Holocaust deniers, explain this.

[Meadmaker]

When did "the Soviets" run the museum? It was always officially the Poles as far as I understand.

Unofficially, the Soviets ran Poland.

I never heard anything about this 'gas chamber' being a post war reconstruction before. It was always presented as being in it's original state--as in a gas chamber.

Since it wasn't a gas chamber at the end of the war, some reconstruction would be required to get it into its original state as a gas chamber. This wasn't some sort of state secret, and was said by three people on that stupid video you linked to.

Usually when dealing with conspiracy theories, you have to take the CT stuff and look up the original to find the contradiction. David Cole has saved us the trouble of looking up, because he left in the testimony that contradicts his story.

(As an aside, you do know that Mr. Cole has since joined the dark side as a holocaust believer, recanting and apologizing for his work as a denier, right? His acceptance of the mainstream version of events is cited on denier pages as proof of a Jewish conspiracy to threaten and intimidate witnesses.)

Why are you pretty sure that the Soviets didn't try to convince anyone that, while in use as a gas chamber, there was no door?

Because only a moron would think there would be no door on a gas chamber. On the other hand, you might not mention the lack of a door to tourists, because...

I don't remember anybody in my tour party noticing that there was no door.

Besides, anyone with a clue who did notice that there was no door would conclude that they must have knocked out the door and not rebuilt it, and that "original state" didn't necessarily mean correct in every single detail. Of course, anyone who either didn't understand that or had a question about it could raise their hand and ask about the door, and get an answer as to why there was no door, but that would be far too complicated for someone who thinks he is horribly clever because he noticed the lack of a door and "realized" that they were obviously hiding the reconstruction.

It didn't seem as significant to me as the stupid chimney. You can see from this Youtube video that there is still no door. This room IS shown to tourists as being in the state it was when it was used as a gas chamber.

It already showed that in the David Cole video you linked earlier. The stupid one. Is this one less stupid than the Cole video? Would it provide fewer details, so that you would actually have to look up the true story in other sources? I must admit I owe you a thank you for linking that Cole video. I had read bits and pieces on denier sites before, but it would be so much work to actually figure out what was going on by researching the true story that I hadn't gotten round to doing it. That Cole video tied all the stupid in one package and put a nice neat bow on it.

(For those not inclined to watch it, the Cole video shows the room, and asks the tour guide, the chief tour guide, and the scientist at the on site museum about these things. The story that the three give is always the same, but each has slightly different details given. Then Cole, the narrator, explains that they all contradicted each other. It's a wonderful example of CT stupidity, but it is valuable because it does give the real story, well expressed and summarized, right there on the video.)

Yes, Meadmaker, the story really is that stupid.

Well, somebody's story really is that stupid.

 

[Meadmaker]

BTW, there's no ash. No pits. No bodies. No nothing at Treblinka. Wiernik is a liar. Anything that is corroborated by his testimony is a lie as well.

Nothing? That whole 2 hectare ash field is nothing?

I sense denial.

 

[Meadmaker]

I confess that I thought daughters would be too low even for Bomba....

And the others. Including the Nazi guards who told the same story.

 

[Nick Terry]

Originally Posted by Dogzilla
BTW, there's no ash. No pits. No bodies. No nothing at Treblinka. Wiernik is a liar. Anything that is corroborated by his testimony is a lie as well.


Nothing? That whole 2 hectare ash field is nothing?

I sense denial.

Indeed, denial it is, and I mean in the psychological sense of intoning over and over 'it isn't there, it didn't happen, it isn't there, it didn't happen' without rhyme or reason.

I'm particularly impressed by the deranged statement that anything corroborated by Wiernik's testimony is a lie. Does this work the other way around as well?

Abraham Krzepicki escaped Treblinka early on and fled back to the Warsaw ghetto, where he wrote down a lengthy account of his experiences, which were then deposited with the Ringelblum archive and buried in a milk-can in early 1943. Krzepicki did not survive the war, but his account was dug up along with the rest of the contents of the milk can some years after the war. His account was then published and later on, translated (eg in Alexander Donat's The Death Camp Treblinka in 1979, a relatively standard source).

Wiernik, meanwhile, was interned in Treblinka and only escaped long after the milk-can was buried, writing his account in 1944 when there was absolutely no possibility the milk-can could be got at.

I invite Dogzilla to confirm that these two accounts, must be considered entirely independent evidence. If not, why not? If they are independent, why do both these witnesses describe Treblinka as an extermination camp? There are many more matching details to get through as well, but the brute fact of mass slaughter should be enough to start with.

One might add to Krzepicki the early account by David Milgrom, another early escapee, authored in August 1943 and already published in the outside world by early 1944, and the account by Oskar Strawczynski, whose manuscript is dated 1944 and was published recently in Escaping the Hell of Treblinka.

All of these accounts, predating the liberation of Poland, are reducible to Wiernik? Really?

Cue bleating and whining about how Dogzilla doesn't have these texts in front of him, cannot possibly comment, blah blah blah blah.

So let's set Dogzilla another task as well, which is to identify all the observations in Wiernik's account, which as any fule kno is online in English for all to read, and for him to start by listing all those parts he has no objection to. Like, for example, that there was a camp at Treblinka at all, that there were Germans there who may or may not have been named such-and-such, that there were deportations of Jews from Bulgaria and Grodno, and so on. Wiernik's account is 18,000 words long.

Is Dogzilla saying every single line is a fantasy? Even if we can point to non-testimonial evidence to prove otherwise?

I mean, if we have a document like this one

SS-Sonderkommando Trebinka, Beförderungsvorschag, Treblinka, den 1.9.1943, gez. Franz, IPN (Institute for National Memory, Warsaw) CA 903/2, p.11


which clearly indicates Kurt Franz served at SS-Sonderkommando Treblinka in a position of authority (and also proves he was an Untersturmfuehrer)

and we have Wiernik talking about Untersturmfuehrer Franz 13 times...

...then what are we supposed to make of that?

 

[Saggy]

and we have Wiernik talking about Untersturmfuehrer Franz 13 times...

...then what are we supposed to make of that?

What do you make of the fact that the movie Godzilla shows the Empire State Building in more than 13 scenes. Do you conclude that the movie documents real events?

 

[Meadmaker]

What do you make of the fact that the movie Godzilla shows the Empire State Building in more than 13 scenes. Do you conclude that the movie documents real events?

Absolutely not! It proves, beyond a reasonable doubt, that the place allegedly called "New York City" was invented for a Godzilla movie. It's not a real place.

 

[Dogzilla]

I watched it a long time ago. Jews gave haircuts to their own wives and mothers, all stripped naked and standing in a very overcrowded room, the gas chamber no less, I don't think any daughters were included, to the best of my recollection. Phantasmagoria at its worst.

You can see Abe Bomba's Shoah testimony here. Many people think this scene is the most powerful in the entire film.

 

[Dogzilla]

Unofficially, the Soviets ran Poland.



Since it wasn't a gas chamber at the end of the war, some reconstruction would be required to get it into its original state as a gas chamber. This wasn't some sort of state secret, and was said by three people on that stupid video you linked to.

Usually when dealing with conspiracy theories, you have to take the CT stuff and look up the original to find the contradiction. David Cole has saved us the trouble of looking up, because he left in the testimony that contradicts his story.

The three different people do NOT say the same thing. The reason I don't make too much of this part of the David Cole video is that the official tour guides at any museum or national shrine don't always know everything and might make something up. It's happened to me at the La Brea Tar Pits in Los Angeles.

I also make allowances for the fact that none of these three people David Cole spoke to spoke English as a first language.

(As an aside, you do know that Mr. Cole has since joined the dark side as a holocaust believer, recanting and apologizing for his work as a denier, right? His acceptance of the mainstream version of events is cited on denier pages as proof of a Jewish conspiracy to threaten and intimidate witnesses.)

It's not a "Jewish conspiracy" that silenced David Cole but it was clearly a threat from the Jewish Defense League that did. The JDL had a section on the web site documenting their actions against David Cole but after the latest redesign, it's not there anymore. You can find the gist of what the JDL posted on the vho websitehere.

Michael Shermer in his book, Denying History, talks about the David Cole affair as well. Google books has the relevant pages here.

David Cole obviously dropped his revisionist activity due to pressure from the JDL. Nobody in their right mind thinks otherwise. If he had really 'seen the light' and believed the holocaust story, he would have answered the unanswered questions that he himself had asked.

 

[Dogzilla]

And the others. Including the Nazi guards who told the same story.

What Nazi guards told the same story?

 

[Bluespaceoddity]

You can see Abe Bomba's Shoah testimony here. Many people think this scene is the most powerful in the entire film.

While others ridicule it and ask misleading questions that can be answered with some personal research and a little help from ... well in your case not your friends.

After reading Arad's Belzec, Sobibor, Treblinka do you think Holocaust denier "observations" about hair collection in Reinhardt camps, for example, is reasonable? When you saw denier bud's comments on the work of barbers like Abraham Bomba "... except that's not how it would have... etc" did you not immediately think about the orders to collect hair as Industrial Ersatz war time material? Didn't you find it odd that deniers who appear at first so fond of quotes from Arad pick their lines so selectively and are reluctant to quote other sections? Would you be so kind to quote what Arad wrote and whose order Arad referenced on page 109?

Did you not participate in the hair related RODOH threads? Have you never heard of:
"... Bezugnehmend auf den Reichsbefehl 18/III von 13. Mai 1938 machen wir nochmals auf die Anordnung über Sammlung von Frauenhaaren aufmerksam. Die Sammlung soll jetzt in folgenden Städten in verstärktem Maße durchgeführt werden: Berlin, Hamburg, Leipzig, Breslau, Dresden, Zwickau, Plauen, Braunschweig, Dessau, Glogau, Halle, Hannover, Frankfurt/Main, Freistadt, Görlitz, Hirschberg, Liegnitz....
... Aus den Haaren werden Filzstoffe hergestellt..."
cited by Gisela Miller-Kipp in her book "Auch Du gehörst dem Führer" about the BDM?

Never seen the posters of the earlier, WW1 era, hair collection campaigns in Germany, as pointed out by ignorantbystander, who posts here as well from time to time?

Never read about the results of such earlier campaigns?
… besten belegt ist auf diese Art der Sammlung wieder in Flensburg, wo sie am 29. Dezember 1917 vom Rotem Kreuz eingerichtet wurde. Es sollte dabei ausschließlich "ausgekämmtes Haar" gesammelt werden, das der "Herstellung von Treibriemen und Filz für Kriegswirtschaftliche Zwecke" dienen sollte. Nach Angaben Harald Hohnsbehns wurden bis zum Juni 1918 an allen Flensburger Mädchenschulen 151,65 kg Haar zusammengetragen ... etc"
From:"Vaterländische Erziehung" für "Höhere Mädchen" by Hans-Christian Pust

What about the documentation that exists for shipment and delivery of hair to certain firms during the nazi era? You've never seen the:
"Forderungsnachweis Konzentrationslagers, Verwaltung Lublin
am Firma Paul Reimann, Friedland/bez. Breslau
für Monat Juni 1943 ... etc"
Dated 22 June 1943. A notification that 200 kilo hair has been delivered to the firm for which payment, of 100 Mark, to settle the outstanding debt related to this transaction, should be transferred to a certain account number in Berlin A copy of this accounting detail is included, among other places, in the Sobibor book by Jules Schelvis. Pick your language of choice for the page number.

Why doesn't denierbud ever update his footage to incorporate answers he should have been able to find for himself. Answers that have also been posted for his benefit for years at Holocaust Controversies Blog? if denierbud is to be taken seriously as a source of information wouldn't that be reasonable to expect?

A lot of people think these are just minor details. Nitpicks. But do they not expose denier methods? Do these examples not at the very least show that there are reasons why women's hair was cut even though the women were gassed? Do these not at the very least suggest other reasons besides the ones deniers selectively offer for haircuts? Do these historical and contemporary examples not therefore place Abraham Bomba's statements in a historical perspective? Would it not be reasonable that someone like denier bud at least mention such examples?

It's like Saggy never updating his website to reflect what is obvious to anyone who has ever looked at books about Auschwitz by Pressac or Dwork and van Pelt. Or at the photos of the signs at Auschwitz provided by the websites Saggy himself references as his sources.

Do you really think that works in your favor? For whose benefit are you doing this?

 

[Dogzilla]

Abraham Krzepicki escaped Treblinka early on and fled back to the Warsaw ghetto, where he wrote down a lengthy account of his experiences, which were then deposited with the Ringelblum archive and buried in a milk-can in early 1943. Krzepicki did not survive the war, but his account was dug up along with the rest of the contents of the milk can some years after the war. His account was then published and later on, translated (eg in Alexander Donat's The Death Camp Treblinka in 1979, a relatively standard source).

Are you sure about the chain of events? He wrote a lengthy account of his experiences after escaping from Treblinka. Instead of publishing them to tell the world what was happening so the world would have a chance of stopping what was happening, he deposited them with the Ringelblum archive which then buried them in a milk can? Or did he deposit them with the Ringelblum archive AND bury another copy in a milk can himself?

Anyhoo, the lengthy account lie buried in the milk can until after the war when it was dug up and published. You said it was translated in 1979 but when was it first published?

Wiernik, meanwhile, was interned in Treblinka and only escaped long after the milk-can was buried, writing his account in 1944 when there was absolutely no possibility the milk-can could be got at.

I invite Dogzilla to confirm that these two accounts, must be considered entirely independent evidence. If not, why not?

It depends upon when they were published

If they are independent, why do both these witnesses describe Treblinka as an extermination camp? There are many more matching details to get through as well, but the brute fact of mass slaughter should be enough to start with.

One might add to Krzepicki the early account by David Milgrom, another early escapee, authored in August 1943 and already published in the outside world by early 1944, and the account by Oskar Strawczynski, whose manuscript is dated 1944 and was published recently in Escaping the Hell of Treblinka.

All of these accounts, predating the liberation of Poland, are reducible to Wiernik? Really?

Cue bleating and whining about how Dogzilla doesn't have these texts in front of him, cannot possibly comment, blah blah blah blah.

Well, OK, if one does not need to read the texts to know what is said before one comments on them, I'll say those eyewitnesses all describe Treblinka as the place where the Germans held a fifteen month rave for Jews complete with free cocaine, prostitutes and of course the highest quality Xstacy tablets straight from Amsterdam. That doesn't mesh with what Wiernik said at all.

But seriously, the whole buried in a milk can story sounds like some Nancy Drew Mystery novel. Oskar Strawczynski, can date his manuscript 1944 but if it was published recently in Escaping the Hell of Treblinka it can be considered as reliable as any of the latter day survivor stories. Whether or not these sources actually corroborate as you say they do and the questionable integrity of recently unearthed testimony don't matter as long as they don't show us where the bodies went.

So let's set Dogzilla another task as well, which is to identify all the observations in Wiernik's account, which as any fule kno is online in English for all to read, and for him to start by listing all those parts he has no objection to. Like, for example, that there was a camp at Treblinka at all, that there were Germans there who may or may not have been named such-and-such, that there were deportations of Jews from Bulgaria and Grodno, and so on. Wiernik's account is 18,000 words long.

That seems like a rather pointless exercise because nothing Wiernik says addresses the fundamental question: where did the bodies go?

Is Dogzilla saying every single line is a fantasy? Even if we can point to non-testimonial evidence to prove otherwise?

The question is moot.

I mean, if we have a document like this one

SS-Sonderkommando Trebinka, Beförderungsvorschag, Treblinka, den 1.9.1943, gez. Franz, IPN (Institute for National Memory, Warsaw) CA 903/2, p.11


which clearly indicates Kurt Franz served at SS-Sonderkommando Treblinka in a position of authority (and also proves he was an Untersturmfuehrer)

and we have Wiernik talking about Untersturmfuehrer Franz 13 times...

...then what are we supposed to make of that?

That Wiernik met an Untersturmfuehrer Franz but never got his first name?

 

[Dogzilla]

While others ridicule it and ask misleading questions that can be answered with some personal research and a little help from ... well in your case not your friends.

After reading Arad's Belzec, Sobibor, Treblinka do you think Holocaust denier "observations" about hair collection in Reinhardt camps, for example, is reasonable? When you saw denier bud's comments on the work of barbers like Abraham Bomba "... except that's not how it would have... etc" did you not immediately think about the orders to collect hair as Industrial Ersatz war time material? Didn't you find it odd that deniers who appear at first so fond of quotes from Arad pick their lines so selectively and are reluctant to quote other sections? Would you be so kind to quote what Arad wrote and whose order Arad referenced on page 109?

Did you not participate in the hair related RODOH threads? Have you never heard of:
"... Bezugnehmend auf den Reichsbefehl 18/III von 13. Mai 1938 machen wir nochmals auf die Anordnung über Sammlung von Frauenhaaren aufmerksam. Die Sammlung soll jetzt in folgenden Städten in verstärktem Maße durchgeführt werden: Berlin, Hamburg, Leipzig, Breslau, Dresden, Zwickau, Plauen, Braunschweig, Dessau, Glogau, Halle, Hannover, Frankfurt/Main, Freistadt, Görlitz, Hirschberg, Liegnitz....
... Aus den Haaren werden Filzstoffe hergestellt..."
cited by Gisela Miller-Kipp in her book "Auch Du gehörst dem Führer" about the BDM?

Never seen the posters of the earlier, WW1 era, hair collection campaigns in Germany, as pointed out by ignorantbystander, who posts here as well from time to time?

Never read about the results of such earlier campaigns?
… besten belegt ist auf diese Art der Sammlung wieder in Flensburg, wo sie am 29. Dezember 1917 vom Rotem Kreuz eingerichtet wurde. Es sollte dabei ausschließlich "ausgekämmtes Haar" gesammelt werden, das der "Herstellung von Treibriemen und Filz für Kriegswirtschaftliche Zwecke" dienen sollte. Nach Angaben Harald Hohnsbehns wurden bis zum Juni 1918 an allen Flensburger Mädchenschulen 151,65 kg Haar zusammengetragen ... etc"
From:"Vaterländische Erziehung" für "Höhere Mädchen" by Hans-Christian Pust

What about the documentation that exists for shipment and delivery of hair to certain firms during the nazi era? You've never seen the:
"Forderungsnachweis Konzentrationslagers, Verwaltung Lublin
am Firma Paul Reimann, Friedland/bez. Breslau
für Monat Juni 1943 ... etc"
Dated 22 June 1943. A notification that 200 kilo hair has been delivered to the firm for which payment, of 100 Mark, to settle the outstanding debt related to this transaction, should be transferred to a certain account number in Berlin A copy of this accounting detail is included, among other places, in the Sobibor book by Jules Schelvis. Pick your language of choice for the page number.

Why doesn't denierbud ever update his footage to incorporate answers he should have been able to find for himself. Answers that have also been posted for his benefit for years at Holocaust Controversies Blog? if denierbud is to be taken seriously as a source of information wouldn't that be reasonable to expect?

A lot of people think these are just minor details. Nitpicks. But do they not expose denier methods? Do these examples not at the very least show that there are reasons why women's hair was cut even though the women were gassed? Do these not at the very least suggest other reasons besides the ones deniers selectively offer for haircuts? Do these historical and contemporary examples not therefore place Abraham Bomba's statements in a historical perspective? Would it not be reasonable that someone like denier bud at least mention such examples?

It's like Saggy never updating his website to reflect what is obvious to anyone who has ever looked at books about Auschwitz by Pressac or Dwork and van Pelt. Or at the photos of the signs at Auschwitz provided by the websites Saggy himself references as his sources.

Do you really think that works in your favor? For whose benefit are you doing this?

Hair was shaved off prisoners entering concentration camps for the same reason it used to be shaved off prisoners and men entering the military: lice control. Pure and simple. If the hair could then be used for manufacturing textiles, then good for the Germans for thinking of doing that. The lack of any Jewhair textiles found after the war is curious, however.

 

[Bluespaceoddity]

...

The examples of hair collection campaigns from both world wars show that there are reasons to cut hair even from people who don't benefit from hair cuts themselves,

That hair has applications as industrial Ersatz material offers an explanation other than hygiene and removes the reason given by deniers for doubting that people like Bomba were forced to perform those haircuts at Reinhardt camps for -particularly women- on their way to the gas chambers.

Would it not be more honest to reference such historical precedents rather than pretend there is only one possible reason to cut hair in deceptive attempt to cast doubt on statements from Bomba and others?
Or are world war 1 era German high school girl diary entries, news paper clippings and posters about hair collection campaigns early zionist plants in that vast conspiracy that also includes people from that time worrying about pogroms and famine?

Is it not reasonable to conclude that hair does have value as a industrial raw material from sources independent of the nazi state?
You appear to be conceding the point but for some reason add a little spin to steer away from the actual point made.

Besides, Felt cloth manufactured with human hair is on display at Auschwitz.

Are you going to quote what Arad wrote -on page 109- about Oswald Pohl's order or not?

 

[Matthew Ellard]

Besides, Felt cloth manufactured with human hair is on display at Auschwitz.

Felt for felt boots for the germans soldiers in 1942.

IMT Document USSR-511
The Chief of the Central Economic and Administrative Office of the SS, SS-Obergruppenführer Pohl, on the basis of a report, orders that all human hair cut in concentration camps is to be delivered for utilization. Human hair is to be processed into industrial felt and spun into yarn for submarine crews and hair-felt-socks for the Reichs railway workers will be manufactured of combed and cut women's hair.

And here is the result
http://www.thuringenmilitaria.com/pictures/brownboots.jpg
These have felt tops woven from horse hair or sometimes human hair with heavily padded soles. Have brown leather lowers and strap fasteners and thin rubber soles which are padded by layers of felt. Standard medium size, fits anything from 43 to 45. Overall condition is very good no mothing. €80.

 

[Nick Terry]

Are you sure about the chain of events? He wrote a lengthy account of his experiences after escaping from Treblinka. Instead of publishing them to tell the world what was happening so the world would have a chance of stopping what was happening, he deposited them with the Ringelblum archive which then buried them in a milk can? Or did he deposit them with the Ringelblum archive AND bury another copy in a milk can himself?

Anyhoo, the lengthy account lie buried in the milk can until after the war when it was dug up and published. You said it was translated in 1979 but when was it first published?

It depends upon when they were published

Krzepicki's account of Treblinka wasn't the first that made it to the Warsaw ghetto, there were several others. The extant ones mention gas chambers. The Ringelblum circle then compiled a report on the entire liquidation of the Warsaw ghetto which included a lengthy report on Treblinka, which made it to the outside world. The date on Krzepicki's account makes it quite likely that Hersz Wasser, who wrote the November 1942 report on Treblinka, did not take it into consideration. That may be why Wasser, basing himself on an unknown source, mentioned steam chambers, whereas at least three other reports dated in the same time-frame say gas chambers. Thus are misunderstandings born.

Krzepicki's account was published in the 1950s in Polish translation.

Well, OK, if one does not need to read the texts to know what is said before one comments on them, I'll say those eyewitnesses all describe Treblinka as the place where the Germans held a fifteen month rave for Jews complete with free cocaine, prostitutes and of course the highest quality Xstacy tablets straight from Amsterdam. That doesn't mesh with what Wiernik said at all.

Very droll. But unfortunately, very very wrong. Off you trot now to the library and look up the accounts. Sadly, denier scriptures have not dealt with Krzepicki or the Ringelblum archive, so you're entirely on your own here.

But seriously, the whole buried in a milk can story sounds like some Nancy Drew Mystery novel.

Unfortunately your sneering doesn't even begin to deal with the evidence compiled in the Ringelblum archive, which ran to a further 2,062 items amounting to 10s of 1000s of pages of material.

It wasn't just one account buried in a milk can, it was 2,063 documents buried in two milk cans. A third milk can was lost.

Oskar Strawczynski, can date his manuscript 1944 but if it was published recently in Escaping the Hell of Treblinka it can be considered as reliable as any of the latter day survivor stories.

Absolutely wrong. The account was deposited in what became the Jewish Historical Institute's archive immediately after the war; the reason it was not published at the time was because Strawczynski was merciless in observing the inevitable human failings of some of his fellow Sonderkommandos.

Just because something is published recently does not thereby change the date at which the document was produced. Saying otherwise is an insult to the historical profession, archivists, publishers, every sentinent reader of history, and basic common sense.

Which probably explains why you uttered something as idiotic as the above.

But please, do keep insinuating conspiracy theories you are too chicken to spell out properly. It makes you look like such a man of integrity and honesty. Not.

Whether or not these sources actually corroborate as you say they do and the questionable integrity of recently unearthed testimony don't matter as long as they don't show us where the bodies went.

Blah, blah, blah.

That seems like a rather pointless exercise because nothing Wiernik says addresses the fundamental question: where did the bodies go?

It's far from a pointless exercise but a very basic one.

The question is moot.

On the contrary, it is far from moot since your mass graves litmus test is not actually accepted as the sole means of assessing witness credibility in any known method of inquiry other than the know-nothingism of denial.

That Wiernik met an Untersturmfuehrer Franz but never got his first name?

Does this then cast doubt on the obvious match between Wiernik's testimony and the documented proof that an Untersturmfuehrer named Franz served at Treblinka? Are you really that desperate?

BTW there is a document, a rare surviving waybill, indicating that women's hair was transported out of Treblinka in the autumn of 1942. So we can regard that part of Wiernik's testimony as confirmed as well.


You're not really doing very well, I'm afraid. You've got at least another 100 Treblinka witnesses (inmate, SS, Trawniki) to deal with, and are still stuck on the denier 101 level of 'nur nur Bomba' and 'nur nur Wiernik'.

 

[Nick Terry]

What Nazi guards told the same story?

The ones that were interrogated after the war, nitwit.

A simple Google search will reveal their names, and googling those names would even locate many testimonies from them online, quite aside from those already published in Arad, Sereny or other standard works on this subject. Like this:

p.109 of Arad
Stangl: One day we received a disinfecting machine without having been told what it was for. I asked about it in Lublin. I was told in reply that from now on we were to cut the women’s hair. The hair should be cleaned and packed in bags…

Your kneejerk response to any statement referring to well known evidence is to ask for more details. Either this means you are grotesquely ignorant of the history (well, we know that, but..) or it means you are simply engaged in rearguard trolling.


Once again, you demonstrate the inability of denier chimps to understand the principle of total evidence. If you want to claim that all 100 Treblinka witnesses are wrong about hair cutting, you have to deal with all 100 Treblinka witnesses, or at the very least a demonstrably representative sample of them, not just one cherrypicked example of a very late testimony given to a film-maker. And you have to deal with the documents; the corroborating witness evidence of hair cutting in the other AR camps showing this wasn't a unique policy.

 

[Meadmaker]

Indeed, denial it is, and I mean in the psychological sense of intoning over and over 'it isn't there, it didn't happen, it isn't there, it didn't happen' without rhyme or reason.

Exactly.

 

[Meadmaker]

You're not really doing very well, I'm afraid. You've got at least another 100 Treblinka witnesses (inmate, SS, Trawniki) to deal with, and are still stuck on the denier 101 level of 'nur nur Bomba' and 'nur nur Wiernik'.

Is there something about Bomba that makes deniers scoff at him? I have read, not seen, his account in "Shoah", and there's nothing in it that struck me as ridiculous, and he says the same things as the others. Is it just because he's on film, and so they have to single him out for his high profile? Or has he done anything else that makes him a good denier target?

Usually, when CT folks pick on one character, they find something implausible about what someone says, declare that person to be a "star witness", discredit him, and then declare that this undermines the entire case. It's a variant on the straw man fallacy. Why do they say, "nur nur Bomba"? There's nothing in what I've read that makes him a good target.

 

[Meadmaker]

What Nazi guards told the same story?

All of them. There's no one who was in a position to see it who says anything else.

(And by "the same story" I do not mean the story about the man's wife and daughter. I mean the same story that the women were stripped, then had their hair cut, and then were gassed.)

 

[Nick Terry]

Is there something about Bomba that makes deniers scoff at him? I have read, not seen, his account in "Shoah", and there's nothing in it that struck me as ridiculous, and he says the same things as the others. Is it just because he's on film, and so they have to single him out for his high profile? Or has he done anything else that makes him a good denier target?

Usually, when CT folks pick on one character, they find something implausible about what someone says, declare that person to be a "star witness", discredit him, and then declare that this undermines the entire case. It's a variant on the straw man fallacy. Why do they say, "nur nur Bomba"? There's nothing in what I've read that makes him a good target.

Bomba is a denier icon based on a sub-Gerstein-type argument to incredulity, since a wilful pedant can interpret Bomba's words as meaning he was supposedly saying the gas chamber was stuffed full of more women waiting for their hair to be cut than seems realistic to wilful pedants, who as we know only ever apply a mindless literalism to these testimonies.

These wilful pedants ignore the fact that Bomba says that haircutting only happened in the gas chamber for about a week. They also ignore the fact that Bomba's statements on this don't make any grammatical or logical sense when one reads the transcript:

"In one day there was about, I would say, going into that place between sixty and seventy women in the same room at one time. After we were finished with this party, another party came in, and there were about 140, 150 women. They were all already taken care of, and they told us to leave the gas chamber for a few minutes, about five minutes, when they put in the gas and choked them to death."

Que?

The first sentence doesn't even make grammatical sense, and the 'procedure' is totally unclear. Too vague to be useful either way, and quite liable to being mixed up with other memories. The second and third bolded sentence implies that the new batch of women had already had their hair cuts elsewhere ('they were all already taken care of') and it's not made clear where. Another gas chamber, since there were several of them in one building? Or outside? In the corridor? In the open air? In the undressing barracks?

The measurement given earlier corresponds to the 'old' gas chambers, which had smaller chambers - Wiernik says 5 x 5m, so Bomba's 12 x 12 feet is about 4 x 4m, close enough to suggest the old chambers. But by the time the haircutting began for Bomba (4 weeks after his arrival from Czestochowa, from where deportations left in the last week of September = towards the end of October), the new gas chambers were operational.
It would make a certain sense to use the old gas chambers as a temporary 'hair salon' and then transfer the women to the new gas chambers to be killed, but Bomba doesn't describe that. It doesn't make much sense to cut hair in the old gas chambers and then use them to kill the women, when you have new ones across the path, that are moreover described as much larger, unless you're running both chambers simultaneously, for which there was no real need. If the haircuts were in the new gas chambers, then Bomba misremembered the dimensions of the old ones as the new ones.

So many contradictions, that this testimony is very close to useless in evidentiary terms. The memories seem jumbled up to me.

As Bomba gave a statement 20 years beforehand in a formal legal setting, one would need to compare with the prior testimony to see whether he described things more accurately and more coherently, while not being filmed doing a haircut in a rented barbershop and not looking at the person questioning him in English as opposed to whichever language he was deposed in during the 1960s.