someone who was gassed / resettled via the Reinhardt camps (and prove this with definite documentation): I agree that these prove nothing in either direction. In fact, for holocaust believers to be reduced to making a parallel unanswerable challenge is something of a victory for revisionism, because it puts both orthodoxy and revisionism on an equal footing, whereas orthodoxy claims that there is not even a debate.
The case in which the "give the name of a gassed Jew" challenge is valid is when facing the claim (which is rather common, but disclaimed by real experts) that the extermination of the Jews in gas chambers is well documented, even "the best documented event in history", or that "we know they were gassed from the Nazi's own records." When faced with those who make such claims, then this challenge is quite valid. However, when dealing with historians who concede the lack of documentary evidence for homicidal gassing at Auschwitz, Treblinka, etc. the "give me a name" challenge is meaningless. The function of the challenge, therefore, is to force holocaust historians to publicly admit a fact (the lack of documentary evidence for homicidal gassings) that they are well aware of but generally prefer to brush under the carpet.
