Eichmann in Jerusalem

Discussions on the Holocaust and 20th Century War Crimes. Note that Holocaust denial is not allowed. Hosted by David Thompson.
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michael mills
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#76

Post by michael mills » 07 Aug 2003, 12:29

Demonio wrote:
Im actually 24.Why do you speak of Village people. How do you know the people in my Village ?
Demonio,

The "Village People" were a mock rock group who were around when you were a very small boy.

"YMCA" was one of their best-known numbers. I am reliably informed that their fascination with the institution related mainly to the opportunity it provided for meeting athletic young men in the showers.

Michael Mills

tonyh
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#77

Post by tonyh » 07 Aug 2003, 12:59

But what agenda is he supposed to be serving. He knew he would hang any way
Why must it be an agenda? To have an agenda, you must have an endgame and Hoeß knew his life was over anyway. There was no way he was going to recieve a fair trial. So why not say what his captors wanted him to say, so his last remaining months on Earth would be relatively easy, instead of not saying what they wanted him to say and having ten shades of shit beaten out of him repeatedly.

People will say or sign anything with the constant threat of pain over their heads.

Tony


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witness
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#78

Post by witness » 07 Aug 2003, 13:11

There was no way he was going to recieve a fair trial. So why not say what his captors wanted him to say,
Exactly the opposite ! Why not to fight tooth and nail to prove the truth if you know already that you are doomed anyway?
People will say or sign anything with the constant threat of pain over their heads.
So much appreciation for the shining hero of the SS ubermench knighthood ?
:lol:

tonyh
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#79

Post by tonyh » 07 Aug 2003, 14:54

Exactly the opposite ! Why not to fight tooth and nail to prove the truth if you know already that you are doomed anyway?
Alread answered in the previous mail. If you know you heading for the rope and not telling your captors what they want to hear leads to pain...then you sign and say what they want you to sign and say.
So much appreciation for the shining hero of the SS ubermench knighthood ?
A really stupid comment, even for you Witness. Well done :D

Tony

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chalutzim
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#80

Post by chalutzim » 07 Aug 2003, 17:04

tonyh wrote:
But what agenda is he supposed to be serving. He knew he would hang any way
Why must it be an agenda? To have an agenda, you must have an endgame and Hoeß knew his life was over anyway. There was no way he was going to recieve a fair trial. So why not say what his captors wanted him to say, so his last remaining months on Earth would be relatively easy, instead of not saying what they wanted him to say and having ten shades of shit beaten out of him repeatedly.

People will say or sign anything with the constant threat of pain over their heads.

Tony
Typical psychologic insight found on a Friday night in the street corner pub. Deniers become desperate with all that Hoess stuff. It's quite amusing. Let's see what an honest and knowledgeable member have to say regarding Hoess credibility:
Roberto wrote:
My French is not very good, but what I read in the above quote is that Lucy Dawidowicz in 1975 gave an estimation (total for Auschwitz) of two million.
Scott Smith wrote:
Lucy Dawidowicz (1974) claimed 2-4 million at Auschwitz, not 3-4 million as I stated.

Did she say "2-4", or something like "a Soviet investigation commission said 4, but I think it was half of that at most"?

The French text I quoted suggests the latter rather than the former.
Scott Smith wrote:
Martin Gilbert (1980), Auschwitz and the Allies, p. 337 claimed "minimum" "two million Jews" and "two million" others, i.e., Poles, Russians, homosexuals, etc.
If so (I'm reasonably skeptical of anything that comes from the keyboard of Mr. Smith), this would mean that Gilbert didn't take into account the results of historical research that had been going on for almost three decades when he wrote his cited book.

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.

The fact that Höß gave this figure in the depositions at his Warsaw trial and in his memoirs is one of the strongest indications against the allegation that either were in any way influenced by his captors. Would the Poles have tortured or otherwise influenced Höß into providing a figure that countered the one upheld by the Polish government at the time (and until 1990)? As John C. Zimmermann writes in his online article How Reliable are the Höss Memoirs:
Höss was directly challenging the credibility of his captors. He simply could not have written this under duress. Rather, if he was being forced to write these memoirs the 4 million number would certainly have turned up. Also, this shows that his memoirs were not tampered with by the Polish or Soviet authorities. This could explain the reason - though the author has no information to this effect - the Höss memoirs were not released by the Poles until 1958, more than eleven years after they were written.
Source of quote:

http://www.holocaust-history.org/auschw ... s-memoirs/
http://www.thirdreichforum.com/viewtopi ... 2 11:47 pm

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witness
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#81

Post by witness » 07 Aug 2003, 23:56

tonyh wrote:
So much appreciation for the shining hero of the SS ubermench knighthood ?
A really stupid comment, even for you Witness. Well done :D

Tony
Ad hominem ? .There is nothing stupid in this remark of course but I like it that you are so pissed off by my mockery comment about the ubermench stamina of your SS hero who himself did not hezitate to give orders to murder and torture his own prisoners.
Shooting in your own foot Tonyh ?Well done . :)

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#82

Post by David Thompson » 08 Aug 2003, 01:38

Please avoid negative personal comments.

demonio
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#83

Post by demonio » 08 Aug 2003, 08:12

witness wrote:
tonyh wrote:
So much appreciation for the shining hero of the SS ubermench knighthood ?
A really stupid comment, even for you Witness. Well done :D

Tony
Ad hominem ? .There is nothing stupid in this remark of course but I like it that you are so pissed off by my mockery comment about the ubermench stamina of your SS hero who himself did not hezitate to give orders to murder and torture his own prisoners.
Shooting in your own foot Tonyh ?Well done . :)
The witness makes a good point

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Scott Smith
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#84

Post by Scott Smith » 08 Aug 2003, 08:22

witness wrote:
tonyh wrote:There was no way he was going to recieve a fair trial. So why not say what his captors wanted him to say,
Exactly the opposite ! Why not to fight tooth and nail to prove the truth if you know already that you are doomed anyway?
A brainwashed person has no will of his own beyond the permission of his conquerors or what he thinks will please them. They do not have to hold the threat of pain over him because he will beg them for torment. And if they will not comply in this he will torture himself. The Sword of Damocles is always hanging over his head and he will punish his own misthoughts with the vengeance of any Inquistor. It is not enough that he lies--he must believe his lies.
:)

demonio
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#85

Post by demonio » 08 Aug 2003, 10:42

Scott Smith wrote:
witness wrote:
tonyh wrote:There was no way he was going to recieve a fair trial. So why not say what his captors wanted him to say,
Exactly the opposite ! Why not to fight tooth and nail to prove the truth if you know already that you are doomed anyway?
A brainwashed person has no will of his own beyond the permission of his conquerors or what he thinks will please them. They do not have to hold the threat of pain over him because he will beg them for torment. And if they will not comply in this he will torture himself. The Sword of Damocles is always hanging over his head and he will punish his own misthoughts with the vengeance of any Inquistor. It is not enough that he lies--he must believe his lies.
:)
psychology of the condemned ?
:)

xcalibur
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#86

Post by xcalibur » 08 Aug 2003, 10:57

Scott Smith wrote:
witness wrote:
tonyh wrote:There was no way he was going to recieve a fair trial. So why not say what his captors wanted him to say,
Exactly the opposite ! Why not to fight tooth and nail to prove the truth if you know already that you are doomed anyway?
A brainwashed person has no will of his own beyond the permission of his conquerors or what he thinks will please them. They do not have to hold the threat of pain over him because he will beg them for torment. And if they will not comply in this he will torture himself. The Sword of Damocles is always hanging over his head and he will punish his own misthoughts with the vengeance of any Inquistor. It is not enough that he lies--he must believe his lies.
:)

Yes.... and perhaps no. It seems apparent that Hoess' testimony was to one degree or another coerced (and by that standard alone should never have been allowed to be entered into evidence in any trial against any defendant). We have spoken here of his possible motivation or "agenda" for making the statements he did and the suggestion that he made them truthfully because he knew that he faced the noose has been suggested. On the other hand, we also have the fact that Hoess had been told repeatedly that his family faced deportation to the Russians should he not be compliant. Coercion enough. This in and of itself should have been enough (using the legal standards of the day) to impugn his testimony regardless of its veracity.

Having said that, legalities are one thing and truth is another. Was he a complete liar? I think not. His part in the brutalisation of prisoners and killings at Auschwitz are indeed very hard to ignore. His testimony before the IMT, his sworn statements, etc. all seem oddly weighted to proving that there was no ill treatment of prisoners (as though this was where he felt his main guilt lay), and yet he then goes on very dispassionately about gassing transports. In short, he seems to deny vehemently the smaller crimes and can't wait to talk volubly about and confess to the larger one.

tonyh
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#87

Post by tonyh » 08 Aug 2003, 11:54

Ad hominem ? .There is nothing stupid in this remark of course but I like it that you are so pissed off by my mockery comment about the ubermench stamina of your SS hero who himself did not hezitate to give orders to murder and torture his own prisoners.
Of course its a stupid remark. There is nobody on the thread who would look upon Hoeß as a "shining hero of the SS ubermench knighthood" and frankly, such a flippant silly aside would be incapable of making me "pissed off". You just succeed in making yourself look foolish, Witness.

Tony

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witness
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#88

Post by witness » 08 Aug 2003, 12:19

There is nobody on the thread who would look upon Hoeß as a "shining hero of the SS ubermench knighthood" and frankly, such a flippant silly aside would be incapable of making me "pissed off". You just succeed in making yourself look foolish, Witness.
You are desperately trying to prove that all Hoess's testimony is worthless because written under duress.Therefore it is quite logical to assume that you purpose is to apologize the crimes of the Nazis in Auschwitz because the Nazis are your heroes.
As for the " shining hero of the SS ubermench knighthood" ...I explain -this is called sarcasm .
You are indeed foolish if you are not able to comprehend this :)

tonyh
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#89

Post by tonyh » 08 Aug 2003, 12:40

Therefore it is quite logical to assume that you purpose is to apologize the crimes of the Nazis in Auschwitz because the Nazis are your heroes.
Another remarkably stupid comment, Witness, you must be proud.
:lol:
Tony

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witness
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#90

Post by witness » 08 Aug 2003, 12:55

I am wondering -are you projecting your own stupidity Tony ? :)
Let's start calling names contest ?
How old are you ?

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