To_Mandalay
2yr ago
Why is there not a single TII guard or prisoner, out of the thousands of people who passed through the place ('thousands' certainly went through TII at one time or another regardless of whether you think 800,000 Jews ever were sent there) who ever claimed the place was anything other than an extermination camp? Can you show any comparable historical event where every single witness lied about every detail of what what happened?
To_Mandalay
2yr ago
Immediately after the war multiple people in the area spoke about the smoke and visible flames produced by the cremation pyres at TII. The fact that these reports did not reach the outside world a few months earlier than they did is not condemnatory.
More speculation without evidence or support in mainstream historiography.
So what? 'Mainstream historiography' evolves constantly in any case. Arad's book was written forty years ago. Revisionists have no room to complain about speculation. When it comes to the very real historical problem of accounting for the disappearance of Polish Jewry, all they have is speculation. Not even any oh-so-unreliable eyewitnesses.
That is an excellent point, which also raises the point that the alleged arrival of 800,000+ Jews to the camp
I didn't say anything about 800,000 Jews. I know you claim TII was a sorting camp or a small labor camp or something like that. Even on those accounts Jews were sent to TII.
But that said, yes, mass transports of Jews were sent to TII, as documented in the Höfle telegram, the Ganzenmüller letter, the Stroop report, and a German police report from Bulgaria in April of 1943. There is no argument that "Treblinka" in these documents refers to anything other than TII, unless you want to claim that mass transports of Jews were sent to the TI work camp or Treblinka village for some reason (the Stroop report explicitly identifies TII). That is without referencing a single eyewitness.
I know you don't take the revisionist complaint about lack of documentation seriously, it's why I'm a revisionist. The mainstream makes these fantastical assertions and then tires to absolve themselves of having documentary support for what they are claiming actually happened. That was a big hint to me that Revisionists are right.
But you aren't (ostensibly) just picking holes in the 'mainstream' story. You have your own thesis to to defend which is the resettlement of the Jews in the east, which you have claimed multiple times on this forum was the real final solution. If you want to do actual history you have to actually make positive claims as to what happened in the past and not just pick apart what other people say happened. So the fact that revisionists cannot produce any actual positive evidence whatsoever for this hypothesis means they apply an unfair double standard when they ding Holocaust historians over supposedly paltry evidence.
I am currently reading a book called A TERRIBLE REVENGE: The Ethnic Cleansing of the East European Germans, 1944-1950 by Alfred Maurice de Zayas. Because it deals with a mass resettlement that actually happened anywhere besides the minds of revisionists, the book is full of photographs and eyewitness accounts from Germans who personally lived through the expulsions. In college I actually knew a German girl who told me stories about her family's expulsion from East Prussia in 1945. Contrast this with the supposed resettlement of the Jews which has produced not a single eyewitness, nor a single piece of documentary evidence. This is actually easily as ridiculous as cremating thousands of corpses with a few dry branches.
You maybe should get your eyeballs checked, as the area is significantly larger than the yellow areas.
the yellow areas identified by Colls +the area under the cement of the memorial.
Can you instead concede specifically that the cremation operation claimed by Yitzhak Arad: Late February/March 1943 - August 1943 cremation of 800,000 people, was not possible as described?
I read Arad's book a while ago, but if he indeed claims that 800,000 people were fully cremated between March 1943 and August 1943 using nothing but dry branches then yes he is wrong, you win.
You also know as well as I do that the Soviet investigation concluded that no mass graves were found and none likely remained in the camp.
The Soviet investigation found huge pits several meters deep filled with human ash and bone. Call them whatever you want.
The Revisionist approach is "Yitzahk Arad is making impossible claims, so the foundation of this entire narrative is very weak and more physical evidence is therefore required." And Holocaust blogger approach is "Yitzahk Arad is making impossible claims, so what actually happened must have been half of what he claimed."
That is actual historical revisionist, like how after the opening of the Soviet archives historians came to understand that GULag and Great Purge death tolls needed to be revised significantly downwards, or how recent archaeological excavations in Mexico showed that prior yearly estimates of sacrificial victims were significantly inflated.
But you didn't ask it specifically about the Great Purge.
Your entire point was that
ChatGPT suggested it would take at least several hundred cords of wood to cremate 5,000 people (before even bringing up Holocaust issues, so it cannot be said to just be regurgitating Revisionist literature).
To_Mandalay
2yr ago
With all the attention and rumor surrounding this camp, were there any contemporaneous reports of these daily raging infernos?
Contemporaneous reports to who?
even reports in the international press about a Treblinka "extermination camp" before the alleged extermination camp was even open.
The article in question says that Jews were sent to Treblinka (and killed) before any Jews were sent to TII. One might just as well use this article to contest that any Jews were ever sent to TII, but not even revisionists do that. It's possible that either knowledge of the intended function of TII linked before the start of operations (since Belzec and Sobibor had been open for months at this time) or that there were 'test gassings' carried out there as at Belzec and Sobibor. I consider either of these plausible.
Is there any documentation referencing or establishing the daily mass deliveries of huge quantities of dry wood? No, there is not.
Is there any documentation referencing or establish the delivery of anything to Treblinka during the entire period of its operation? No, there is not.
I find it extremely difficult to take revisionists seriously when they complain about a lack of documentation, considering your thesis is that the Nazis shipped and resettled millions of Polish Jews to the Russian east without leaving any evidence of the mass operation whatsoever in the historical record. That would in fact be much more remarkable than killing those same people and utterly unprecedented in modern history.
He, contra authoritative historians like Arad, suggests that mass cremations began much earlier.
Yitzhak Arad is not holy scripture.
So he defends mainstream historiography by abandoning it, and it's telling that the "best defense" from the Revisionist argument is to retreat from the claims when pressed.
"Mainstream historiography" does not deny the possibility of earlier cremations (though yes, the concerted effort to cremate all the bodies apparently did not begin until early 1943), nor does it insist that all of the bodies were completely cremated. Even if it did, so what?
If not all the cremations were done, or the cremation was not complete with a high state of destruction, that also flies in the face of the logic which is claimed to have motivated the orders.
You're right that it's infeasible to completely cremate several hundred thousand corpses on open air pyres in the space of a few months. Which is why it is unsurprising that it didn't work, and the place was found by the Soviets and the Poles covered in ash and bone and bits of intact human corpses .
Look at the diagram of Birkshaw pits scaled to the Treblinka-required-equivalent shows how large of an area would have been required and how Caroline Coll's GPR
Eyeballing Jannson's photo, the area of the Birkshaw pits is not in fact significantly larger than the yellow areas identified by Colls+the area under the cement of the memorial. And that is assuming that corpses could be packed only as densely as they were at Birkshaw, and no more. Certainly not, considering the density at Birkshaw was, according to Jansson, quite low.
Again I'll emphasize that Colls did not excavate any of the pits suggested to contain mass graves, so we're left in a familiar situation....
I refer you to the recent example of the Kommunarka and Cambodia. There is nothing suspicious or unusual about not digging up the sites of well-established mass graves.
You can say ChatGPT is wrong but it's highly unlikely that Revisionist literature has influenced its understanding of cremation so heavily.
I didn't say it did. The point is that ChatGPT is useless for this purpose, unless you want to agree with the bot that the Great Purge is "highly unlikely" to have happened.
To_Mandalay
2yr ago
Recently a memorial was established in Russia at the site of the Kommunarka "firing range" (google translate seems to handle this okay, there were a few sources in English but most were sparser) where several thousand people were shot and buried during the purges in the late 30s. The locations and dimensions of the mass graves were established through ground radar, soil samples, topographical survey, and other non-invasive methods, without any actual excavation. Revisionist methodology would insist on doubt that anyone was ever shot or killed at Kommunarka since the bodies weren't dug up and counted (in fact these are pretty much the same methods used by Andrej Kola at Belzec in the 90s and by Caroline Sturdy-Colls at Treblinka a few years ago, and revisionists did immediately insist that the lack of full excavations was extremely suspicious).
In Cambodia, while some of the mass graves from the Pol Pot era have been dug up, most have not been, and when researchers decided to try and get a count of how many people had died during the Khmer Rouge genocide they mostly relied on witness testimonies and non-invasive surveys of the grave-sites rather than excavations.
I don't think it's really "standard protocol" so to speak to dig up all mass graves of a mass-killing event.
I don't really see the purpose of digging up places like Treblinka. It's naturally more sensitive than massacres from hundreds or tens of thousands of years ago. The only real purpose would be to placate Holocaust deniers and I don't blame the people in charge of these sites for not being prioritizing that.
Here is the "white paper" released by the bloggers of holocaustcontroversies.com as a response to Carlo Mattogno and Jürgen Graf (the two most prolific revisionists) on the matters of Treblinka and the other two death camps in Poland. The section on cremation begins on page 440.
Here is Mattogno and Graf's response to that response. The section on cremation begins on page 1296 and runs for nearly 200 pages.
Here is the HC bloggers response to that response to the first response.
short version:
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the cremation period was probably longer than revisionists allow, as multiple witnesses report at least partial cremations going back just about to the beginning of Treblinka's operations in the fall of 1942.
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probably not all of the corpses were cremated to begin with (a survey of Belzec by a Polish scientist called Kola in the 90s detected the presence of intact corpses at the bottoms of the pits there, so likely the same is true at Treblinka).
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of those corpses that were cremated, many (likely even most) were not cremated as thoroughly as would be the case in an actual crematorium. It was not necessary to reduce the corpses to the consistency of sand, or to destroy all the bones. This is supported by the fact that the site of Treblinka was found to be littered with pieces of skeleton by the Soviets and that bits of bone can still be found lying around at the former sites of the Polish death camps today (how many people have to die somewhere so that bone fragments can still be easily found by casual observers on the surface of the ground decades later?).
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fuels besides wood (and certainly besides green wood) were used. Many witnesses testify to the use of petrol. The revisionist objection that using gasoline for mass cremation would have been a stupid idea and thus the Germans would not have done it is interesting in light of the fact that gasoline-fueled mass cremation of corpses on giant grids made out of rails was precisely the method used to cremate the victims of the Dresden bombings as discussed here. As an aside, if the horror stories about Treblinka were merely the fantasies of 'agitated peasants' (as @SecureSignals says elsewhere in the thread) it's very strange that their fantasies would just happen to hit upon the very method of makeshift mass cremation employed by the Germans two years later. As for the delivery of dry wood to Treblinka, which is dismissed on the grounds that there are no witness statements nor documentary evidence for such deliveries, it should be noted that there is essentially no documentary evidence related to the functioning of Treblinka at all. I think there are maybe half a dozen documents in total. And yet, no one, revisionist or otherwise, denies that there was some kind of facility at TII, whatever its purpose, that operated for over a year. And as for eyewitness accounts of wood deliveries, since not a single person who ever set foot in TII, Jew or German or Ukrainian, ever claimed the place was anything other than an extermination camp, all of these people must be lying for the revisionist thesis to go through, and so it is strange for revisionists to insist upon eyewitness accounts of wood deliveries considering they don't believe there are any honest Treblinka eyewitnesses period. it. I don't see why the (not even total) cremation of the Treblinka victims could not have been accomplished using wood and liquid fuels in various proportions over a period of several months. (Needless to say, there is also not a scrap of evidence, documentary, eyewitness, or physical, for the 'delivery' of millions of Polish Jews to the Russian east, a movement on par with the 'national actions' of the NKVD in the 30s or the expulsion of Germans from eastern Europe after the war, yet revisionists insist this is what happened. But that is another story.)
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The objection that there were no contemporaneous reports of the cremations by locals is senseless. There were plenty of locals who talked about the smoke generated by the funeral pyres after the war. During the war, who were the locals supposed to make reports to, exactly? The Germans?
As for burial space, the revisionist source here linked elsewhere in the thread, in turn linkes to Young, Marsland, & Smith, Foot & Mouth Disease Epidemic. Disposal of culled stock by burial: Guidance and Reference Data for the protection of controlled waters. Draft R&D Technical Report: Version 7: 20 June 2001 and provides a table from that report. Apparently, in the course of burying the carcasses of the foot and mouth epidemic, a density of about 15 pigs per sqm and 13 sheep per sqm was achieved (pig and sheep being roughly the same size as an adult human, though the victims at Treblinka were probably a bit smaller).
If there were 2ha of burial space at Treblinka, and the graves had an average depth of 5m (in reality probably significantly deeper), then the total volume of grave space would be something like 140,000m^3. Assuming 700,000 corpses, there does not seem to be a big problem. But many of the Treblinka victims were never buried in the first place.
Here revisionist Friedrich Jansson, who ran this blog, tells about the "495,000 sheep-equivalent carcasses" that were buried in about "1.3467 hectares" of burial space at Birkshaw. A total volume of grave space of 202,500 cubic meters as Jansson says elsewhere in the post. That would be a density of only about 2.4 carcasses per cubic meter. Nevertheless he considers it absurd that the 2 or so hectares of burial space in the Treblinka death camp could have accommodated ~700,000 or so corpses, or that they could have been packed any tighter than the carcasses at Birkshaw.
As another aside, with regards to ChatGPT's ability to evaluate the reality of historical atrocities , here is what ChatGPT has to say about the plausibility of Stalin's purges (without letting on that I'm asking about the Great Purge)
To_Mandalay
2yr ago
Arguably it was one of the greatest solutions to incel issues. And by limiting females to one male guaranteed one female for every male.
You said this, which seems to imply it was a Christian 'solution.'
To_Mandalay
2yr ago
I don't believe non-monogamous systems were prevalent in pre-Christian Europe.
To_Mandalay
2yr ago
Monogamy is not a Christian invention. I'm not sure where people get this idea.
To_Mandalay
2yr ago
I don't know that much about WWI but I got the sense that it was a very theatrical and "hollywood-ized" depiction of the war. I watched the 1930 years ago in college and I especially remembered the scene where their kindly postman becomes a tyrannical bully once he's in uniform. I was disappointed not to see that in this movie.
To_Mandalay
2yr ago
I am absolutely not pro-infanticide, but the killing, or at least exposure of crippled or deformed infants is extremely common throughout history. In ancient Rome it was considered something you kept quiet, but by no means a crime or a horrific crime as it might be considered today. Oftentimes people were not considered 'full' humans until they had lived a few years already, partially because mortality rates among infants and young children were so high. The idea infanticide is a heinous moral abomination seems to be a product of the slow christianization of western morality.
To_Mandalay
2yr ago
You are basing so much on so little
All I am basing on these documents, is that the Nazis sometimes used 'resettlement' as code for 'murder,' and this is a matter of documentary fact.
To_Mandalay
2yr ago
There are many, many, many documents describing resettlement in the General Government
There aren't. There are plenty of documents that use the words "resettlement" or "evacuation," there aren't any documents actually describing to the process of resettlement of several million Polish Jews (i.e, transportation, provisioning, housing) in northern Russia (like Bühler said) or Lublin (like Korherr said--evidently they couldn't even agree on where the Jews were supposed to be 'resettled'), which would have left behind plenty of documentation had it actually happened. When you add this to the fact that there is hard evidence, which I have presented, that "resettlement" was sometimes used as a code for "murder" by the Nazis, and that many Nazis discussed this openly after the war in non-coercive settings (Adolf Eichmann, for example, talked about the extermination of Jews in the GG to journalist and former SS man Wilhelm Sassen in Argentina in the 50s), things begin to look suspicious.
In these trials (the IMT) the prosecution also claimed:
Is your contention that these documents are forged?
To_Mandalay
2yr ago
Besides the fact that there is explicit evidence of 'resettlement' being used as code for 'murdered', use of 'code words' is significantly less problematic than the massive falsification of population statistics (by a factor of like six) in an internal report on the population of the Siberian GULag system.
At the very least you are no longer in any position to ding Holocaust historians for not taking Nazi claims of resettlement at face value.
To_Mandalay
2yr ago
I think it's ridiculous to believe NKVD officers in charge of compiling deportation statistics would lie to their superiors about the number of people in their GULag system by a factor of six, causing all sorts of administrative problems, so that they could hoodwink 21st century Holocaust revisionists in a hypothetical future where the USSR collapsed. If you don't, then fine, we won't agree on that.
Sanning cites a different mainstream source with a higher estimate. There's variance and uncertainty, that's the entire point.
He cites one source which is flatly contradicted by every other source and also by common sense. There was no country on earth allowing hordes of illegal Polish shtetl Jews over its borders. It is known where the Jews of Poland went in the 30s, when they went anywhere. They went to Palestine, and they went to the Americas. A tiny number went to other European countries. The Jewish-Polish emigration of the 1930s is accounted for. There is 'uncertainty' in that, maybe 68,000 Jews went to Palestine, maybe it was 70,000, there is not uncertainty that maybe it was five times that number, and maybe hundreds of thousands of Polish Jews snuck into the US when no one was looking.
This is like saying, "there's uncertainty on whether Caesar was born in 100 or 101 BC, so maybe he was actually born in 200 BC." The uncertainty Sanning wants does not exist.
I had to read this a couple of times because... of course I agree that there is a clear motivation for hiding the toll of famine and repression. But if there was famine and repression experienced by the large numbers of Jews who fled Poland to the Soviet Union ahead of the German advance (very reasonable to assume and widely reported by mainstream sources), there would be a motivation to transfigure those people to be victims of Nazi gas chambers instead of dead in camps in Siberia.
In internal NKVD documents that no one but Soviet officials were ever supposed to see? Your contention is essentially that the NKVD fudged these numbers so that fifty years later, after the fall of the Soviet Union they could be used to support the historicity of the Holocaust.
Sanning doesn't rely on this assumption of NKVD data mainpulation
You're right, because this data wasn't available yet when Sanning wrote his book, and it shows the number of Jewish deportees into the Soviet interior to have been not much more than 100,000, and very likely less. This is a big problem for Sanning because he needs the number to be in the range of 600,000, but this is disproven by NKVD data, which was produced for the eyes of the NKVD (so not for the purpose of propagandizing anyone), and which there is subsequently little reason to distrust on this point.
But to stay on point, Sanning has 100,000 Jews leaving Poland every year between 1933 and 1939. The Polish government, as Sanning admits, says more like 19,000 (generously, actually a bit less). Marcus' book, drawing on the contemporary statistics of the Jewish Agency for Palestine and other sources, says about 17,000, which is in line with the estimates of the Polish government. Sanning's estimates are a massive outlier, though unfortunately I can't find his source online to see if he's even presenting it honestly, and also don't make any sense when you consider the extremely strict immigration policies of the United States (which would have been the second most popular destination for Polish Jews after Palestine).
The total emigration from Poland in total from 1931 to 1938 was about 500,000. Sanning would need every one of these to be Jews, but in fact most were gentile Poles working abroad. Jews were only 20% of this number, and this over several years. Polish Jewish emigration to other European countries per year was very low, and in no year after 1933 did it even rise above 1,000 people. The majority of Jews who left Poland in the 30s went to Palestine, and their numbers are well accounted for. About 68,000 between 1931 and 1939. Much less than that went elsewhere. France and the Benelux countries, the other main destinations for Polish Jews, were only receiving a few hundred Jews (Jews total, so not just Polish Jews) per year from 1931 to 1934. From '34 to 1939, this shrank to a few dozens per year. There is absolutely no room for 100,000 Jewish emigrants from Poland a year. The estimate of 3,000,000+ Polish Jews on the eve of the war remains well-founded, while Sanning's numbers are completely baseless.
To_Mandalay
2yr ago
You can cite other sources but you are just affirming the uncertainty of the problem...
It is the only source I am aware of that gives a number anywhere near as high as 100,000 per year for Polish Jewish emigration. The other sources say lower, and much lower.
Again, Sanning cites Polish government data as stating that between 1934 and 1937, 75,527 Jews left Poland. It's reasonable to say that this (which would be about 18,882 per year) may be an underestimate. It's completely unreasonable to say that the real per year number was 100,000 (based again, on a single source), meaning the Polish government failed to notice 80% of Jewish emigrants. That's absurd. There is uncertainty, there is not remotely that level of uncertainty. The fact that Sanning doesn't even mention the extremely high rate of unregistered Jewish births (compared to gentiles) makes his fertility estimates worthless.
The manipulated results of the Soviet census were presented in public at the party congresses for propaganda purposes. There's no comparison to NKVD deportation data that was only unearthed in the 90s.
To_Mandalay
2yr ago
Sanning's estimate for the pre-war Jewish population of Poland is way too low. His analysis doesn't even mention that nearly half of Jewish births in pre-war Poland went unregistered, so his conclusion that death rate surpassed birth rate is unsustainable.
He has 100,000 Jews leaving Poland every year between 1933 and 1939, based on a single cite from the Institute for Contemporary History in Munich in the early 50s. I cannot access the primary source, but I am unaware of any other source with numbers this high. In *Social and Political History of the Jews in Poland 1919-1939," by Joseph Marcus, drawing on a variety of sources, estimates roughly 150,000 Jewish emigrants from Poland between 1931 and 1939. Half of these went to Palestine, which had displaced the US as the primary destination of Polish Jews, so there is no room for extra hundreds of thousands of Polish Jews floating around the rest of the world.
Sanning cites Polish government statistics between 1934 and 1937 as showing 75,527 Jewish emigrants from Poland, but discards them as a "worthless" underestimate. For roughly the same period (1932 to 1936), Marcus cites a little more than 85,000. It is believable that the Polish authorities might miss 10,000 or so illegal emigrants, but it is not really believable that they would undercount Jewish emigration by a factor of more than five, as Sanning needs for his thesis to work.
Sanning doesn't really provide any grounds for removing 700,000 Jews from the standard estimate of Polish Jewish population in 1939.
@Stefferi by the way, I don't know if you've ever heard of or read this book, but if you are interested in demography it is a pretty interesting look at Polish Jewry in the inter-war years.
To_Mandalay
2yr ago
Since "Holocaust Denier" is already a very small sub-group (certianly smaller than creationists now, let alone a few decades ago) "people who take huge chunks out of their lives to argue with Holocaust Deniers" is an even smaller one. The closest is probably the Holocaust Controversies blog which is not very well organized and nearly as active as it used to be but still updates occasionally, and has had a running debate with many of the more high profile denialists (Carlo Mattogno, Jurgen Graf, etc.) for many years. The Skeptics Society forum also has a subforum dedicated to Holocaust denial which is not very active but has a long backlog, which consists of more or less the same group of people arguing with HD for years. People talk about "the death of denial" because most of the big names have either died, dropped off the map, or are getting on in years, but there's probably a "death of anti-denial" too because on that side it's also mostly the same people that it's been since the early 2000s.
To_Mandalay
2yr ago
I’d be interested to listen to a good-faith debate between, say, @SecureSignals and an actually well-respected PhD Holocaust historian
You could ask David Cole on twitter. He's not a "well-respected PhD Holocaust historian" and he's usually actually a 'revisionist' who got famous in the 90s for his "David Cole inside Auschwitz" video. But he agrees that 1 million+ Jews were killed through gas chambers in Belzec, Sobibor, and Treblinka. At this point he doesn't even deny there were gassings at Auschwitz, though he says they were sporadic and done on the direct authority of Rudolf Hoess rather than ordered from Berlin (unlike, he says, Belzec, Treblinka, etc.). I think he puts the final death toll at around 4 million taking into account the General Government transit camps, shootings in the USSR, Auschwitz, etc. I'd say if Cole's version is correct most people, myself included, would agree "the Holocaust" happened.
He'd probably say no to a debate as well (and might insult you while he's at it) but probably your best bet.
To_Mandalay
2yr ago
I shower every day, unless I'm not going to be around other people in any kind of close-quarters setting for any extended period of time, in which I shower every other day. I can't go more than two days without showering before I feel disgusting and have to shower for my own comfort. I am extremely skeptical of anyone who claims they can go a whole week or more without showering and not stink pretty bad.
To_Mandalay
3yr ago
This may have been the case for the Chinese, where a lot of the murders were tong related or otherwise financially motivated, but with the Italians and Irish the great majority were things like drunken fighting, disputes over women, avenging personal slights, etc. I don't know if the presence or absence of organized crime would significantly impact things like that.
To_Mandalay
3yr ago
NYC homicide rates are specifically for men, Philly rates are for the whole ethnic group. NY is still higher but it's not as extreme.
To_Mandalay
3yr ago
The cite is "Shihō Chōsaka, Shihō Kenkyū 17, Hōkokushū (Judicial Research: No. 17, Collection of Reports), Tokyo: Shihōshō (Mar. 1933), 434 (National Diet Library, Call Number: AZ-771-H26)." I don't know if this would be digitized anywhere.
To_Mandalay
3yr ago
Homicide rates have dropped a lot in the last two centuries or so, at least in part because of greatly improving medical care. That's why I think proportions are more important that absolute numbers.
The data point about Koreans in Japan is also very interesting; I'm reasonably confident that Korea's murder rate is not 14 times higher than Japan's.
That's for crime in general, not homicide; unfortunately I couldn't find data on Korean immigrant vs Japanese homicide in particular, though another source I posted also stated that they were overrepresented in "violent crime" (unfortunately without giving a proportion, and citing a Japanese-language source).
I've seen that video. It would be comparable if there was a wealth of testimonies from people who had personally spoken with these phantom Cossacks, and testimony from the Cossacks themselves.
Treblinka, specifically. The correct proportion is not "Treblinka witnesses who allege extermination" : "all witnesses who were anywhere in the Nazi camp system at any given time" it is "Treblinka witnesses who allege extermination" : "all witnesses who were ever in Treblinka." The proportion is 1:1. TII was so small that it would be next to impossible for anyone to send any significant amount of time there and not realize what the place was, so for the revisionist case to go through it must be that every Treblinka witness who ever testified about the place lied through their teeth, and not a single honest Treblinka witness ever came forward. This is highly implausible.
There were Treblinka witnesses who did not identify Demjanjuk as Ivan Grozny, while there are none who did not identify Treblinka as a death camp.
Victims of the Great Purge (Kamenev, Zinoviev, Bukharin, Tukhachevsky etc.) generally denied the charges until they were beaten into confession. Franz Stangl and Kurt Franz denied what Treblinka was, neither in the courtroom, nor in private life. Neither did any other Treblinka guard. Franz and Stangl were not tortured and they received the maximum penalty. They had nothing to gain by lying.
Not to mention those who spoke about Treblinka outside of courtroom settings like Eichmann (before his abduction) and Franz Suchomel.
Were there hundreds of people who claimed to have worked at the corpse factory?
The Treblinka "narrative" was established in 1942 by the simple fact that Jews were going in and not coming out, and then by the reports of escapees who returned to Warsaw (who must, on the revisionist account, have all been coordinating their lies very well).
My evidence that TII was an extermination camp is this:
there is German documentation to support the arrival of very many mass transports of Polish Jews to Treblinka, as I outlined earlier in the thread.
Eyewitness testimony is unanimous that TII was an extermination facility.
Huge quantities of human ash and remains found on the premises in 1944.
I realize I'm not going to convince you. You are familiar with the same evidence I am. You are not satisfied with that evidence but there it is.
A few weeks ago you said this:
Where is the evidence for this? It's not fair that only one side of the debate is expected to provide evidence for their thesis.
Is there any German documentation of this operation? Are there train schedules? Memos ("the resettlement of the Warsaw Jews in Riga is nearly complete etc.") ? Accounting for the massive quantities of supplies that would be necessary to settle and provision these millions of people in the east? Where were these Jews "concentrated"? Are there any first-hand witnesses to this mass population movement? Jews who underwent deportation? SS men, local auxiliaries who oversaw the logistics of this gargantuan operation? Reports to Berlin on the operation as it was carried out? Red Army men who overran this massive concentration of Polish Jews in the western USSR? Is there any physical evidence of this operation? The remains of the place(s) where these people were "concentrated"? The people themselves?
As far as I have seen, there is nothing of the sort.
The Soviet deportations from the Baltic states were many times smaller than this supposed Jewish deportation would have been, and yet there remains ample documentation of the state agencies that carried out the deportations, documentation on the settlement and lives of the deportees in Siberia, eyewitness accounts from the deportees themselves, memoirs, and photographs.
You have said that the story of Treblinka is absurd. I think it is absurd to claim that the Germans carried out a massive action larger than any single Soviet deportation, and pulled it off without leaving a shred of evidence behind, but this is the revisionist claim.
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