Merged General Holocaust denial discussion thread

[Clayton Moore]

In 7320 Saggy quoted the Black Book passage discussing the propensity of a certain Nazi to have somebody throw three and four year old Jews up in the air so they could be shot to the delight of the Nazi's daughter. In 7328 you turned the three and four year old children into babies. Nice try.



It's not impossible at all. But how high can you throw a Jewish baby vs a Jewish four year old? You can probably throw the baby higher. The story is no doubt a complete fabrication no matter what. But you recognized that while throwing babies in the air for target practice is ridiculous, it's even more ridiculous to be tossing four year olds in the air for target practice. So you changed the story to bring it more in line with what you thought was more believable. Again, nice try.

Lying by these Holocaustics is like advertising on the WEB. It's free and it is a win win win win win win squeaky wheel venture.

 

[Dogzilla]

You're kidding, right? Anyway, I will remind you of the names of four reliable witnesses and one darned decent interviewer: Pesye Schloss, Yudis Trojak, Kazimierz Sakowicz, and Karl Jeager for the witnesses. And Herman Kruk for the interviewer. All gave similar accounts of the mass murder at Ponar the first week of September. All are credible, none has been shown to be anything like a degenerate liar.

First, Pesye Schloss was an eyewitness and no amount of ignorant obfuscation on your part changes that fact. Look up the definition of eyewitness again and tell us with a straight face why Pesye Schloss wasn't an eyewitness to the events at Ponar that first week in September 1941, referencing the definition of eyewitness, not your wishful thinking. This - "Lemmycaution attempted to explain that Kruk's description of what Pesye Schloss witnessed is equal to Pesye Schloss' description of what Pesye Schloss witnessed to no avail" - is pure nitwittery. Think about it. I wrote that Pesye Schloss was an eyewitness; I even provided you with the common and ordinary definition of eyewitness, which perfectly describes Pesye Schloss. As I further told you, if your issue is with Kruk's account, go for it, but don't play games. So go after Kruk - show how his diary is unreliable. Explain how he came to summarize a number of testimonies about the action at Ponar in ways that other, independent sources confirm - but without his accounts having any credence. Go for it. But stop ranting with empty slogans. Please.

Do you have testimony from Pesye Schloss? Not Kruk. Schloss.

Second, you still don't know how to understand events in the past. We have several accounts that agree in many particulars, the most important being the carrying out of a mass execution at Ponar by Lithuanian shooters under direction of the Germans but also the pattern of the killings: groups of 10, theft of clothing, use of pits, etc. All this lends credence to the independent accounts. That is why Sakowicz's account is fatal to your case, because it confirms the shooting action and it is a good match with other accounts on the way it was carried out. Sorry, but that is a given, unless you can show something to cast doubt on the independent accounts. What makes these witnesses credible is that their testimonies reinforce one another and match with other independently given accounts.

Third, all your verbose waffling doesn't excuse you from giving direct answers, as you and your cohorts keep running from doing, to the following questions:

(1) As to the eyewitness Pesye Schloss, who offered first-hand knowledge of the early September mass execution of Vilna Jews at Ponar, can the deniers tell what were the lies they claim she told and how they know she lied?

(2) Then, can they explain how Yudis Trojak, another eyewitness, whose first-hand experience in the same murder action was taken down by Kruk, lied and how they know she lied?

(3) And then can they further explain Sakowicz's Ponar diary, which provides additional first-hand evidence for the same action?

(4) Also, can they explain the contents of Jaeger's official report of December 1941 describing in part the same event?

(5) And, finally, might they deal with a secondary source, Arad's account in Ghetto in Flames, and tell us the supposed problems with that reconstruction of the events of the first week of September 1941 in Vilna and at Ponar?

If you have various Germans, Jews, and Lithuanians describing the same thing then you can be reasonably certain it happened. I don't have any reason to believe it did not happen. Whether or not Pesye Schloss is lying about her experience, I cannot say. I'd have a better idea if I could actually read Pesye Schloss' testimony but I don't think it matters much. Kruk describes her describing something that sounds like Jews being shot on the eastern front. Does anybody think that Jews weren't shot on the eastern front?

Fourth, this - "And now he's switched back to the argument that eyewitness testimony singular is not the proper unit of analysis" - is beyond lunacy and calls into question your reading comprehension skills again. I never subscribed to, indicated I subscribed to, or stated I subscribed to singular testimony as a proper unit of analysis. I told you that in a number of posts, explaining how even starting with a single witness will inevitably and inexorably lead you to other witnesses, to documents and reports, to similar events, to policy, etc. And after that Nick cogently explained that precisely this, leading you to see the absurdity of Saggy's method, was part of my own method. You are too dim to get what you are told directly over and over. That is astonishing, frankly.

You offered us Pesye Schloss as an example of a credible eyewitness to the holocaust. When the obvious problems with this one person is pointed out, you say that you never intended Pesye Schloss to be a credible eyewitness to the holocaust. Then why did you mention her?

One reason you and your chums, in fact, cannot answer my simple question - how do you know that Pesye Schloss lied? - is that it requires you to look beyond a single data point, start to make comparisons, draw conclusions about the weight of the evidence, and finally respond honestly.

And, last, let's not forget what this discussion is about. It is about whether every Jewish witness is a degenerate liar. You have done nothing to suggest that Pesye Schloss, eyewitness; Herman Kruk, chronicler of Vilna; Kazimierz Sakowicz, journalist and observer at Ponar; or Karl Jaeger, SS-Standartenfuhrer, lied degenerately about Ponar. Nothing. Isn't is strange that these diverse sources all agree on the main points? After all, that is what we ask of credible witnesses, that their testimony can be confirmed by other testimony, by documents, by other pieces of evidence. Explain that, Dogzilla.

It sounds like different people described something that sounds like Jews getting shot on the eastern front. Do any of these sources say why these Jews were shot?

 

[Robrob]

So, still waiting for one of the loons to explain why it is physically impossible that a child was thrown in the air for machine gun practice.

Waiting....

Originally Posted by Clayton Moore:
Just stand there like the zombies the Holocaust depicts them to be.

I've noticed you keep doing that. If a report doesn't detail every single thing that happened or didn't happen during an incident, you create a new strawman and simply assume the worst. In the above example, the report discussed the murder of children. It described was done to them and by whom. It didn't describe the response of the crowd, why would it? That's not germane to the account. It also didn't describe what the commandant had for lunch or that a flock of geese flew overhead shortly after.

If you continue to find evidence (and always in favor of your POV) in what was not described, one can only conclude you are not being honest.

It sounds like different people described something that sounds like Jews getting shot on the eastern front. Do any of these sources say why these Jews were shot?

I seriously doubt the guards told the Jews why they were being shot, so my guess would be no.

 

[Dogzilla]

So, still waiting for one of the loons to explain why it is physically impossible that a child was thrown in the air for machine gun practice.

Waiting....

It's not physically impossible. It's breathtakingly cruel and diabolical but it's extremely dangerous for the person tossing the child and serves no practical purpose. I know that being visual/spatially challenged is a prerequisite for believing everything about the holocaust. But try and picture how this particular act went down. Where was the man doing the shooting? How far away was the man tossing the four year old child? Did he toss the child straight up? How long was the child in the air before he hit the ground? What did the man tossing the child do after he threw the child in the air? Run away? Stand there? If the shooter missed did the child survive the ordeal? Was the child then picked up and thrown up in the air again? When the child was dead, whether from being shot or hitting the ground, did they continue to toss the body in the air? Did they get another child? Where were the children kept while waiting to be thrown in the air and shot at?

This scenario that find totally plausible serves no practical purpose outside of a Warner Bros. cartoon. Constructing a catapult to launch the kid is more believable.

I've noticed you keep doing that. If a report doesn't detail every single thing that happened or didn't happen during an incident, you create a new strawman and simply assume the worst. In the above example, the report discussed the murder of children. It described was done to them and by whom. It didn't describe the response of the crowd, why would it? That's not germane to the account. It also didn't describe what the commandant had for lunch or that a flock of geese flew overhead shortly after.

If you continue to find evidence (and always in favor of your POV) in what was not described, one can only conclude you are not being honest.


I seriously doubt the guards told the Jews why they were being shot, so my guess would be no.

This incident was described in the Jaeger Report. What did it say there?

 

[little grey rabbit]

Having been marched to a tank ditch by the forum moderators, forced to undress and shot, I return. By some strange twist of face the bullet only grazed me, I pretended to be dead, was buried, watched the odd fountain of blood and the earth heaving up and down for 3 days, I finally managed to crawl out under cover of darkness and make my way back to continue the thankless task of correcting Mr Caution's howlers.

And, last, let's not forget what this discussion is about. It is about whether every Jewish witness is a degenerate liar. You have done nothing to suggest that Pesye Schloss, eyewitness; Herman Kruk, chronicler of Vilna; Kazimierz Sakowicz, journalist and observer at Ponar; or Karl Jaeger, SS-Standartenfuhrer, lied degenerately about Ponar. Nothing. Isn't is strange that these diverse sources all agree on the main points? After all, that is what we ask of credible witnesses, that their testimony can be confirmed by other testimony, by documents, by other pieces of evidence. Explain that, Dogzilla.

Trouble is we don't have four witnesses. We have one, Kruk. The others either did not survive the war or made their contributions under Soviet coercion.

Thus all we need is one liar - Kruk - in order to explain the evidence before us. Fortunately it is not difficult to demonstrate Kruk is probably liar. Assuming his account to be true, it is impossible to conceal what had happened from the Ghetto leadership and Ghetto resistance. And since, as Mr Caution is well aware, Vilna was seen by the Poles as Polish territory and there were close links between Jewish and Polish resistance, it is impossible that soon after September this information would not have been in the hands of the Polish underground. Since there was plenty of communications via radio, via Hungary, via Sweden, via underground courier channels with the neutral and Allied press, what is the first version that the story of Ponary appeared?

Like this:
The Milwaukee Journal - June 16 1942
MASS SLAYING OF JEWS TOLD
Polish Refugee Declares 60,000 Were Mowed Down Near Vilna
By Bernard Vallery Journal Special Correspondence
Stockholm, Sweden - Sixty thousand Jews of Vilna were put to death between May 7 and 12 by the German controlled Lithuanian police, a Polish eyewitness who was in Vilna up to May 24, reported Monday. The witness arrived a few days ago in Stockholm after a dramatic escape via Warsaw and Gdynia, where he hid himself aboard a ship bound for Sweden.
The Polish refugee's story was impossible to confirm in Stockholm. He said members of the special Lithaunain police, recruited by Germans among Lithuanian criminals and Quislingists, started persecuting Jews and also Poles immediately after the announcement of the so-called autonomous status of the Baltic states at the end of April.
Machine Guns Do Job
Up to then 80,000 Vilna Jews were concentrated in two ghettos. ON May 7 the executions started, the refugee said. The jews, including women and children, were carried in trucks to the suburbs of Ponary, where they were mowed down by machine gun fire. The executions continued every night until May 20, it was said, and during the day members of the special Lithuanian police were selling the clothes of their victims in the streets of Vilna.
The eyewitness said that about 20,000 Jews of "useful professions," such as doctors, surgeons, scientists and specialised workers, escaped execution. No German military or even Gestapo people were seen taking direct part in the executions, but neither did they interfere.
Polish Officers Seized
From a different source it also was reported that as a consequence of the murder in Prague of Reinhard Heydrich, deputy Reich protector of Bohemia-Moravia, all Polish reserve officers were arrested by the Gestapo and several hundres of them were shot, while about 160,000 Polish workers of military age were conscripted and were to be sent as laborers to the eastern front.
Polish reserve officers, it was said, were ordered to report to the Gestapo last Tuesday and were then sent to special concentration camps. Several hundreds of them, considered as particularly anti-German, were reported to have been immediately executed. Twelve hundred reserve officers from Silesia were put in jail and warned by the Gestapo they would be shot if any anti-german "incident" took place in Poland.
The same informant reported that on Monday June 8, 12 women and three men were hanged in the market place of Posen for distributing illegal newspapers. They were left hanging for two days.
Between 500 and 800 German policemen, who after a prolonged stay in Norway became "demoralized" by Norwegian opposition, were sent back to Germany a few days ago, it was reliable reported in Stockholm Monday. A number of policemen refused to go back and, according to the same report, were executed.
Copyright 1942 New York Times

For Mr Kruk's account to be correct it would require the Jewish community of Wilna to have conspired to have kept the news of their tragedy from the outside world until the end of the war. Which is utterly implausible

 

[Nick Terry]

Do you have testimony from Pesye Schloss? Not Kruk. Schloss.

Schloss's testimony is in Kruk's diary. She gave her account directly to Kruk, who thus acted no differently to an interviewer taking down a statement in a variety of contexts. If you are asking whether Schloss herself wrote something down, the answer is to my knowledge no. But that doesn't stop Schloss having given testimony and being a witness.

If you have various Germans, Jews, and Lithuanians describing the same thing then you can be reasonably certain it happened. I don't have any reason to believe it did not happen. Whether or not Pesye Schloss is lying about her experience, I cannot say. I'd have a better idea if I could actually read Pesye Schloss' testimony but I don't think it matters much. Kruk describes her describing something that sounds like Jews being shot on the eastern front. Does anybody think that Jews weren't shot on the eastern front?

By the time of the incident in question, the eastern front was up near Leningrad and east of Smolensk, while Vilnius was many hundreds of miles behind the frontline. It had been handed over to civil administration more than a month previously.

You offered us Pesye Schloss as an example of a credible eyewitness to the holocaust. When the obvious problems with this one person is pointed out, you say that you never intended Pesye Schloss to be a credible eyewitness to the holocaust. Then why did you mention her?

Precisely because Schloss's eyewitness account leads "inevitably and inexorably... to other witnesses, to documents and reports, to similar events, to policy, etc", to quote LemmyCaution.

Whereas you guys think that you can find a single witness and turn him/her into a loose thread to unravel the jumper, sane people realise that you can start with a single witness and achieve precisely the opposite, begin to weave a story that takes in all manner of other evidence.

It sounds like different people described something that sounds like Jews getting shot on the eastern front. Do any of these sources say why these Jews were shot?

The shooting which Schloss survived was part of a series of shootings at Ponary which reduced the Vilnius ghetto to a population of 15,000, who were described by Karl Jaeger as consisting of 'Work Jews, including their families'. Jaeger rather famously wrote in his report in December 1941 that:

I can state today that the goal of solving the Jewish problem for Lithuania has been achieved by Einsatzkommando 3. In Lithuania, there are no more Jews, other than the Work Jews, including their families

So by the time Jaeger wrote his report, he considered the shootings to be part of a 'solution' to 'the Jewish problem'. In fact he wanted to go further and carry out a 100% extermination:

I also wanted to kill these Work Jews, including their families, which however brought upon me acrimonious challenges from the civil administration (the Reichskommisar) and the army and caused the prohibition: the Work Jews and their families are not to be shot!

The opposition to total extermination on the part of other factions in the occupation regime included the efforts of Wehrmacht officers like Major Plagge, who ran a maintenance workshop that employed Jews, to save and rescue Jews from what Plagge recognised to be a policy of extermination.

Jaeger goes on to state that pregnant Jewish women will be "liquidated" and says he is of the opinion that the sterilisation of male Jews should begin 'immediately'.

There are other documents from Lithuania in 1941 corroborating this, eg a report from the Gebietskommissar in Schaulen in September 1941 recording a conversation with one of Jaeger's lieutenants, expressing similar sentiments.The observers, like Sakowicz, Kruk, Kovner and others, concluded from the pattern of violence that the Nazi aim was extermination.

One of Jaeger's counterpart units, Sonderkommando 1a under Martin Sandberger, had the much easier task of cleansing Estonia, and succeeded in rendering Estonia judenfrei by the time of the Wannsee conference in January 1942, by killing nearly 1,000 Jews, every single Jew who remained in the country.

In early 1942, the third unit in the Baltic states, Einsatzkommando 2, which operated in Latvia, stated that

Das Ziel, das dem EK 2 von Anfang an vorschwebte, war eine radikale Loesung des Judenproblems durch die Exekution aller Juden.

i.e

"The goal, which the Einsatzkommando strove towards from the start, was a radical solution of the Jewish problem through the execution of all Jews."

As in Lithuania, a small proportion of Latvian Jews were spared for labour purposes.





There's quite a bit written on the Holocaust in the Baltic states. Just from the past 11 years since 2000 one can easily read:

Angrick, Andrej and Witte, Peter, Die ‘Endlösung’ in Riga. Ausbeutung und Vernichtung 1941-1944. Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft: Darmstadt, 2006
 (since translated into English)
Arad, Yitzhak, The Holocaust in the Soviet Union. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2009
Balberyskski, Mendel, Stronger Than Iron: The Destruction of Vilna Jewry, 1941-1945: An Eyewitness Account. Gefen, 2010

Kruk, Herman, The last days of the Jerusalem of Lithuania. Chronicles from the Vilna Ghetto and the camps 1939-1944, Yale University Press, New Haven/London 2002
Margolis, Rachel, A Partisan from Vilna. Academic Studies Press, 2010
Margolis, Rachel and Tobias, Jim G. (eds), Die geheimen Notizen des K. Sakowicz. Dokumente zur Judenvernichtung in Ponary. Nürnberg, 2003, in English as Sakowicz, Kazimierz, Ponary Diary, 1941-1943. A Bystander’s Account of a Mass Murder. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2005


Porat, Dina, The Fall of a Sparrow: The Life and Times of Abba Kovner (Stanford, California: Stanford University Press, 2010)
The German occupation of Latvia : 1941-1945 : what did America know? : Stockholm documents / editor, Andrew Ezergailis. Rīga : Publishers of the Historical Institute of Latvia, 2002
The murder of the Jews in Latvia : 1941-1945 / Bernhard Press ; translated from the German by Laimdota Mazzarins. Evanston, Ill. : Northwestern University Press, 2000
Weiss-Wendt, Anton, Murder Without Hatred: Estonians and the Holocaust. Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 2009

and in German, also:
Benz, Wolfgang and Distel, Barbara (eds), Der Ort des Terrors. Geschichte der nationalsozialistischen Konzentrationslager. Band 8: Riga-Kaiserwald, Warschau, Vaivara, Kauen (Kaunas), Plaszow, Kulmhof/Chelmno, Belzec, Sobibor, Treblinka. C.H. Beck: Munich, 2008
Birn, Ruth Bettina, Die Sicherheitspolizei in Estland 1941-1944: Eine Studie zur Kollaboration im Osten. Paderborn: Schöningh, 2006
Dieckmann, Christoph, Deutsche Besatzungspolitik in Litauen 1941-1944. Göttingen: Wallstein, 2011
Curilla, Wolfgang, Die deutsche Ordnungspolizei und der Holocaust im Baltikum und in Weissrussland 1941-1944. Paderborn, 2006
Hoffmann, Jens, ‘Das kann man nicht erzählen’: ‘Aktion 1005’ – Wie die Nazis die Spuren ihrer Massenmorde in Osteuropa beseitigten. Hamburg: Konkret Verlag, 2008
Hoppe, Bert and Hildrun Glass (eds), Die Verfolgung und Ermordung der europäischen Juden durch das nationalsozialistischen Deutschland 1933-1945. Bd 7: Sowjetunion mit annektierten Gebiete I. Munich: Oldenbourg, 2011
Reichelt, Katrin, Lettland unter deutscher Besatzung 1941-1944. Der lettische Anteil am Holocaust. Berlin: Metropol, 2011
Wette, Wolfram (ed), Retter in Uniform. Handlungsspielräume im Vernichtungskrieg der Wehrmacht. Frankfurt am Main, 2002 (chapter on Plagge)
Wette, Wolfram, Karl Jäger: Mörder der litauischen Juden. Frankfurt am Main: Fischer, 2011

which doesn't count various other chapters in monographs, edited collections, journal articles, or works in Polish, Russian, Lithuanian, Latvian or Estonian, referred to and cited in the above works. Or, indeed, all the works written before 2000.

We appreciate that you might want to keep the discussion lobotomised and decontextualised, but we don't.

 

[LemmyCaution]

Do you have testimony from Pesye Schloss? Not Kruk. Schloss.

Yes, of course, she is quoted in Kruk, who also summarized her testimony. And that of others. Please do try keeping up.

If you have various Germans, Jews, and Lithuanians describing the same thing then you can be reasonably certain it happened. I don't have any reason to believe it did not happen. Whether or not Pesye Schloss is lying about her experience, I cannot say.

Since the whole point of Saggy's claim was that all Jews who were witnesses were degenerate liars, I hope even you can see the trouble he's in.

I'd have a better idea if I could actually read Pesye Schloss' testimony but I don't think it matters much. Kruk describes her describing something that sounds like Jews being shot on the eastern front. Does anybody think that Jews weren't shot on the eastern front?

You can read Schloss's testimony but you've chosen not to, apparently. Her testimony doesn't describe, no matter how you slice it, a shooting of Jews on the eastern front. Try again. Here, of course, is why you need to consult more than one witness or source. If you do this, you will find that Pesye Schloss didn't witness Jews being shot on the eastern front. She witnessed something different to that. What she witnessed can be described, and has been, using a number of sources, not just her description. You can read secondary accounts of the action in which Pesye Schloss was shot in a number of places, probably the longest and most detailed being Arad's Ghetto in Flames. This kind of ignorance - "sounds like Jews being shot on the eastern front" - is why you aren't taken seriously: because you're not serious. You obviously haven't even bothered to familiarize yourself with the topic under discussion and pay attention. The primary and secondary sources on this action are sufficient to prevent you or anyone else from having to guess at what Pesye Schloss's testimony "sounds like"; it is well known what she became involved in, which was not Jews being shot at the front.

Further, your flippant description of what you think happened makes it all too clear that you want to take agents out of it: "being shot," as though people "get shot" without someone's shooting them. One use of Pesye Schloss's testimony along with other sources I've mentioned is to construct who carried out the shooting, which you've managed to misunderstand; who organized it and directed it; who saw it; why it took place; and other such points.

You offered us Pesye Schloss as an example of a credible eyewitness to the holocaust. When the obvious problems with this one person is pointed out, you say that you never intended Pesye Schloss to be a credible eyewitness to the holocaust. Then why did you mention her?

Taking your points in reverse order, I don't recall saying I hadn't intended Pesye Schloss to be taken as a credible eyewitness to the Holocaust. Did I? Can you please quote my writing that? Recall that in this post from last night http://www.internationalskeptics.com/forums/showpost.php?p=7749300&postcount=7352, I wrote precisely the opposite - twice. First,

Anyway, I will remind you of the names of four reliable witnesses and one darned decent interviewer: Pesye Schloss, Yudis Trojak, Kazimierz Sakowicz, and Karl Jeager for the witnesses. And Herman Kruk for the interviewer. All gave similar accounts of the mass murder at Ponar the first week of September. All are credible, none has been shown to be anything like a degenerate liar.

And

You have done nothing to suggest that Pesye Schloss, eyewitness; Herman Kruk, chronicler of Vilna; Kazimierz Sakowicz, journalist and observer at Ponar; or Karl Jaeger, SS-Standartenfuhrer, lied degenerately about Ponar. Nothing. Isn't is strange that these diverse sources all agree on the main points? After all, that is what we ask of credible witnesses, that their testimony can be confirmed by other testimony, by documents, by other pieces of evidence. Explain that, Dogzilla.

You still haven't explained that, by the way. Anyway, to be clear, in case the above reminders of what I wrote are over your head, I intended Pesye Schloss to be taken as one credible eyewitness to one mass execution that was part of a group of mass executions of Jews in Vilna during the Holocaust. I believe I have done this. Second, I intended, by exploring the testimony of a single eyewitness, to show the absurdity of Saggy's claim and method through discussion, which inevitably forced a comparison of sources in order to make any judgments about what occurred, about witness and document credibility, and about explanations of events making up the Holocaust. I believe I have also done this.

As for your first point, where you mutter about problems with Schloss being pointed out, I have been waiting, quite patiently in fact, for someone to point out some problems with Schloss. I have read some wildly off the mark glosses on her testimony - including your nearly illiterate "thesbian" comment; I have read some remarks that run more or less, "Couldn't be, nope, people wouldn't"; I have had the pleasure of reading your multiple and erroneous witterings on what an eyewitness is; I have seen you, in addition to misunderstanding the rather simple text in Kruk, completely garble Kassow and in the process further garble Kruk. Those are "problems" with you and your cohorts, not with the eyewitness account of Pesye Schloss.

I have also seen you dodge and avoid direct questions about Sakowicz's eyewitness account, Jaeger's report, and Kruk's journal.

But since you now admit you cannot say that Schloss lied, you have pretty much rendered this discussion superfluous, unless it motivated you to consult any of the sources mentioned during it. Because, recall, what we've been discussing is the claim that all Jewish eyewitnesses to the Holocaust were degenerate liars - and here is one which you can't prove, by your own admission, to be a liar, much less degenerate.

It sounds like different people described something that sounds like Jews getting shot on the eastern front. Do any of these sources say why these Jews were shot?

Again, you're kidding, right? Why do you parade your ignorance? This time taking your points in order. First, no, this action did not take place on the eastern front, and, no, it was not as simple as "Jews getting shot." Please read at least one source on an event you want to discuss. As Nick has said, I have read dozens on this one short event and many more on the chain of events of which it was part. Second, of course some of the sources on the Great Provocation do state reasons for it. I'll let you find out which by doing some basic reading. But even better, if you read a number of the sources, you can put together your own explanation of what happened and why. And that is how history is done. Not one person's word at a time.

Edit: I wrote this before reading Nick's reply. Nick was kinder than I in summarizing for you, with some detail, what you would find were you to consult the sources. I didn't do this in the naive hope that you might be tweaked to actually read something to discover why I was replying as I did. Oh well. Your errors and dodges, between Nick and me, have been made clear as day.

 

[LemmyCaution]

Having been marched to a tank ditch by the forum moderators, forced to undress and shot, I return. By some strange twist of face the bullet only grazed me, I pretended to be dead, was buried, watched the odd fountain of blood and the earth heaving up and down for 3 days, I finally managed to crawl out under cover of darkness and make my way back to continue the thankless task of correcting Mr Caution's howlers.

Trouble is we don't have four witnesses. We have one, Kruk. The others either did not survive the war or made their contributions under Soviet coercion.

Thus all we need is one liar - Kruk - in order to explain the evidence before us. Fortunately it is not difficult to demonstrate Kruk is probably liar. Assuming his account to be true, it is impossible to conceal what had happened from the Ghetto leadership and Ghetto resistance. And since, as Mr Caution is well aware, Vilna was seen by the Poles as Polish territory and there were close links between Jewish and Polish resistance, it is impossible that soon after September this information would not have been in the hands of the Polish underground. Since there was plenty of communications via radio, via Hungary, via Sweden, via underground courier channels with the neutral and Allied press, what is the first version that the story of Ponary appeared?

Like this:
The Milwaukee Journal - June 16 1942
MASS SLAYING OF JEWS TOLD
Polish Refugee Declares 60,000 Were Mowed Down Near Vilna. . . .
For Mr Kruk's account to be correct it would require the Jewish community of Wilna to have conspired to have kept the news of their tragedy from the outside world until the end of the war. Which is utterly implausible

Really? You seem to have gotten rusty during your time out. Woulds might be reassuring to you, but your piling would haves one on the other is not a substitute for finding out how things went down. Further, it is customary for participants in a discussion to keep in mind what others have said during it. I leave aside your shameless lying. Here is an earlier post from this discussion that casts just a bit of doubt on your bombastic claim: http://www.internationalskeptics.com/forums/showpost.php?p=7740375&postcount=7240

in Who Will Write Our History?, a discussion of Warsaw ghetto, Kassow observes how news of the Ponar murders reached Jews in Warsaw--first repeated by Poles, then from Aryeh Wilner, then from members of Jewish youth groups. In October 1941 an underground Warsaw newspaper carried an account of the executions at Ponar. Daniel Fligelman, an Oyneg Shabes member in Warsaw, interviewed Wilner in depth: Wilner "described how the Germans seized thousands of Jews on the streets and in their homes and transported them to an unknown destination. At the beginning of September [when Pesye Schloss was captured and taken to Ponar] a Jewish woman, who had escaped from the killing grounds of Ponar, gave the ghetto its first eyewitness account: in large pits that the Soviets had dug to store oil, the Germans and Lithuanians were shooting thousands of Jews . . .' p286 Just as local accounts in Vilna maintained, the Oyneg Shabes members were aware that the shootings were carried out by Lithuanians directed by German officers. p297

"Liar Kruk" is a natural progression given the trouble you guys are in. And so is ignoring Sakowicz and Jaeger, who are independent of Kruk. Do I sense the forgery and manipulation cards about to come into play?

 

[uke2se]

It's not impossible at all. But how high can you throw a Jewish baby vs a Jewish four year old? You can probably throw the baby higher.

Why does height matter? Is that an intricate part of the story?

The story is no doubt a complete fabrication no matter what.

The story is no doubt real no matter what.

But you recognized that while throwing babies in the air for target practice is ridiculous,

You're lying again.

it's even more ridiculous to be tossing four year olds in the air for target practice.

And even more lies. Look, if you want to be taken seriously, stop lying so openly. I never "realized" any such thing. Throwing children in the air for target practice is sick, twisted and absolutely something your Nazi heroes would do.

So you changed the story to bring it more in line with what you thought was more believable. Again, nice try.

I've changed nothing. You just lied about it.

 

[uke2se]

A brief thread reflection:

All of the deniers have now abandoned any pretense at honesty, all lying openly in what Kevin Ryan would call "masochistic lies", that is, lies that are so easy to see through that there is no rational reason for them.

I think this is a sign that this thread is finally on its last legs. They have run out of energy for keeping their charade up. Soon we'll see more open Nazi rhetoric topped off by "Heil Hitlers" and the like. I welcome this development because it drags these creatures into the light of day.

Keep it up, deniatards.

 

[Saggy]

Throwing children in the air for target practice is sick, twisted and absolutely something your Nazi heroes would do.

Throwing babies into the air for target practice by machine gunners no less is absurd on its face. It is a sick twisted fantasy of the Jews, like the rest of the holohoax.

 

[uke2se]

Throwing babies into the air for target practice by machine gunners no less is absurd on its face. It is a sick twisted fantasy of the Jews, like the rest of the holohoax.

Citation needed.

 

[Clayton Moore]

Citation needed.

How about no lie is too big to demand that it be believed? The Holohoax and 9/11 are proof of that.

 

[Saggy]

Citation needed.

I've got two...


'Night' by Elie Wiesel

'The Black Book' by Grossman and Ehrenberg

 

[uke2se]

I've got two...


'Night' by Elie Wiesel

'The Black Book' by Grossman and Ehrenberg

I don't think you understand what the word "citation" means.

Neither of those books say what you just did.

 

[Dave Rogers]

Go to the Penn State former defensive coordinator charged with sexual abuse of children thread.

http://www.internationalskeptics.com/forums/showthread.php?t=223360

Notice how people draw the line where children are concerned. People go berserk when they see children being mistreated.

I did go to the thread, and looked into what actually happened. A defensive co-ordinator was caught in the act of raping a ten-year-old boy in 2002. The senior coaching staff were informed, and decided not to do anything. Now, nine years later, he's at last being prosecuted for long term child abuse. And what are people complaining about? That the coaches who covered up for a child rapist for at least nine years have now been sacked. And they weren't even being forced to cover for him at gunpoint. Contrary to what Clayton wants it to suggest, this story actually seems to imply that people don't give a **** about children being mistreated if it means their football team might not win so often.

I marvel at the level of delusion that leads deniers to cite evidence that directly contradicts their position in support of it. They appear to have fooled themselves so comprehensively that they can't evaluate evidence even on the most basic level.

Dave

 

[Corsair 115]

Throwing babies into the air for target practice by machine gunners no less is absurd on its face. It is a sick twisted fantasy of the Jews, like the rest of the holohoax.

Claiming a worldwide Jewish conspiracy which controls the media, academia, and everything else is absurd on its face. It is a sick, twisted fantasy of neo-Nazis and Nazi sympathizers.

 

[Dogzilla]

Yes, of course, she is quoted in Kruk, who also summarized her testimony. And that of others. Please do try keeping up.

I asked if you there is any testimony from Schloss. Nick says that to his knowledge, Schloss did not write any thing. Kruk wrote one paragraph which appears to be a quote from Schloss. Are there any other direct quotes from Schloss recorded anywhere?

Since the whole point of Saggy's claim was that all Jews who were witnesses were degenerate liars, I hope even you can see the trouble he's in.

Saggy is indeed in trouble if he wants to prove that all Jewish witnesses were degenerate liars by using Pesye Schloss' testimony. There's simply not enough information to know if she is lying or not.

My interest in Saggy's question is to assess what you guys consider good reliable eyewitness testimony. I am frankly a little bit surprised that a couple of sentences recorded by somebody else would be your first choice of a "credible source."

You can read Schloss's testimony but you've chosen not to, apparently. Her testimony doesn't describe, no matter how you slice it, a shooting of Jews on the eastern front. Try again. Here, of course, is why you need to consult more than one witness or source. If you do this, you will find that Pesye Schloss didn't witness Jews being shot on the eastern front. She witnessed something different to that. What she witnessed can be described, and has been, using a number of sources, not just her description. You can read secondary accounts of the action in which Pesye Schloss was shot in a number of places, probably the longest and most detailed being Arad's Ghetto in Flames. This kind of ignorance - "sounds like Jews being shot on the eastern front" - is why you aren't taken seriously: because you're not serious. You obviously haven't even bothered to familiarize yourself with the topic under discussion and pay attention. The primary and secondary sources on this action are sufficient to prevent you or anyone else from having to guess at what Pesye Schloss's testimony "sounds like"; it is well known what she became involved in, which was not Jews being shot at the front.

OK, she wasn't shot 'at the front.' She was shot in the East.

Further, your flippant description of what you think happened makes it all too clear that you want to take agents out of it: "being shot," as though people "get shot" without someone's shooting them. One use of Pesye Schloss's testimony along with other sources I've mentioned is to construct who carried out the shooting, which you've managed to misunderstand; who organized it and directed it; who saw it; why it took place; and other such points.

Taking your points in reverse order, I don't recall saying I hadn't intended Pesye Schloss to be taken as a credible eyewitness to the Holocaust. Did I? Can you please quote my writing that? Recall that in this post from last night http://www.internationalskeptics.com/forums/showpost.php?p=7749300&postcount=7352, I wrote precisely the opposite - twice.

First, And You still haven't explained that, by the way. Anyway, to be clear, in case the above reminders of what I wrote are over your head, I intended Pesye Schloss to be taken as one credible eyewitness to one mass execution that was part of a group of mass executions of Jews in Vilna during the Holocaust. I believe I have done this.

That you did. I expected a testimony that was more than a couple of sentences written by somebody else. How is a man writing in his diary more reliable than a journalist writing for a newspaper?

Second, I intended, by exploring the testimony of a single eyewitness, to show the absurdity of Saggy's claim and method through discussion, which inevitably forced a comparison of sources in order to make any judgments about what occurred, about witness and document credibility, and about explanations of events making up the Holocaust. I believe I have also done this.

I think you should have chosen a better example. No matter how you slice it, we're hearing Schloss' testimony through Kruk. That's a second hand account. And one of the few direct quotes from Schloss tells us that the men were numbed with blows to the head and only later were they shot. Maybe there's a problem with the translation but what is she talking about?

As for your first point, where you mutter about problems with Schloss being pointed out, I have been waiting, quite patiently in fact, for someone to point out some problems with Schloss. I have read some wildly off the mark glosses on her testimony - including your nearly illiterate "thesbian" comment; I have read some remarks that run more or less, "Couldn't be, nope, people wouldn't"; I have had the pleasure of reading your multiple and erroneous witterings on what an eyewitness is; I have seen you, in addition to misunderstanding the rather simple text in Kruk, completely garble Kassow and in the process further garble Kruk. Those are "problems" with you and your cohorts, not with the eyewitness account of Pesye Schloss.

Please find my 'nearly illiterate' reference to "thesbian" and tell us how it is not obvious from the context that I was referring to a woman who enjoys sex with another woman and that spell-check evidently missed it.

Or perhaps you could find the actual word I used and apologize for your vertical dyslexia that causes you to read p's and b's upside down.

I have also seen you dodge and avoid direct questions about Sakowicz's eyewitness account, Jaeger's report, and Kruk's journal.

I am very interested in what the Jaeger report says about this incident or what any contemporary German/Lithuanian documents say about this incident.

But since you now admit you cannot say that Schloss lied, you have pretty much rendered this discussion superfluous, unless it motivated you to consult any of the sources mentioned during it. Because, recall, what we've been discussing is the claim that all Jewish eyewitnesses to the Holocaust were degenerate liars - and here is one which you can't prove, by your own admission, to be a liar, much less degenerate.

But as I stated earlier. I am not interested in proving all Jewish eyewitnesses are liars. I am interested in what you consider good evidence.

Again, you're kidding, right? Why do you parade your ignorance? This time taking your points in order. First, no, this action did not take place on the eastern front, and, no, it was not as simple as "Jews getting shot." Please read at least one source on an event you want to discuss. As Nick has said, I have read dozens on this one short event and many more on the chain of events of which it was part. Second, of course some of the sources on the Great Provocation do state reasons for it. I'll let you find out which by doing some basic reading. But even better, if you read a number of the sources, you can put together your own explanation of what happened and why. And that is how history is done. Not one person's word at a time.

Edit: I wrote this before reading Nick's reply. Nick was kinder than I in summarizing for you, with some detail, what you would find were you to consult the sources. I didn't do this in the naive hope that you might be tweaked to actually read something to discover why I was replying as I did. Oh well. Your errors and dodges, between Nick and me, have been made clear as day.

I'm not interested in finding out just how reliable Pesya Schloss' testimony really is by reading hundreds of pages of similar testimony. Shootings don't interest me as much as finding evidence for gas chambers or for an overall extermination policy. Sorry if I don't get excited about all the things that excite you. If that makes me stupid, oh well.

 

[Dogzilla]

Why does height matter? Is that an intricate part of the story?

Yes. It speaks to the safety of the alleged action.

The story is no doubt real no matter what.



You're lying again.



And even more lies. Look, if you want to be taken seriously, stop lying so openly. I never "realized" any such thing. Throwing children in the air for target practice is sick, twisted and absolutely something your Nazi heroes would do.

Maybe I should have said that you "subconsciously realized" how ridiculous the story was and you changed it in your mind without being consciously aware of it. Or maybe you just lie without any particular reason and in this case you just happened to make the story better.

Maybe my Nazi heroes would love to throw preschoolers in the air and shoot them but that's not something they could realistically do. Do you think they're the Incredible Hulk or something?

 

[Robrob]

It's not physically impossible. It's breathtakingly cruel and diabolical but it's extremely dangerous for the person tossing the child and serves no practical purpose.

So the claim it was physically impossible, that was just you guys lying again?

And since when did argument from incredulity pass for evidence?

But try and picture how this particular act went down. Where was the man doing the shooting? How far away was the man tossing the four year old child? Did he toss the child straight up? How long was the child in the air before he hit the ground? What did the man tossing the child do after he threw the child in the air? Run away? Stand there? If the shooter missed did the child survive the ordeal? Was the child then picked up and thrown up in the air again? When the child was dead, whether from being shot or hitting the ground, did they continue to toss the body in the air? Did they get another child? Where were the children kept while waiting to be thrown in the air and shot at?

You really put a lot of effort into imagining all the details that could possibly be contained in a single sentence description. Why would any of that be included in a single sentence description?

Let me help you. Someone threw a child and another person shot at them with a "machine gun" (quotes because it was more than likely a machine pistol). Everything else is you imagining reasons to argue.

This scenario that find totally plausible serves no practical purpose outside of a Warner Bros. cartoon. Constructing a catapult to launch the kid is more believable.

Argument from incredulity makes you seem slightly less than reasonable. You've already moved the goal posts from the objective, "physically impossible" to the subjective, "why would they do it." I'm curios, why are you now insisting there must be a"purpose" for a wanton act of cruelty?

Throwing babies into the air for target practice by machine gunners no less is absurd on its face. It is a sick twisted fantasy of the Jews, like the rest of the holohoax.

Not a bit of factual evidence to support your claim, just argument from incredulity. Honestly, that makes you look more than just a little bit disingenuous.

Edited by LashL: 

To remove quote of modded content.