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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?
While I haven't read much about the Holocaust, reading this thread you seem to have an absolutely absurd standard for what constitutes breaching the 'mainstream' narrative in a meaningful way. Historians clearly disagree on minor details in all areas of history without being classed as of a different school or interpretation. What you seem to be implying is that if @To_Mandalay has even the smallest of disagreements with an influential mainstream writer then he suddenly can longer be considered to subscribe to the mainstream view, which is patently ridiculous. Find me any other area of historical research where there is not disagreement even within supporters of one particular interpretation or narrative on points of a similar magnitude to expanding somewhat the range of time for cremation at Treblinka.
To give an example of something of which I am better acquainted, in the study of the Ostrogothic kings of Italy one major interpretation (probably the 'mainstream' one if there could be said to be such a thing) is that there was considerable continuity between their rule and Roman rule in the reign of Theodoric, with Roman institutions and culture preserved across a range of areas. Now, if I agree with that argument, but disagree with one of its most strenuous and influential proponents, say Moorhead, on the translation and interpretation of one particular letter in the Variae, no-one would ever say I had meaningfully diverged from his interpretation. The same goes here; I don't think expanding the date range for creation or arguing that some minority of corpses didn't get cremated (on which point, I don't see why that's incompatible with a cover-up intention; they may simply not have been able to complete the task) now renders, as you put it, the entire narrative 'discredited'. 'More research' is always a good thing but the broad thrust of a narrative can still remain intact even if some tweaking of it might be needed.
Edit, something I forgot to put: I realise that your disagreements with the mainstream narrative are probably much bigger than that, but the problem is you're declaring anyone disagreeing on anything, no matter of what importance, with a mainstream historian as necessarily being in the revisionist camp, which is silly.
I have never seen anybody other than a Revisionist recognize that the Treblinka narrative presented in the "standard work" on Treblinka is impossible. To_Mandalay is the only one in the mainstream camp I have ever seen concede that. It is entirely fair to attribute that position to Revisionism because Revisionists, at great personal risk and costs, have been the only ones who have done the research and published those criticisms that he is now acknowledging are true.
If you can show me any published work from the mainstream camp that is critical of Arad's narrative along the same line of argument, you would have a good point, but the logistical impossibility of Arad's claims is a position that is indeed 100% owned by Revisionists and acknowledged by no mainstream historians.
Arad didn't entirely make up those claims out of the blue. Those historical claims were made based on witness testimony. As has been stressed in this argument, there is no documentary or physical proof establishing the murder of millions of people in these "extermination camps". The case is based on the testimony of witnesses. For example, someone in this thread cited Chil Rajchman as providing a compelling witness testimony for the cremation operation at Treblinka. But Rajchman stressed that the cremation work was completed early:
Rajchman states that the work was completed by July. Arad cites Rajchman and heavily relies on his account of the cremation operations. The implication of Arad formulating an impossible historical narrative is that the evidence used to substantiate the narrative was unreliable.
If Rajchman's account of cremation work being done and the mass graves being "spotlessly" cleaned by July is wrong, and he even describes Himmler visiting and laughing at the completely cleaned out mass graves, how does that impact your assessment of his credibility? To_Mandalay's position constitutes an inherent criticism of Rajchman's account, which does have implications for the broader narrative and is not a minor issue.
Revisionists contend that the entire mass cremation narrative was formulated by lying witnesses in order to provide an explanation for a lack of evidence for what they claimed to witness. After all, if you are lying about someone committing a crime you may also lie about how you witnessed them cover up the evidence for their crime, thereby providing an explanation for why investigators would not be able to find evidence for your allegation. So acknowledging Arad's narrative as unworkable is not just a minor historical disagreement, it's a justification of the Revisionist criticism of the evidence used by mainstream historians that formulates the foundation for the entire narrative.
The thrust of the narrative does not remain intact because the evidence which was used to formulate the discredited narrative is the same body of evidence used to prop up the other parts of the narrative.
The way I have approached this is that the evidence is co-related. If holocaust historians cite 3 witnesses that claim something, and Revisionists show beyond doubt that one of the witnesses is wrong or lying, that increases my suspicion that the other witnesses are unreliable. Revisionists have proven beyond doubt that the mainstream historical narrative was wrong about Majdanek as an extermination camp with homicidal gas chambers, and that increased my suspicion that it was also wrong about other alleged "extermination camps."
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?
Ryan Faulk presents an interesting case study in how rumor can lead to systematically false testimony, even false testimony that confounds both sides of a conflict. People even claimed to first-hand witness the details of "Russians mobilizing in England" but it never happened. Take something like a delousing procedure, and it's trivial to see how this could form the basis for some murder-shower propaganda rumor that takes on a life of its own.
The proportion of "Holocaust witnesses" to the main alleged extermination operation is an extremely low percentage of all witnesses, certainly a very small fraction of a single percent. Even at Auschwitz, over 99% of witnesses did not report any direct knowledge of gas chamber extermination and only a very few number of witnesses interviewed by the Soviets claimed to be Sonderkommando for example.
The vast majority of witnesses were likely telling the truth to the best of their recollection and it's only a very small number of testimonies proportionally that are identified by Revisionists as deceitful.
Your question should ask instead if there are comparable tribunals where witnesses lied about what happened, but you know the bar for that is absurdly low. All 9 Treblinka "witnesses" false-positively identified John Demjanjuk as a Treblinka guard in that Israeli show trial. At the original Nuremberg trial, the entire Treblinka narrative was substantiated by a single witness testimony that lasted no longer than 15 minutes, and that witness was not even cross-examined. This behavior doesn't just apply to witnesses with a bone to pick, it also applies to defendants as well, probably most famously in the Salem Witch trials:
At the Nuremberg Trials, the former commandant of Auschwitz Josef Kramer flatly denied the Auschwitz extermination narrative in his opening defense:
But as the trial unfolded he understood that the only permissible defense was to admit knowledge but downplay responsibility for the same reasons as above.
And of course there were many Soviet show trials where people confessed to ridiculous and false things. The chief Soviet prosecutor in the Nuremberg Trials was heavily involved in those Stalinist show-trials as well.
There is also the fact that the WWI German "corpse-factory" atrocity hoax is eerily similar to the WWII Holocaust atrocity claims, so there is even precedent for specifically allegations of "corpse factories" being intentionally created but widely-believed atrocity lies.
The entire Treblinka narrative was established in a sham trial based on no evidence. That doesn't lend credibility to the subsequent trials decades after the fact, where the extermination narrative had already been "proven" decades before those trials even happened. Although at Nuremberg, the alleged murder weapon used at Treblinka was still steam chamber.
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.
Even better, there were witnesses to snow being shoveled out of the passenger wagons which were allegedly transporting the Russians. A very Holocaust-esque detail. There seems to be something about a passenger train with the shades drawn that excites the imagination of passersby in the right conditions and state of rumor.
Closed goods wagons do a lot of work in the Holocaust narrative as well. The British civilians thought they were witnessing mass transports of Russians when they saw random trains with the shades drawn. No doubt similar errors would be made with transports consisting of closed goods wagons and unknown cargo.
There is no German documentation to support the arrival of mass transports of Jews to T-II. The only surviving train records denote "Treblinka" as the destination, but even the mainstream acknowledges that this did not refer to T-II, and they allege that there was some (undocumented) shunting operation from Malkinia that is not recorded anywhere. Those same records also specify lengthy stops at other locations known to be connected to labor camps.
The Hoefle Telegram says "T", and it shouldn't be assumed that this referred to T-II. We know the train schedules documented "Treblinka" as the transport destination but that did not actually denote or indicated T-II as the destination of the transport. The Korherr report is even more vague and describes the settlers as "sifted through the camps of General Government", which does not provide any sort of statement on how many Jews set foot in T-II either. Of course neither document makes the slightest mention of extermination, and Korherr himself claimed after the war to believe that it referred to actual resettlement.
Soviet investigators concluded that they found no mass graves and none likely existed in the camp. You have even acknowledged that a complete cremation cover-up to make the graves "spotlessly clean" was not possible. That makes the lack of discovery of mass graves, by the own conclusion of the Soviet investigation, much more unlikely given your recognition that a complete cover-up was impossible.
So there's no documentation of mass transports to T-II, investigators have never discovered any mass graves on the site by their own stated conclusions- you entirely rely on the testimony of witnesses.
Yes, there are. It turns out that there were many tens of thousands of camps in the East that historians were not aware of, and those camps have only recently been studied with very limited information available.
It's pretty awkward of them to find 6x the number of camps that they previously thought existed. Obviously the greater number of camps than expected implies a greater operation of resettlement rather than mass extermination.
So historians missed tens of thousands of camps that existed in these areas. This revelation certainly gives more context to Korherr's interpretation of settlers "sifted through the camps of General Government" as opposed to documenting some exact number brought to T-II for extermination. It turns out there were many more camps than historians had ever imagined. Likely there are many more that have not been found.
You realize that your entire case relies on the reliability of Soviet investigation right? Because it is also possible (indeed likely) that exculpatory evidence would not have been investigated, retained, or presented by Soviet investigators. The Soviets denied access to Western observers during these investigations, which further reduces their credibility. You can't say that it didn't leave behind "a shred of evidence" unless you trust Soviet investigators to find and preserve the exculpatory evidence that would have been left behind. I certainly do not.
And of course, 40,000+ camps can only be interpreted as evidence for resettlement, as those camps would not have been necessary given the assumption of an extermination policy.
On the other hand, I do trust that if there had been mass graves of 800,000 people in Treblinka, the Soviet investigators would have found them and conducted a propaganda campaign with 10x the fanfare of the German exhumation of the Katyn Mass Graves. The fact that they concluded in their own report that no mass graves were found and never bothered to excavate any of them with international observers and the whole nine yards should be interpreted as evidence that the mass graves are not there.
They weren't able to actually do a grand mass grave exhumation like the Katyn Forest massacre because they weren't able to find any mass graves! That fact has been attributed to the magical cover-up by the magical cremations, but you and I know that's a lie.
Edit: One more point, which is that Majdanek had many, many witnesses to mass gassings in facilities which are now admitted to have not been gas chambers. I would daresay that there were more Majdanek gas chamber witnesses than Treblinka witnesses based on some thread I saw awhile back where a bunch of witness testimony was compiled from former Majdanek inmates who had identified the (real) shower facility as the center of gas chamber extermination.
The unreliability of witness testimony is legendary. I've already explained to you why the historical validity of the subsequent trials - decades after the fact - has low historical trustworthiness but you continue to just appeal to the witnesses anyway. Witnesses in a show trial are not good historical evidence, period. But that's all you really have to work with.
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