Saturday, July 28, 2007

This is a serious case of ... well, "Revisionism"

In his CODOH post of Thu Jul 26, 2007 2:08 pm, my old friend "Haldan", aka "k0nsl" aka Jonathan Andersson, committed the imprudence of mentioning my name.

While I usually let the Cesspit lunatics spout their boring nonsense as they please, when they mention me in their babblings I take a closer look at the same, and that’s what I’m going to do now regarding Mr. Andersson’s post.

Read more!



Andersson starts out as follows:

Hannover wrote:
This is absolutely embarrassing.
from:
http://www.jewishgen.org/ForgottenCamps/Camps/TreblinkaEng.html

This is supposed to be a mass grave that held 900,000 Jews at Treblinka.

It sure is. I tried to ask Nick Terry, Roberto and I believe even Andrew E. Mathis about this strange "mass grave". I said, all I see is wooden planks and some form of sheet material - "where are the bodies, where are the human remains and how could so many corpses fit in such a small grave?" No reasonable response from neither of those self-proclaimed Holocaust Experts. None.


I don’t remember where on the RODOH forum Andersson asked those silly questions, and it would be too much of an effort to roam through old threads trying to find the one he may have been referring to, if existing. (Typically dishonest "Revisionist" that he is, Andersson of course doesn’t give his readers the opportunity to check his claims by providing a link or a thread title. Not that anybody on the Cesspit, where the name "RODOH" cannot even be spelled out, would be likely to check, of course.) But if the bugger asked such questions, the likely answer was that

a) the photograph shows but one small section of one out of several mass graves in which the bodies at Treblinka were buried, and allows for no estimate about the size of the grave it shows let alone that of any other grave; and

b) if the bodies are mostly not visible (there are arguably three at the top of the grave that can be made out), this is because they are covered by wooden planks and what looks like tarpaulin sheets, which may have been related to an effort on the part of the camp staff to stretch the capacity of the mass graves by "top down" burning, or (see the comment on this site) to an experiment on whether the bodies could be effectively burned inside the mass graves.

If this answer was not "reasonable" enough for Mr. Andersson, that’s because his criterion of reasonability is a rather peculiar one that he shares with most if not all fellow "Revisionists": whatever fits his preconceived notions is necessarily "reasonable", and what does not fit those notions can never be.

After this instructive introduction, Mr. Andersson turns to downright lying when he writes the following:

I have that discussion saved somewhere and will look it through sometime. Very embarrassing! However, all three of the gentlemen stuck by the insane claim that its a mass grave which held 900,000 Jews.


That’s about as thick a straw-man as I have ever seen. Neither Nick, nor Andrew, nor I maintain that the number of victims of Treblinka was necessarily as high as 900,000 (the documentary evidence rather points to an order of magnitude of 750,000 to 800,000, and the very site that Andersson's brother-in-spirit Jonni "Hannover" Hargis started out making a fuss about states that "Jews from the Polish Districts of Warsaw, Radom, Bialystok and Lublin as well as others from Theresienstadt concentration camp, Macedonia and the Reich comprised he nearly 750,000 people who would die in the gas chambers of Treblinka between July 1942 and April 1943"), and neither of us has claimed that the bodies of the victims, insofar as they were not incinerated right after the killing during the later stages of Treblinka’s operation, were buried in one single mass grave. My take on the number, size and capacity of the mass graves at Treblinka is explained in my articles Polish investigations of the Treblinka killing site were a complete failure … and Videos, a must see!, among others.

The next straw-man dished up by Andersson is just as mendacious:

A mass grave of wooden planks and sheets spread here and there is evidence enough for those gentlemen that the Germans did away with 900,000 Jews - yet can not explain why there are no human remains.


Actually the bigmouth would have a hard time finding a statement where either Nick, Andrew or I ever invoked this photograph, which like all photographs can but illustrate a small fraction of the events in question and constitutes no more than one out of many elements of evidence, as "evidence enough" for the mass murder committed at Treblinka. I actually don’t remember having addressed that photograph except in the context of "Revisionist" ramblings about it, like in my RODOH posts # 8582 and # 8588. Evidence to the mass killings at Treblinka consists of

• the depositions of numerous eyewitnesses, including and especially former members of the SS staff testifying or on trial for their crimes before West German courts,

• documentary evidence that allows for reconstructing the deportations to Treblinka and shows Treblinka to have been a final destination for deportees taken there, a place where people were taken in order to be destroyed and a place from which an unbearable stench of corpses emanated and befouled the air,

• the physical evidence discussed in my above-mentioned articles and

• demographic evidence showing that none but a few dozen escapees from among the hundreds of thousands of deportees were ever seen or heard of again after entering Treblinka.

As to the claimed absence of human remains, Andersson should start doing something about his ignorance by reading this article, which is based on sources quoted by "Revisionist" guru Carlo Mattogno.

The continuation of Andersson’s straw-man:

Actually, I find it all a bit hilarious; a tiny picture, some wooden planks and a bit of yarn here and there, and you've got a "mass grave" of Jews.


is just plain infantile and yet another indication of the inability of "Revisionists" to understand that context is the name of the game: the picture in question is only known to show a part of a Treblinka mass grave because it is part of an album of photos taken by Treblinka’s second-in-command Kurt Franz, who in turn described the mass killing and body disposal procedure at Treblinka at his trial before a West German court (in which he was sentenced to lifetime imprisonment), and whose description is corroborated by those of other eyewitnesses and further evidence independent of him. Without this context, the photograph in question would be completely meaningless, and even within that context it is just one out of many exhibits, which provides no meaningful information except in connection with other exhibits.

Then Andersson opens his mouth real wide:

In the meantime, there are a endless list of real mass graves where the victims are German, Polish, Latvian and other Europeans, everywhere - easily identified as such!


I would love to see the fellow trying to show but a few examples out of the "endless list" he claims. As I pointed out in this article, only a fraction of the mass graves containing victims of Stalin’s purges or penal camps, of crimes committed by Soviet soldiers against German civilians in 1944/45 or of postwar expulsion atrocities against ethnic Germans in Poland, Czechoslovakia and other countries, have so far been found. On the other hand, the former occupied territories of the Soviet Union are full of Nazi-made mass graves investigated by Soviet state commissions, whose findings are largely corroborated by evidence independent of the Soviets, as in the examples mentioned in Nick’s article Mass Graves in the Polesia and in my article Neither the Soviets nor the Poles have found any mass graves with even only a few thousand bodies …. Hundreds of such mass graves have lately been located again in the course of the Yahad in Unum project.

Finally comes the icing on Andersson’s cake:

But here we are looking at a microscopical picture of a small hole with some wooden planks in it, and that is evidence of murder by the Germans, of 900,000 thousand Jews - almost a million people.


No, Mr. Andersson. It’s just a photo showing a small fraction of one of the several mass graves in which, as becomes apparent from a multitude of eyewitness, documentary, physical and demographic evidence, hundreds of thousands of people murdered at Treblinka were buried before they were disinterred and incinerated in order to reduce the amount of incriminating evidence. It is but one of the many pieces that make up the puzzle of evidence to the Treblinka mass killings – nothing more, and nothing less.

Andersson ends his sermon as follows:

Picture that.

Impossible.


Yeah, just picture the inane trash that folks like Andersson are capable of uttering in all seriousness. I would consider it impossible that such nuts as Andersson are in existence, were it not for the clear evidence that they actually do exist.

Thursday, July 26, 2007

I Smell the Wood Burning

Jonnie Hargis, the UCLA library assistant who posts to the Führerbunker as "Hannover," took some time out from his schedule on July 26 to "think," as he put it, offering this steaming pile of pony loaf, begging the question of what goes on in Hargis's head when he doesn't have "thoughts."

It brought to mind this list of 10 traits of conspiracy theorists by Donna Ferentes, which was I think originally drafted to describe 9/11 "troofers."

Read more!


Consider the mind of a Holocaust denier, though, with regard to these traits:
  1. Arrogance: So I think anyone familiar with his "work" will agree that Hargis is arrogant. So is Fritz Berg. So is Robert Faurisson. And David Irving. I've met very few humble Holocaust deniers. Granted, I'm not a humble person myself. But is the average normative Holocaust historian quite so arrogant? I know a couple of prominent historians personally. Are some arrogant? Sure. Is it an overwhelming trait of Holocaust historians? No.

    Note how Ferentes typifies this arrogance. No Holocaust historian I know or have read has ever defined him- or herself as a "truth-seeker." There have to be at least half a dozen variations on that name as handles at the Führerbunker.

  2. Relentlessness. I think this is typified best by how often something like the "Auschwitz four-million gambit" is used by deniers, no matter how often it's pointed out how easily disproved it is.

  3. Inability to answer questions. Read here and see how Hargis refuses to answer a simple yes-or-no question.

  4. Fondness for certain stock phrases. Do yourself a search on "Holocaust industry" at the Fuhrerbunker sometime.

  5. Inability to employ or understand Occam's Razor. A sad example is found here. What our little friend seems not to understand is that there is no leap in logic when you have Adolf Eichmann testifying that code words were, in fact, used.

  6. Inability to tell good evidence from bad. Writes Ferentes, "Conspiracy theorists have no place for peer-review, for scientific knowledge, for the respectability of sources." Find me a tenured U.S. historian who denies the Holocaust.

  7. Inability to withdraw. See a key example here.

  8. Leaping to conclusions. Again, from Ferentes: "Small inconsistencies in the account of an event, small unanswered questions, small problems in timing of differences in procedure from previous events of the same kind are all more than adequate to declare the 'official' account clearly and definitively discredited." The consistencies in eyewitness testimony far outnumber inconsistencies and the inconsistencies are much smaller in magnitude than the similarities.

  9. Using previous conspiracies as evidence to support their claims. Take, e.g., Don Heddesheimer's claim that it was claimed that six million Jews were killed in World War I. But no such claim was ever made. Oh, well.

  10. It's always a conspiracy.
I'll give the final point entirely to Ferentes:
A person who always says the same thing, and says it over and over again is, of course, commonly considered to be, if not a monomaniac, then at very least, a bore.
Yes, indeed.
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