Revisionists vs. Belivers

[Charles Bunch]

>>Proofs of the holocaust are tens of thousands of documents, testimonies and other legal documents...<<

>Testimony at best is allegation, not proof.

No, testimony is evidence. Proof results from the accumulation of evidence and the logical conclusions that evidence leads to. The amount of testimonial evidence for the Holocaust is substantial. It is of three kinds, that of Jewish survivors who witnessed key components of the Holocaust, that of non Jewish witnesses, and that of the perpetrators, who admit to carrying out various acts associated with it. This constitutes a very powerful foundation for other evidence and collectively the "proof" of a Holocaust undertaken by Nazi Germany is overwhelming.

>Documents can be forged or arrived at by coercion.

An utterly meaningless statement that applies to all historical events. Historians did not suddenly forget how to authenticate documents when it came to the Holocaust. Many documents are further corroborated by testimony.

>Note, that I am not saying that this is per se for holocaust docs and testomonies. But it has been done in the past and could be true of some docs and testomonies from holocaust related material. I, for one, cannot and will not rule that out.


Oh, God forbid you should say anything concrete that you would have to support with evidence!

You're merely content to make vacuous statements about the nature of evidence which applies to all historical events, and about which no reason exists to believe has specific application to evidence for the Holocaust in any way.

[Laurent]

>>But if you do that to prove that use of diesel engine, as reported in 1945 documents, is impossible, so that proves that gaschambers were impossible<<

But this isn't even a point Laurent, 'cos nobody is trying to suggest this.

I'm not saying or suggesting that someone said it here (?), but it has been said and written many times elsewhere, and that is the reason why 'believers' react so strong to questions on holocaust.

>>Proofs of the holocaust are tens of thousands of documents, testimonies and other legal documents...<<

Testimony at best is allegation, not proof. Documents can be forged or arrived at by coercion. Note, that I am not saying that this is per se for holocaust docs and testomonies. But it has been done in the past and could be true of some docs and testomonies from holocaust related material. I, for one, cannot and will not rule that out.

A testimony or a document isn't a proof, tens of thousand of them are the proof the holocaust has taken place. But despite this people are always denying it.

Real historian work is to link documents and testimonies between them to validate them and to have a better view/understanding of the events. The more data you have, the best is your work. And everytime you will find some statements differing from one source to another, and that is where the real study began.

Regards

Laurent

[tonyh]

>>people are always denying it<<

Where, Who.......I honestly don't see it. I have never seen anyone on this board or otherwise say that the holocaust, as a whole, didn't happen.

Tony

[tonyh]

>>An utterly meaningless statement that applies to all historical events.<<

Do you ever write anything remotely intelligent Chucky? I was applying it to all historical instances.

Tony

[Xanthro]

He refused to believe that the orginal claim was murder-by-steaming and not diesel exhaust.
----------------------------------------

See, this is an example of holocaust denial. Nobody serious ever considered that steam was the method of execution at Treblinka.

What happened was this. A witness from outside the camp, and at a distance, saw Jews be led into a chamber. Then he saw what appeared to be steam rising from the roof, then the body were removed. Based on his observations, he believed that steam was used and reported that.

Historians look at the circumstances of his observation, and they compare that to other evidence. Since the other evidence overwhelmingly points to a large engine being used, and since the exhaust of a large engine on a cold day could easily be confused as steam, it's concluded that the witness was reliable, but came to the wrong conclusion for method of death based on the method of observation.

Every once in awhile, some lay person retells the steam story in an newspaper edititorial. This is simply because s/he is repeating erroneous information that has been heard or read.

To the denier, this is proof that people exagerate the horror of the holocaust in order to promote some cruel propaganda.

To the historian, this is proof, that like all historical lay person knowledge, erroneous information is in the public. There's no plot or conspiracy to perpetuate this incorrect information, any more than there is a plot or conspiracy that many Americans when asked who the second President of the United States, answer Bill Clinton.

Xanthro

[Charles Bunch]

>>An utterly meaningless statement that applies to all historical events.<<

>Do you ever write anything remotely intelligent Chucky? I was applying it to all historical instances.

Nothing you have written in this group approaches any level of adult intelligence.

To the extent that your comments apply to all history, that is a measure of how cliched and meaningless they are to the discussion.

The fact is you wish to spread doubt about the Holocaust as a factual historical event, but are too ignorant of the facts to do so directly.

[Roberto]

I see the Reverend has been valiantly defending the merits of “Revisionism” once again, as I would have expected from our first and foremost Keeper of the Faith.

I strongly disagree with those who say there is no Faith involved here.

You bloody well should, Reverend, because there’s actually a lot of Faith involved. Your Faith and that of like-minded believers in the supreme virtues of Adolf and the Third Reich and the utter evil of World Jewry.

If you look at our diesel debates of over a year ago, Roberto did not know anything about Treblinka. Not one thing.

Exactly. I was never interested in that place until the Reverend introduced me to it with his diesel nonsense. But I’ve learned a lot in the meantime, whereas the Reverend is still as ignorant as he was at the outset.

He refused to believe, for example, that there was a labor camp there, a gravel quarry.

Like a bitching fish-woman, the Reverend is repeating one of his staple half-truths (or shall I say lies?). The Reverend’s contention being that the hundreds of thousands taken to Belzec, Sobibor and Treblinka were used for slave labor at those places, I asked him if there were any nearby factories or mines that might have required so large a labor force. Whereupon the Reverend produced the Treblinka quarry (nothing similar for the other two camps), to which I replied by asking him if that quarry had been of a size and deadliness such as to consume the lives of 700,000 to 900,000 workers within little more than a year. To which the Reverend of course had nothing to say. If the Reverend thinks my memory is letting me down, he is kindly invited to demonstrate this by producing the respective passages of our discussions on the old forum.

He refused to believe that the orginal claim was murder-by-steaming and not diesel exhaust.

Another of those statements that should be slapped in the Reverend’s face. As he well knows, my argument was and is that this understandable inaccuracy in early reports by outside observers does in no way alter or affect the essential findings of fact about the mass killings at Treblinka, however much the Reverend hates to admit to the utter irrelevance of his fussing.

He just knew that I must be wrong.

Considering that the Reverend never managed to answer to a single one of my questions about the documentary, eyewitness and physical evidence to the Treblinka killings, addressed i.a. in my post # 1358 (1/25/02 10:36:23 pm) on the thread

Eyewitness Testimony
http://pub3.ezboard.com/fskalmanforumfr ... =1&stop=20

on the old forum, that conclusion is actually a very reasonable and accurate one.

And he has used his skills as a lawyer who has a lot of time on his hands to defend his Faith.

Poor Reverend, he seems to be taking Cletus for an idiot, which he doesn’t seem to be. No faith is required where there are proven facts, Reverend. So what I do is not to defend any faith, but to challenge and take apart the moronic Faith of those for whom the facts are secondary to their pro-Nazi and/or anti-Semitic ideas – folks like yourself.

I am a skeptic

The most transparent of the Reverend’s lies. Why does this “skeptic” so piously and uncritically believe in whatever his “Revisionist” gurus, who are obviously nothing other than ideologically motivated propagandists, come up with?

and I have never said that the Holocaust never happened. That is absurd. The holocaust is not ONE monolithic event but consistst of millions of experiences and points-of-view.

Something you can say of every historical event and phenomenon. And who said the Holocaust was “ONE monolithic event”, Reverend?

If we want to discuss details that's fine. There are lots of exagerrations, atrocity propganda, and outright lies.

Exaggerations and atrocity propaganda – which are present in regard to any historical event, the Holocaust being no exception to the rule - have long been identified and dismissed as such by historiography. As to outright lies, the only ones I have come across so far on this forum are those of the “Revisionists”.

However, this is just a hobby for me and I don't have unlimited time. My major proposition is that all matters, including what Le Pen calls a "detail" of history, the gaschambers themselves, can and should be debated.

Nothing against that, with the qualification that it makes no sense to debate whether or not events proven beyond reasonable doubt occurred and that arguments should be based on something more than the wishful thinking, hollow speculations and distortions, misrepresentations or dismissal of evidence that “Revisionists” build theirs upon.

Nobody OWNS History.

Certainly so, but the “Revisionists” sure would love to.

Most of the Believers got theselves kicked off the Codoh forum for misbehavior.

Why, have any “Revisionists” been kicked off the Codoh forum? As far as I know, that happens only to their reasonable opponents who infringe the deliberately non-transparent and arbitrarily wielded “posting rules” that the moderator uses to censor such contributions that might put the “Revisionist” side into trouble. I have collected a great many such censored posts, which can be viewed on the following threads of the old forum:

Open debate?
http://pub3.ezboard.com/fskalmanforumfr ... =240.topic

Open debate? (continuation)
http://pub3.ezboard.com/fskalmanforumfr ... =211.topic

More "open debate" ...
http://pub3.ezboard.com/fskalmanforumfr ... =211.topic

And I thought they had learned something ...
http://pub3.ezboard.com/fskalmanforumfr ... =174.topic

They are about as interested in exploring history and different views therein as the Medieval Inquisition in determining the historicity of Jesus. Any who doubt the miracles must be of the Devil, you know.

Exactly, Reverend. I couldn’t have said it better myself. The above description fits the moronic True Believers who call themselves “Revisionists” like a glove.

That's true. I know Roberto from the Fall of 2000 when he was trying to promote his "ecumenical" Holocaust and irritating the hell out of conservative Germans.

Who, far more reasonable than the Reverend, eventually recognized that they had misunderstood my intentions and acknowledged that I had a point.

I mentioned that his stance could make him susceptible to charges of anti-Semitism because the Holocaust is a Jewish cultural thing and that they don't appreciate anyone else using it beyond mere lip-service.

Something I couldn’t care less about. The fact is that far more non-Jews than Jews fell victim to Nazi genocide and mass murder, even if certain “exclusivists” among Jewish scholars may not want this to be remembered.

The Jews don't want the Armenian Holocaust undermining the uniqueness of the Jewish Holocaust, for example.

Is it all Jews, Reverend, or just a limited number of Jewish scholars? Careful with those generalizations, they may expose you as what you are.

German historians with a Genocide-theory-of-history have tended to focus less on Jews.

What’s a “Genocide-theory-of-history” supposed to be, Reverend?

For them the gospel is NS-Verbrechen.

Not a gospel. A crucial phenomenon of German history.

It carries all torches. So much so that if anyone doubts a particular NS atrocity story he must be trying to rehabilitate National Socialism to enslave those poor German people again.

Depends on the substantiation of such doubt and on the underlying message and intentions.

The Holocaust is not ONE monolithic event to be acknowledged or Denied.

Who said it was?

The real difference between "deniers" and "believers" is emphasis on totality of evidence.

And the "totality" did not even consider such details as the technical operation of gaschambers and whether diesel exhaust could kill until Revisionists started to challenge their stories.

The specifics of certain killing devices are irrelevant minor details, the notions of which may be accurate or not without the essential facts being in any way affected thereby. The Reverend should get that into his skull if he wants to stop making a fool out of himself. Or does he have to stick to fussing about those minor points because he has nothing else to offer?

No, the Believers are not interested in any totality. Not by a long shot.

Exactly, Reverend. True Believers like yourself are not interested in looking at the relevant evidence, such as the transportation documents that show how many hundreds of thousands of people disappeared behind the gates of Belzec, Sobibor and Treblinka extermination camps, because such evidence may confront them with questions they are not able to answer and, oh my Führer, even doubts about the sustainability of their notions.

Some of the Revisionists aren't either

Dead wrong. “Revisionists” and Believers are one and the same thing, and none of them cares about any evidence. Why, they know beforehand that what they don’t want to have happened cannot have happened, don’t they?

but that is not the point.

Then what is the point, Reverend?

Quote:

"Believers" view the entire historical record and come to a probable conclusion as to what happened.

Funny, few of the Revisionists say the Holocaust never happened. They doubt things like gaschambers and atrocity propaganda and most think the six-million figure is an irresponsible exaggeration.

Well, I’d say downsizing genocide and mass murder against evidence is tantamount to denying it.

Not long ago it was Holocaust Denial to doubt that four-million were gassed at Auschwitz.

Show us one statement from a reliable source that corroborates this imbecile contention of yours, Reverend. Just one.

Now that is widely recognized to have been a mistake. It was more like a million.

The Reverend doesn’t get beyond his Articles of Faith, does he? Once again, LIAR:

William Shirer, The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich, Simon and Schuster New York, 1960
Page 973

How many hapless innocent people - mostly Jews but including a fairly large number of others, especially Russian prisoners of war - were slaughtered at the one camp of Auschwitz? The exact number will never be known. Hoess himself in his affidavit gave an estimate of ‘2,500,000 victims executed and exterminated by gassing and burning, and at least another half million who succumbed to starvation and disease, making a total of about 3,000,000’. Later at his own trial in Warsaw he reduced the figure to 1,135,000. The Soviet government, which investigated the camp after it was overrun by the Red Army in January 1945, put the figure at four million. Reitlinger, on the basis of his own exhaustive study, doubts that the number gassed at Auschwitz was ‘even as high as three quarters of a million.’ He estimates that about 600,000 died in the gas chambers, to which he adds ‘the unknown proportion’ of some 300,000 of more ‘missing’, who were shot or died of starvation and disease. By any estimate the figure is considerable.

Emphasis is mine. The figure of 1,135,000 victims of the Auschwitz-Birkenau death camp, given by Höß at his Warsaw trial, is in line with most posterior estimates by historians:

- Dr Josef Kermisz, from the Jewish Historical Commission in Poland, wrote in 1949 that this Commission had evaluated the number of victims of Auschwitz at 1 500 000;

- Gerald Reitlinger in 1953 estimated at 800 000 to 900 000 the number of Jewish victims of Auschwitz;

- Raul Hilberg, in The Destruction of European Jews, 1961, estimated the number of Jewish victims of Auschwitz at 1 million and the total number of victims of Auschwitz at 1.1 million.

- Helmut Krausnick declared in 1964, at the process against former members of the Auschwitz staff in Frankfurt, that the total number of victims of Auschwitz was between on million and one and a half million;

- Georges Wellers in 1983 provided an estimate of 1.3 million Jewish victims at Auschwitz and a total of 1.5 million victims of the camp;

- Franciszek Piper, in a study that started in 1980 and the results of which were presented in 1991 and 1994, gave as the total number of victims of Auschwitz a minimum of 1.1 million and a maximum of 1.5 million.

Quote:
"Deniers" use small segments of the historical record to support a previously formed opinion.

Yes, I think the gassing stories at Treblinka and the gas-vans are nothing more than atrocity propaganda

On what basis do you think that, Reverend? Can you account for the fate of the hundreds of thousands who disappeared behind the gates of Treblinka? Can you explain away the documentary, physical and eyewitness evidence? Can you do anything other than helplessly squeal “forgery” when confronted with documents such as Just’s letter to Rauff of 5 June 1942? No, you can’t, which means that what you think is of no relevance whatsoever.

, which is not to say that nothing bad ever happened to the Jews.

No, they were “horribly abused” and “sometimes killed”, weren’t they?

Quote:
Stating that less than 6 million Jews died in the Holocaust doesn't make you a denier. I've posted it could be between 4 and 9 million, and that the exact number can never be known with certainty. I doubt anyone here calls me a denier.

It doesn't make you a Denier unless you cross the pale in some other way that marks you as a H-skeptic. Start doubting diesel gaschambers, or better yet Zyklon-B, while affirming the six-million...

Not a denier, but a poor jerk who wastes his time on irrelevant academic issues.

But technically, anything less than 6M is enough.

For what, Reverend? For being a denier? Boy, then I’m also one. As are Hilberg, Reitlinger and other historians.

Quote:
All historical evidence should have to pass peer review before publication, and all evidence must be examined. This is what standard historians do on all historical subject matter.

This is just another way of saying that historical research and science cannot be conducted by amateurs but only by bona fide and vested elites.

No, buddy. It means that historiography requires objectivity and thorough analysis of sources, both of which are expected of historians.

Nonsense.

Is what Smith produces all the time.

There should be free access to archives to anyone who wants to look.

Why, isn’t there?

I know that is not the European tradition where one must be vouched-for by the establishment

How do you know that? Personal experience, any serious source, or just what Uncle Brad or Uncle Freddy told you?

and "Holocaust Denial," whatever that is, is illegal.

That’s unfortunate, but illegal nonsense is still nonsense.

Quote:
Sometimes people disagree with the historical record and they argue against it by looking for small errors or possible errors and equating that with the destruction of the entire thesis.

At the very least that should lead to a reexamination of operating hypotheses.

Depends on the extent and significance of the error. An inaccuracy in the description of a mass murder weapon will hardly lead to the conclusion that mass murder did not take place if there is conclusive documentary and/or physical and/or eyewitness evidence that it did.

Quote:
For example, the whole Diesel Engine at Treblinka debate. It's hard to kill people via CO using a Diesel Engine. Some witnessed state that a Diesel Engine was used there to kill people. A true historian would look at this and compare all the other evidence and conclude that a) A diesel engine wasn't used, and the witness is mistaken, b) that the method of death wasn't CO, c) an inefficient method of death was used.

The denier claims that this is proof that much of the holocaust is a cruel propoganda trick. That eyewitness testimony is part of some conspiracy, along with all other evidence because it's simply impossible that a diesel engine was used.

Well, we've been through this and I've explained that rather than an apriori belief in gassings, which renders all investigation moot and redundant from the Believer's point of view

There’s no such thing as an “apriori belief”, Reverend. There are the conclusions drawn by criminal justice authorities and historians from thorough assessment of documentary, physical and eyewitness evidence.

, we should instead employ forensic archaeology at the Treblinka site to determine if the physical human remains are consistent with hundreds of thousands of deaths/murders.

That has been done, as you know, shortly after the war by the Central Commission for the Investigation of German Crimes in Poland. And the results did not contradict the conclusions on the death toll drawn from the documentary and eyewitness evidence, which by themselves are sufficient to prove the occurrences. They corroborated those conclusions.

I said at the start that I was willing to concede that 700 thousand (Hilberg) died or were murdered

What’s that supposed to mean? You don’t “concede” historical facts, you either acknowledge them or close your eyes to them because they don’t fit into your bubble. The latter being what the Reverend likes to do.

there but not by diesel exhaust.

If not by diesel exhaust, then by gasoline exhaust. Big deal.

This took us through reams of Denier/Believer rodomontade.

If the Reverend had said “I think the gassing engine that killed hundreds of thousands of people at Treblinka was not a diesel engine, but a gasoline engine”, nobody would have cared about his stance. But the message was “they didn’t gas anybody there because if they had wanted to do so they would have used gasoline and not diesel engines”, wasn’t it? And that stance, as the Reverend should admit if there’s just a little intellectual honesty in him, absolutely sucks and is just about the greatest bullshit I’ve ever come across.

Yes, the Holocaust is a religion; make no mistake about that.

No, it’s a historical fact, despite the tendency of some to mystify it. The religious folks can be found in the “Revisionist” camp.

It is no different fundamentally than any other religion or belief-system that this Atheist has had the honor to debate.

Could it be that the Reverend has never realized that his supposed “Atheism” is in fact adherence to a quasi-religious sectarian creed?

Quote:
That type of reasoning is laughable no matter what the subject matter.

It is laughable that some could believe so fervently in fairy tales.

What fairy tales is the Reverend talking about? The ones that make up the version of certain historical events that he believes in, perhaps?

Groupthink is a fascinating subject for the psychologist.

Sure, the “Revisionists” would certainly be a banquet for any good shrink.

All I have ever required is an agreement-to-disagree.

Apart from that contention being dishonest as hell given the Reverend’s persistent efforts to hammer his sermons into the heard of his readers, agreement to disagree requires arguments worthy of respect on both sides – and there are no such arguments that the Reverend can offer.

How else do you suppose that I get along with Dan, a fervent Calvinist? We agree-to-disagree, emphasizing our similarities, not our differences. And thus we respect each other.

Dan is an amenable fellow who you can get along with because, unlike the Reverend, he doesn’t try to force-feed his views to the audience of this forum. The Reverend’s insistent, repetitive and paternalist preaching of his fathomless nonsense, rather than the nonsense itself, are the reason for the deep contempt I feel for the fellow.

[Scott Smith]

Dan is an amenable fellow who you can get along with because, unlike the Reverend, he doesn’t try to force-feed his views to the audience of this forum. The Reverend’s insistent, repetitive and paternalist preaching of his fathomless nonsense, rather than the nonsense itself, are the reason for the deep contempt I feel for the fellow.

Now, Roberto. I suppose we fear what we don't understand and have to develop stories. Anyway, you know that I would give you the shirt off my back and the last gulp from my canteen. Besides, your Is-Too/Is-Not posts demonstrate better than I can express in words what I am talking about.

CLICK!

[Scott Smith]

He refused to believe that the orginal claim was murder-by-steaming and not diesel exhaust.
----------------------------------------

See, this is an example of holocaust denial. Nobody serious ever considered that steam was the method of execution at Treblinka.

Well, the IMT obviously bought it; otherwise they would have developed some other plausible explanation for a murder weapon. Do I need to post IMT 3311-PS again? The truth is they didn't care if it was Death Rays or Moonbeams.

The steam story was among the most plausible of the testimony describing bizarre modes of murder. Delousing in steam chambers was obviously confabulated into a mechanical murder-factory. Later, historians went with what must have seemed to the propagandist an incontestable story involving smelly diesel engines, and the West German Treblinka trials bought into that. It also squared with the diesel story of Belzec before Saint Gerstein was completely discredited after being examined critically for the first time ever, decades after the end of the war. Nobody asked if these atrocity stories were really true or not, and whether the murder weapons could actually WORK.

Why?

Because they held an apriori belief in the larger atrocity story and the details were just minor inconveniences shoehorned to fit into their Belief system for historical verisimilitude.

The scientific method, however, looks at the evidence and then proceeds accordingly. And here, at Treblinka, there is scant anything other than some atrocity tales and some demographic anomalies. Yes, we should flesh-out those questions with bizarre gaschamber fantasies, shouldn't we...

Every once in awhile, some lay person retells the steam story in an newspaper edititorial. This is simply because s/he is repeating erroneous information that has been heard or read.

To the denier, this is proof that people exagerate the horror of the holocaust in order to promote some cruel propaganda.

The effect is the same. The atrocity tale is being retold for the same reason that the religionist Bears Witness about overcoming personal demons. No plot. No conspiracy. No rationality. Just a want--and NEED--to Believe. Doubters are DENIERS at best; at worst they are Evil. They work for the Devil. We must ever be vigilant!

Hard to do with the First Amendment allowing skeptics to ask impertinent questions, huh?

[Scott Smith]

Just my two cents...

Questionning the fact that diesel engines were used in gaschambers is fine to me, if you find it's impossible, so you want to prove that something else was used, it's only historian work.

But if you do that to prove that use of diesel engine, as reported in 1945 documents, is impossible, so that proves that gaschambers were impossible, that is holocaust denial.

Well, if one has an apriori belief or a blind FAITH in what others with a vested interest in a certain outcome have had to say about the matter, then yes, it is DENIAL. It is also self-evident tautology. History is not ontology, however. The TRUTH is not a good or bad thing.

I'm not contesting that there were murders. I'm taking issue with the murder-factory story. The way to find out more is not with fables but with forensic archaeology to see if the physical remains are consistent with the claims. We know that there was body-disposal and likely shootings at Treblinka. We know little else for certain. But there is no need to make up perverse gaschamber fantasies.

That said, i'm interested in your diesel exhaust study. I don't know more about lethality of it, what I know from numerous sources is that Jews were packed in gaschambers as much as possible and in any circonstances like that people will begin to die even if there is nothing lethal in the air, just because oxygen will lack very soon. Saturating the air with any exhaust will certainly hasten the processus but I'm not specialist.

Actually, packing people into an airtight room WILL kill them in short order because they will consume the available oxygen. But piping in diesel exhaust will NOT hasten the process--it will LENGTHEN it.

The reason is because diesel exhaust not only has very little carbon monoxide in it but a great deal of OXYGEN which will be added.

The result is that it might take HOURS to kill the people where it would have taken only minutes with the diesel engine switched OFF. See chart, Test no. B-13. An unloaded diesel engine has over 17 percent oxygen in the exhaust. Normal air is 21 percent. No carbon monoxide, and without it there is no practical execution.

Best Regards,
Scott

[Scott Smith]

Regarding gasvans, why would have German soldiers said before court that they used them ? This was not in Nuremberg, but in the 60s, before German courts.

Because much of the foundation for the story has been "proved" beforehand in previous show-trials, like the ones at Krasnodar/Kharkov in 1943, and subsequent trials simply take Judicial Notice of these "true facts."

In a medieval inquisition you did NOT dispute the existence of witches or witchcraft. If you do you will burn at the stake for certain. You merely affirm that the stories are TRUE--which is what the court wants to hear--but you attempt to minimize your own personal involvement in the horror and hope for the best. Sometimes you get lucky--sometimes not--but this is your only chance once accused. Any witness who deviates from the standard Holocaust story can be accused of warcrimes or collaboration himself.

But once accused, if you cooperate, the sentences will likely be light compared to the gravity of what is being alleged. In a European culture that now makes it illegal to doubt the Holocaust--whatever that means--can we expect anything else than a show-trial? I think not.

And many of these testimonies said that gasvans not really work and that during dischargement living Jews were found.

If they didn't work, then why bother? Unless the Nazis wanted to have a little fun with them bloody Jews--or the stories are nothing more than gross exagerrations at best.

Best Regards,
Scott

[Laurent]

I'm not contesting that there were murders. I'm taking issue with the murder-factory story. The way to find out more is not with fables but with forensic archaeology to see if the physical remains are consistent with the claims. We know that there was body-disposal and likely shootings at Treblinka. We know little else for certain. But there is no need to make up perverse gaschamber fantasies.

Well that is exactly what I said above. You demonstrate that diesel exhaust can't be used in a gaschamber (something I can't talk about, also I will like to know what is the chart you post here, it could be anything) and then you speak of 'perverse gaschamber fantasies'.

That is revisionnist methodology. Before speaking of 'fantasies', examinate the other possibilities (essence engines, smoke generator, what ever else).

By jumping from one point to a general affirmation, all your demonstration is flawed and so if doubt your first point. If you ignore the rules of historical demonstration, how can I be sure that you say something true on the first part ?

My major proposition is that all matters, including what Le Pen calls a "detail" of history, the gaschambers themselves, can and should be debated.

Well you matter is diesel exhaust or is it the existence of gaschambers ?

Gaschambers are not a detail. I'm not Jew or not linked to any Jewish organization, but I think that the Holocaust has been so far an unique event in the world history (thanks God for it).

Why ? Not because it was Jews that were killed, but because of the methodology used.

Genocides happen sadly on a regular basis in history. If we consider will to kill and bestiality of the killings, slaughters in Armenia and Rwanda are just so awful and evil than the Holocaust.

Most of the worst killings in history were made by soldiers, milicians or uncontroled mobs. That is what happens in Soviet held territories of Europe in 1941. Up to this date, Nazi ways to treat the 'Jewish' problem were criminal but not uncommon regarding to history. And Jews believe that the opression will hit them hard but their communities will survive.

Starting from the winter of 41-42, even if the killings in the East will continue until 1944 and the liquidation of the last workcamps, the killings became an industry and that is the uniqueness of the Shoah. No more Jew-hater killing them with clubs or bullets, but firms where engineers were working on increasing the killing capacity of their death factories. Killing Jews was no more a crusade or a bloody work that has to be done, just a practical, 'scientifical', technical problem. During the same time, 'crowd management methods', always the same in each ghetto, were used so that Jews always had a hope to save them and their family and to divide them as most as possible.

These guys make the killing of 5,5 millions Jew possible during WWII. And if diesel exhaust didn't kill (something I had no proof until now), they used something else. They were better technicians that the witnesses who saw what they thought diesel engines.

Diesel use is a detail, because it is cited only in a small part of testimonies. Gaschambers are not a detail, because they are the center part of the nazi try to eradicate Jewiness of Europe. Something they sadly almost achieved in most of East Europe... and that is something difficult to be denied.

Laurent

[Scott Smith]

Hi Laurent,

I made the chart, a simplified version, from the table for Engine B on page 99 of the famous 1941 study on diesel exhaust by Holtz and Elliott for the U.S. Bureau of Mines. I've been citing it on this forum for over a year now. I have another graphic in more detail and the raw data table, if necessary.

John C. Holtz and M. A. Elliott; Pittsburgh, PA. “The Significance of Diesel-Exhaust-Gas Analysis.” Transactions of the American Society of Mechanical Engineers. Vol. 63: February, 1941; pp. 97-105.

The information was first given in the 1984 paper by F. P. Berg in the Journal of Historical Review.

Berg, Friedrich Paul. "The Diesel Gas Chambers: Myth within a myth." Journal of Historical Review. Spring, 1984; vol. 5 no. 1: p. 15.

I agree that the diesel gaschambers and diesel gas-vans are only pieces of the puzzle. I am not qualified to analyze the Zyklon-B gaschambers at this time, but here are some other papers by Berg:

Berg, Friedrich Paul. "The German Delousing Chambers." JHR. Spring, 1986; vol. 7 no. 1: p. 73.

Berg, Friedrich Paul. "Typhus and the Jews.” JHR. Winter, 1988; vol. 08 no. 4: p. 433.

Whether the murder-weapon was diesel engines or not, we should agree that there would have had to have been a WORKABLE murder-weapon, do we not?

Best Regards,
Scott

[Hans]

. I am not qualified to analyze the Zyklon-B gaschambers at this time, but here are some other papers by Berg:

Keep the Faith, Scott. By the way, I'm still interested in the alleged questionable "process engineering" you have observed about Auschwitz gas chambers.

[Roberto]

Whether the murder-weapon was diesel engines or not, we should agree that there would have had to have been a WORKABLE murder-weapon, do we not?

Laurent,

I see Reverend Smith thinks he has found a new customer for his fathomless diesel nonsense.

I suggest you ask him if he can explain why it would not have been possible to make the exhaust of a huge diesel engine reliably lethal by restricting the air intake (as done by Pattle & Stretch on a tiny 6 bhp engine) and/or increasing the fuel supply (as done by Holtz & Elliot in the experiments where they obtained the most toxic exhaust, the fuel supply in the one with the most lethal exhaust (almost no oxygen and a carbon monoxide content of 6 %) being 60 % higher than in their experiment B-12, where the exhaust was already lethal on account of a too low oxygen content, and 6.5 times higher than in the experiment where the engine ran without a load).

The toxicity of diesel engine exhaust is a function of the contents of oxygen (the lower , the worse, the survival minimum for human beings being 8 %), carbon monoxide and oxides of nitrogen (the higher, the worse, a CO concentration of 0.4 % being lethal for a human being). These contents, in turn, are chiefly a function of the fuel-air ratio, i.e. the amount of air that is taken in by the engine due to its rotation in relation to the amount of fuel that has to be burned. This makes it logical to assume that restricting the air intake and/or increasing the fuel supply is an effective way of increasing the toxicity of the engine&#8217;s exhaust, independently of the engine being or not under load &#8211; an assumption that is confirmed by the experiments of Pattle & Stretch in 1957 and Holtz & Elliot in 1941.

Smith will object that Pattle & Stretch didn&#8217;t manage to achieve exhaust toxic enough to be lethal with their method, but that is most probably related to the fact that they made their experiments with a very small (6 bhp) engine. Comparison of the exhaust composition at similar fuel-air ratios in Pattle & Stretch&#8217;s 6 bhp engine, the 40 bhp and 70 bhp engines used by Holtz & Elliot and the 150 bhp engine used by Elliot & Davis in experiments made in 1950 suggests that the bigger the engine is, the more toxic the exhaust is likely to be. This, in turn, makes it seem plausible that Pattle & Stretch&#8217;s method (restriction of the air intake), the one of Holtz & Elliot (increase of the fuel supply) or a combination of both would have made the exhaust of a huge engine (the one at Treblinka seems to have had 500 bhp, according to eyewitness testimonials) reliably lethal on account of a too low oxygen content, probably also combined with a lethal concentration of carbon monoxide. Smith has so far been unable to explain what is wrong with this reasoning.

I suggest you also ask Smith what the hell it is supposed to matter whether the gassing engine in question could or not have been a diesel engine. Even if Smith&#8217;s technical arguments were correct, this would only mean that the engine used was actually a gasoline engine burning diesel fuel or gasoline, and that the witnesses or those who assessed their statements were mistaken in regard to this irrelevant minor detail.

The Reverend has been trying to sell his nonsense for over a year now, which is why I know his arguments by heart. However, he has neither been able to answer satisfactorily to my questions, nor - which I consider worse &#8211; managed to demonstrate the relevance of his contentions.

Enjoy this academic discussion about the sex of the angels (if you have the necessary patience, that is), which I have been through so often that it draws a hearty yawn every time I see Smith coming up with it again. I will translate the chapter on the major anti-partisan operations in Belorussia from Christian Gerlach&#8217;s Kalkulierte Morde in the meantime. That is definitely more interesting.

Best regards,

Roberto