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Yes, unlike securesignal's other hobby horse, HBD belief is in the majority here, and the rest don't want to know, safe in the knowledge that 'scientists disagree'.
Oh, ChatGPT gives amazing results on the other hobby horse as well. For example, Chat-GPT flatly denies the Treblinka narrative when pressed to describe the logistics of the operation and gives Revisionist arguments when asked to explain the skepticism, saying "The historical accuracy of claims about large-scale outdoor cremations, particularly in the context of the Holocaust, is widely disputed and further research is needed to fully understand the scale and nature of these events":
Now it could be said that there is clearly Revisionist material in the training dataset, so it's not too surprising that ChatGPT gives a critique of the Treblinka narrative that is essentially the Revisionist argument verbatim. But I do not doubt that the quantity of orthodox material on the Holocaust narrative vastly outnumbers Revisionist literature, so it's interesting to see a Revisionist response from ChatGPT on the Treblinka question. I would maintain that Revisionists are right that the claimed logistics of Treblinka are completely absurd, so ChatGPT can't (yet) formulate a response that explains how this could have reasonably happened, so it prefers the Revisionist criticism of the claimed logistics of the operation.
It also gave a Revisionist response to the other two controversies I asked it about (shrunken heads and lampshades allegedly discovered at Buchenwald by Allied investigators).
Obviously it's very easy to also trigger ChatGPT to give orthodox answers about the Holocaust and how it's important to remember it so it never happens again, etc. I'm pretty sure asking about "gas chambers" would be tightly controlled as HBD for example, but clearly cremation capacity and burial space are problems that slipped through the censors, for now. But it's going to get better over time at detecting Denier arguments and avoiding them.
I suspect in terms of text available on the internet, where a book that wasn't digitized carries zero weight and an anonymous commenter has weight, on specific issues that "revisionists" like to ask questions about, the revisionist case probably has more weight in the AI's model. After all, it was trained on predicting internet text, and I've never seen anyone expounding unprompted on the logistical details of how the Holocaust happened who wasn't pushing a "revisionist" position.
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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:
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.
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).
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?).
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.)
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)
A key takeaway from the Holocaust blogger's analysis is that even they, using the most generous (and wrong) assumptions possible in order to reduce hypothetical fuel requirements, still estimate it would have required 30,450 kg of dry wood to cremate 2,500 bodies. With a daily cremation rate of 5,000 - 7,000 bodies attested to by witnesses and claimed by mainstream historiography, that would be an average daily fuel requirement of over 60-85+ cords of wood to be delivered, hauled, used for construction, and burned on a daily basis for 150 days straight. That is a daily requirement of over three to four times the amount of wood as in this video.
The burning of this wood according to Jansonn's estimate would produce the daily equivalent to a 150m x 150m forest fire that looks like this. Again, this is assuming the Holocaust blogger's stated fuel requirements rather than an estimate closer to Carlo Mattogno's analysis which would multiply the scale of these allegations.
These raging infernos were only about 500 meters from a busy rail line connecting Malkinia to Siedlce Poland. The camp was also in the area of several villages and hamlets. The Treblinka camp was well known among the locals and there were even reports in the international press about a Treblinka "extermination camp" before the alleged extermination camp was even open.
With all the attention and rumor surrounding this camp, were there any contemporaneous reports of these daily raging infernos? No, there weren't, despite the fact that local villagers would go to the camp perimeter to trade embezzled property. Is there any documentation referencing or establishing the daily mass deliveries of huge quantities of dry wood? No, there is not. Is there any witness account for how this wood was delivered or hauled to the cremation aera despite the huge logistical problem it posed? No, there is not. There is nothing.
Witnesses claim little or no fuel was required because the story-tellers had no conception for the amount of fuel that would be required to actually do what they were claiming (and neither do many people here, apparently). So they didn't think it was a problem to claim that only dry branches were used, or no fuel was used at all.
What is the absolute best way to defend the claims? The best way to defend the claims is to abandon them, as To_Mandalay has. He, contra authoritative historians like Arad, suggests that mass cremations began much earlier. Also contra mainstream historiography, claims that some unspecified portion of the victims did not get cremated and that complete cremation was probably not attained. 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.
The problem with his retreat is that he further contradicts the "logic" in the entire operation. Why didn't Treblinka have state-of-the-art crematoria like other concentration camps? Because the plan was to bury the bodies, and the order to exhume and cremate them was a last-minute decision to hide the evidence after the Katyn Forest mass graves were discovered by the Germans and Himmler supposedly got spooked by his own mass graves being found in the same way.
Likewise, it is said that the motive for the gargantuan task to exhume and cremate millions of corpses was to hide evidence of the crime. 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.
Jannson's analysis strongly supports the Revisionist argument. 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 results identified 0 pits with the dimensions resembling the Birkshaw pits in size, shape, or volume. 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....
"Not prioritizing" that is not an accurate description. The authorities responsible for the site hired a team of archaeologists, and produced TV shows and exhibits based on that work. They forbade the excavation of any mass graves. So it's not just "not prioritized", it's forbidden.
"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" sounds familiar...
Genocide deniers ask: Where are the bodies of the residential schoolchildren?
We see To_Mandalay pull a very familiar script. This is the script that Revisionists have had to contend with for decades. And now the Kamloops allegations provide another example that should hopefully wake people up to the tactics used by actors maliciously engaging in atrocity propaganda for political purposes.
Well the most pertinent claim from ChatGPT was on cremation requirements in a context that wasn't related to historical atrocities. So you have to assume that Revisionist literature polluted ChatGPT's understanding of the science of cremation even in a non-atrocity context, and that's why it estimated fuel requirements in line with Mattogno and not in line with the Holocaust bloggers. You can say ChatGPT is wrong but it's highly unlikely that Revisionist literature has influenced its understanding of cremation so heavily.
Contemporaneous reports to who?
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 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.
Yitzhak Arad is not holy scripture.
"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?
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 .
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.
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.
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 anyone anywhere!
Any sort of document or report about anybody in the area noticing a daily forest-fire size inferno from the camp which was well known among the locals. Somehow reports of a "Treblinka extermination camp" reached London before Treblinka was even open! But during the height of the extermination with the most publicly visible impossible-to-hide massive fires 24/7, there's nobody who noticed anything? Nobody who noticed hundreds of cords of wood being delivered every single day? None of the witnesses noticed or appreciated the massive amount of fuel that would be required for what they were claiming to witness? They kind of forgot about the thousands of cords of wood that would have had to have been burned?
More speculation without evidence or support in mainstream historiography. It's not plausible that the TII "extermination camp" would be outed in the international press before it was even opened by shrewd spies operating in the area, but then the impossible-to-hide daily mass cremation fires were not apparently noticed by anybody.
That is an excellent point, which also raises the point that the alleged arrival of 800,000+ Jews to the camp, T-II, is not documented. So that should be added as another premise to these grand claims that does not have documentary support. The claim that ~800,000 people step foot in T-II specifically is based solely on witness testimony and has no documentary support. So there's another assumption added to the pile needed to make the story work.
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.
Another very good point! But if you doubt Arad's claims strongly enough you will be thrown in jail in much of Europe. On the other hand, you can deny holy scripture without anybody raising an eyebrow, which makes Holocaust historiography holier-than-holy scripture. The main point is that these claims made in mainstream historiography were not based on strong evidence, and instead of Holocaust bloggers saying "Arad and mainstream historians got it right, look at all this evidence that shows their conclusions", the bloggers will retreat from the claims that are being challenged by Revisionists to try to make them more reasonable than what was originally asserted.
You maybe should get your eyeballs checked, as the area is significantly larger than the yellow areas. The shape of the yellow areas also do not resemble the shape of a well-constructed huge mass graves which would have been required to achieve the shape and dimensions of the graves alleged. Caroline Colls did not find a single pit that resembled the very large pits you are referencing, and of course she did not excavate any mass graves in the camp at all.
That's a vague concession. 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? That would be a more meaningful concession but I have a feeling you won't be willing to make it.
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. And since then no excavation of alleged mass graves has ever been done, and it's specifically forbidden by Jewish authorities.
This is also a good demonstration of the Revisionist versus the Holocaust blogger approach. 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 the pattern I've observed and it's another reason I'm a revisionist.
I think ChatGPT gave a reasonable response. Such a mass execution is highly unlikely in general in that it's a rare event. But you didn't ask it specifically about the Great Purge. ChatGPT gave specific criticisms of the evidence for the Treblinka narrative. Does it give similar criticisms of the evidence for the Great Purge?
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.
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.
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.
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.
the yellow areas identified by Colls +the area under the cement of the memorial.
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.
The Soviet investigation found huge pits several meters deep filled with human ash and bone. Call them whatever you want.
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.
Your entire point was that
Yitzhak Arad served as the director of Yad Vashem, Israel's official Holocaust museum, for over twenty years. It's fair to say that this is the most important academic position in Holocaust historiography. Arad's work, despite being originally published 40 years ago, is still the standard work on the so-called Operation Reinhardt Death Camps.
The Operation Reinhard Death Camps, Revised and Expanded Edition, authored by Arad with Yad Vashem as contributor, was published only in 2018. Are these claims still in the "Revised and expanded edition?" Yes, they are. From Chapter 23 of my copy:
Needless, to say there's no documentary evidence whatsoever that Himmler visited Treblinka. But Arad goes on:
From Chapter Twenty-Four: "The Erasure of the Crimes"
What are the implications of acknowledging Arad's claims are impossible? For one, Arad's account does not permit you peg the start of mass cremation earlier than Himmler's alleged visit to Treblinka in February/March 1943. Secondly, you can't make the cremation operation end later because of the camp revolt. Thirdly, leaving a bunch of corpses uncremated would contradict the claimed orders and objective of the alleged cremation operation- to erase the crime. So you can't really massage Arad's account into a workable narrative without dispensing with the historical continuity that he is presenting.
In any case, the persistence of these impossible claims in the most important standard works of the Holocaust proves that Revisionism is necessary. You don't seem to mind conceding that Arad's account is impossible, but there is no mainstream historian that challenges those claims on their impossibilities. Only Revisionists do that.
Arad's claims demonstrate a systematic failure of mainstream historiography. If impossible claims have been made and believed for so many decades, that is proof that additional evidence is required to truly understand what transpired. In other words, you can't just say "Oh they must have cremated 200,000 people instead of 800,000 then because that is more plausible." The proper conclusion is that more research is needed if any of the claims attached to the discredited narrative are true to any extent.
And given the systematic failure of witnesses, courts, and historians to ascertain the truth of these allegations, they should not be believed without a large amount of physical evidence. Physical evidence that would still be right there in the ground in massive quantities for the mainstream to uncover - if they wanted to. But they don't want to- why complicate these fantastical narratives, which are already widely believed, with real excavations?
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Thanks for all the info, looks like I've got a bunch of reading to do.
You switched from square to cubic meters halfway through there, but 2ha= 20000m^2, x15 gives us 300k, so the pit would have to be two and a third time's as deep as those in the UK. Seems within reason.
If there are chunks of bone just laying around, why is nobody digging these sites? We can reconstruct the details of massacres from ten thousand years ago, why is nobody trying to do the same here while evidence is still easy to gather?
The idea that it would be "disrespectful" is ridiculous if there are body parts laying on the surface unburied. Surely someone should be willing to fix that, right?
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.
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Quoting the camp commandant, Franz Stangl:
Concrete blocks were installed as a base to lay the rails on. About 1000 bodies were burned at a time, with 5-7,000 per day.
Quoting SS-Oberscharführer Heinrich Matthes, who was in charge of Camp III (the extermination section of Treblinka):
Yechiel Reichmann, a Jew part of the "burning group" who was one of the several dozen who survived the mass breakout from Treblinka that ended its operation:
(The "expert" referred to was SS-Standartenführer Paul Blobel.)
Once again, I would repeat that the biggest obstacle to Holocaust denialists is why exactly the Germans (as well as Ukrainian and Polish auxiliaries who testified about the cremation of corpses at the Aktion Reinhard camps) went into such imaginary and morbid detail about something that never happened. Why not just deny it all if they were innocent? Why come up with such ridiculous exaggerations and lies, and then why did the other witnesses also lie to corroborate them? Barely any Jewish victims survived the Reinhard camps to claim otherwise.
Quotes sourced from Belzec, Sobibor, Treblinka : The Operation Reinhard Death Camps by Yitzkah Arad.
Here are some other gems from Yechiel Reichmann including claims of:
The Germans building a special incinerator in Treblinka to exterminate British Jews after Hitler conquered Great Britain:
And blood that burst into flames like fuel:
Reichmann also falsely identified the American-Ukrainian citizen John Demjanjuk as a Treblinka guard known as "Ivan the Terrible." Demjanjuk was convicted and sentenced to death, but the conviction was overturned because it turned out all the Jewish witnesses which had identified him were "mistaken."
Things to keep it mind when you are trying to gauge the credibility of Rajchman's claim that thousands of people were cremated with "dry branches", or that blood seeped from the earth and burst into flames.
The Nazi leadership were delusional. They believed they could turn the tide until the very end of the war. Hitler's megalomaniacal redevelopment of Berlin was only put on hold in March 1943, after his defeat in Stalingrad. Even in late 1944, they were expending military resources to destroy artefacts and buildings of no military value in Warsaw. The notion is hardly "laughable".
That sounds like methane or other decomposition products from the bodies, cf. landfill fires. It is not nearly as preposterous as you are claiming that a giant pile of corpses that had been decaying for a long time could burst into flames and burn for a day. Presumably those present were not familiar with the nature of anaerobic decomposition, which is why they misidentified the substance as blood, which, of course, it was not.
Therefore, a plausible explanation exists for both of those claims. Of course, it's just speculation, but you were implying that both claims are patently ridiculous and could not possibly be true.
You consider it plausible that the Germans built a large incinerator in Treblinka for British Jews who would be deported there after Hitler captured Great Britain? It's not plausible at all. There's no documentation for such a nonsensical plan. Such a device as described by Reichmann is not described in any documents or other witness testimonies, and you won't find a single mainstream historian who makes this claim today. There are multiple "mini-legends" within the Treblinka narrative that try to gave the British/Americans more stake in the Treblinka narrative, and that was one of them that didn't make its way into mainstream historiography. You have outed yourself as being incapable of assessing the plausibility of claims made by witnesses. Your judgement is obviously too clouded by your biases on the issue.
There's a difference between planning for victory and "you know what, let's just go ahead and build a large incinerator for British Jews for when Hitler gets around to conquering Great Britain, so they can be sent here to Treblinka." I can't begin to describe how asinine the assertion is. Needless to say, it did not happen, and it discredits Reichmann's account along with all of his other assertions.
Decomposing/decomposed bodies are not flammable. The methane gases would escape in the open pit, and blood is not flammable. Bodies cannot sustain a fire for a day, and the decomposition would reduce the body mass that would provide energy. Even during a short cremation, the body mass cannot sustain a cremation and external heat has to be added to maintain temperatures. 250,000 bodies bursting into flames, with flammable blood seeping to the surface and burning for an entire day is a propaganda hoax. It did not happen, and it's unbelievable to me that you would think that this actually happened.
Reichmann says that over a million corpses were buried in Treblinka before being unburied and burned, and that particular mass grave with 250,000 bodies was only on grave of eleven mass graves. Do you think it's possible to bury a million people in 5 football fields?
It's astounding how much nonsense you are willing to believe without any concrete physical evidence or without the claims even being remotely possible. But believing this story requires belief in the impossible, because the official narrative makes impossible claims only supported by witnesses who lack credibility and have an obvious motive to lie.
Absent other evidence, and without further investigation, I would not immediately dismiss allegations of the Nazis building special facilities for British Jews in early 1943. Thankfully, you have now provided evidence that it didn't happen.
But why should this one claim, which is apparently likely false, entirely discredit the account? Eyewitness testimony is known to be quite unreliable, and I can imagine that all sorts of rumours were circulating at the time, see e.g. the soap-from-fat myth. All it shows is that eyewitness accounts should be interpreted critically and shouldn't be taken at face value, which is something we already knew.
The gas can slowly seep from the ground and catch fire when exposed to an ignition source, and then burn for a while. This is exactly what happens in landfill fires.
Of course not. My hypothesis is that some kind of liquid resulting from the decomposition process was misidentified as blood, and that this liquid and/or the associated vapours are what caught fire.
I'm not saying the bodies themselves burned. I'm speculating that they released a flammable gas which could have burned for a day. The remains of the bodies would then have to be cremated separately.
I'm not sure where you got "5 football fields" from, but I will go with it. According to a unit conversion website, 5 football fields is approximately 26,700 m2. The website you linked mentions a depth of four storeys or "between 8 and 12 meters". This website, which I found on the Wikipedia article for the Treblinka camp, says the burial ditches were "10m deep". So, 10 metres seems like a reasonable assumption. This gives us a volume of 267,000 m3. To bury a million corpses therein, one would need to bury around four corpses per cubic metre, which is very much plausible.
The best piece of physical evidence I have is the missing six million Jews. Where did they all go? If Treblinka was merely a transit camp, where did the Jews transit afterwards? Compare the pre-war and post-war census data in Europe, especially Eastern Europe. Even accounting for emigration, millions of Jews disappeared.
In general, I think census data is a reliable source for estimating the number of victims. I'm not familiar with the details of the Holocaust in Europe as a whole, so the best example I can provide is the Jasenovac concentration camp. Shortly after WWII, it was estimated that around 600,000 people were killed there. These estimates were widely accepted, including by the Encyclopedia of the Holocaust and the Simon Wiesenthal Center. Later claims went as high as a million or more. In the 1980s, two researchers independently arrived at much lower estimates based on demographic data. Eventually, after the end of communist censorship, a new consensus formed that the number of victims is around 100,000, an order of magnitude lower than previous estimates.
This shows that it is entirely to possible for new research to greatly lower the estimated number of victims. There is no conspiracy to suppress the truth. Indeed, despite the number six million being embedded in popular culture, some credible historians place it at closer to five million. Yad Vashem says "the number of victims was between five and six million".
What is the motive to lie?
You are asking why a witness claiming something that did not happen discredits the account? It increases the probability that the witness is lying. You suggest that the witness maybe just heard a false rumor, but you don't consider the possibility that the witness lied in order to increase the stakes of what he claimed to witness. There were other aspects of this happening, it's a pattern. Revisionists don't have to prove the witness is lying about everying, they just have to show the witness accounts are not sufficient evidence to establish what is being claimed.
That is good for you to acknowledge, but you are not interpreting the eyewitness accounts critically. For example, you take it for granted for granted that the entire 2 hectares of area conceivably had burial pits of 10 meters deep. No pits of 10 meters have been identified nor excavated, but apparently you do not require any physical investigation of these 10 meter pits in order to be sure they existed. The area burial density is unlike any other grave in human history, not even close. It is not plausible absent concrete, physical evidence which does not exist. Of those 2 hectares, 0% has been shown to actually cover mass graves of any depth, much less mass graves 10 meters deep for the entire area.
A million people buried in 2 hectares would be by far the most dense grave of carcasses in human history. It's not a plausible claim unless there is significant physical evidence to support it, and there is not. You rely on witness testimony to assert the plausibility of the claims.
Edit: A Revisionist has also compared burial density of other (real) concentration camp mass graves to the alleged Treblinka mass graves. Again, the real concentration camp graves resemble other known mass graves and the Treblinka mass graves you are alleging resemble nothing in history.
Furthermore, the historical position is not that these claims are plausible, it's that they are certain and there is no doubt the claims are true. Your assertion that "if 100% of 2 hectares was one giant pit that was 10 meters deep then it would be plausible" is a weak position in the face of official historiography, which has a much stronger position than "plausible."
Do you also think it's "plausible" that 5,000-7,000 people were cremated on outdoor pyres every single day? Do you think the truth of that claim is as certain as it is claimed by mainstream historiography? Do you also think it's plausible that these cremations were done without fuel?
The motive to lie is that a political prisoner detained and subject to harsh conditions has a reason to want to exact revenge against the defeated adversary. He might exaggerate the crimes committed by his captors or entirely make up claims that would be used against them in court and subject them to punishment.
In the trial of John Demjanjuk, Reichmann was one of 9 "Treblinka witnesses" who misidentified Demjanjuk as "Ivan the Terrible" in court. Do you think this was random circumstance, or do you think the misidentification was motivated by other factors? "Other factors" would include fame for participating in the Israeli show-trial and political clout- being celebrated by the global media for being a witness who identified "Ivan the Terrible." There is also a nationalistic motive, as Jewish nationalism is closely tied to Holocaust lore, having a conviction for a Treblinka guard in Israel would be a propaganda win for Jewish nationalism write large.
It even turned out that one of the witnesses who identified Demjanjuk as "Ivan the Terrible", Eliahu Rosenberg had testified in 1947 that "Ivan the Terrible" was killed in the Treblinka revolt. So that witness, Rosenberg, who made a big scene when he asked to "look into the eyes of Demjanjuk" to identify him, testified decades earlier that Ivan the Terrible was dead only to testify in the trial that it was John Demjanjuk. This cannot be said to be a case of mistaken identity. Why would Rosenberg testify that Ivan the Terrible was killed, and then identify him in a trial decades later?
The motives for false testimony are numerous, and systematically false testimony is not unusual either. It was a common features in witch trials and Soviet show-trials.
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Keep in mind 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), which is of course a reasonable estimate. Here's a video of 20 cords of wood being delivered hauled by a crane. Ask yourself if it's reasonable to believe there was ~20 times this amount of wood delivered and burned on a daily basis within this small camp. And there are no witness accounts for such deliveries and of course no documentation whatsoever of the delivery of any wood, much less hundreds of cords per day. There were also 0 contemporaneous reports of these daily raging infernos burning 24/7 despite the fact the camp was known among the locals and immediately next to a rail line.
It's a problem with the story, the claim that 5-7,000 people were cremated per day is not credible and there's no good evidence for it. Like ChatGPT said, the evidence relies on contradictory and unreliable witness accounts without concrete evidence. It's a logistically absurd claim. It's not even close to being possible.
In my experience, chatgpt has a real problem with numbers. I've asked it to give me a prompted block of text with 500 characters, and it almost never gets it right.
I've attached a screenshot of me asking it: "what's a larger number? 537 or five hundred and forty five?" to which it responded: "537 is a larger number than 545."
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All those figures about wood are for burning one body at a time for traditional funeral practices, which is very inefficient. From a few large animals I had to cremate rather than bury, it seems like you can burn quite a few for the price of one, but who knows how far that scales?
Edit: the incinerations during the UK foot and mouth outbreak are probably our best guide here. You'll never believe how many animals were burned--it's a little on the snout. It's possible they were using literal tons of diesel, but it's at least something to research.
I've always been on the lookout for decent mass cremation info, but never came across anything useful--even India during Covid never did "mass cremation" as in "multiple bodies per pyre." Doing it in open air rather than in a regenerative furnace is going to significantly increase the amount of wood needed--"some brush and petrol" sets off all my bullshit detectors.
I do think the "cooking people in their own fat" thing is patently ridiculous. If nothing else very low temperature cremation would leave enormous quantities of unburned bone to rebury, rather defeating the point of the whole operation. (But hey, it's something we could dig for!)
Just saw your edit. Revisionists have already studied the UK foot and mouth outbreak as a case study for mass burial and cremation.
Here is a source showing the mass burial specifications for the UK foot and mouth mass graves. It shows 1,262,000 worth of sheep that weighed 50kg on average (close to an average human) were buried in about 1000 hectares of mass grave space.
There is no more than 2 hectares of possible mass grave space in Treblinka based on mainstream research. Arad claims those 2 hectares held 800,000 human corpses.
The revisionist also analyzes the UK foot and mouth livestock mass grave at Great Orton. About 575,077 sheep-equivalent carcasses were buried in mass graves covering no less than 55 hectares.
If Treblinka achieved similar density as that livestock grave then that would imply 72 hectares of space would have been required to bury 760,000 people, but there is only 2 hectares of possible space where those bodies could have been buried in Treblinka, and 0% of those 2 hectares have ever been showed to cover mass graves.
The Revisionist put together the to-scale results from recent GPR investigation of Trebklina (in yellow) next to the Great Orton grave space (orange). So the orange space (at the very least) was required to bury 575,000 animal carcasses weighing an average of 50kg. But the yellow spots are supposed to account for the burial of 700,000-800,000 people in this small space in Treblinka. He also inlaid the GPR hits in a 1-hectare space to scale. Mainstream historians claim that 700,000-800,000 people were buried within that white square (plus maybe one more of those squares but there's no evidence for that). Those little pits supposedly held more carcasses than all of Great Orton.
Here's the to-scale comparison with Belzec, where the number of alleged burials in Belzec is 75.6% of the number of sheep-equivalent carcasses buried at Great Orton (orange).
There's also a brief analysis of the UK foot and mouth graves on cubic volume to show that what was observed was perfectly inline with Revisionist estimates.
Lastly, the UK foot and mouth case study allows us to dispense with the absurd claim from @official_techsupport that humans are self-cremating.
A 200-meter pyre for 1,200 sheep doesn't stand against the magical pyres at Treblinka that could cremate 7,000 people using a "few dry branches" or no fuel at all! So it goes.
It is a physical fact that a human body releases several times more heat when burned that is required to evaporate all the water it contains (the main heat sink, everything else is a rounding error). This means that the more bodies you burn at once, the less extra fuel you need per body, on the margin. You have not disputed this claim at all, except by asking GPT if a single body can be burned with minimal extra fuel.
And then there's the issue of comparing apples to oranges: how much more efficient the Germans became after tons of trial and error (as mentioned in your own sources) and how much lower were their standards for the acceptable result of cremation compared to the USDA (not to mention human crematoriums).
You are just speaking pure nonsense, but I'll point out that the standard of cremation for hiding the evidence of a crime requires a much higher state of destruction than cremating a carcass for sanitary or biohazard reasons.
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I am aware of that point being raised by anti-Revisionists and I actually brought it up with ChatGPT in the original convo:
It makes sense, there's no free lunch. You might reduce heat escape (which would be a big problem with open-air pyres lol) but on the flip side the unevenness of the heating of the stacks would reduce efficiency. In any case we aren't talking about magic, even say a 25% improvement in efficiency isn't bringing this operation closer to the realm of reality.
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I would say it recognizes revisionist questions and therefore gives revisionist answers. And it accepts the argument about the operational challenges and vastness of the task, because having to burn 5000 corpses or kill millions of russians etc, is so far out of the normal experience that it seems "highly unlikely" to it. Which it is. I can't remember a single day where I burned 5000 corpses or killed millions of russians.
You can approach it from a totally non-Revisionist starting point, though, which I did. First ask how much wood to cremate a body. Then ask how much wood to cremate 5,000 bodies - i.e. "hundreds of cords of wood." So it's already giving Revisionist arguments before the topic comes up. I doubt that its answers to cremation in general are so heavily influenced by Revisionist arguments. It just walks directly into the Revisionist line of argumentation when starting from generalized questions like that.
There are also many published volumes of work explaining in detail how the cremations were allegedly done. A more kosher ChatGPT would just say "this is how it was done" and describe the process as claimed by mainstream historiography (I expect it will do this when it is more "advanced"). There is a lot of discussion of mass cremation in the mainstream literature, it is not an issue that is only discussed by Revisionsits. It's only Revisionists though who allege that the claims are not possible, and instead of copy + pasting the description from mainstream historiography it seems inclined towards the Revisionist argument.
Let's say that it is not remotely possible 5,000 people were cremated every day at Treblinka, and Revisionists are right. How would an AI create a response that describes the possibility of something impossible/did not happen? It would probably prefer to generate the more likely response, i.e. the Revisionist critique of the claims.
But like I said it's going to get better at detecting this stuff and copy+pasting the mainstream position as in the case with HBD.
"When the air could be breathed again, the doors were opened, and the Jewish workers removed the bodies. By means of a special process which Wirth had invented, they were burned in the open air without the use of fuel." (I recommend reading https://www.unqualified-reservations.org/2011/10/holocaust-nazi-perspective/)
As far as I understand, burning a human body is an energy-positive process (quick googling: meat energy density is about 10MJ/kg, water heat of vaporization is about 2MJ/kg, humans are 60% water), so you only need extra fuel to start the fire and due to inefficiencies. Once you figure out how to cremate 5000 bodies at a time you definitely don't get the naive answer to the question you proposed.
The suggestion that cremations were burned in the open-air without fuel is of course completely absurd, but so it goes in Holocaust lore. You are not just burning the meat, you are trying to cremate the skeleton to ashes, which requires a prolonged period of extremely high heat. Cremation is not an energy-positive process.
Is a perfect example of Holocaust mysticism. The statement "By means of a special process which Wirth had invented" is supposed to give credibility to the absurd claim. The "special process" was laying corpses on makeshift grates made with railroad rails and burned on open-air pyres.
But you can notice there is already a contradiction in the witness testimony. One says that the cremations were performed without the use of fuel (!) and the other just mentions that "dry branches" were used. Of course none of the methods attested to are remotely possible.
Here's another quick-and-dirty source:
The energy from that is not coming from the body. It is a completely absurd claim but it's part-and-parcel for the sort of "witness testimony" you get when you try to account for the logistics for what is claimed.
That's a "jet fuel can't melt steel beams" kind of argument. I'm pretty sure that turning bones to ashes only requires a certain temperature and is also an energy positive process by itself, or if not then a rounding error compared to the heat required to evaporate the water. You're welcome to look up the chemical processes involved, for me my back of the envelope calculations and some physics-related common sense provide convincing enough proof that cremation is in fact an energy-positive process, so your "multiply the wood amount by 5000" argument is nonsense.
I'm OK with assuming that the Nazi judge did not relay the boasting about the cremation process by the guy who he had shot in precise enough detail.
It's pretty unbelievable that you make the claim that thousands of people could be cremated simultaneously without fuel (except to start the fire), and that the cremation would be net energy-positive. Then you accuse me of making a "jet fuel can't melt steel beams" argument. You are literally saying that the cremations were magical and the bodies were self-cremating.
Humanity has practiced cremation for millennia. Cremation is not net-energy positive. There are many studies and case studies, especially pertaining to the cremation of livestock during pandemics, and what you are claiming is a fairy tale. Revisionists have also studied cases where extremely hot house or car fires failed to cremate a body, the notion that a body is self-cremating once a temperature threshold is reached is completely asinine.
But just because I asked ChatGPT to weigh in since people are more likely to trust an AI to say the sky is blue than a Holocaust denier:
You have not provided an explanation for how 5,000 could have been cremated every single day, you are providing evidence of how completely absurd the official story is and how detached it is from reality.
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Ultimately, the credibility of that particular piece testimony does hinge on the question of whether it is possible for a meat-powered fire to generate enough heat to self-sustain once it gets started.
But let's actually do the math ourselves, instead of just parroting the arguments of ChatGPT, which is a language model which infamously has trouble telling you which of two numbers is larger unless you tell it to work through the problem step by step.
Enter the bomb calorimeter. It is a reasonably accurate way of measuring the energy content of various substances. Measurements using bomb calorimeters suggest that fat contains 38 - 39 kJ / g, proteins 15 - 18 kJ / g, and carbohydrates 22 - 25 kJ / g.
Humans are composed of approximately 62% water, 16% protein, 16% fat, 1% carbohydrates, and 6% other stuff (mostly minerals). For the cremation story to be plausible, let's say that the water would need to be raised to 100ºC (4.2 J / g / ºC) and then boiled (2260 J / g), and the inorganic compounds (call their specific heat also 4 J / g / ºC -- it's probably closer to 1, which is the specific heat of calcium carbonate, but as we'll see this doesn't really make much difference) raised to (let's say) 500ºC.
So for a 50 kg human, that's
31 kg water: - 12 MJ to raise to 100ºC, 70MJ to actually boil
8 kg protein - 132 MJ released from burning under ideal conditions
8 kg fat - 308 MJ released from burning under ideal conditions
500g carbohydrates - 12 MJ released from burning under ideal conditions
3 kg other - 6 MJ to raise to 500ºC.
So that's about 450 MJ released by burning, of which about 90 MJ goes towards heating stuff and boiling water. That sure looks energy positive to me.
Sanity check -- a tea light is a 10g blob of paraffin wax, which has a very similar energy density to fat. So a tea light should release about 400 kJ of energy when burned, which means that a tea light should contain enough energy to boil off about 150 mL of water, or to raise a bit over a liter of water from room temperature to boiling, if all of the energy is absorbed in the water.
And, in fact, it is possible to boil water using tea lights. A tea light takes about 4 hours to burn fully. That video shows 17 tea lights burning for 8.5 minutes, which should release about 60% as much energy as is contained in a single tea light. It looks like that brought about 400ml of water to a boil, so the sanity check does in fact check out.
I really don't think that random british dude who is showing you how to use candles to boil water during a power failure is in on a global conspiracy to cover up a lack of genocide, but, just in case you think he is, this is an experiment you can try at home with your own materials.
Edit: clarity
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You are literally arguing against physics. Again, quick googling told me that: meat energy density is about 10MJ/kg, water heat of vaporization is about 2MJ/kg, humans are 60% water. I don't account for bones but I also don't account for fat and brains. Can you do basic math?
Your argument is that since a proper cremation of a single body requires a lot of energy, a mass cremation of 5000 bodies requires a proportionally prohibitive amount of energy. When I point out that it doesn't scale like that at all because of physics (not to mention that Nazis weren't interested in proper cremations), you make more arguments supporting that cremation of a single body requires a lot of energy.
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I didn't want to get sucked into this, and I'll bow out soon, but: they did have the industrial capacity and logistics to kill millions of russians, in combat and out, consuming among other things millions of cords of ammunition, so why does a similar, actually considerably easier, task, present insurmountable challenges in the case of jews ?
It's a good point, industrial ingenuity is a prominent feature of German culture. They certainly had the capacity to do it if they wanted to, which is why the methods attested to make no sense. The Germans were world leaders in chemistry and industry, as you pointed it. So how did they murder up to a million people in Treblinka?
It is said that they tricked up to a million Jews into entering bedroom-sized gas chambers disguised as shower rooms, where they were murdered using the exhaust from the engine of a captured Soviet tank. Although other concentration camps like Dachau had state-of-the-art cremation technology, Treblinka did not have any crematorium. So 750,000+ people were buried in under 5 acres (ChatGPT also said that was not possible by the way). Then, the Germans dug those people out and cremated them on makeshift grates made with railroad rails from March until August 1943. This is the mainstream claim.
Does that sound like German industrial prowess, or does it sound like wartime rumor from agitated peasants who know nothing about the science of execution or cremation? Exhaust from a Soviet tank engine? Really? Why would such a nonsensical weapon be used by the world leaders in chemistry for such a crucial task? They wouldn't have. The entire operation is nonsensical.
Urgh, the point is not about german industrial prowess, the russians also had an industry capable of killing millions of germans who shoot back, and were no slouches on murdering vast amounts of civilians either. Germans used the exhaust pipe execution for T4. Not getting into details of the camps, good day, I'm out.
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