Merged General Holocaust denial discussion thread

[LemmyCaution]

To be fair to Saggy: Saggy asked for one credible Jewish eyewitness. Nick and others have said there are 100s of credible Jewish eyewitnesses but nobody has named one.

To be fair to Nick: As Nick pointed out, the holocaust wasn't a single big event. It was tens of thousands of little events happening in tens of thousands different places to millions of people over a period of several years. There won't be anybody who witnessed it all. There will only be people who witnessed a small part of it.

Nick also claimed that the testimonies must be considered collectively, not individually. That's true. ONE person's statement, no matter how believable, without any other corroboration isn't proof of anything.

And, let's be honest, anybody Nick would name would be dismissed by Saggy as unreliable anyway.

Maybe the question should be, is there a central repository of eyewitness statements that are considered valid and reliable by holocaust scholars? Or, since it is impossible for any one person to read/analyze/cross reference/synthesize the potentially hundreds of thousands of eyewitness statements, is there a core list of survivors who have given statements that have been and currently are relied upon by scholars in their research?

I vaguely recall David Irving asking this question to van Pelt during his trial but I can't find it in the transcripts now and I don't recall the answer.

I named a pair of witnesses, whose testimony taken together is credible, and yet we are still getting "no one named anyone." I will thank you for understanding and not strawmanning Nick's comment on the problem of single data points.

 

[Wroclaw]

I see, thanks for LC having quoted him, that Saggy is still spouting his nonsense.

I take it that Saggy considers himself "white." As such, knowing the sheer misery that white people have caused around the globe, that he accepts that violence toward white people is fair enough.

That being said, and bearing in mind that the vast majority of African-Americans have white blood in them due to rape, it's perfectly fair game for blacks to rape whites. Hell, if Saggy's wife got raped by a black man, I'm sure he would see it as just historical justice being paid her.

Right?

 

[Wroclaw]

Of those, I don't believe Kaltenbrunner accepted the charges against him. That's one. The "no Nazi ever denied the holocaust" is a mantra for Team Holocaust but it isn't true.

The Kaltenbrunner argument is a red herring, and you know it. As a stand-in for Heydrich at Nuremberg, he got tarred with Heydrich's brush and it's probably true that much, if not most, of what he was charged with at Nuremberg were things for which he was ultimately not responsible. That responsibility would have fallen to Heydrich or Eichmann.

Heydrich never stood trial, of course, but Eichmann did. So do you think what Eichmann was charged with he denied?

 

[LemmyCaution]

Why is it that Irene Zizblatt has been allowed, many years after being proven a liar, to continue to lie to American school children?

And who is in the position to prevent this in all the schools of the country? Please don't insult our intelligence with your reply. What is her speaking schedule, by the way and just for interest?

Why don't the Holocaust historians discredit her and prevent her from lying so grossly about the Holocaust?

Joachim Neander wrote a critique of her book and concluded it was full of distortions. For some reason this doesn't count. Probably because his doing so rubbishes your inane argument.

Why don't the Holocaust believers posting on this thread discredit her for lying so grossly about the Holocaust?

Some have. Myself, Nick, I think others but can't recall. People interested in the facts of the Holocaust are very interested in weeding out the liars and confused, as Joachim Neander himself has argued.

Is it because lying to the goyim is OK? And diming on non goyim is a no no.

Now you have gone around the bend. Who here has made any such argument or implied any such thing?

It seems that is how Bernie Maddoff lasted so long. Many non goyim knew but wouldn't dime on him.

Oh my. Here we go.

 

[Wroclaw]

Right, so Bernie Madoff's Jewish victims, because many were Jewish, decided not to report him because of loyalty to the tribe?

Are you freaking nuts?

 

[LemmyCaution]

Right, so Bernie Madoff's Jewish victims, because many were Jewish, decided not to report him because of loyalty to the tribe?

Are you freaking nuts?

He seems to be every bit as loony as he is a bad speller.

 

[Nick Terry]

To be fair to Saggy: Saggy asked for one credible Jewish eyewitness. Nick and others have said there are 100s of credible Jewish eyewitnesses but nobody has named one.

To be fair to Nick: As Nick pointed out, the holocaust wasn't a single big event. It was tens of thousands of little events happening in tens of thousands different places to millions of people over a period of several years. There won't be anybody who witnessed it all. There will only be people who witnessed a small part of it.

Nick also claimed that the testimonies must be considered collectively, not individually. That's true. ONE person's statement, no matter how believable, without any other corroboration isn't proof of anything.

And, let's be honest, anybody Nick would name would be dismissed by Saggy as unreliable anyway.

Maybe the question should be, is there a central repository of eyewitness statements that are considered valid and reliable by holocaust scholars? Or, since it is impossible for any one person to read/analyze/cross reference/synthesize the potentially hundreds of thousands of eyewitness statements, is there a core list of survivors who have given statements that have been and currently are relied upon by scholars in their research?

I vaguely recall David Irving asking this question to van Pelt during his trial but I can't find it in the transcripts now and I don't recall the answer.

The notions of a "central repository" or "core list", presumably meaning a canon, are both somewhat nonsensical.

If you are researching Auschwitz then you can read through the West German pretrial investigation for what became the Frankfurt Auschwitz Trial, and look over statements from 1,400 witnesses. Or you can read the trial transcript, now available on DVD, and look at about 400 witnesses who appeared on the stand or whose statements were read into evidence. Or you could look at the Polish investigation for what became the Hoess trial and read 300-400 statements from 1945. Or you could look at the Soviet investigation in the spring of 1945 and read 200 official interrogations and about 50 written accounts in the same files. Or the 50 or so in the Dejaco trial.

Reliability isn't a yes/no issue with witnesses. It's much more sensible to think in percentage terms. No statement is ever going to exhibit perfect knowledge, perfect expression or perfect clarity. People usually say very vague things about dates, and other details. And they get things wrong for this or that reason. There is enough psychological research on the subject that this is how things are, end of story.

A good witness statement, no matter what the issue, will be something like 70-90% accurate when measured against other known facts or other testimonies. That means, they might remember the month wrong, they might not remember all kinds of things. Human memory is not a camcorder built in to a Terminator which can be played back verbatim. If anyone thinks it is, they are severely deluded.

In a cohort of 200 or 400 witnesses, there will be some who are completely incoherent and offer virtually nothing useable for whatever purpose (legal, historical). There will be some who are very detailed and very coherent. There are many who are in between. One study of the reliability of memoirs found that 7% of a sample of 300 were by the harsh estimation of the critic, "useless". That seems about right to me in my experience.

 

[tsig]

Well, there is a long list of countries that have expelled the Jews .... here tis ..

http://www.biblebelievers.org.au/expelled.htm

so, for them to generate murderous animosity is not unusual. Why do you pretend otherwise? Even Jews acknowledge this, see for example B. Ginsburg's 'The Fatal Embrace, Jews and the State', when they're not posting gibberish on the internet.

Note: I didn't say or imply that the Lithuanian Jews were partisans, but that they were collaborators during the previous Soviet occupation. This is just a variation on Ginsburg's thesis, btw.

The Jews are so evil that Hitler must have been a saint not to have them all killed.

 

[Nick Terry]

As Nick Terry said "Sane people's understanding of the Holocaust includes mass extermination by shooting, deaths in ghettos, labour camps and concentration camps, deaths in transit en route to the camps, shootings on arrival at places like Treblinka, and gassings at Chelmno, Belzec, Sobibor, Treblinka, Auschwitz, Majdanek, Semlin and Maly Trostinets along with many other places. By definition there cannot be one witness to all these sites."

Similarly, there won't be one credible Nazi guard or otherwise involved party who can deny the whole thing. There are only those who can say they did not participate in or were not aware of what they were accused of doing.

Of those, I don't believe Kaltenbrunner accepted the charges against him. That's one. The "no Nazi ever denied the holocaust" is a mantra for Team Holocaust but it isn't true.

No Nazi ever provided credible testimony which would point to any other explanation than extermination.

We can break down the Holocaust and provide multiple witnesses to each killing site, offering a lot of detail, this is written up in the history books.

But you cannot provide a single witness, Nazi or otherwise, who ever said anything which would add up to an equivalent level of detail, describing how the camps were transit camps or talking about how they looked after the Jews from Auschwitz or Treblinka in one of the mythical resettlement camps in the east, or anything else which would be a genuine contradiction.

Deniers haven't even had the wit to invent more than a couple of fake witnesses purporting to claim anything different, and those were so transparently fraudulent that they don't get touted by every single denier, as one would expect if they were actually credible.

But if you think I'm wrong, hit us with a witness who explained what really did happen. In detail.

 

[Nick Terry]

Ignoring a lie or a misdeed and allowing them to continue is the same as condoning them.

So I'm correct, you don't give a flying crap about the truth as long as you benefit from the lies.

In what way do I "benefit" from the publication of a memoir by an American vanity press which passes off other people's experiences as their own autobiography?

I'm really at a loss here. Zisblatt is an elderly woman in the US who has confabulated a lot of other people's experiences into her own story and produced what is by all accounts a pretty terrible memoir. I cannot even buy a copy in my own country, which speaks volumes about its lack of genuine commercial success. I can't find proper reviews of the book in the mainstream press. Evidently, appearing in a Spielberg documentary ten years beforehand doesn't help you secure a proper book deal. You'd a thunk that someone at HarperCollins or whoever would have jumped at the chance. But no, they didn't bother.

 

[Saggy]

Your reply isn't coherent.

1. What does your list of countries expelling Jews have to do with the questions I asked you, ...................

??? My understanding is that Lithuanian 'paramilitary' groups did massacre some Jews after the Nazis invaded and dispelled the communist govt. which had oppressed the Lituanians, who saw the Jews as collaborators with the communists.

This is a variation on Ginsburg's thesis in 'Fatal Embrace, Jews and the State', which explains the many expulsions of the Jews as resulting from the populace rising up against the Jews who they see as serving a corrupt ruling class.

So, what happened in Lithuania was just another instance of the people rising up against the Jews.

HTH

 

[Saggy]

I'm really at a loss here. Zisblatt

I'll clarify it for you, Zisblatt is perfectly typical and representative holohoax liar. Her lies are no more obvious and absurd than those Weisel, Wiernik, Bomba, Rosenberg, or any other Jewish 'eyewitness' you want to name.

But then, you don't want to name ONE, not even one, because you know I'm right.

 

[little grey rabbit]

The Kaltenbrunner argument is a red herring, and you know it. As a stand-in for Heydrich at Nuremberg, he got tarred with Heydrich's brush and it's probably true that much, if not most, of what he was charged with at Nuremberg were things for which he was ultimately not responsible. That responsibility would have fallen to Heydrich or Eichmann.

Heydrich never stood trial, of course, but Eichmann did. So do you think what Eichmann was charged with he denied?

Guy Walters' Hunting Evil, page 319

In 1962 [sic] Aharoni recruited the former Dutch SS officer Willem Sassen to help them find Mengele. Since listening to Eichmann record his memoirs, Sassen claimed to now realize that the stories of the Holocaust were more than just Allied propaganda and for five thousand dollars per month he aggeed to help the Mossad.

Rauff, Rademacher, Sassen all recruited by Mossad/Shin Bet.

Has anyone managed to find a photo of Eichmann's crematorium yet?

 

[little grey rabbit]

Again, your incredulity is not an argument; when you pile mockery on top of it, you let your slip show quite a bit.

Lets just say it seems that Mueller notoriously does not seemed to have done coffee and his stone-cold tea nestled very much in complex moral and structural nexus.

 

[Clayton Moore]

Well, there is a long list of countries that have expelled the Jews .... here tis ..

http://www.biblebelievers.org.au/expelled.htm

so, for them to generate murderous animosity is not unusual. Why do you pretend otherwise? Even Jews acknowledge this, see for example B. Ginsburg's 'The Fatal Embrace, Jews and the State', when they're not posting gibberish on the internet.

Note: I didn't say or imply that the Lithuanian Jews were partisans, but that they were collaborators during the previous Soviet occupation. This is just a variation on Ginsburg's thesis, btw.

So why did all those countries expel Jewish people?

 

[Clayton Moore]

Right, so Bernie Madoff's Jewish victims, because many were Jewish, decided not to report him because of loyalty to the tribe?

I'm talking about authorities who let him slide and looked the other way for many years. But then you knew that.

Why are you covering for them by pretending that his victims were protecting him?

 

[Clayton Moore]

In what way do I "benefit" from the publication of a memoir by an American vanity press which passes off other people's experiences as their own autobiography?

I'm really at a loss here. Zisblatt is an elderly woman in the US who has confabulated a lot of other people's experiences into her own story and produced what is by all accounts a pretty terrible memoir. I cannot even buy a copy in my own country, which speaks volumes about its lack of genuine commercial success. I can't find proper reviews of the book in the mainstream press. Evidently, appearing in a Spielberg documentary ten years beforehand doesn't help you secure a proper book deal. You'd a thunk that someone at HarperCollins or whoever would have jumped at the chance. But no, they didn't bother.

Yeah sure. Spielberg should have been deluged with criticism over that movie he got awards for. Yet he is still champion Spielberg. When he should be scumbag liar Spielberg. Go figure.

 

[Corsair 115]

Why is it that Irene Zizblatt has been allowed, many years after being proven a liar, to continue to lie to American school children?

Ah, so in addition to your proposed media conspiracy (which you have yet to explain if it applies only to the U.S. or if Jews control the media in almost every other nation in the world too), we now get your education conspiracy. Same question applies to that one: is this only in the U.S.? Or are Jews somehow controlling the educational systems of pretty much every other nation in the world too?

Why don't the Holocaust historians discredit her and prevent her from lying so grossly about the Holocaust?

Are you proposing yet another conspiracy? There is a Jewish conspiracy keeping historians silent and towing the Jewish-approved historical line? Same question as before applies once again: is this only in the U.S.? Or does it apply to historians in just about every other nation around the world?

So, Clayton, you've now got three (global?) Jewish conspiracies on the go: one involving the media, a second involving the educational system, and a third involving historians. Will you be adding a fourth to this remarkable list?

 

[Nick Terry]

I'll clarify it for you, Zisblatt is perfectly typical and representative holohoax liar. Her lies are no more obvious and absurd than those Weisel, Wiernik, Bomba, Rosenberg, or any other Jewish 'eyewitness' you want to name.

No, Zisblatt is not "perfectly typical and representative".

But then, you don't want to name ONE, not even one, because you know I'm right.

I don't need to name any. You're the one who, if you want to be taken seriously, have to demonstrate that every single witness, whether Jewish, non-Jewish or German, is lying.

You name three witnesses from Treblinka - there are more than 300 witnesses from Belzec, Sobibor and Treblinka. There are 90 named in Arad's book which appeared 24 years ago.

You name two survivors of Auschwitz (and whatever else Zisblatt said, it seems from documents that she was there for a while). But neither of them were witnesses in any investigations of trials. The Frankfurt Auschwitz Trial heard the evidence of more than 400 witnesses, after a pre-trial investigation involving 1,400 witnesses.

You simply keep on repeating 'liar, liar, liar' without ever backing up your claims. You assume that all the witnesses are the same and are treated the same. But Zisblatt is not Wiernik. No serious historian thinks Zisblatt is a credible witness. Every serious historian thinks Wiernik is a credible witness.



So here's my challenge thrown down to you and Dogzilla and Clayton Moore. Wiernik's memoir is under 20,000 words long. It's easily available online. You and Dogzilla and Clayton Moore are going to break new ground in revisionism, because you're all going to analyse the entire statement, all 20,000 words of it.

There are 20,000 words, and probably several thousand discrete points which are made, ranging from a name to a time-frame to a dimension to a number to colours and impressions.

Everyone can read the statement, because it's online. So we can see very clearly if any of you are cherrypicking things. You need to tell us what points in the statement can be confirmed by documents, and what points are corroborated by other witnesses.

Before you can blether about "lies" you must first tell us what is true in the statement.

Was there an SS man at Treblinka called Franz? Yes or no?
Were transports from Bulgaria sent to Treblinka? Yes or no?
Were Jews from Warsaw deported to Treblinka? Yes or no?
Was there a forced labour camp nearby? Yes or no?

The answer to all those questions - and many more - is 'yes'. A documented yes.

You need to tell us about the people mentioned, either by name or description. Count them all up. Tell us whether they have been confirmed by another source. You need to tell us about the events, big and small, that happened in the camp during the time Wiernik was there. There are lots of things you need to do in order to analyse the entire statement.

Then, and only then, will you and Dogzilla and Clayton Moore be doing anything which remotely approximates what lawyers and historians do.

You're not going to do this, of course. Because you only know how to spew out your cherrypicked incredulities.

But that's OK, because the Wiernik Challenge can remain a standing one.

 

[LemmyCaution]

??? My understanding is that Lithuanian 'paramilitary' groups did massacre some Jews after the Nazis invaded and dispelled the communist govt. which had oppressed the Lituanians, who saw the Jews as collaborators with the communists.

This is a variation on Ginsburg's thesis in 'Fatal Embrace, Jews and the State', which explains the many expulsions of the Jews as resulting from the populace rising up against the Jews who they see as serving a corrupt ruling class.

So, what happened in Lithuania was just another instance of the people rising up against the Jews.

HTH

You are telling a tiny, tiny part of what occurred, focusing on Kovno in particular, where local antisemites slaughtered Jews, most notoriously at Lietukis garage. It should be noted that the LAF, a collaborationist formation supported by the Germans, helped control Kovno during the early days of the occupation. But I was writing about something different, the events in Vilna, which have nothing to do with the murders committed by antisemitic collaborators in Kovno. There was no such Selbstreinigungsbestrebungen in Vilna. Before turning to Vilna, it should be noted that Stahlecker wrote about Kovno in this vein:

As a result of the pogroms carried out by the Lithuanians, who were nevertheless substantially assisted by Sipo and SD, 3,800 Jews in Kauen [Kovno] and 1,200 in the smaller towns were eliminated. . . . These spontaneous mopping-up actions were, however, insufficient to stabilize this rear section of the Front, and at the same time the enthusiasm of the local inhabitants waned.

The 15 October 1941 report differentiated between the 3,800 Jews killed in self-cleansing operations in Kovno and the killing of "some Communists who had been left behind." The "self-cleansing" operations in Kovno didn't last long, for the Germans assumed control and with it command of anti-Jewish actions.

In Vilna, local collaborationists patrolled the city in company of German troops after the Soviets were driven out. But, as Stahlecker noted, in Vilna local Lithuanians were more anti-Polish than antisemitic. In Vilna, EK9 attached a local collaborationist group, the Ypatingas Burys, for support of its campaign against the Jews, but here the operations were directed and under command of the Germans from the outset. It was these anti-Jewish actions which Kruk and Sakowicz observed, not "self-cleansing" in the first days of the war at Kovno. It was these observations which I asked you about--whether they were not credible and why and whether you have even read them. I will conclude that you haven't, because you keep conflating Kovno and Vilna, which would indicate ignorance on your part of this region and the development of the genocide there. You can't be expected to know everything, of course, but you've made some rather sweeping statements, haven't you, and attached yourself to a non-entity like Zisblatt. So the existence of the Kruk diary and Sakowicz's journal are problematic for your claims, whether you are aware of these witness reports or not.

What happened in Kovno wasn't even as simple as another example of people rising up against Jews. What happened in Vilna had even less to do with local antisemites acting under protection of the German occupying force.

You have chosen not to pursue your argument regarding communist collaboration at this point. When you do resume it, please also append a list of names of Jewish-Bolshevik victims of these slaughters and a brief description of their collaboration with the Soviets. In addition, please explain the parallel mass murders of Lithuanian collaborators in these early days.