On the contrary, the sum total of sites provides us with a larger amount of data as to methods and scale, which any sensible person would take into consideration.
Since the sites are connected by documents and witnesses, then the corroboration of documents and witnesses by physical evidence at the other 42 sites also corroborates the documents and witnesses related to Treblinka.
This is explicitly the case with the core Reinhard camps, via the Hoefle telegram and Korherr report, but via the Korherr report, Chelmno becomes directly connected, and via other sources, the T4 institutes become connected; Chelmno is explicitly connected via Blobel to the Aktion 1005 sites and to Auschwitz; Auschwitz is connected to the other concentration camps.
SS personnel were also transferred from Belzec and Sobibor to Treblinka; other SS witnesses involved in Auschwitz and other killing operations also visited Treblinka.
No we're not only going to talk about Treblinka. Sorry
There is no "team holocaust". Stop being a patronising a-hole.
No, you simply need to get on with proving your case, using the numbers you think are most grounded.
No, you need to spell out your argument. It's quite likely there will be a disagreement over the interpretation of some of the numbers
This rather spectacularly misses the point of the comparison. Once again, comparison isn't about finding the closest match. It is about identifying data which is comparable in at least one dimension.
The British government buried a tonnage of animal carcasses on four sites in 2001 during the FMD epidemic, which is probably equal to or very close to the total weight of the human victims of the three Reinhard camps of Belzec, Sobibor and Treblinka. Those four burial sites were not dug up again and cremated, that wasn't why the fact of the 2001 burials was mentioned. It was simply to indicate that mass burials on the scale of the Reinhard camps are not unknown. Thus any argument to sheer incredulity about the scale of the burial full stop will fail.
The British government also incinerated large tonnages of animal carcasses in 2001, in a combination of smaller pyres on farms as well as some centralised sites. The data is available in a variety of reports which can be accessed on the internet. The FMD mass cremations were not carried out identically to the Reinhard cremations, but they offer us a point of comparison.
The techniques used to cremate animal carcasses on large pyres, dating back to the 19th Century but certainly also including the 2001 FMD epidemic, are closer to the reported techniques used to carry out mass cremations at the Reinhard camps than any other reported cases of mass cremation of human beings.
The physiological differences between human corpses and animal carcasses are nowhere near as critical as the simple fact that it's hardly unknown for hundreds of cows, weighing 250-500kg each, to be piled up onto a single pyre and cremated. If agricultural agencies have been able to do this on repeated occasions, then there is nothing logistically impossible about the SS organising pyres burning thousands of human corpses in one go.
The sources I mentioned (Bay and Muehlenkamp) should be taken into consideration in any discussion of this issue.
Once again: I don't care what sources you use. I simply care that you advance an argument, and take into consideration as many pieces of information as you can. The more you factor in, the more likely your argument is to stand up.
Unfortunately it seems you are hellbent on dismissing data and dismissing perfectly logical comparisons, judging by your remarks above.
'Data', btw, would include not only the historical evidence related to the major Nazi killing and cremation sites, but also our knowledge of what is possible with carcass disposal, especially if you get into questions of fuel consumption.
You've got access to quite a large amount of data via the sources given, and it's almost certain that your evaluation of the information will be different to the evaluation of others. Your task is to convince other people that your evaluation is better, not to dream up ways of dismissing the other evaluations via ad hominems or goalpost moving or strawmen or handwaving.
Not true even for Treblinka. Remember the Lazarett was already operational in 1942. That was where the Sonderkommandos were liquidated and a proportion of the new arrivals were taken to be killed. Quite a few deportees to Treblinka, at least several thousand, were taken to the labour camp and either died there (and were buried) or were only transferred after mass cremation had begun.
You should also be aware that there are some sources indicating early experiments with cremation in the death camp area of Treblinka in late 1942, probably abortive, and likely to carbonise the stinking mass of rotting flesh that was being complained about to the Wehrmacht. But it's another illustration of how the volume required could have been affected.
Are you ever going to quote any?
which survivors? were they employed burying bodies?
Why does it take a training program to pass on simple knowledge about the most efficient way to arrange corpses in a mass grave? All that is required is for a foreman to instruct the prisoner commandos on the way they'd like it done. This can then be altered and adjusted to make sure that the graves are used as efficiently as possible.
If they're not used efficiently, then more graves have to be dug, something that evidently happened anyway. But hat might also lead to the necessity of expanding the camp area, which would involve cutting down surrounding woodland (which was done anyhow, to gather firewood and) and moving fences.
Those actions were by no means impossible or prevented by anything you could cite. The camp was surrounded by woodland, not by farms owned by peasants or town streets or industrial facilities. There was nothing stopping the camp being made bigger if the SS needed it to be bigger.
Or the Nazis could have closed the site and set up another one, just as they did with Belzec, which was closed at the end of 1942 with Sobibor and Treblinka picking up the slack, along with the mass shootings of more than 100,000 Jews in Galicia district, as well as using camps like Auschwitz.
That's another reason why the 42 sites need to be remembered. The Nazis had loads of places they could kill people. That they continued to kill and bury people at Treblinka is because they could continue to do so. If they couldn't, i.e. ran into one of your impossibilities, then they'd have changed up, just as they did at Belzec (which was closed down because the graves were overflowing).
You were reminded when we discussed this topic before that Treblinka was established and thus laid out before Himmler accelerated the extermination program, and thus was designed too small for its eventual task. The SS did not find it a problem to redesign and expand the gas chambers. They wouldn't have found it a problem to expand the camp, either. That they didn't expand the camp is most obviously explained by the fact that they didn't need to expand the camp. The existing grave space sufficed to accomodate that many bodies.
That's why several people have looked at the air photos, calculated the surface area, and mapped grave spaces onto the surface area of the death camp, showing that the space could quite comfortably have accomodated graves holding far more bodies than was actually necessary. Summary
here.
Source for discussing layers of soil or chlorine or lime at Treblinka?
You're grossly underestimating the potential effects of decomposition, especially the bodies buried in the summer of 1942, which was the peak moment for arrivals (remember many died en route). It's true that bloating would have first expanded the space occupied, but after that phase of decomposition, there is a considerable leaching of bodily fluids and a reduction in total volume.
It's not difficult to understand that in mass graves, decomposition would affect different layers in different ways. Right at the bottom of the grave, then conditions would be conducive to turning some corpses that had
already passed through putrefaction (bloating) and black putrefaction (collapse) into corpses in wax-fat transformation. But those are the stages when the most weight is lost due to the leaching of fluids.
Uh yes we do for Sobibor, and the Belzec data does prove the case. If you're going to offer nothing more than bare-assertions then kindly eff off. You were asked to show your maths, not continue to handwave,
With Treblinka we simply don't know the precise dimensions of the graves. There is data from the 1945 investigation which indicates approximate depth, and witness statements. The latter cannot be turned into stone, since it is well known that witnesses may over or under estimate.
If you're just going to dismiss the excavations at Belzec, Sobibor and Chelmno as a joke then there is really no point even continuing this discussion. What precisely is joke-worthy about those excavations? Do you have a reasoned scientific case against the auger method of determining grave size? Can you cite any professional archaeologists who would disagree with these methods when used in another context? Or is your disagreement entirely selective? Kola et al used the same method when working with Soviet graves, incidentally.
BTW have you even got a valid starting figure for the average weight of a victim at these camps? Can you even begin to model the data regarding the proportion of men, women and children? Or are you going to start with a horribly fallacious assumption that all the victims were adult males weighing 70kg on average, or pretend they were fat Midwesterners instead of starving Polish Jews many of whom had been immured behind ghetto walls for up to 2 years?
The latter consideration applies especially to Treblinka, since more than a third of the 1942 victims came from the Warsaw ghetto. Many others came from Bialystok, Grodno, Radom, Czestochowa and other closed ghettos.
Instead of fisking my reply above, please set out your full argument in flowing form. I won't bother to reply to any more fisking.
