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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.
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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