Merged General Holocaust denial discussion thread

[Cyrix686]

I'd better not, I'll be accused of sycophancy by the Great Brian of Revisionism. Or is that brain? I've tried parsing it and it is gibberish.

Here's what I have:

Germany loses war because they were egg cosying the population.

It's true, Dogzilla has managed tonight to make no sense whatsoever.

 

[tsig]

Can someone translate this to proper English is this just the incoherent ignorant gibberish it looks like at first glance?

Getting shot and killed is a lot like being forced to do your homework.

 

[Nick Terry]

So we can't respond to anything somebody on your team says without verifying that what they insist is the truth about the holocaust or that their interpretation of what they believe is the truth about the holocaust is indeed what the mainstream historians say is the truth? We should just assume that you people are quite possibly spouting out rubbish and that we need to fact check your argument first?

And if we actually try to check your facts before we respond, we can't rely on any of the most respected historians in the field or any book they've written if it more than a few years old because there's a pretty good chance that the information is out of date.

What I think would be easier is for you guys to get your facts straight--especially when only a Joo hater doesn't take everything you say at face value.

Does anybody wonder why I want to establish some basic parameters first?

Considering that it was you who introduced several errors and misinterpretations into the discussion, not least of which was mistaking a secondary source for a primary source, I'm not sure you're in the best position to be whining about anything.

LemmyCaution flagged up a witness mentioned in Hermann Kruk's diary. That diary is a primary source. Even Clayton Moore managed to manipulate Google Books to go to the original source, although he clearly misunderstood it, as then did you, cueing off Clayton Moore's incredulity.

Then you find that the same witness was mentioned in a secondary source, a book by Samuel Kassow which is on the Oneg Shabes archive. Probably that was by googling, is my guess. Do you actually own the book?

The main subject of that book is Emanuel Ringelblum, the secondary subject is the Warsaw ghetto. What happened in Vilnius comes up a few times but is clearly not the main subject. It seems you cannot decipher footnotes very well as you apparently didn't realise Kassow's source for his paraphrase was... Kruk. Probably Google Books didn't give you access to the footnotes.

Things become even funnier when, having had the source of your error explained to you, there now begins the typical Dogzilla huffing and puffing about historians and the Holocaust and teams and 'you guys' and all the rest of it.

One would have to conclude that you simply have never read very much on any subject not to realise that in order to be readable, virtually every single book has to condense and paraphrase its sources, and can only highlight select sources for verbatim quotation. This is not unique to the Holocaust. It really isn't. If you read about the same event in several different sources, there are almost invariably differences in how the original source is condensed. A million and one possible variations can creep in to telling the same story from the same sources. That's just how writing and language are. Yet now you insist others get their story straight, when it is you and Clayton Moore who couldn't even comprehend the primary source properly.

Thing is, others had their story straight from the beginning. LemmyCaution mentioned Schloss because he has Kruk's diary. That was his source, which is a primary source. He invoked Schloss because he knows quite a bit about the Wilno ghetto and the circumstances of the various killing actions in 1941 at Ponary.

Maybe you remember a flop-eared poster named little grey rabbit who used to pop up every so often and is currently on suspension. Well, the bunny came a spectacular cropper over Ponary and the actions against the Wilno ghetto. I'm sure some of the members here know the catchphrase that goes along with that debacle. I'm also sure that memories of that never to be written page of glory in the history of revisionism prompted LemmyCaution to proffer a Wilno ghetto witness to see whether the menagerie would bite. Although maybe bite isn't the right word, since you're all as incoherent as gramps without his dentures.

It's actually amusing to watch you and other deniers flail around hopelessly dithering over one hearsay witness, falling into what ought to have been a pretty obvious trap set by LemmyCaution, ignoring the small herd of elephants in the room, namely the totality of evidence regarding the Wilno ghetto. You are so predictable you fall into these heffalump traps every freaking time, and never learn, never realise where you are going wrong, and never once bother to do more than google up a rapid-fire response. It's really, really funny watching you guys flail around like this.

 

[Nick Terry]

Getting shot and killed is a lot like being forced to do your homework.

Ah, I think we have identified a root cause of the problem.

 

[A'isha]

Can someone translate this to proper English is this just the incoherent ignorant gibberish it looks like at first glance?

Let me see if I can follow his denier line of thought.

The SS reports describe Jewish civilians, including women and children, being shot en masse in the thousands, as a punishment applied as retribution for some other Jews shooting and killing German soldiers. Since the Germans were just going to kill all those Jews anyway as part of the Final Solution, obviously that contradicts the idea that the Germans killed those Jews as a special punishment for Jewish actions, since apparently you can never do something as a punishment to someone if you were going to do that thing to them anyway. Or something. I'm still not sure how that's supposed to work given the context of the Einsatzgruppen killings as part of the overall Final Solution. Anyway, therefore, the SS reports are fake and the Holocaust never happened. Or the SS reports are real, but the Holocaust still never happened. Either way, the Holocaust never happened.

My head hurts now.

 

[LemmyCaution]

I was actually talking to Nick Terry's sycophants who simply won't choose one of the people on this list of two hundred. This Schloss chick someone suggested turns out to be a bust. It doesn't look like we have any direct testimony from her at all.

Pesye Schloss was not a "chick," you offensive bigot. She was a 16-year-old whose testimony, recorded by Herman Kruk, you haven't made a dent against; nor have you even started to tackle the evidence from a number of other sources corroborating her testimony and cited by Nick and me. As to the details, you and Clayton Moore can't even summarize them honestly or accurately. Oh, and you also didn't deal with Oskar Strawczynski, whose name I offered, either. But you're a denier, so I expect you to blether on and on no matter how weak your case turns out to be.

 

[Nick Terry]

Let me see if I can follow his denier line of thought.

The SS reports describe Jewish civilians, including women and children, being shot en masse in the thousands, as a punishment applied as retribution for some other Jews shooting and killing German soldiers. Since the Germans were just going to kill all those Jews anyway as part of the Final Solution, obviously that contradicts the idea that the Germans killed those Jews as a special punishment for Jewish actions, since apparently you can never do something as a punishment that you were planning to do anyway, or something. Therefore, the SS reports are fake and the Holocaust never happened. Or the SS reports are real, but the Holocaust still never happened. Either way, the Holocaust never happened.

My head hurts now.

I can see why...

 

[A'isha]

I can see why...

Darn it, I totally forgot to fit in the part about how the mass execution of civilians as part of a years-long, evolving, and deliberate genocide of a religioethnic group is exactly like making your kid do her homework.

Oh, well.

 

[Border Reiver]

If your head hurts remember that beer makes it better.

 

[Dogzilla]

This still doesn't amount to a coherent argument.

You clearly need to read a LOT more on the Warsaw ghetto and grasp its economy properly. You also need to remember that there were other ghettos involved, and that there would have been differences in their economic situation, remaining wealth, etc. Bialystok had been a ghetto only since 1941, Warsaw since 1940. There was nowhere else more affected by starvation than Warsaw. But the Warsaw ghetto also saw the worst class disparities of any ghetto, with a minority of black marketeers and other prosperous individuals remaining alright, while the mass of the population was unemployed and increasingly, unemployable, and thousands dropping dead from starvation. The ones who were in work weren't deported.

So then not everybody in the Warsaw ghetto was starving? Some of the elites were doing OK? And there were differences between the ghettos as far as wealth and nutrition? But nowhere else was affected by starvation the way Warsaw was? And thousands of Jews dropped dead from starvation before the deportations to the death camps begin, leaving alive the ones presumably who had enough food to survive. So explain to me again why the size of all the Jews deported to Treblinka need to be based on the most emaciated Jews in the ghetto that suffered the worse famine?

Here's a link to a book which summarises the findings of the Warsaw doctors' medical study on starvation in the Warsaw ghetto
http://www.tushnet.com/leonard.html

Highlights: children before puberty were severely stunted in growth, as one would expect from experiencing 2 years of malnutrition. 9 year olds were the height of 6 year olds; 3 to 4 year olds were no bigger than infants. Weight loss was on average 50%. (Ch 6 p.57)

Adults averaged a 20 to 50% weight loss (Ch 6 p.51) with most having lost between 65 and 90 pounds (29 to 40kg) in bodyweight. The lowest observed weight was a 53 pound woman, aged 30 (24kg)

I like the introduction there: "Leonard Tushnet was a physician and writer. His writings covered Jewish history, medicine, and science fiction, often in combination." So he might mix fantasy with reality. Check.

I thought the discussion of edema and generalized swelling as an effect of starvation was interesting. And he confirmed my hypothesis about starvation reducing the sex drive and in some cases stopping menstruation. So I guess the birth rate really plummeted eliminating a whole bunch of really tiny people being sent to the death camps.

Belsen survivors were studied by British RAMC doctors and found to weigh on average 44kg for men (between 38.7 and 59.7kg) and 35.5kg for women (25-45.5kg). Those were the ones who could actually stand up. Most of these were Central Europeans, with probably many Hungarian Jews. (P. L. Mollison, 'Observations On Cases Of Starvation At Belsen', The British Medical Journal, Vol. 1, No. 4435 (Jan. 5, 1946), pp. 4-8). The average for one man and one woman would thus be 39.75kg.

Sounds like the density of the mass graves at Belsen would be a good metric to use.

Roberto Muehlenkamp used other figures to arrive at an average of 43kg for men and women, and 16kg for children, and proceeded on your one third assumption. His average for adults is thus appreciably higher than the Belsen average. The overall average for two adults and one child is thus 34kg. He stated that using this figure was a definite underestimate for Belzec where the proportion of children was more like 42%. I woud repeat the same observation for Treblinka.

You'll need to define "children" for that to be meaningful.

Your insistence that one third of the corpses needing to be buried were children is touchingly stubborn, but ignores pretty much every step of the chain taking Polish Jews from their peacetime lives to burial at Treblinka. The proportion of children who were deported was higher than the prewar proportion. If you hold back adults for work but deport children, then you're going to deport proportionately more children. The proportion of children among the bodies thrown into the mass graves at Treblinka was also higher than the proportion who arrived at the camp. Each of these factors made only a slight individual difference, but taken together they progressively add up.

And children were deported while their parents remained behind to work? And the parents didn't complain about this? Worrying about their children didn't cause productivity problems?

How would it be possible for the proportion of children thrown into the mass graves be higher than those who arrived at the camp? The children were all murdered upon arrival and tossed into the graves. Some of the adults were kept alive for work but they too eventually were killed and tossed into the mass grave.

If that proportion (number of children actually in the mass graves) reached 40%, which seems very probable, then instead of Roberto's 43 + 43 + 16kg, you'd have 43 + 43 + 43 + 16 + 16 kg = 32.2kg average. And if you dispute the numbers for average adult weight, you're much more likely to still end up with a very low average overall weight if the proportion of children is higher.

Roberto Muehlenkamp was responding in his blog to Carlo Mattogno, who has at least tried to produce figures for average weight. Mattogno estimated 55kg average weight. That would lead to a corpses per cubic metre density of 12 bodies per cubic metre. Roberto's 34kg average would lead to 20 corpses per cubic metre.

You can make up any reason you like to explain why there would be so many more children in the mass graves. Without any sources cited, it doesn't carry much weight. If you want to use Roberto's estimate that 20 corpses will fit in a cubic meter you'll need to show a mass grave that has achieved that density.

Best/middle/worst case scenario modelling would start by using figures like these. 34kg to 55kg is not an unrealistic range, and the evidence points more in the lower direction than the upper direction.

Using those figures together with known anthropological data to produce an estimate of between 12 and 20 corpses per cubic metre of mass grave space is also not unrealistic. At the lower end, similar numbers of fully-clothed contemporary adult commuters carrying bags can be squeezed into tube trains or buses today. A fat midwesterner conducted an experiment with his fat midwestern family and found that you can cram in what would equate to 28 people into a cubic metre if necessary. One does not need to accept that result to know that high numbers are entirely possible.

Is your fat midwesterner Charles Provan by any chance? He did an experiment showing density of bodies in a gas chamber. He was working with living bodies that can contort themselves to fit into X square feet in size. We're talking about dead bodies that can fit into X cubic meters in size. It's an apples and oranges comparison that is especially pathetic because his experiment didn't even prove what he said it did. But that's OK because--maybe you remember this--a while back someone made a brilliant point about the holocaust by juxtaposing an identical quote being used by Michael Shermer in two different contexts. One of the points people tried to use to dismiss this was that Michael Shermer isn't a historian. Well....guess what Charles Provan isn't either.

For you lurkers, check out the photographs Charles Provan used to support his findings that Kurt Gerstein estimates of the number of people in a gas chamber are actually possible. Since these photographs are necessary to "prove" that his experiment worked like he said it did, you can judge how much value to place on his findings by the quality of these pictures.

And that's still before we factor in decomposition.

Which would be negligible.

Now, please, show us your numbers and demonstrate the "impossibility" using maths and proper data, instead of continuing to handwave and digress.

Instead of disputing every premise and every detail, why not use best/middle/worst case scenario modelling, using the numbers already on the table.

We have for example perfectly good evidence that the Treblinka graves were up to 1/3 deeper than the deepest Belzec graves, as established by the 1945 Polish commission and Kola's investigations. That evidence cannot be dismissed a priori with a load of handwaving about the untrustworthiness of East Bloc investigations, when your actual claim was that the graves were "impossible".

Really? Show that graves at Treblinka with a depth of 7.5m and realistic sizes for the other dimensions, bearing in mind all the other evidence we have, couldn't have accomodated the total number of corpses.

That was your claim, and you're still dancing around it with a load of waffle.

Your the one who is still dancing around. Answer the questions so we can move forward. What is it about specific pieces of information that scares you so much?

 

[LemmyCaution]

Dogzilla has leaped into the fray, dismissing Pesye Schloss - whose testimony it was that she was shot twice during a mass execution directed by the Nazis at Ponar the first week of September 1941 - as a "chick." Clayton Moore has argued that Pesye Schloss can't be believed, well, because she can't be believed. Let's see these two heroes of revisionism explain Ponar and the evidence concerning Ponar. I think we would all like to hear what they make of the other witnesses cited by Herman Kruk, whose journal summarizes their testimony immediately following the large-scale massacre at Ponar the first week of September 1941. I think we would all like to hear what they make of Kazimieriz Sakowicz's journal in which is recorded his observations of the shootings which Kruk wrote about. I think we would all like to hear what they make of Karl Jaeger's report of December 1941. I think we would all like to hear what they make of the account of the September 1941 action at Ponar in Yitzhak Arad's Ghetto in Flames. And then we are still waiting to hear and I am sure would want to learn how our brave revisionists believe Pesye Schloss lied, what were the specific lies, and how the revisionists know she lied - not empty braying about weak cases or mindless repetition of incredulity but specifics based on evidence.

 

[LemmyCaution]

So then not everybody in the Warsaw ghetto was starving? Some of the elites were doing OK? And there were differences between the ghettos as far as wealth and nutrition?

Anyone who has done minimal reading about the Warsaw ghetto knows the answers to these questions. Are you asking them rhetorically or genuinely? Do you really not know the answers?

 

[Dogzilla]

Let me see if I can follow his denier line of thought.

The SS reports describe Jewish civilians, including women and children, being shot en masse in the thousands, as a punishment applied as retribution for some other Jews shooting and killing German soldiers. Since the Germans were just going to kill all those Jews anyway as part of the Final Solution, obviously that contradicts the idea that the Germans killed those Jews as a special punishment for Jewish actions, since apparently you can never do something as a punishment to someone if you were going to do that thing to them anyway. Or something. I'm still not sure how that's supposed to work given the context of the Einsatzgruppen killings as part of the overall Final Solution. Anyway, therefore, the SS reports are fake and the Holocaust never happened. Or the SS reports are real, but the Holocaust still never happened. Either way, the Holocaust never happened.

My head hurts now.

You guys just hate it when something you didn't think about when you made up your ridiculous holocaust story is pointed out.

 

[A'isha]

You guys just hate it when something you didn't think about when you made up your ridiculous holocaust story is pointed out.

By definition, it's impossible to actually think about the kind of anti-logic contained in your post.

And did you just accuse me of being one of the conspirators involved in crafting the Great ZioHoloHoax? I'm...uh...flattered?

 

[LemmyCaution]

You guys just hate it when something you didn't think about when you made up your ridiculous holocaust story is pointed out.

In point of fact, they seemed rather to enjoy the delightful and deranged silliness of your post. You don't seem to read people any better than you read texts.

 

[Wroclaw]

Just a quick note: Decomposition would hardly be "negligible" given the propensity of the Nazis (and others) to use quicklime.

 

[Wroclaw]

If your head hurts remember that beer makes it better.

Beer makes everything better.

 

[Wroclaw]

Well, the bunny came a spectacular cropper

Say what?

 

[Dogzilla]

I'd better not, I'll be accused of sycophancy by the Great Brian of Revisionism. Or is that brain? I've tried parsing it and it is gibberish.

Here's what I have:

Germany loses war because they were egg cosying the population.

It's true, Dogzilla has managed tonight to make no sense whatsoever.

"egg cosying the population"??? How did you get 'egg cosying' out of 'coddling'? Are you one of those non-native speakers running English through the google translator?

 

[Robrob]

Maybe the part where a guard was killing people, including children, saw a child who was alive, took her shoes and then shot her in the foot.

You have yet to explain why you find the incident incredible.

According to the source document, the child was unconscious. For some reason you continue to claim she was "playing dead."

And what kind of a master thespian is able to take a bullet through the foot without flinching?

Essentially your response has boiled down to "she's not credible, she's a liar" without a single shred of evidence presented to contradict her story.