This weekly roundup thread is intended for all culture war posts. 'Culture war' is vaguely defined, but it basically means controversial issues that fall along set tribal lines. Arguments over culture war issues generate a lot of heat and little light, and few deeply entrenched people ever change their minds. This thread is for voicing opinions and analyzing the state of the discussion while trying to optimize for light over heat.
Optimistically, we think that engaging with people you disagree with is worth your time, and so is being nice! Pessimistically, there are many dynamics that can lead discussions on Culture War topics to become unproductive. There's a human tendency to divide along tribal lines, praising your ingroup and vilifying your outgroup - and if you think you find it easy to criticize your ingroup, then it may be that your outgroup is not who you think it is. Extremists with opposing positions can feed off each other, highlighting each other's worst points to justify their own angry rhetoric, which becomes in turn a new example of bad behavior for the other side to highlight.
We would like to avoid these negative dynamics. Accordingly, we ask that you do not use this thread for waging the Culture War. Examples of waging the Culture War:
-
Shaming.
-
Attempting to 'build consensus' or enforce ideological conformity.
-
Making sweeping generalizations to vilify a group you dislike.
-
Recruiting for a cause.
-
Posting links that could be summarized as 'Boo outgroup!' Basically, if your content is 'Can you believe what Those People did this week?' then you should either refrain from posting, or do some very patient work to contextualize and/or steel-man the relevant viewpoint.
In general, you should argue to understand, not to win. This thread is not territory to be claimed by one group or another; indeed, the aim is to have many different viewpoints represented here. Thus, we also ask that you follow some guidelines:
-
Speak plainly. Avoid sarcasm and mockery. When disagreeing with someone, state your objections explicitly.
-
Be as precise and charitable as you can. Don't paraphrase unflatteringly.
-
Don't imply that someone said something they did not say, even if you think it follows from what they said.
-
Write like everyone is reading and you want them to be included in the discussion.
On an ad hoc basis, the mods will try to compile a list of the best posts/comments from the previous week, posted in Quality Contribution threads and archived at /r/TheThread. You may nominate a comment for this list by clicking on 'report' at the bottom of the post and typing 'Actually a quality contribution' as the report reason.
Jump in the discussion.
No email address required.
Notes -
If he was protesting a plan to deport several million Jews into his domain he would complain about that, not one transport of skilled workers.
The entire first half of the letter is Kube talking about the tens of thousands of Jews he has killed over the past few weeks to make Belarus Jew free.
One of the graves at Belzec, Grave 5, had the dimensions of 32 x 10 x 4.5 meters. The crematory layer was 1.00 meter thick (a quantification). Even assuming that the extent of the crematory layer is overestimated by half, that would still be the remains of some 3,000 people in this one grave out of dozens. There is no reason for a transit camp to have several tens of thousands of cubic meters' worth of burial pits.
We can compare the result to the testimony of Rudolf Reder, the principal witness to the alleged extermination at Belzec:
So nothing was found that at all resembled the account of the most important witnesses. The incongruence of what was found with the testimony is a major problem and would warrant more through study in a sane world. Your estimate of 3,000 people in Pit 5 is based on nothing and pulled from thin air. Even if it were true, that would represent 0.5% of the alleged victims buried at Belzec.
Even if 3,000 people were buried in that pit, and all pits also had 3,000 victims (even though they are much smaller), that would "only" amount to 99,000 people, 500,000 short of what is claimed by mainstream historiography. The sheer scale of the orthodox narrative is completely untenable from every dimension: burial space, cremation capacity, soil displacement, fuel requirements for cremation capacity.
The assertion is that those 600,000 victims were cremated on open-air pyres at Belzec, but as Mattogno notes:
In consideration of the orthodox Holocaust narrative claim of 6,650 corpses being cremated on outdoor pyres every single day, with the corpses exhumed from graves "100 m long and 25 m wide" according to the most important witnesses, Kola's results are not at all consistent with this narrative and do not bring it closer to the realm of reality.
The function of archaeology is to corroborate or correct eyewitness and documentary evidence. This is like saying that when they found the Titanic and confirmed the ship split in two before sinking this should have been a blow against the "official story" which up until then had the ship sinking intact.
Pit is 32 long, 10 wide, and 4.5 meters deep. Kola measured a crematory layer 1 meter deep. Chop the 1.0 meter in half and that's a 0.5 meter thick crematory layer. If a human body leaves 0.0421667 cubic meters of ash (Mattogno's number), then it's roughly 0.5 x 10 x 32 / 0.0421667 = 3,794 people. Assuming Kola overestimated the size of the crematory layer by half. And there were more crematory layers in grave 5 alone, this was just the thickest one.
Even if there were "only" tens of thousands of cremated people in the ground at Belzec that is enough to refute the transit camp idea.
Höfle telegram has 430,000 Jews shipped to Belzec by the end of 1942, after which Belzec pretty much ceased operations, so 600,000 is much too high.
Neither is there a single witness to trains leaving Belzec full of deportees bound eastwards (though there are plenty of witnesses to the opposite; trains coming in and leaving empty), but for Mattogno's thesis to stand several such trains must have left daily in full view of all the locals.
You say "much too high" and then act like 430,000 solves the problem, which it does not. Another notable aspect of Kola's investigation is that while he found some corpses that had not been cremated (it would be quite helpful for everyone if they were actually excavated and studied) there were very few relative to the claimed victim count, so there's no room for you to claim, contrary to the official narrative, that masses were left uncreated. With respect to Treblinka, I recall that you argued some significant proportion of victims must have been left uncremated to try to get around the problem of mass cremation. You can't resort to that for Belzec, you have to actually account for the logistical feasibility of the operation you are claiming took place: an operation that is completely void of documentary evidence or witness account, with nobody seeming to recall where the fuel was procured in order to cremate 430,000-600,000 people in a matter of a few months.
The Belzec camp was well-known among the population and much of the camp was in full view of spots from the surrounding area. Are you familiar with any contemporary reports of the raging infernos that would have been burning hundreds of cords of wood on a daily basis to cremate thousands of people per day, every day?
There's next to no documentation for anything regarding the day to day operations of Belzec, Sobibor, or Treblinka, since Himmler and Globocnik had most of it destroyed. And as usual, for some reason Mattogno insists that wood was the only possible fuel that could have been used.
I presume you specify "contemporary" reports to exclude any reports made after the end of the German occupation, which to me raises the question of to who locals should have made these reports to in 1942 and '43. The Nazis?
The report from the Main Commission for the Investigation of German Crimes in Poland estimated the number of people murdered at Belzec at 600,000, which became widely accepted in the literature. Raul Hilberg estimated 550,000. Yitzhak Arad accepted 600,000 as a minimum estimate. The lower estimates among the literature come from Pohl and Witte who estimate 480,000 to 540,000.
But we'll move ahead with your 430,000 estimate, noting that it's a significant downward revision from the literature but it isn't going to make a difference. On April 11, 1946 the Polish prosecutor wrote:
The witness Kozak declared in his report:
So the position of investigators and historians is that all the victims of Belzec were cremated in 90 days. Even using your lower revision for the number of victims at Belzec, that is still an average of 4,777 corpses that would have been cremated on a daily basis on makeshift, outdoor pyres. Mattogno, based on his research and experiments, estimates it would have required 160 kg of firewood per corpse for cremation. The daily requirement of fuel consumption at Belzec would have been in the zone of 764,320 kg of wood (about 1.7 million pounds) burned on a daily basis. For what it's worth, Chat GPT gives a much higher estimate of fuel requirements than Mattogno at "450 to 900 kg" of wood per body, with no gains of efficiency from stacking.
When it came to Treblinka, you acknowledged that the standard work on the Reinhardt camps by Yitzahk Arad contained a history of Treblinka that could not have been true. You said "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." I was surprised to see you acknowledge this, because it's the first time I've ever seen a non-Revisionist concede that point. You then stated that some large, unspecified portion of the victims must have been left uncremated at Treblinka due to the impossibility of what mainstream historiography claims. That's a convenient rejoinder, because there has not nor will there be scientific investigation that would validate your hypothesis of hundreds of thousands of uncremated corpses on the grounds of Treblinka today.
At Belzec, the story is different. The (highly limited) forensic investigation of the site shows there is no mass of uncremated victims. So either the impossible cremation operation described happened, or the extermination narrative at Belzec unravels at the seams.
Since you already acknowledged that Revisionists are correct and the cremation operation at Treblinka described by Yitzahk Arad is impossible, what is your position on the alleged cremation operation at Belzec which is nearly identical?
There was no shortage of rumors and reports from underground spy networks operating in the area. There are other contemporary accounts of activity at the camp, like trains arriving. The daily cremation of 4,000+ people within a small area of a small camp would appear as an enormous forest fire a stone's throw from civilian train station!
The supposed secrecy of the extermination operation was restricted to an extremely small number of people. Nearly every single German soldier or Polish peasant or whoever would not have known that this was supposed to be a cremation pyre from a secret extermination conspiracy. There would have been reports and rumors, of which there was nothing.
The biggest problem with the narrative isn't even the complete absence of documentation, or the complete absence of contemporary reports, the biggest problem is that the claim itself is totally absurd. Before you even consider the evidence, which is essentially non-existent outside witness testimony, you would have to acknowledge that what is being claimed is prima facie impossible. You conceded that with respect to the "standard work" on Treblinka, but now for Belzec you accept the truth of the official narrative which is equally ridiculous?
It's not my estimate. It's the number that the Höfle telegram gives, which was not available to Hilberg or Arad.
Of course reducing the number of corpses to be burned by nearly a third makes a difference.
I said this, and then later I went and checked Arad's book, and he never actually says "every single last corpse at Treblinka was burned to ashes, no exceptions," or anything that could be reasonably interpreted as implying that. My statement was a conditional ("if he indeed claims") which doesn't hold.
If the cremations started in December as your first cited source says, that's more like 120 days than 90. And this is ignoring the multiple SS men and other witnesses who claimed that the cremations started in November, which would bring the total time up closer to 150 days. (I expect you might jump on this contradiction so I will just say ahead of time that no, I don't think failing to remember three or four years later whether cremations began in November or December is a damning indictment.)
And again Mattogno insists that only wood can be considered as a fuel at Belzec despite the fact that the Germans used liquid fuels to cremate corpses elsewhere (Dresden) and that witnesses mention liquid fuels in conjuncton with the Belzec cremations.
Did not show that. The Belzec investigation was exactly what I had in mind when I made the suggestion about Treblinka. Unless Kola happened to hit literally the only bodies on the grounds then there there have to be more down there.
It is not even 'highly limited.' If a dozen soil samples are taken at regular intervals from an area several dozen square meters in size and all of them are full of crematory remains, then it's because the ground underneath is full of crematory remains. There is no other explanation.
Nearly every single Polish peasant in the area would have known this because as you state they saw thousands of people arriving every day and never leaving.
Well there's the walk-back I was expecting. I even cited the relevant passages from Arad at the time to refresh your memory, multiple passages, but this one suffices:
So you are back to claiming that this is plausible, even though I presented it to you at the time specifically to give you the opportunity to assess it in context- and you did not defend its plausibility then. But now that you realize the Belzec story relies on the plausibility of a nearly identical operation, without the possibility to claim masses were left uncremated, you are now saying "what Arad said is plausible."
By all accounts wood was the primary fuel source.
There is no scientific source describing the technical operation and results of the pyres at Dresden. Available evidence in terms of empirical results for using gasoline in mass cremation shows it is not feasible. An official report on the 1967/1968 UK foot-and-mouth disease epidemic, during which many animals were cremated on open-air pyres, explains why:
This analysis of the problems with the use of napalm applies a fortiori to gasoline. There is no way around in this logistical problem, and a picture of uncremated bodies in Dresden provides nothing in the way of scientific evidence.
This is nonsense- if hundreds of thousands of corpses were at Belzec they would have been found by the core sampling. It is utterly impossible that hundreds of thousands of bodies were in the ground that were missed by Kola.
The cremation of the bodies of the dead constitutes in and of itself neither proof nor evidence in favor of the official theses, because this was the practice in all concentration camps and had a well-established hygienic function. With no attempt to quantify the amount of human remains, we are left with the fact that:
Even assuming the downward revision of 430,000 victims, that is still 260,000 bodies with absolutely no space where they could have been buried. And that's assuming a 100% capacity with 8 corpses per cubic meter. For comparison, the Soviet report on Katyn reported a mass grave density of 1 body per cubic meter of grave volume for the 11,000 Poles found in those mass graves (11,000 Poles buried in 10,947 cubic meters of mass grave volume, which is half of the entire volume identified by Kola).
These stories Belzec and Treblinka are a massive outlier in every respect. Even making extremely conservative estimates and throwing in the kitchen sink:
Assuming a revised/lower death toll than what historians and courts estimated, and what witnesses said.
Assuming cremation started earlier than witnesses and investigators claimed (do you have a source for the November 1942 start of cremation at Belzec by the way? I can't find an account that says this).
Assuming much more efficient fuel consumption than empirical results from mass cremation.
Assuming the most densely packed mass graves in history.
None of this, even when taken all together at the same time, makes the story plausible. Precisely because of Kola's investigation you have even less room to navigate because you can't claim "graves of 5m deep, probably much deeper" (which you claimed for Treblinka) or hundreds of thousands of uncremated corpses. Kola's investigation is a good example of how the more scientific investigation there is, the less room the mainstream has to handwave these issues with "probably" and "maybes." No, you actually have to explain how 430,000 people were buried in this space, or how these people were all cremated in 3, 4, 5 (take your pick!) months without any written record of anybody noticing anything unusual, or any record or account of where the fuel was acquired for this enormous operation. The arrival and departure of trains sparked rumor and speculation, but according to you, the mass cremation of 430,000 people on open-air pyres was apparently not reported on by anyone.
Arad does not say "every last body at Treblinka was cremated," so it's not a walk-back. It's also not a walk-back because I explicitly referred to Kola's results in that previous discussion as a justification for my suggestion regarding uncremated bodies at Treblinka. I said "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," because at the time I didn't feel like going and checking, but Arad doesn't actually say that. Arad saying "800,000 people were cremated" doesn't mean "every single last body at Treblinka was cremated" anymore than saying "Dresden was destroyed by firebombing" means "every single last building in Dresden was destroyed by firebombing."
This photograph shows a heap of ashes on the ground next to a currently burning pyre, so apparently it worked fine for the purposes of the Germans in 1945. Whether it was safe, or clean, or even particularly efficient doesn't matter if it successfully reduced the corpses to something like ash (which does not even have to be "ash" in the technical sense.) The photographic evidence of cremations at Dresden in the exact same conditions that would have obtained at Belzec is empirical evidence that it is possible to cremate corpses in that fashion. The fact that this cremation was not carried out by scientists does not matter when there are photographs of the process and the results. Corpses that have been buried in the ground for months will also have less water in them than fresh ones.
As a side note, strange that "agitated peasants" spreading rumors (as you have put it before) managed to hit upon precisely the method of cremation--corpses piled up on grids made out of railroad ties--that it is known the Germans used elsewhere.
If it was possible in Dresden to cremate 500 bodies a day on open air pyres made from railroad ties and fueled by gasoline, then it was possible for the several-hundred-strong staff of Belzec to cremate 2 or 3 thousand a day (3,161 per day assuming the operation started on November 15th and lasted through March and every single last body was cremated) on several Dresden-equivalent pyres using liquid fuel and wood. The lack of documentation should not bother anyone, since there is no documentation period on the daily operation of a camp which operated for more than a year.
I didn't say there were. I'm sure it's much less than that. Maybe hundreds or thousands.
It does, because even if you assume a ridiculously high "natural" mortality rate of say 20% for the deportees to Belzec, that would have produced roughly 430,000 x 0.2 x 0.0421667 = 3,626 cubic meters of human ash, which could have been easily accommodated in two or maybe three of the pits Kola found. There is no plausible non-sinister reason for the established volume of the graves.
To establish a grave of X volume with a layer of "homogenous crematory contents" of Y volume is quantification, and Kola did this.
SS man Heinrich Gley said the cremations started in November. Another SS man named Fritz Tauscher even said October. These are cited on page 441 of the HC controversies Aktion Reinhardt 'white paper.'
The 'downward revision' isn't some sort of desperate last-ditch attempt to save the official story, it's merely taking the Nazis' own documents on the matter at face value. The Höfle telegram, which was not available to any witnesses or to Polish courts in the 40s or to any historians prior to the 21st century, says 430,000 deportees to Belzec by the end of 1942, and after that the camp mostly ceased operations, therefore that's how many people were deported to Belzec.
I actually don't know what the revisionist explanation for intact corpses in the ground at Belzec is. If Belzec was a transit camp then the camp authorities would have been dealing with a few thousand, maybe in the low tens of thousands of corpses over the space of more than a year. Taking the above (absurdly high) estimate of a 20% mortality rate that would have been some 86,000 corpses over the time of Belzec's operation. Should have been quite easy to cremate every one of those, and no reason for any to be left unburnt. Taking Mattogno's estimate of a 5% mortality rate (in turn taken from Dieter Pohl), barely 20,000 bodies. Assuming the same cremation period from November to March, the camp staff would have had to cremate a mere 150 bodies per day. The fact that there are unburnt bodies at all is evidence a greater scale to the operation.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link