I know that we've been over this but why are the things you mention physically impossible? To throw someone into a burning pit and cremate the body in the same fire is not physically impossible. The mind staggers and it is difficult to accept such an action - but that is different to its being physically impossible and prima facie a degnerate lie, absurd, and ridiculous. Rational thought, in fact, tells you that when such claims are made, and similar claims are made in number, then investigation is called for.
Testimony and documents concerning Auschwitz show that daily life there was not characterized by constant random and chaotic acts of sudden and brutal personal cruelty toward the inmates. (The major violence consisted in the terms and conditions of their incarceration and the regularized mass murder, including ramp selections, gassings, medical experiments, and so on, not individual acts of sadism.) That does not mean that the conditions did not give individuals with the proper mindset license to act sadistically and carry out "excesses." Flogging and other violent forms of punishment, including the death sentence for camp infractions, were enforced. Atrocities, although not constant, helped terrorize the prisoners, adding to the official regime's impact. We've already been through this, when guys were learned about a very plausible and documented atrocity, which you doubted on physical grounds, the suspension of prisoners on stakes at Buchenwald. Other excessive acts included dog cells, standing cells, sports, and roll call brutalities.
At the Auschwitz trial, for example, witnesses testified that defendant Oswald Kaduk 1) trampled a rabbi to death, 2) strangled inmates with a walking cane, 3) drowned inmates, 4) engaged in the "sport" of cap throwing in which victims were made to throw their caps into restricted areas and shot if they followed the order to retrieve the hat and also if they disobeyed the order and kept out of the restricted area, and 5) sadistically abused women by harming their genitalia. Testimony showed that defendant Stefan Baretski had organized a "rabbit hunt" of incoming Salonika Jews who'd survived selection in which the Jews were ordered to remove their caps and those who reacted too slowly were shot to death at the wire fence. The witness testimony against Baretski included that from Otto Wolken, prisoner #128,828 and an Austrian who worked in the hospital and happened to have kept and retained notes about what he witnessed in his time in the camp. Baretski was also convicted of stomping a Musselmann to death, of shooting at least five prisoners to death who failed to keep up in "sports" he'd ordered, and of drowning four prisoners in a water tank in June 1944. Defendant Herbert Scherpe was one of those convicted in the killing of young boys brought to the camp from Zamosc in 1943. The boys were murdered by phenol injections, usually administered by Josef Klehr. The first group, about 60, were killed however by Scherpe, Klehr being absent when the transport arrived. Scherpe's conviction was for aiding and abetting, in the words of the judgment, because "The fact that [the victims] were killed as members of the Polish nation . . . shows clearly not only that there was no death sentence against them, but that their right to live was no longer acknowledged. . . . Defendant Scherpe killed the children under orders. . . . The defendant recognized that the killing of the children was a universal crimes. This is clearly shown by the facts that already before the killing action he protested to the camp doctor Rohde and that he discontinued the killing. . . . He followed the order only reluctantly." Scherpe admitted the killings, but also witnesses testified to them, including Tadeusz Pazcula, Stanislaw Glowa, and Stanislaw Klodzinski who added of Scherpe's actions after a second day of killings was ordered that "I want to note that SS-SDG Scherpe refused to undertake these injections." Finally, numerous witnesses, and some victims, testified to the torture device devised and used by defendant Boger, called the Boger swing, a "low trestle . . . with an iron rod on its back; there was a person tied to the rod by his hands and feet, and his head was hanging down." Boger used this device in what the Gestapo called intensified interrogations. Boger's victims often were killed during interrogation, and many of those who survived were shot at the black wall in the Stammlager. Summarizing witness testimony, the judgment said that "Boger was one of the most zealous of the SS men in the bunker evacuations. He hated Poles, and they constituted the majority of the arrested prisoners. . . . It filled him with a deep sense of satisfaction that he produced fear and terror in his prisoners." Boger admitted to black wall shootings and participating in ramp selections. He said that he was under orders. The court found him guilty of personal excesses in his use of violence and cruelty. The list of his convictions ran to 20 pages.
Guess who did not testify at the Auschwitz trial? And guess about how many witnesses did testify at this trial?
