Chokaaaay, I'm back. Scrambled egg on toast brunch was awesome. Budly is evidently still in his coffin, and what better time to finish off the discussion when the vamp-ie is sleeping?
So, what do we have left? The basic problem shared by denierbud and his earthly representative is that they desperately want to "discredit" witnesses, forgetting that in other contexts, their own belief system, revisionism, hierarchises witnesses beneath documentary and physical evidence.
And that's where things get readlly interesting. They're right - documents and physical evidence trump witnesses, which is why absolutely no nitpicking of how Wiernik describes the 'Scheissmeister' can ever succeed in discrediting
the totality of the evidence for Treblinka.
This 'trumping' is moreover rather interesting since it functions much like a latched door that can swing one way but not another. We might take a witnesses' word describing the background conditions to how a document was composed, and what was left out, but we'd rarely accept an outright denial in court that a document doesn't say what was put in to it. And a witness sinning against the CT Law of 100% on how someone was killed and cremated cannot really overcome the documents and physical evidence proving that people were killed and cremated.
And that, oh earthly representative of the mighty denierbud, is why none of you denier dudes are taken very seriously, because you spin the plate and start at the point of seeming least resistance, then pyramid your nitpicks into 'proof' that the harder stuff must have been faked also. While it provides aficionados of wrongness such as myself with hours of warped entertainment, it just doesn't cut it in the real world.
The simple fact is that every single witness, SS or prisoner, to the goings-on inside Treblinka could have been killed and we'd still be able to prove it was a death camp for the extermination of Jews. This is something called a
thought experiment; in reality the world doesn't work like that. It is always much nicer to have witnesses as they can tell you things about what happened that other sources cannot. Society's faith in the ability of witnesses to tell as much of the truth as is humanly possible, however, is not a license for CT unreasoning from 'anomalies' in witness statements to handwaving away the hard stuff.
Let's remind ourselves that when Treblinka was overrun by the Soviets, they found a layer of ash the size of several football fields. A year later, the site was so devastated by frantic Polish grave-robbers digging into the cremains that the stench was miasmic and body-parts were strewn all over. Even if all witnesses had been bumped off in order to be silenced, then as incriminating sites go, this was surely one of them. The only way around this evidence is for denierbud, budly, Uncle Tom Cobley and all to allege that Evil Soviets (with the not-always-vocalised addendum of: 'controlled by Even More Evil Joooos') faked their reports, the ash was just some leftovers from the camp kitchen (or something) and the photos of said wasteland don't prove anything.
Yeah, right.
The problem is compounded when we turn to the documents. Little noticed by deniers, who rarely seem to read German documents, being a) usually ignorant of the German language and b) fooled by the fact that their gurus usually avoid the really nasty ones like the plague, there is a pretty firm chain of documents proving that the three camps of Belzec, Sobibor and Treblinka were extermination sites. Formal 'proofs' can be achieved in as little as four documents, and there are actually several such 'proofs'. Note that historiography is not a matter of mathematics, so I am speaking metaphorically. Unlike maths, historians put as many documents into the equation as possible, so don't think it's just about four documents.
You can even use said documents to infer very strongly that the means of execution involved gassing via engine exhaust. As denierbud and his earthly representative have not seemingly discussed any of these documents - least, I really don't remember the HC rebuttals dealing with denierbud's take on any of the nasty ones - I will confine myself to mentioning two documents.
By themselves they pose serious problems for denial. And they are far from alone.
The first is Globocnik's report to Herff on the Aktion Reinhard personnel. This identifies 92 men transferred from T4, the Nazi euthanasia program, which involved six 'institutes' equipped with bottled carbon monoxide gas chambers. Let's stop and ponder this for a minute in the light of denier claims that these camps were 'only' transit camps. So here we are in 1942, and the Polish underground press is raising a hue and cry about how Belzec, Sobibor and Treblinka are death camps.
The Polish underground just happens to pick at random three out of the hundreds if not thousands of camps in occupied Poland to which 92 killers experienced in murdering people using gas chambers are sent?
What, honestly, are the chances that out of all the thousands of camps in existence in the whole of Nazi occupied Europe, three camps get picked which are 'actually' transit camps and the Nazis happen to send 92 experienced gas chamber killers to them in order to supervise... an 'evacuation'? What, did RuSHA and the RKF or even just the regular police have such a manpower shortage that the bottom of the barrel was these dregs from T4?
I'd love to see a denier explain that one to me one day, without resorting to the 'forgery!' card, which as they ought to have realised by now, is code for 'I am absolutely unable to explain this one away, therefore the evidence
must have been faked so that I can maintain my irreducible delusion'. Least, that's how it looks to the rest of us.
Of course, if the denier does play the forgery/fabrication card, then they have the wee problem of adding six further sites and about 30 more trials plus 100s more witnesses - all German - who must have been 'coerced' or 'induced' or 'bribed' to say things that were not true. Since moreover there are 70,000 medical files and the greater part of 70,000 death certificates - with fake CODs - signalling the bureaucratic demise of the 70,000 victims, it's not even possible to claim that people were not killed in the euthanasia centres.
Curses, foiled again!
So, onto the next document. It's a doozy, and it connects with Wiernik's testimony as well as the testimony of other AR camp survivors. There's another personnel document giving the names of the AR camp staff who are being promoted in 1943. Need I point out that the
same names appear in the 1944-45 testimonies of AR camp survivors, including Wiernik's memoir, and that the document was only discovered some time later - probably in the late 1940s - in the SS personnel files housed in what became the Berlin Document Center.
Nota bene, the BDC was not under the control of the Poles, Soviets or even the Jooos, although I wouldn't be surprised if deniers might wish to fall back on the last one and allege hoax by ethnic telepathy, which would surely warrant a submission to Randi's $1 million challenge.
Enough of that. While I have great faith in the ability of conspiracists to reason like small children caught in a lie and improvise explanations for why their hands are in the cookie-jar, let's be realistic here, and not make the CT too baroque, shall we?
The
rational conclusions, requiring no ad hoc auxiliary hypotheses, are as follows:
1. The named SS men served in the Aktion Reinhard camps
2. The fact that the prisoners could remember the same names means the prisoners also spent time in the selfsame camps
This seemingly small point does something that denierbud and his earthly representative seem blithely unaware might be possible: it
corroborates Wiernik's testimony on a crucial detail - the identity of some of the perpetrators. The nature of witness testimony is invariably such that the overwhelming majority of a testimony cannot be so corroborated, but very often a certain amount can. And this gives the rational human being greater confidence in the totality of the testimony. Some scholars of witness evidence such as the philosopher Douglas Walton (albeit quoting someone else whose name I forget) even go so far as to label this type of corroboration as 'convergence'. A document and a witness both converge on the same conclusion. (Note that this discussion of 'convergence' is quite separate to Michael Shermer's invocation of the term.)
The other form of corroboration is of course the more usual one of multiple witnesses saying the same thing. I do believe that Roberto pointed out that the by chosen examples proffered by denierbud as arguments to personal incredulity - the Scheissmeister, the burning of the bodies - are described by multiple witnesses. That means, dear denier, that it is a methodological FAIL to consider one witness alone and ignore the corroboration.
By all means, examine the
totality of each individual witness statement, but as neither denierbud nor his earthly representative appear to have done that - ignoring Wiernik's extensive description of the camp's Goffmann-on-acid and Foucault-on-smack social orrganisation, the naming of other prisoners and camp guards, the discriminating judgement of character shown by Wiernik, who singles out Germans and Ukrainians for praise due to their genuine or relative humanity and kindness - we can await the day when such an examination is ever performed by a Holocaust denier. Unlike budly's childish 'you can't debunk me nur nur nur' declarations of victory, I feel we are on firmer ground in predicting that doomsday will arrive first, since such an examination of the entirety of a witnesses's testimony has never happened in over 64 years of erstwhile 'revisionism'. They prefer, after all, to glom onto the bits that discuss gas chambers and body-incineration.
The other route is to examine the totality of witness statements plural on a specific point. Again, we can safely await the day when a denier manages to round up all the witness statements on a particular point - not even the vaunted Guru Mattogno has done that - and presents something resembling a coherent, reasoned argument. Hasn't happened yet, is unlikely to happen any time soon, and certainly didn't happen in Episode 1 of 'One Third of the Holocaust'.
That leaves the small parts which only Wiernik mentions. Nobody else describes him being shot in the breakout, or the girl 'leaping' the fence, which amounts to just... two... infelicitous phrasings that a person not in the grip of a mind-numbingly bovine literalism would generally regard as not terribly significant.
But wait! Note the methodological hypocrisy of denial here. Witness testimonies are chiefly to be examined for what they say about the
really naughty stuff, everything else is just padding and can be ignored,
except when they chance upon something that might trigger personal incredulity, in which case it can be lifted out of context and waved around the internet enough times to qualify as an entry in Denier Bu****** Bingo.
Note also the confusion in their tiny little minds as to what constitutes a narrative or an account. Instead of looking at the whole story told by the witness, they batten on to the 'core' parts, discombobulating the actual narrative presented by someone like Wiernik, and thus strawman it hopelessly.
Wiernik's testimony describes a hellish camp for the selected Sonderkommandos. Let's conduct another thought experiment and excise gassing from the picture momentarily. Is that the ultimate target? Is the only problem with the actual history of Treblinka the annoyingly inconvenient fact that everyone describes it as an extermination camp? In which case where are the seams and joins showing how and where 'gassing' was grafted on to the genuine, correct tale of a hellish labour camp?
Or is any description of individual sadism by individual Germans unacceptable to the deniers? In which case they cannot reason backwards from the really big-ticket item to pretend that the smaller cruelties did not happen either, since human nature is what it is, and we have quite enough examples of civilised nations - in fact, all of them - acting worse than a pack of rabid dogs on various occasions in the 20th and 21st Centuries. Trying to claim that the Third Reich was an exception is just the No True German fallacy, trying to claim it couldn't have happened to Jews is belied by the behaviour of the Nazi to everyone else in Europe, and/or is barely veiled antisemitism.
Maybe I'll dump another Katyusha salvo on your head in due course, Mr Budly. But for now I'll finish off with this following gnomic, creepy-speaking-in-maybe-third-person remark
Then the point is made that by episode 29, Denierbud has found a book that has Wiernik's account and was thus being dishonest about how hard it was to find. But maybe Denierbud didn't know about Donat's book when he made episode 1, but knew about it by episode 29. A 4-hour video takes years to make
To which one has to reply quite simply: has denierbud never heard of editing facilities?
Ta-ra for now.
- Edam
, I instead parody the setting of "rules" by going wide and far to choose only semidigestible cheese-like products that only superficially bear resemblence to the genuine article. 
