Merged General Holocaust denial discussion thread

[kageki]

This--another of your refusals to answer what was asked--is what is evasive, not my questions, which were in fact straightforward. Moral possibility is not what I posed. I asked 3 or 4 questions, not one of them probing moral dimensions.

By the way, this is the second or third time you tried putting words in my mouth, to make it appear that I argued or wrote something you wished I had. Doing so is an unattractive and unconvincing means of discussion. It signals to readers that you have weak arguments, as does your continued refusal to answer direct questions.

I did comment on the morality of mass extermination, but did not ask you about it. In fact, I also discussed the difficult technical matter of shooting thousands upon thousands and mentioned a number of logistical-technical issues, leaving out some others, such as how to manage "left behind" goods and possession, that the killers needed to innovate on. These sorts of considerations, and the evidence issues, led to my asking you questions about what you think occurred in terms of the shootings and why you conclude what you conclude.

As a reminder, here is what I asked and what you continue to duck, now saying your cowardice is due to something I didn't ask--about the morality involved! First: Later I asked you some similar questions:

And now to this bit of silliness. Well, that does seem like an indication of emotional problems. But, my opinions aside, the emotional problems of the members of the mobile killing units are well documented as was the reaction of the higher-ups to try to manage the emotional fallout and related difficulties the killers were subject to.

Right so I mentioned the scale. Is that your primary concern? Maybe the numbers are off like everything else. I don't know much about the Einsatzgruppen so I can't comment. At least some of the shootings seem like retaliations though.

What's not well documented are the gassings. I would think there would still be emotional problems either way.

 

[TSR]

Maybe some day the LemmyCautions of the believers will "get it" that when their truths become impossible or almost impossible, such as green wood being feasible and hot enough to cremate bodies in a timely/expedient manner, other truths are dependent on that failed truth.

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How hot is "hot enough", and what is the average temperature of green-wood fire?
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[TheRedWorm]

Not really. I've designed one. Minions did the grunt work.

Can I thus conclude that you are not actually interested in an honest and open debate, but are merely here to troll? You can tell me, I'll keep your secret safe.

 

[Clayton Moore]

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How hot is "hot enough", and what is the average temperature of green-wood fire?
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Asking dumb questions again? You do the research and make your declaration.

 

[TSR]

Asking dumb questions again? You do the research and make your declaration.

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No, just questions you cannot answer, thereby proving that your claim that using green wood to start a pyre is "impossible or almost impossible" has no basis in fact, but instead is based on your ideological need to deny the Holocaust.

You made the claim -- *you* do the research. Actually, the way we big kids work it is to do the research *first*, so that we don't end up having to try to reverse the burden of proof.

*Then* we can get back to Treblinka, and what evidence you have to off showing that Guta and Abus Strawczynski were sent anywhere else after their arrival there.
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[LemmyCaution]

Right so I mentioned the scale. Is that your primary concern? Maybe the numbers are off like everything else.

No. I wonder what you think happened in the East, regarding mass shooting executions, and why. What is the evidence you accept--and for what? That is what I asked you, and whilst scale is part of it, scale is only part of it.

I don't know much about the Einsatzgruppen so I can't comment.

But you said:

No actually I don't necessarily deny open air shootings because that makes sense.

On what basis did you say that if you can't comment? I doubt you will grasp this but your commenting on a matter your say you can't comment on, along with your continual resort to personal credulity/incredulity, won't do your cause well.

At least some of the shootings seem like retaliations though.

So what? Retaliations (the word is reprisals) for what? "Seem" based on what? Against whom? When? What about the many shootings that clearly had nothing to do with reprisals and were not even claimed to be such?

What's not well documented are the gassings. I would think there would still be emotional problems either way.

Again, the important point is not what your common sense tells you reality should be like. The important thing is what is there evidence for. As I told you, and as others also have said in this thread, there is a great deal of evidence for gassings. (To be clear, I also mentioned the emotional fallout suffered by the killers involved in open air shootings because the Germans themselves mentioned this and believed this and believed that other methods would cause less stress; that is what's documented--and has nothing to do with whether or not killers in other contexts should or did suffer emotional distress.)

Now, you may not like the evidence for gassings, as you've stated, because gassing people to death offends your sense of what reality should be like whilst open air shootings don't. But, again, there is evidence for the death camps, including gassings, from a range of sources: we have testimony from perpetrators, bystanders and observers, and victims; there are documents relating to various elements and stages of the extermination process and results; there is forensic and physical evidence from the camps themselves.

Your personal standards of belief and disbelief are really a non-argument. They lead you, as upthread, to state that evidence which exists doesn't exist. And--especially since you accept open air shootings, which you say you know so little about you can't comment, and which you also clearly don't understand the scale and complexity of as you try making them sound simple and straightforward--your handwaving away of the evidence for gassings comes across as equally ill-informed and as a double standard based on your "common sense" and nothing else.

You wind up implying that (1) 1.4 million Jews (and many others) were shot to death by the Nazis but that (2) another 3.7 million Jews wound up missing rather than killed (I am including both the 2.6 million gassed in this total and the others who died in transit, in camps and in ghettos). None of your fellow deniers has been able to sustain a coherent or convincing argument, based on evidence, about what happened to so many European Jews.

So, to add 2 new questions to our little list, is this what you are arguing (that 1.4 million Jews were murdered by Nazi shooting squads in the East whilst the other 3.7 million, from all over Europe, went missing), and, if so, what are your evidence and explanations for what happened to these "missing" Jews?

 

[kageki]

No. I wonder what you think happened in the East, regarding mass shooting executions, and why. What is the evidence you accept--and for what? That is what I asked you, and whilst scale is part of it, scale is only part of it. But you said: On what basis did you say that if you can't comment? I doubt you will grasp this but your commenting on a matter your say you can't comment on, along with your continual resort to personal credulity/incredulity, won't do your cause well.So what? Retaliations (the word is reprisals) for what? "Seem" based on what? Against whom? When? What about the many shootings that clearly had nothing to do with reprisals and were not even claimed to be such?

Again, the important point is not what your common sense tells you reality should be like. The important thing is what is there evidence for. As I told you, and as others also have said in this thread, there is a great deal of evidence for gassings. (To be clear, I also mentioned the emotional fallout suffered by the killers involved in open air shootings because the Germans themselves mentioned this and believed this and believed that other methods would cause less stress; that is what's documented--and has nothing to do with whether or not killers in other contexts should or did suffer emotional distress.)

Now, you may not like the evidence for gassings, as you've stated, because gassing people to death offends your sense of what reality should be like whilst open air shootings don't. But, again, there is evidence for the death camps, including gassings, from a range of sources: we have testimony from perpetrators, bystanders and observers, and victims; there are documents relating to various elements and stages of the extermination process and results; there is forensic and physical evidence from the camps themselves.

Your personal standards of belief and disbelief are really a non-argument. They lead you, as upthread, to state that evidence which exists doesn't exist. And--especially since you accept open air shootings, which you say you know so little about you can't comment, and which you also clearly don't understand the scale and complexity of as you try making them sound simple and straightforward--your handwaving away of the evidence for gassings comes across as equally ill-informed and as a double standard based on your "common sense" and nothing else.

You wind up implying that (1) 1.4 million Jews (and many others) were shot to death by the Nazis but that (2) another 3.7 million Jews wound up missing rather than killed (I am including both the 2.6 million gassed in this total and the others who died in transit, in camps and in ghettos). None of your fellow deniers has been able to sustain a coherent or convincing argument, based on evidence, about what happened to so many European Jews.

So, to add 2 new questions to our little list, is this what you are arguing (that 1.4 million Jews were murdered by Nazi shooting squads in the East whilst the other 3.7 million, from all over Europe, went missing), and, if so, what are your evidence and explanations for what happened to these "missing" Jews?

Where do you get these numbers anyways? How many people do you think were gassed at Auschwitz? Is it 5 or 6 million?

http://hooverhog.typepad.com/hognot...-holmes-an-interview-with-samuel-crowell.html

Simply put, the mass gassing claim is a conspiracy theory which assumes that the people involved – no more than a few hundred – not only managed to kill millions of people, not only managed to conceal the remains of these millions, but succeeded in concealing the evidence of what they were doing to such a degree that to this day there is no documentary, material or forensic evidence for gas chambers at many camps, and the evidence everywhere else is scarce, ambiguous, or non-existent. The likelihood of this being historically accurate is low, just because of the disparity between the claim and the hard evidence supporting it. The likelihood is further decreased when we note that there is abundant evidence for the killing of Jews by shooting or injections, and for the killing of euthanasia patients by sedatives and injections: it is only the gassing evidence that is lacking. The likelihood is decreased even further when we note that the Nazis were accused of just such gassings chronologically before they are supposed to have started them. Thus I conclude that the mass gassing claim is a cultural construct that took hold in the minds of Europeans – not just among Jews, but among everyone – and became truth after the war was over.

 

[Wroclaw]

What's not well documented are the gassings. I would think there would still be emotional problems either way.

Actually, they're incredibly well documented for something that was supposed to be a secret. At least two glaring documents refer to gas chambers, several others are impossible to interpret without testimony, and there's all that testimony — which, strangely, the Bunny refuses to debate.

 

[Dogzilla]

Actually, they're incredibly well documented for something that was supposed to be a secret. At least two glaring documents refer to gas chambers, several others are impossible to interpret without testimony, and there's all that testimony — which, strangely, the Bunny refuses to debate.

I don't think LGR is refusing to debate the testimony. I think he's waiting for that list of 69 eyewitnesses, or witnesses, or people who heard something about gas chambers so he can start the debate. He proposed Konrad Morgan. I'm interested in his testimony myself. Does everybody believe his explanation of how he stumbled upon the extermination machinery while investigating corruption? Why or why not?

But personally I'm more interested in why Eisenhower's observation of what he saw at Ohrdruf is part of the holocaust but the shrunken heads at Buchenwald are not.

 

[Wroclaw]

I don't think LGR is refusing to debate the testimony. I think he's waiting for that list of 69 eyewitnesses, or witnesses

I not only posted the full list of 69 names, but I also indicated which were the eyewitnesses.

or people who heard something about gas chambers so he can start the debate. He proposed Konrad Morgan.

Actually, he just began talking about Morgan, and I suggested we take Morgan up first. He hasn't responded.

I'm interested in his testimony myself. Does everybody believe his explanation of how he stumbled upon the extermination machinery while investigating corruption? Why or why not?

I'll take it up with the Bunny if/when he grows a pair.

But personally I'm more interested in why Eisenhower's observation of what he saw at Ohrdruf is part of the holocaust but the shrunken heads at Buchenwald are not.

What about what Ohrdruf don't you believe?

 

[Corsair 115]

I'm just going to offer the following passage from the concluding paragraph of Chapter 3 of Richard J. Evans' The Third Reich at War, the final volume of a three-volume set documenting the history of the Third Reich:

There was no single decision, implemented in a rationalistic, bureaucratic way; rather, the extermination programme emerged in a process lasting several months, in which Nazi propaganda created a genocidal mentality that spurred Himmler and other leading Nazis to push forward with the killing of Jews on an ever-wider scale. Altogether during the war, some 3 million Jews were murdered in the extermination camps, 700,000 were killed in mobile gas vans and 1.3 million were shot by the SS Task Forces, police units and allied forces or auxiliary militias. Anything up to a million Jews died of hunger, disease, or SS brutality and shootings in the concentration camps and especially the ghettos that the Third Reich established in the occupied territories. A precise total is impossible to arrive at, but it is certain that at least 5.5 million Jews were deliberately killed in one way or another by the Nazis and their allies. Since the opening of the archives in the former Soviet bloc in the 1990s it has become clear that the probable total is around 6 million, the figure given by Adolf Eichmann at his trial in Jerusalem in 1961. 'With this terrible murder of the Jews,' wrote Wilm Hosenfeld on 16 June 1943, 'we have lost the war. We have brought upon ourselves an indelible disgrace, a curse that can never be lifted. We deserve no mercy, we are all guilty.'

 

[MG1962]

Your question itself was evasive because you know what I meant by physical possibility and not the moral possibility that people can commit murder.

Now I wonder if Germans really had emotional issues when they did something like this:

Germans most certainly did have major issues with the emotional impact of what they did. And such behaviour is not confined to them. Virtually every theatre of war where things got really ugly such as Stalingrad and Iowa Jima the jungle war in Burma and New Guinie tell of similar types of 'craziness'

 

[Clayton Moore]

I'm just going to offer the following passage from the concluding paragraph of Chapter 3 of Richard J. Evans' The Third Reich at War, the final volume of a three-volume set documenting the history of the Third Reich:

And yet the currently accepted lie is 900,000 less.

Pretty skewed when Auschwitz was once FOUR million of the SIX million. Whoever supported the early FOUR million at Auschwitz had some serious numbers to refudge.

 

[Clayton Moore]

Germans most certainly did have major issues with the emotional impact of what they did. And such behaviour is not confined to them. Virtually every theatre of war where things got really ugly such as Stalingrad and Iowa Jima the jungle war in Burma and New Guinie tell of similar types of 'craziness'

And yet for all that German genocidal behavior the occupation by the West was seamless. On the German's side anyhow.

 

[MG1962]

And yet the currently accepted lie is 900,000 less.

Pretty skewed when Auschwitz was once FOUR million of the SIX million. Whoever supported the early FOUR million at Auschwitz had some serious numbers to refudge.

So tell me, what is an acceptable number. 900,000 jews is somehow okay and a number we can live with. Is it really any better than 4 million 6 million 20 million.

The numbers killed are meaningless in every sense. No one can truely understand those numbers in any emotional sense. It is the philosophy that killed them that turns civilised peoples stomachs.

 

[MG1962]

And yet for all that German genocidal behavior the occupation by the West was seamless. On the German's side anyhow.

The Western front was a cake walk compared to most of the other battle zones. At least there both sides tried at times tried to be a little civil to each other. But as early as Dunkurque we know of Germans rounding up allied soldiers in a barn then killing them all with hand grenades. So although much rarer on the western front. The SS did still occasionally show their monsterous behaviour

 

[TSR]

Pretty skewed when Auschwitz was once FOUR million of the SIX million.

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Nope. Never was.
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Whoever supported the early FOUR million at Auschwitz had some serious numbers to refudge.

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http://www.nizkor.org/features/denial-of-science/four-million-01.html

Do try to learn a bit about the history you're so rabid to deny.

Oh, and BTW -- this puts the lie to your claim to have mostly read real historians, since none of them ever used the four million number (which, BTW, was *total* and not just Jews) for anything.
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[000063]

Asking dumb questions again? You do the research and make your declaration.

Making assertions then refusing to back them up. Quelle surprise.

I've seen this trick before. On some level, you know the evidence against you might exist, but if you don't go looking for it, you don't have to acknowledge it. Evidence from everyone else, however, is fair game for your disingenuous assertions and snide, passive-aggressive non-statements.

 

[LemmyCaution]

Where do you get these numbers anyways? How many people do you think were gassed at Auschwitz? Is it 5 or 6 million?

Good grief, you are dense. Check out post #2421 in this thread where I cited my source for Jewish victims of the Third Reich. I do not think 5 or 6 million Jews were murdered at Auschwitz, nor does anyone else, and I have stated a couple of times in here that a total of about 2.6 million Jews were murdered in all death camps together, most of them by lethal gas. You really need to learn to read, and count, better.

On Auschwitz-Birkenau, since you asked, my understanding is that about 1.1 million Jews were deported to the camp and somewhere around 1 million of these people, according to Piper of the Auschwitz-Birkenau museum (and also I believe Hilberg), were murdered there. Another 100,000 or so victims, including 20,000+ Zigeuner, were murdered in the camp complex as well.

 

[kageki]

Good grief, you are dense. Check out post #2421 in this thread where I cited my source for Jewish victims of the Third Reich. I do not think 5 or 6 million Jews were murdered at Auschwitz, nor does anyone else, and I have stated a couple of times in here that a total of about 2.6 million Jews were murdered in all death camps together, most of them by lethal gas. You really need to learn to read, and count, better.

On Auschwitz-Birkenau, since you asked, my understanding is that about 1.1 million Jews were deported to the camp and somewhere around 1 million of these people, according to Piper of the Auschwitz-Birkenau museum (and also I believe Hilberg), were murdered there. Another 100,000 or so victims, including 20,000+ Zigeuner, were murdered in the camp complex as well.

The 5 or 6 million was not in reference to Auschwitz. I had mentioned 1.1 million for Auschwitz way at the beginning of this thread.

http://www.fpp.co.uk/Auschwitz/Osteuropa/Fritjof_Meyer2.html

Citing the most recent research Pressac writes of 631,000 to 711,000 dead in total, of which 470,000 to 550,000 non-registered Jews were murdered by gas.[62] With presumably 510,000 dead, of which probably 356,000 murdered by gas, this study arrives at conclusions which are not all that different.

This would take it below 5 million. I don't know what figures to go by frankly.