Donat Unknowingly Debunks the Ugly Voice

The penultimate installment of One Third of the Holocaust begins with a treatment of what the Ugly Voice calls "the third most important book" on Treblinka: Alexander Donat's The Death Camp Treblinka.

Donat, we're also told, wrote The Holocaust Kingdom as well. In the front of the book, a description of Holocaust Kingdom is given: "The journeys of the author and his wife through four countries and nine death camps."

"Maybe they weren't death camps," the UV smugly suggests.

Read more!

Well, there weren't nine death camps, and the six camps that were death camps were only in one country, so here the UV is partially correct. However, three of these camps were Treblinka, Majdanek, and Auschwitz -- all extermination camps. For Donat, as for many survivors, however, even the camps that weren't designed as extermination camps were "death camps," e.g., Dachau, where there were regular atrocities committed but mass extermination didn't take place. "Death camp" ends up being rather an inaccurate term. "Extermination camp" is more precise, but even then it can fall short, as Auschwitz and Majdanek also had large labor division, and even Treblinka seems to have occasionally served as a transit camp for small numbers of Jews fit for labor, sent from there to Majdanek concentration camp.

But the larger suggestion, of course, is one we hear quite often: How could these have been death camps if people survived? Look at the comments in this post by Sergey. Our reader JPSlovjanski wrote:

If someone survives something, it naturally follows that nobody could have died in the event in question.

So....

Nobody died on the Titanic, the Hindenburg, at Stalingrad, 9-11, etc.

Exactly.

Yankel Wiernik's A Year in Treblinka appears in Donat's Treblinka book, as the UV points out. Note that much earlier in the film UV had said that Wiernik's book was hard to come by. In fact, he claimed such in Part 1 of the film, something Roberto has already disproved.

The UV's claim is that Donat, in including Wiernik's account, changed Wiernik's words on the size of the Treblinka gas chambers. However, the contemporaneous Yiddish translation does agree with what Donat's version says, as Sergey pointed out some time ago.

Next the UV goes back to Samuel Rajzman, comparing his account in Donat against the account presented to the House of Representatives before the war was over, which can be read here

In the House account, Rajzman gave Sept. 17 as his date of deportation to Treblinka. In the account included in Donat's book, however, Rajzman says he was deported on Yom Kippur 1942, which fell on Sept. 21. I think that the UV makes a very big deal over a four-day difference, particular since the later account, which had given Rajzman the chance to actually check his dates, gives a date that is listed on Arad's list of deportations from Warsaw to Treblinka.

The UV thinks Rajzman changed the date to Yom Kippur to look more pious. However, even agnostic Jews observe Yom Kippur; next to Passover, it is the most widely obvious Jewish holiday. The UV quotes a Jewish Web site on the issue that "No work can be performed on that day," i.e., Yom Kippur, seemingly implying that Rajzman wouldn't (or shouldn't) have been working on that day. He doesn't take into account that the Nazis never respected the Jewish religion. If they did, so-called work Jews would have been given every Saturday off from work. They weren't.

Quite notable here is that the UV suddenly mentions the Dusseldorf trials Roberto wrote about at length. He also mentions the trial of Fedor Federenko, which is fairly unwise considering the sworn statements he made to American government agents in Hartford, Connecticut in May 1976. They are mentioned in this article by Christopher Browning, author of the excellent studies Ordinary Men and Origins of the Final Solution.

That the date of Rajzman's deportation was Yom Kippur leads the UV to a comparison to Ben Hecht's story in Reader's Digest, featured in Episode 9 and already shown to be true by yours truly.

We should take a moment to note that it is true that Rajzman's different testimonies present certain problems, not the least of which are problems with consistency in the details. Is it possible that he "embellished" his account over time? Yes, it is. But is there any question that this man was in Treblinka? Absolutely not.

Next we cut to footage of Treblinka barber Abraham Bomba. Deportations began from Czestochowa on Yom Kippur, Bomba says, and on the day before Sukkoth (September 24) was the second transport, of which he was part. I guess this is included to indicate that Bomba is also lying, but, again, Arad's deportations list clearly shows that deportations from Czestochowa began on Yom Kippur.

The UV cuts to the bios of 60 Treblinka survivors given in Donat's book at the camp. He notes Donat's surprise at not being answered by many survivors. I don't find this surprising consider that very few people talk about their unpleasant past experiences and, in fact, the suicide rate among Holocaust survivors was signficantly higher than that of the general population. E.g., see this medical abstract.

What does the UV expect? That these people should want to relive Hell over and over?

The UV tells us from looking at the list of survivors that these were "Yiddish speaking people of the Jewish religion who lived in Poland during the war."

However, look closely as the UV pages through the book. Among the names given are Oskar Berger and Richard Glazar. Look very carefully here, because it quite clearly is shown in the film that both of these men were from Czechoslovakia. Czech Jews tended to be German speakers or Czech speakers (the most famous example, Franz Kafka, was a German speaker, as were my own Czech-Jewish ancestors) -- they were not Yiddish speakers, as Yiddish was rarely a spoken language among Jews in Austria-Hungary or, later, in Czechoslovakia.

In fact, look at this list of Treblinka internees. The three members of the Breslauer family listed were from Germany, as was Siegfried Bernstein, Gustav Jordan and Henny and Herta Rosenbaum, Gella Streim, and Clara and Theodor Tuch. Hans Burg seems to have been Czech, as were Hans Freund, Pawel Frey, Samuel Lichtblau, Rudolf Masarek, Milos Schmolka, Karl Unger, and Hanus Volga. Adele and Alexander Blau, Margarethe Hiiferding, Friederike Meier, Emil Pottner, and Petr Strenberg were Austrian. That's twenty-four prisoners that we know of that weren't Polish Jews and didn't come from countries where Yiddish was spoken.

Now the UV deals with this question: If you claim millions didn't die, then where did those Jews go? They emigrated, he answers. He attempts to use the list of sixty Treblinka survivors as a "random sample" of Polish Jews, but he can't do this. Why not? Because this is not a random sample; this is a very specific demographic, as any statistician could tell you, first of all because they all shared a common non-demographic experience and, as already shown, they weren't all Polish!

"There are millions of European Jews in Israel, not thousands," The UV states. This is because the Holocaust didn't happen. Well, for one thing, the CIA Factbook tells us that about 22.6 percent of the Jewish population of Israel is from Europe or America. That would be about 1.1 million European or American Jews living in Israel, assuming the population's composition by ethnicity and origin didn't change between 2004 and 2006. Of course, native-born Israelis are the majority, but population statistics show that only slightly more than half of the Jews in Israel are Ashkenazic (i.e., Eastern European) Jews. The rest are from North Africa, the Middle East, and Asia.

The UV tells us that it is hard to establish an "immigration path" for Jews from Poland to Israel (he assumes that the majority of Holocaust survivors went to Israel, but in fact more came to the U.S., Canada, Australia, and other countries in Europe). Polish Jews picked up Hebrew, the UV says, having "discarded Yiddish." (In fact, Yiddish was spoken throughout the first generation of Israel's existence and is still spoken among Haredi Jews there.)

One of the examples of name-changing that the UV gives is Rudolf Reder (formerly Roman Robak). The problem is that "Rudolf Reder" isn't a Hebrew name; it's a German name, perhaps a variation on Reeder, i.e., a shipowner.

The last person the UV mentions is Arad himself, born Yitzhak Rudnitski. We're told he spoke Yididsh, but how do we know that he spoke Yiddish? As established by myself elsewhere, not all Polish Jews could speak Yiddish. Then we're told about Arad's military career in Israel. What does his military career have to do with any of this? Is it merely another ploy by the UV to not-so-subtly bring Zionism into the discussion again?

And the 5,000-year-old population of Egypt that Arad fought? It's only been an Arab population for about 1,300 years. Before that, they were Greek-speakers. Five thousand years ago, the Egyptian population was entirely different from the one that is there now.

But the UV barely knows Holocaust history, so I guess we can't expect him to know North African history.

Just in case you were wondering...

...what scholarly pursuits holocaustresearchproject.org was up to, click here (or see this screenshot in case they have already changed it).

That, and the "re-establishment" of the old ARC site. The true site is, of course, available only here.

It will suffice to say that H.E.A.R.T.'s "ARC" still contains the fake materials (click here for more details).

This is exactly what I've been writing about all this time. They don't care about authenticity at all.

Chris Webb and Carmelo Lisciotto are not smart people, that much should be obvious by now.

What do deniers give each other for Christmas?

Though there's a school of radical revisionists which holds to the view that Christmas is in fact a gigantic Hoax perpetrated by the retail industry on the world every year, the fact remains that to the best of our knowledge, the majority of our erstwhile opponents, in print and online, celebrate Christmahannukwanzakaa. Well, maybe not the -hannukwanzakaa bit, but you know what I'm talking about.

Yes, it's that time of year, Yuletide Eve, when even diehard Holocaust deniers must surely be gathering round the chimney, not in order to examine it for any traces of carbonised corpses, but to await whatever it is Santa and his little helpers have brought the happy revisionist household that year. All of which begs the question: what could, would or should Holocaust deniers be getting for Christmas?

Answers below the fold...


For some, the answer's fairly easy. For others, we can only speculate.

We're pretty sure that IHR maven Greg Raven will be getting that cut-price bargain video of Tom Cruise and Katie Holmes' fairytale wedding that the Church of Scientology must be marketing to their flock of sheep right about now.

IHR boss Mark Weber, meanwhile, is surely to be given his 25th 'how to complete your book manuscript' guide, seeing as how it's been only 25 years since he wrote to David Irving promising the revisionist blockbuster The Final Solution: Legend and Reality. And maybe a thesaurus as well.

Paul Grubach will get a letter-writing kit so he can practice the calligraphy of his signature for his next missive to a head-of-state or chief executive of an NGO.

Friedrich Paul Berg will be given his umpteenth model German truck to play with, though we also suspect that he may well be rewarded with a year-long prescription to anti-Alzheimer's drug Aricept.

David Irving, meanwhile, will surely get a copy of the critical edition of the Anne Frank Diary from daughter Jessica, a smack in the gob from Bente and his own TV series from Fox entitled Desperate Louse Lies. Without, we hasten to add, any sign of Teri Hatcher or Eva Longoria on-set. Dang!

Richard Krege will get a new lawnmower specially designed to trim in between the patio stones, or the Treblinka monument, so that it'll be dual-purpose.

Joe Bellinger gets a complete annotated and mistranslated set of the Talmud.

Christopher Bollyn is getting a downloaded copy of 'Loose Change' on a CD-ROM. And a Christmas card scrawled 'FUCK YOU' from his former buddies at AFP.

Ingrid Rimland will give hubby Ernst Zündel a matchbook with the ad saying "if you can draw Skippy, you can earn big money as an artist".

Ernst will give Ingrid "some good German black bread" and another yeat of not having to sleep with him.

Robert Faurisson, we're assured, will be receiving a signed first-edition of J-B. Peres' classic 1827 work How Napoleon Never Existed, Or, The Great Error, Source Of An Infinite Number Of Errors To Be Seen In The History Of The Nineteenth Century, which he will hate since it pre-dates his trademark 'Ajax method' by 150 years. But them's the breaks.

Apparently, Carlo Mattogno and Robert Faurisson stopped exchanging Christmas cards in 1995, but there's been no communication breakdown within the Mattogno family. This means that Mattogno's brother, Catholic fundamentalist antisemite Gian Pio, will no doubt be gifting his sibling yet another copy of the Protocols of the Elders of Zion, this time in Polish, which will cause bro' Carlo to grit his teeth and make a wan but sickly smile in front of the aunts and uncles of the Mattogno clan, but which he will rush away the instant the family dinner is over to devour.

The rest of the Mattogno family have apparently clubbed together to get Carlo a barbecue grill to replace the one he set on fire accidentally conducting impromptu cremation experiments with salt beef, since this was the most Jewish meat he could think of trying to carbonise.

Jürgen Graf will find all the latest Ron Jeremy DVDs in his stocking, so that Graf can reassure himself that Jewish pornstars really do have bigger penises than he does.

Alas, poor Sylvia Stolz won't be getting what she wants for Weihnachten this year, a little (Horst) Mahler, and will have to make do with a black-white-red-painted dildo instead. Double alas, the patriotically-painted dildo will turn out to be a leftover from the days of the Kameradschaften so Stolz will try and take it back to the store in case Michael Kühnen sat on it once.

Germar Rudolf's another one who's spending Xmas behind bars, but thanks to his personal website, we know what he put on his wishlist long ago. Mainly really bad 80s pop music and oldies, so it's been decided chez Rudolf that the young boy needs livening up, and thus he'll be receiving Slayer's 'Reign in Blood' and Tool's 'Undertow' albums instead. To complement the Tool CD, he'll also be getting rear-opening pajamas.

Alexander Baron will get the new book 'How to Live on a Prison Diet'.

But let's not forget our online friends at alt.revisionism, the Cesspit and RODOH.

Scott Smith, our favourite denier and owner of RODOH, is probably getting another model German truck like his friend Freaky Freddy Berg.

Claudia Rothenbach is to get a gift certificate to pay for gender-reassignment surgery at Johns Hopkins.

A.S. Marques will be getting a case of King Oliver sardines.

RiverCola will be getting a bullet in the head followed by an exhaustive forensic examination by a neutral commission of investigators, who will then present the results to him in his coffin.

For SeymoreG, we've heard that Martha Stewart's Ephraimite Guide To Entertaining has been wrapped up and placed under the tree down under in New Zealand.

His fellow Kiwi Lurkerthe/rodohcodohwatchwatch is being given free psychiatric therapy.

For Herr Wilf 'neugierig' Heink, a set of rabbit hutches and some lettuce.

A crate of Sterno for Matt Giwer.

Tom Moran gets a set of teach-yourself language cassettes. In English.

New tinfoil and a special Xmassy tinsel variant for Scott Bradbury's hat.

IlluSionS667 is being abducted for a get-away-from-it-all holiday season break inside the alien mothership at Newschwabenland.

And finally, Jonny 'Hannover' Hargis, circus ringmaster of CODOH forum, is getting some very special gifts from the cast of The Wizard of Oz: a heart, a brain and some courage....


Merry Christmahannukwanzakaa everybody!

It’s raining empty claims …

... in episode # 15 of the One Third of the Holocaust video (YouTube version), as denierbud (hereinafter "Bud") shows his viewers all those problems he maintains would have rendered open-air incineration of corpses at the Aktion Reinhard(t) (AR) extermination camps unfeasible.

Read more!


The first problem he mentions is rain. Bud wonders why rain is never mentioned as a problem with the outdoor cremation process, even though incinerations started at times when he believes it rained a lot (in the autumn of 1942 at Belzec and Sobibor, in March 1943 at Treblinka) and there’s no evidence to the grids having been protected against the rain by some sort of roof, which he claims would have been a stupid thing to leave out, so that the rain would have put out the cremation fires.

Let’s examine these claims.

The claim that it must have rained a lot in the area of the AR camps in the autumn of 1942 and in March 1943 is based on two indications:

a) Pechersky’s tunnel, mentioned on page 311 of Yitzhak Arad’s book Belzec, Sobibor, Treblinka. The Operation Reinhard Death Camps and addressed in my article about clip # 16, was flooded by heavy rainfalls that fell on the camp on 8 and 9 October 1943.

b) A sequence from Claude Lanzmann’s Shoah, showing Lanzmann and an interpreter dialoging with a local witness at Treblinka, shows it was raining on the day on which this sequence was filmed.

So it must have rained a lot in the autumn of 1942 at Belzec and Sobibor and in March 1943 at Treblinka, right? I’d say two rainy days in October 1943 and one in the 1970s at the time of Lanzmann’s Treblinka sequence are manifestly insufficient evidence to frequent rainfalls in the autumn of 1943 or in the season and year in which the Lanzmann sequence was filmed, let alone to frequent rainfalls in the autumn of 1942 or in March 1943. This is all the more true considering certain characteristics of the climate in Poland, which are described on this site (emphases in the following quotes are mine):

Poland has a moderate climate with both maritime and continental elements. This is due to humid Atlantic air which collides over its territory with dry air from the Eurasian interior. As a result, the weather tends to be capricious and the seasons may look quite different in consecutive years. This is particularly true for winters, which are either wet, of the oceanic type, or - less often - sunny, of the continental type. Generally, in north and west Poland the climate is predominantly maritime, with gentle, humid winters and cool, rainy summers, while the eastern part of the country has distinctly continental climate with harsh winters and hotter, drier summers.
[…]
Generally, Poland receives all kinds of air masses typical of the northern hemisphere. This results in a variable climate and considerable problems with weather forecasting. Poland's climate is also characterized by substantial weather changes in consecutive years, caused by disturbances in the pattern of main air masses coming to the country. Summer may be hot and dry a few times in a row and then it becomes cool and wet. This phenomenon tends to happen in several-year cycles.
[…]

As we can see, the weather in Poland during a given season is so variable that no conclusion can be drawn from what the weather was like in one season of one year to what the weather was like in the same season of another year. The weather in the early spring months seems to be especially unpredictable:

There are many proverbs about the unpredictable weather, especially in March and April.

One constant of the weather in Poland, however, seems to be a warm transition period between summer and autumn, which usually sets in around mid-September:

Sometimes the season is kind and allows the Poles to enjoy more sunshine. Almost every year, mid September sees the coming of Polish "Indian summer", which is a warm and sunny transition between summer and autumn. Leaves start to fall off the trees, but you can still feel the wafts of warmth.

It is quite possible that in 1942 there was such an "Indian summer" in Poland at the time when the body disposal method at Sobibor was changed from burial to incineration, in October of that year. An indication in this direction is the fact that in October 1942 there was a documented complaint about the stench of corpses emanating from Treblinka extermination camp. In his expert opinion submitted in the course of the Irving-Lipstadt lawsuit, Prof. Christopher Browing mentioned this incident as follows:

The fate of the Jews sent to Treblinka is also reflected in a report noted in the October 10, 1942, entry to the War Diary of the Oberquartiermeister of the military commander in Poland.

OK Ostrow reports that the Jews in Treblinka are not adequately buried and as a result an unbearable smell of cadavers pollutes the air.

Ostrow, it should be noted, was some 20 kilometers from Treblinka.

It must have been quite hot at Treblinka in October 1942 for the rotting corpses, not adequately buried despite the enormous mass graves dug for this purpose, to have issued an unbearable smell that apparently carried as far as Ostrow, 20 km away from the camp. If the weather at Sobibor was similar at the time – and there’s a good chance that it was, considering the relative proximity of the camps – then rain was not much of a concern at the time the body disposal procedure was changed to incineration at Sobibor.

Some rain there probably was in the autumn of 1942, which takes us to Bud’s claim that the absence of some kind of roof to protect the fire from the rain would have been a flagrant absurdity. One might argue thus if i) roofing the fires would have brought no disadvantages in addition to advantages and ii) it was necessary to incinerate bodies every day, even during rainy days, in order to get the job done.

Issue i) can be addressed by simply imagining what would have happened if there had been some kind of roof over the fires: instead of rising high up into the air, the smoke would have been deflected by the roof, escaped along the sides of the grid and probably spread throughout the extermination sector and maybe also other areas of the camp; huge as the grid fires were (see my article about clip # 23), this would have been a lot of smoke, presumably obstructing the vision of and causing breathing difficulties to the SS staff and Ukrainian guards. For some reason the burning of animal carcasses in the open, even in rainy Great Britain, is apparently not carried out under any sort of cover against precipitation. Not that it never rains while a major carcass-burning program, like during the UK’s foot-and-mouth disease epidemic of 2001, is under way, but this seems to have neither led to the implementation of covers against precipitation for the fires nor to have kept the respective program from being carried out. The problem with burning carcasses in the open in rainy weather is not that it cannot be done, but that

Combustion temperatures are low, especially in rainy weather, and this favours the formation of dioxins..

Combustion temperatures at the AR camps may have been higher than in British foot and mouth disease – pyres due to the factors mentioned in my article about clip # 23, the formation of dioxins would of course be no concern to the SS at the AR camps, and neither did they have to incinerate under all weather conditions, at least at Sobibor and Treblinka. At Sobibor, they incinerated a maximum of 250,000 dead bodies between October 1942 and the dismantling of the camp’s facilities, more than one year later. Even if incineration was carried only during a one year period and there was no incineration 20 % of that time due to rainy weather, meaning that on only 292 out of 365 days there were incineration operations, no more than 250,000 ÷ 292 = 856 bodies would have needed to be incinerated on an average incineration day. At Treblinka, as pointed out in my article about clip # 24, they probably took longer to burn ca. 750,000 bodies than the 156 days that Bud calculates with in clip # 24. But even if they accomplished this job within 156 days, and if 20 % of this time no incinerations were carried out because of rainy weather, an average daily performance of 6,000 bodies during the remaining 125 days would have been sufficient to do the job – the six grates mentioned on pages 175 f. of Arad’s book, even with each of these grates «processing» no more than 1,000 dead bodies per day (according to Arad it was possible to burn up to 12,000 corpses at a time on these grids, i.e. 2,000 per grid).

That leaves Belzec, where according to the testimony of Heinrich Gley, quoted on page 172 of Arad’s book, the burning of the corpses was carried out between November 1942 and March 1943, i.e. over a period of ca. 5 months of 150 days. The bodies to be burned were those of the 434,508 Jews delivered at Belzec until 31.12.1942, according to Höfle’s report to Heim of 11 January 1943, minus a handful of survivors. 434,500 dead bodies within 150 days means a daily average of 2,897 bodies per day, lower than the daily average that becomes apparent from Gley’s testimony.

Bud makes the classic «we are supposed to believe» - fuss about the notion that «the Germans» would choose «an outdoor cremation fire in weather like this», i.e. with snow falling. This imbecile fuss calls for the following question: what alternatives were there, that could be quickly implemented when it was decided to clear out the mass graves and burn the bodies (the SS leadership wanted to get the operation over with quickly, as pointed out in my article about clip # 16)? An indoor cremation fire, setting up the grid in some sort of barn which would be quickly filled with smoke hindering any control of the incineration’s progress and requiring some airing time when the burning was finished, assuming that neither the barn itself caught fire nor the fire died down for lack of air circulation? Bud must be joking, and I doubt he can show a single example of such solution having been implemented anywhere for mass-incinerating carcasses, regardless of weather conditions. Or a crematorium, which would have taken months to design, build and commission, like the crematoria of Auschwitz-Birkenau? No, my dear Bud, «the Germans» were not «stupid», they simply had no alternative to doing it the way they did it in order to destroy the bodies in the Belzec mass graves within a short time. And then, their choice was not exactly a bad one if applied correctly, as explained in my article about clip # 23.

Would snow hamper the incineration process? No more so than rainy weather, and here we see carcasses being incinerated in winter during the UK’s 2001 foot and mouth – disease crisis, of course without any kind of roof covering the pyre. In this report about FMD carcass disposal it is stated, under "Air Pollution Monitoring" on page 10, that

Pyres should not be lit under certain unusually still weather conditions that can, but rarely, occur in Autumn and Winter.

This is a clear indication that winter weather is not held to preclude the burning of carcasses on open-air pyres.

Taking advantage of Gley’s statement that corpse incinerations at Belzec started at a time «when snow was already falling», Bud tries to convey the impression that snow was falling all the time while corpses were being unearthed and incinerated at Belzec. Of course this was not what Gley meant to say; he obviously wanted to convey that he recalled the incineration having started at a time when there was already snow, i.e. at the end of autumn/beginning of winter. Nor is constant snowfall during winter customary in Poland, as the above-mentioned site on Poland’s climate tells us:

The average annual number of days with snowfall is 30-40 in the country's western and central part, and over 50 days in the north-east.

If the winter of 1942/43 followed this average – and there’s no indication that it did not – it was snowing at most during one third of the period in which the exhumation and incineration of the corpses at Belzec was carried out.

What about the ground in which the bodies were buried? Bud also sees a problem here, and to support his claim he shows another sequence from Claude Lanzmann’s Shoah in which Lanzmann asks a local interlocutor if it’s very cold in the area in winter. The response is: «It depends» followed by «It can get to minus 15, minus 20». So the weather, according to Lanzmann’s interlocutor, can but need not reach such low temperatures in this area. And if it does, that will probably happen in January, which is the coldest month in Poland, not in November when the unearthing and incineration of the corpses started. It would of course have been logical to do the work of opening the mass graves at the beginning of the operation, when the ground was not yet frozen solid, and as the graves were full of dead bodies and covered only with a thin layer of soil – see the description by Kurt Gerstein quoted in section 4.1 of my article Carlo Mattogno on Belzec Archaeological Research – not much excavation would have been required to open the graves and get at the bodies. So here we also have a false dilemma created by our friend Bud.

In sum, we can conclude that the «inherent contradiction» in Gley’s testimony that Bud claims exists in Bud’s fantasy alone. What has also again been shown is the sloppiness of Bud’s research and the weakness of the conclusions he all too eagerly jumps to.

Before we move on to what Bud tells his viewers about wind and the art of fire-making, a few words about a problem at the AR camps that Bud considers to have been none, the breakdowns of the gassing engines. However rarely Bud thinks that such breakdowns happen "even" with the engines of civilian automobiles (he obviously has never driven on Portuguese roads, otherwise he might change his mind about this), the fact is that engines recovered from booty tanks or trucks were not necessarily in the best conditions, that there was also no interest in keeping them finely tuned because the dirtier the exhaust they produced, the sooner the people in the gas chambers would be killed, and that engine breakdowns did occur at the AR camps – they are mentioned, for instance, in the judgment at the 1st Düsseldorf Treblinka trial – and were a serious problem when they occurred because they hampered the smooth running of a killing machinery that had to «process» thousands of deportees per day in each camp. How frequently such breakdowns occurred during the whole of the AR camps' operation period we don't know; the context of Arad's mention of «frequent engine breakdowns» on page 100 of his book, which Bud refers to, is the initial phase of the period during which these camps were in operation.

We move on to the wind issue. Bud claims that an outdoor fire is inefficient because you lose «most» of the heat to the outside air, especially when there is wind. If so, would this also be a major impediment in case of fires that, as shown in my article about clip # 23, were rather huge and burned wholly or largely inside a pit, and would the heat loss to the outside air not be compensated by better air circulation supporting the incineration in such huge fires? As explained in my aforementioned article, one of the key factors for economically burning a huge mass of animal or human matter on a grid, according to German engineer Heepke’s recommendations and the accounts of the incinerations on the Dresden Altmarkt quoted in that article, seems to be the generation of a huge, blazing, hot flame that will evaporate the moisture inside the matter to be burned and ignite the same as quickly as possible, after which the burning will be dependent to a lesser degree on the flames coming up from the external fuel and rely mainly on air circulation, the matter’s own combustion properties and the heat of the grid. Wind feeding more oxygen to the flames may thus be more helpful than impeditive to the development of a large fire. To be sure, engineer Heepke states that when the grid is lying on the rims of a burning pit having the recommended depth of 1.5 meters, rather than inside that pit, «a great deal of the heat will be lost» to wind. However, the quantitative differences between the former and the latter method are mainly in terms of duration, not so much in terms of fuel efficiency, and the fires in the experiments of Dr. Lothes and Dr. Profé, referred to by Heepke, were also not nearly as large as the incineration grids of Treblinka, where the differences in duration and fuel-efficiency between the «older, not economically satisfactory method» that seems to have been widely practiced in Heepke’s time and the «better arrangement» he recommended might have been smaller, due to the aforementioned effect of more oxygen supply on a huge fire’s intensity.

Bud bemoans the absence of wind protection, which Heepke recommends for pits in marshy land that can be dug only half as deep as the 1.5 meters he considers adequate:

The screen thus took over the function of the missing depth of 0.75 meters; any heat losses can be countered effectively enough by surrounding [the screen] with a layer of earth. These trials, listed in section C, lines VII, VIII, and IX in Table II [see document 3] led to very satisfactory results, nearly equal to those of method B.

What if the windscreen had been missing in these experiments? Heepke:

For comparison, Table II also lists, in section D, lines X and XI, two trials where the carcass was placed directly on the fuel in pits 0.50 - 0.75 meters deep and burnt without any grid or windscreen.

According to Heepke’s Table 2, the "C" experiments, in which a grid and a windscreen were used, resulted in an average fuel consumption of 0.52 kg per kg of carcass and an average duration of 0.68 minutes per kg of carcass, whereas in the "D" experiments, in which no windscreen and also no grid was used, the average fuel consumption per kg of carcass was 0.71 and the average duration was 0.91 minutes. The difference in fuel consumption between both sets of experiments is almost the same in relative terms as the difference in time. By comparison, Heepke’s Table 1 shows that there was a huge difference in time between the "A" series of experiments, with the grid lying on the rim of the pit, and the "B" series with the grid inside the pit: an average of 1.79 minutes per kg of carcass in the former vs. 0.75 minutes per kg of carcass in the latter. The difference in fuel consumption was not big, however: 0.55 kg of fuel per kg of carcass in the "A" experiments, 0.50 in the "B" series. What made the "B" experiments the more successful ones was probably their combining the advantages of good air circulation, which burning on a grid provides, with the advantages of heat retention and wind protection inside a pit – the best of two worlds, so to say. The experiments of the "D" series, like those of the "A" series, lacked the latter advantage and therefore lasted longer, the higher fuel consumption in the "D" experiments in relation to the "A" series probably being due to the absence of a grid improving air circulation. Notably, however, the average duration of the "D" experiments was somewhat shorter than that of the "A" experiments, which can be explained by the fact that, in the former, the pit must have been longer and wider than in the latter to make up for the lack in depth (the amounts of fuel and carcass in all experiments are similar despite the depth of the pits in the experiments of the "C" and "D" series being half or a third of the depth in the "A" and "B" experiments, which suggests that the pit volume was similar in all experiments; this in turn can only have been achieved, in the "C" and "D" experiments, by increasing the area of the pit). The greater width and lesser depth of the pit may have allowed more oxygen to get to the fire in the "D" experiments, thus making up somewhat for the absence of a grid in what concerns air circulation and maybe also for the absence of the windscreen in what concerns heat loss. These factors may also explain why the "D" experiments were much more efficient, in terms of fuel consumption and time, than the "simplest procedure" described by Heepke as quoted in section 2.1 of Mattogno’s article Combustion Experiments with Flesh and Animal Fat. The chief problem with this "simplest" procedure, in which the carcass was burned directly on the fuel in or above a pit 2.5 meters long and 1.5 meters wide and deep, is likely to have been the lack of adequate air circulation, which had to be made up by a lot more fuel. The fuel-intensiveness of burning on a pyre inside a pit without using a grid is corroborated by these Field Notes for Responders Euthanasia and Disposal (E & D), where it is stated that burning carcasses inside a pit, while having the advantage of helping prevent the fire from spreading to other areas, requires more fuel than open-air incinerations:

Because the carcasses are not exposed to as much air (open-air burning), extra fuel or air must be added to the pits to help the fire stay lit.

As becomes apparent from the "B" series of incineration experiments referred to by Heepke, this increase in fuel supply can be avoided by burning the carcass on a grid inside the pit, resting on a section of the pit that contains the fuel and is deeper and narrower than the rest. This arrangement, as mentioned in my article about clip # 23, is similar to what was apparently applied at Sobibor. The Treblinka arrangement, on the other hand, was like that of the "A" series of the experiments mentioned by Heepke, except that there was a space between the bottom of the grid and the top of the pit, corresponding to the above-ground height of the concrete blocks, which probably had the purpose of further enhancing air circulation. Another difference is that the area of the Treblinka grids was much bigger than that of the pits in the experiments mentioned by Heepke. Whereas the pit in the "B" series of experiments, the layout of which is shown here, was only 2 meters wide and had an area of about 5 square meters, the Treblinka pits, according to the calculations in my aforementioned article, had an area of about 66 square meters, more than 13 times higher. So this grid may have considerably benefited from the effects that, as explained above, seem to have considerably reduced the duration in Heepke’s "D" experiments in relation to that of the "A" experiments and also kept the fuel consumption in the "D" experiments much lower than that of the "simplest procedure" described by Heepke. The depth of the pit underneath the grid that was stated by the witness Leleko is higher than in Heepke’s "C" and "D" experiments though lower than in the "A" and "B" experiments, and the space to be filled with fuel (the depth of the pit, 1 meter, plus the height of the concrete blocks, 0.7 meters, see my aforementioned article), is slightly higher than the depth of Heepke’s pits, with the area of pit and grid being bigger in relation to either than in any of the experiments mentioned by Heepke: while the area to fuel depth – ratio seems to have been 5 to 1.5 (ca. 3.33 to 1) in the "A" and "B" experiments and may have been as high as 10 to 0.75 (ca. 13.33 to 1) or 15 to 0.5 (30:1) in the "C" and "D" experiments, it was about 66 to 1.7 (38.82 to 1) at the Treblinka grids, or even 66:1 if only the depth of the pit and not the space above the pit is taken into consideration. If, as suggested by the above comparison between Heepke’s "A" and "D" experiments, a larger area vs. depth relation can partially make up for the absence of a grid and a windscreen, and if the better air circulation of the Treblinka structures due to the presence of a grid, the space between the grid and the top of the pit and the sheer size of the structure is taken into consideration, the negative effect of a windscreen being absent at the Treblinka grids can arguably be assumed to have been negligible.

It should be noted, in this context, that Bud is not a very keen observer, for he backs up his rambling that «The fire sits out in the open» with a picture from Peter Laponder’s model. This model, in which the reconstruction of the grids, as I was told by Mr. Laponder, was largely based on Leleko’s testimony, clearly shows pits underneath the grids, see here and here. A close-up from the model, kindly made available to me by Mr. Laponder, shows these pits even more clearly.

Interested as he is, according to his possibly incorrect reasoning that wind would hamper rather than help fires as huge as those at Treblinka, in making the wind at Treblinka as strong as possible, Bud shows the following statement from a prisoner of the Treblinka 1 labor camp, quoted on page 177 of Arad’s book:

The spring winds brought with them the smell of burning bodies from the Treblinka extermination camp. We breathed in the stench of smoldering corpses … We heard the clatter of the excavators for days and nights on end … At night we gazed at skies red from the flames. Sometimes you could also see tongues of flame rising into the night …

and argues that the winds were so strong that they blew the «smoke» 3 kilometers away, which he claims would have called for a windscreen protecting the grids. The problem with this argument is that the witness nowhere mentions smoke having been blown over from the Treblinka extermination camp. What he mentions is that the wind carried over the stench of the burning corpses. For this the wind need not have been very strong, and according to our site about Poland’s climate winds in Poland do not tend to be strong indeed:

The winds in Poland are typically weak to moderate, their speed ranging from 2 to 10 m/s.

Did Bud simply misunderstand the witness’s statement, or did he deliberately misinterpret it to support his argument?

Bud’s dubious wisdom about wind and fire is followed by a lecture about fire-making. Apparently appealing to the anti-urban resentments of rural rednecks, he claims that «The storytellers didn’t know how to build an outdoor fire». Arad cites a Polish investigation commission’s concluding report about Belzec, according to which «The corpses were laid in layers, alternated with a layer of wood», and Bud comments that «Anyone who’s ever built an outdoor fire knows that wouldn’t work». No explanation is given, and one wonders what outdoor firing experience could have led Bud to draw this conclusion. Has he ever built a pyre like that, alternating corpses or carcasses with wood, especially one of the sizes that the Belzec pyres presumably had?

Inefficient or not, this method was applied by the Nazis on other occasions, as becomes apparent, for instance, from pictures of Klooga concentration camp in Estonia after its liberation by the Red Army in 1944. Some of these very graphic pictures, taken from the archives of the Ghetto Fighters’ Museum, can be found on this RODOH thread. This photograph, for instance, is captioned as showing «A pyre on which the corpses of Klooga camp inmates had been burned». And here we see «A Soviet investigating committee beside a pyre stacked with the bodies of victims in the Klooga camp», which the camp staff had not longer had the time to incinerate. The alternate layers of wood and bodies can be clearly seen on this picture and also on this one, which shows «A Soviet investigative commission inspecting the Klooga camp, gathered beside a pyre on which the corpses of inmates had been prepared for burning», furthermore in this picture showing «Inmates' corpses stacked on pyres in the Klooga camp». Information about the Klooga concentration camp, along with further pictures of yet unburned or partially burned corpses, can be found by running a search for «Klooga» on the USHMM site. Incineration at this camp seems to have been inefficient indeed, but as they obviously lacked the grid structure applied at the AR camps, this and not the unsuitability of the alternate wood-corpses arrangement may have been the reason why some of the corpses were only partially burned, a lack of time and of liquid fuel presumably being factors of influence as well. Some of the pictures of Maly Trostinets concentration camp in Belorussia that can be found by running a search for «Maly Trostinets» on the same site suggest that the same incineration procedure was applied at that camp, also with limited success, during the German retreat from Belorussia in mid-1944.

Was this procedure also applied at Belzec, as stated by the Polish investigation commission, albeit with greater success due to the use of a grid structure and presumably also because more time and liquid fuel was available to help the burning, apart from the important factor of the bodies having been in a more or less advanced state of decomposition? I consider this improbable for the following reasons:

i) Such procedure is not mentioned for the «sister camps» of Belzec, Sobibor and Treblinka;

ii) Alternating the bodies with wood on the grid would have taken up more space and therefore possibly not allowed for the burning rate that becomes apparent from Heinrich Gley’s deposition in conjunction with the documentary evidence (see above);

iii) There are no direct eyewitnesses to this procedure having been applied at Belzec, for all I know.

It is therefore possible that the Polish investigation commission surmised the application of this burning procedure, based on speculations of surrounding villagers and on what the Soviets had found at other Nazi killing sites, like the above-mentioned Klooga and Maly Trostinets camps. Another possibility is that the wood placed between the bodies was not logs of timber but small amounts of highly flammable tree branches like those used for kindling underneath the grid, which would have served as an accelerant like the straw that, according to the excerpt from David Irving’s Apocalypse 1945. The Destruction of Dresden quoted in my article about clip # 23, was placed between each layer of bodies on the grid set up on the Dresden Altmarkt after the bombing attack of 13/14 February 1945. If so, it is possible that this was done at Sobibor and Treblinka as well.

Bud takes issue with the description of the Treblinka roaster on page 174 of Arad’s book:

After the most diverse burning attempts had been made for this purpose, a large burning facility was constructed. It consisted of concrete bases about 70 cm high, on which 5 to 6 railway rails about 25 to 30 meters long lay in small intervals.

He complains that this «isn’t much higher than a camp fire».

Apart from the fact that the space containing the fuel, as established in this article, also included the pit described by Leleko and was therefore 1 meter higher or deeper than becomes apparent from Arad’s description, what exactly is the relevance of the fire’s height supposed to be? The "camp fire" underneath the Treblinka grids covered an area of about 66 square meters, according to my calculations of the grid area. It was thus probably much bigger than any camp fire Bud has ever seen, so his comparison hobbles for this reason already. Also and just as important, the corpse incineration procedure relied on bodies being quickly ignited by a huge blazing flame of petrol-doused wood, which consisted largely or wholly of highly flammable dry tree branches. Bud’s complaint is based on his ignoring the latter factor and assuming that what burned the bodies was only the fire underneath, which is a fallacious assumption for the reasons I have explained.

As described on page 175 of Arad’s book, the corpses were arranged in layers on the grill to a height of two meters. Bud claims that «The bodies on top wouldn’t even get warm let alone be cremated», again without substantiating this claim, and ignoring the above-mentioned mechanics of this combustion procedure as well as the liquid fuel in which the «fresh» bodies were drenched and the contribution to combustion that was provided by dehydration and/or flammable substances created by the decomposition process in the case of the bodies taken from the graves, which made up the overwhelming majority of the bodies burned on the Treblinka grids. Also, if Bud’s considerations were accurate the burning of 6,865 corpses on the Dresden Altmarkt, employing what can be called the Treblinka procedure on a smaller scale, would have been at least as improbable as the incinerations on the Treblinka grids, for a look at the pictures of the Dresden grid shown in this article suggests that the space underneath the grid was rather smaller than «campfire» size.

Bud’s further complaints are the following:

«Arad never mentions adding more wood to the fire»

Neither does the evidence to the incinerations on the Dresden Altmarkt, and neither do engineer Heepke’s descriptions of the process of burning carcasses on grids, quoted by Mattogno. So there’s nothing wrong with this supposed omission.

«Nor does he mention anyone rotating the bodies on the lower layers with the upper layers»

Boy, our friend Bud has a fertile imagination. I wonder how he pictures this «rotating the bodies», which of course was not practiced at Dresden either, and obviously just as unnecessary there as it was at Treblinka.

«Yankel Wiernik wasn’t the only eyewitness to say that bodies burn on their own»

Well, the bodies didn’t burn on their own in the sense that Bud attributed to Wiernik’s description, as explained in my article about clip # 1.

Yechiel Reichman’s testimony on page 175 of Arad’s book is quoted by Bud. It reads as follows:

The SS "expert" on body burning ordered us to put women, particularly fat women, on the first layer of the grill, face down. The second layer could consist of whatever was brought – men, women, or children – and so on, layer on top of layer … Then the "expert" ordered us to lay dry branches under the grill and to light them. Within a few minutes the fire would take so it was difficult to approach the crematorium from as far as 50 meters away … The work was extremely difficult. The stench was awful. Liquid excretions from the corpses squirted all over the prisoner-workers. The SS man operating the excavator often dumped the corpses directly onto the prisoners working nearby, wounding them seriously …

«We see a lack of fire knowledge», Bud claims. Where that lack of fire knowledge is supposed to become manifest he doesn’t explain, except when he mockingly remarks «Yes, just lay some dry branches under the grill». Actually «some» dry branches would be 30.9 cords of branches and maybe also other wood, according to my calculations in this article, though the incinerations on the Dresden Altmarkt suggest that the wood requirements may have been much lower. And they were doused with petrol as described by SS-man Heinrich Matthes, also quoted in the same article. So were the bodies themselves except for the decomposed ones (i.e. the overwhelming majority), which didn’t require being drenched in liquid fuel for the reasons explained here. In clip # 25 Bud himself tells his viewers how well dry branches burn and that it therefore made sense to use them for kindling. Has he now forgotten this?

The arrangement of the bodies (such with higher fat content below, so they would contribute to the burning of those above), described by Reichmann, is read but not commented except as covered by the general «lack of fire knowledge» claim. Actually it made technical sense to see to it that the bodies in the lower layer would quickly ignite and thus contribute to the dehydration and subsequent ignition of the bodies above them, who in turn would provide all or much of the fuel for burning the next layer of bodies. It may be questionable whether the procedure described by Reichman could be adopted with decomposed bodies taken out of the mass graves, but these burned quite well for other reasons I have explained, and as the gassing of arriving victims went on while the bodies taken out of the mass graves were being incinerated, it was also possible to do «mixed» incinerations consisting of both recently killed and decomposed bodies.

Bud tells us that «The logistical part of Reichman’s account is so bad that we know he’s not telling the truth». What kind of logic is that? As if an eyewitness undergoing a horrible experience would focus his attention on logistical matters! And then, Reichman’s account is by no means implausible from a logistical point of view, especially if read in conjunction with the deposition of Heinrich Matthes. Reichman’s mention of the «SS-expert» is also corroborated by both Wiernik and Heinrich Matthes, two eyewitnesses independent of each other and of Reichman. So, contrary to Bud’s illogical claim, Reichman is quite a credible witness, even though his statement about the fire being too hot to approach from as far as 50 meters may be an overestimate of this distance.

«Bodies don’t burn like wood logs on outdoor fires», Bud tells his viewers. Well, that’s not exactly what Reichman is saying as he mentions the wood underneath the grids, and his testimony has to be read in conjunction with that of Matthes and eventual other witnesses used by Arad, who mention the wood and the bodies (when «fresh») being sprayed with an inflammable liquid. The description of the procedure and the differences between decomposed and «fresh» bodies in Arad’s book is the following (emphases are mine):

Between 2,000 and 2,500 bodies – sometimes up to 3,000 – would be piled on the roaster. When all was ready, dry wood and branches, which had been laid under the roaster, were ignited. The entire construction, with the bodies, was quickly engulfed in fire. The railings would glow from the heat, and the flames would reach a height of up to 10 meters.
At first an inflammable liquid was poured onto the bodies to help them burn, but later this was considered unnecessary; the SS men in charge of the cremation became convinced that the corpses burned well enough without extra fuel.
[…]
The bodies of victims brought to Treblinka in transports arriving after the body-burning began were taken directly from the gas chambers of the roasters and were not buried in the ditches. These bodies did not burn as well as those removed from the ditches and had to be sprayed with fuel before they would burn.

Burning «on their own» under such conditions was exactly what the bodies of 6,865 bombing victims on the Dresden Altmarkt did. So another of Bud’s false claims goes down the drain.

In Bud’s bizarre reasoning, Yeichel Reichman is supposed to be also less credible because of the «psychological/emotional content» of his account. From page 216 of Arad’s book, Bud quotes a part of Reichman’s account where the witness «gets a little carried away with an emotional content, beseechingly asking, “Where is God …”», according to Bud. What we have here is another misrepresentation of an eyewitness’s statements, for there is no «beseeching» in this part of Reichman’s account; on the contrary, Reichman is taking issue with fellow inmates for their adherence to religious beliefs and practices, which he considers ridiculous or despicable under the circumstances. The passage of Arad’s book including this Reichman quote reads as follows:

Religious expressions and what might even be taken as justification of the mass killings also caused antagonistic reactions, protests and demands of "Where is God?" Yechiel Reichman writes:

I hear from the left side of the hut how the poor miserable people are standing there, praying the Afternoon and Evening services, and after the prayers, with tears in their eyes, they say Kaddish. The Kaddish wakes me … I was almost out of my mind, and I yelled at them: "To whom are you saying Kaddish? Do you still believe?! In what do you believe and whom are you thanking?! You are thanking the Master of the Universe, for His righteousness, Who took our brothers and sisters, our fathers and mothers – you are thanking Him?! No, no! It is not true that there is a God in Heaven. If there were a God, He wouldn’t be able to look at this great tragedy, at this great injustice, as they murder the unborn children innocent of any crime, as they murder people who wanted to live in honesty and benefit humanity, and you, the living witnesses to this great tragedy, you are still thanking?! Whom are you thanking?!"

How Reichman’s description of his understandably antagonistic reaction is supposed to affect the credibility of Reichman as a witness is beyond me, as it is how someone could witness occurrences like Reichman was witnessing without getting emotionally involved and calling fellow inmates fools because they continued to thank God. It’s about time Bud understood that the experience of Reichman and other eyewitnesses was not a normal nine-to-five job or a Sunday pick-nick. It was the mass murder of innocent human beings.


Many thanks to Sergey for his always pertinent constructive criticism, and to Peter Laponder for our conversations about the Treblinka grids and for the close-ups of his model he kindly made available to me.

Irving: "If they're so touchy about the whole thing, they shouldn't have done it in the first place"

There's been an almost deathly silence in the print editions of the papers to which my news-addicted household subscribes about the return of David Irving to British soil. After the flurry of Reuters reports and then another flurry when a press conference saw him use the phrase 'nigger brown', it seems that Irving may well have finally exhausted the patience of the British Fourth Estate.

The solitary lone exception to the press blackout this Sunday seems to be a short diary column piece by Rod Liddle for The Sunday Times, entitled 'They've made a martyr out of this Holocaust denier'.

Liddle, for those of you who don't know the world of the British media intimately, is a moderately unpleasant former producer of Radio 4's Today breakfast news show and probably more famous for his marital infidelity than his sneering right-wing views. But even Liddle can't bring himself to do more than conclude his article with the line 'What a singularly unpleasant man Irving is, in almost every regard, despite his obvious erudition. A snob and a pathological racist who will now revel in his role as martyr to the freedom of speech'.

But this isn't the most notable thing about the article. Liddle evidently gave Irving a tinkle on the dog and bone, extracting the following quote from him:

"It did occur to me how many of the leading Nazis were either Austrian by birth,
or educated in Austria. Really, if they're so touchy about the whole thing, they
shouldn't have done it in the first place."

That should have a few deniers choking into their cornflakes this breakfast-time.

Empty Promises

Michael Santomauro is a Holocaust denier and has been proprietor of RePortersNoteBook.com for at least six years now -- maybe longer. With Germar Rudolf now in Germany awaiting trial, Santomauro has taken over Rudolf's site also, with his characteristic flair. When I went to see David Irving in February 2003, Santomauro was "hosting" the event and confiscated several copies of a pamphlet published by the Holocaust History Project, that I had placed on an information table there.

Santomauro first caught my eye with this promise that is still posted to his site: "$1,000.00 reward (will be paid by RePortersNoteBook.com) to the first person to prove that any portion of Israel Shahak's Jewish History, Jewish Religion -- The Weight of Three Thousand Years, chapter 5 is inaccurate." I submitted this essay, which is now cited by Wikipedia, among other sources on Shahak. Santomauro refused to pay.

Now, as a "celebration" of David Irving's release from jail in Austria, Santomauro is offer $10,000 "any person to prove that any topic in the book published by Germar Rudolf who is currently in prison and on trial in Germany for writing this book titled: The Lectures on the Holocaust [Online here] where the essence of it's [sic] content by chapter or topic is not academically acceptable."

Read more!

Anyone even remotely considering taking this on should take several steps before even getting down to work

1. Get Proof that Santomauro Has the Money. If he doesn't have the money, then what would be the point?
   
2. Have Him Put the Money in Escrow. Then he can't cry poor mouse later on.
   
3. Get Specifics From Santomauro About What He Wants. In particular, get him to define "academically acceptable."
   
4. Get Him to Sign a Notarized Document That He Will Actually Pay if You Meet His Specific Demands. Then if he doesn't, you have legal recourse.
   
5. Submit Anything Intended for Santomauro to Myself or Nick Terry First. Both Nick and I have published in peer-reviewed academic journals, and I actually edit one currently for my job. That includes coordinating peer review. So we'll be able to gauge -- as experts -- whether the article you submit passes economic muster.

Maybe one of us here will take a crack at it first. Hey: Who couldn't use an extra $10,000?

More on this one later.

How to Actually Read a Book and Embarrass a Holocaust Denier

Episode 17 of One Third of the Holocaust, "Belzec Chronicles," [You Tube version] begins with a treatment of SS-Oberscharfuhrer Josef Oberhauser, who was in charge of the building of Belzec. The Ugly Voice insinuates that there is something fishy in the fact that the sentence he received when tried in January 1965 in Munich was four-and-a-half years. The UV notes that Oberhauser had already gotten a fifteen-year sentence by a Soviet military tribunal (he was released in 1956).

Read more!

One of the rhetorical questions brought up by the UV in this section, by the way, is why it took West Germany twenty years to begin prosecuting death camps cases (not just the Reinhard(t) camps, as the UV says, but Auschwitz also). The answer is rather simple: The Cold War. Germany, as we all know, was partitioned after World War II, and East Germany became part of the Soviet bloc. Poland, where these camps had all been, was also in the Soviet bloc, and these nations sought to prosecute these criminals first and, in many cases, alone.

The "Khrushchev Thaw" after Stalin's death in 1953 allowed a great deal of information that had not been previously available to West German authorities to be released in 1958. Many of the defendants in these trials then had to be tracked down, and even once West Germany had the necessary information to try the war criminals, there were still jurisdictional disputes with East Germany, Poland, and the Soviet Union. In addition, there was the sluggishness of West German criminal justice in getting down to investigating and prosecuting Nazi homicides, pointed out in this article.

Incidentally, the UV reveals, especially in this clip, that he read what Arad wrote about the trials of former AR camp staff before West German courts. How, one wonders, does his awareness of these trials match with the fuss he made in Clip # 5 about the Nuremberg record of the AR camps amounting to only 20 minutes of supposedly unreliable testimony? (See the related article).

Back to the issue at hand: Why did Oberhauser only get four-and-a-half years at Munich? You can read about the Belzec trials in greater detail here, from which the following excerpt is taken:

To rebut the general defence proffered collectively by the defendants, the prosecution relied on one principle: that the defendants were guilty of collective participation, even though they had not acted as instigators. In principle, the one in charge who gives the orders (Wirth, Hering), is solely responsible. The one who carries out these orders must also share the responsibility if he knows the task in hand is unlawful. The jury disagreed. On 30 January 1964 the trial collapsed and all the defendants, with the exception of Oberhauser, were acquitted. The defence of "acting out of fear for life" was accepted by the court. (emphasis mine)

The emphasized passage shows that the court considered in the acquitted defendants’ favor that they had carried out their murderous activities in a situation of duress, subject to a fearsome superior’s authority. Even the only one of the defendants who was eventually sentenced for his activities at Belzec, Oberhauser, benefited from such considerations, as pointed out on the above-mentioned site:

One point, that came over very strongly during the trial and was corroborated by all the defendants to Oberhauser’s advantage, was that Wirth’s law and discipline was fearful with no way of challenge.

However, as the same source tells us, the claim of having acted out of fear of the terrible commandant Wirth was somewhat less than credible in the case of Oberhauser due to his close association with the commandant. This was why Oberhauser was not acquitted, though the court, as becomes apparent from the respective judgment, considered in Oberhauser’s favor that his contribution to the mass killing at Belzec by obtaining material for the gassing installation had been a comparatively insignificant one (!), that he had led an orderly life after the war, and that he had joined the SS at age 20, at a time when he was not yet able to realize that this formation would one day be used to commit mass crimes. Furthermore, the court considered in Oberhauser’s favor that he had been but a subordinate executor of orders and that long years of National Socialist indoctrination may have reduced his respect for the lives of others, especially such whom the state leadership proclaimed to be inferior.

These arguments invoked by the court in Oberhauser’s favor are somewhat less than convincing, but they are in keeping with a phenomenon that was already addressed in this article, i.e., the sometimes outrageous leniency of West German courts in sentencing participants in Nazi mass killings on account of their proven criminal deeds. Contrary to the ignorant speculations, based on wishful thinking alone, that the Ugly Voice and other “revisionists” indulge in, this leniency was not the result of any “deals” that defendants cut with the prosecution or the court, accepting to tell them what they supposedly wanted to hear in exchange for a light sentence, but came from a soft spot that West German judges, some of them with their own Nazi pasts themselves, tended to have for defendants who had “merely” carried out orders and not also murdered on their own initiative.

As mentioned in the same article, the light sentences often issued for participation in mass killing brought harsh criticism from scholars, prosecutors, and other entities in Germany or abroad. Now, what “revisionists” like the Ugly Voice would have us believe is that the criminal justice authorities of the German Federal Republic -– which, after all, is a constitutional state with criminal procedure laws aimed at protecting suspects and defendants against any arbitrariness, and with a judiciary independent of the other powers of state and subject to the law alone –- violated their legal duty to establish the truth and committed the crime of sentencing innocents for crimes they had not committed, in order to comply with the instructions of some sinister conspiracy or of a German government seeking to demonstrate such compliance, and that only to see their infamous “work” destroyed or at least diminished by their handling a great many Nazi killers with kid gloves. The absence of any evidence supporting it aside, this is a self-contradictory proposition without any connection to reality. But, then, so is “revisionism” as a whole.

The UV then segues indelicately to a treatment of the testimony of Rudolf Reder, who he claims to have been the sole survivor of Belzec who lived past 1946. He also asks why "no one else escaped". The UV shows his utter idiocy again. Arad has a whole sub-chapter in his book which is called "Escapes from Belzec" (pp. 264, 265). He mentions the escapes of Mina Astman, Malka Talenfeld, dentist Bachner, Rudolf Reder and Chaim Hirszman. UV shows this very sub-chapter in this part of his video.

Also, Carlo Mattogno in his Belzec book quotes M. Tregenza (p. 51):

At the end of 1945, only seven surviving Jews were known to have survived Belzec,[133] one of whom was murdered a year later at Lublin by Polish anti-Semites. Of these seven survivors, two – Rudolf Reder and Chaim Hirszman[134] – testified to the mass murder in court after the war. Only Rudolf Reder, the most famous survivor, published a brief account of his experience in Krakow in 1946.

Mattogno's footnote:

133 Rudolf Reder, Sara Beer, Hirsz Birder, Mordechai Bracht, Samuel Velser, Chaim Hirszman, and a Jew nicknamed “Szpilke.”

So much for "why no one else escaped" nonsense.

(A side note: when mentioning that Adalbert Rueckerl uses Reder in his book, the UV calls him a "Holocaust writer". Apparently, the Ugly Voice doesn't know that Rueckerl wasn't a mere "Holocaust writer", but the head of Zentrale Stelle der Landesjustizverwaltungen zur Aufklärung nationalsozialistischer Verbrechen.)

Reder escaped from Belzec in November 1942, while on a day trip to Lvov to gather tin to bring back to the camp. The UV finds Reder's account unreliable based on several points:

1. That a prisoner would go on a mission outside the camp in the first place.
   
   Why is this such a big deal? It's not as if people didn't know that Jews were being employed as slave laborers. This was not something that the SS attempted to hide.
   
   
2. The SS were the elite forces of the German army. Why would four SS men be sent on such an errand? Why not send a regular soldier?
   
   As already pointed out in Roberto’s article about Clip # 1 and in Sergey’s article An Ugly Analysis, most of the murderers who staffed the Aktion Reinhard(t) camps were not members of the German armed forces at all. Most of them had been made available to Aktion Reinhard(t) by the German police or by the authority conducting Aktion T4, the Nazi "euthanasia" program of killing physically and/or mentally disabled patients of German sanatoria, the reason for this choice of staff probably being that these men had some experience in the institutional killing of helpless human beings on a large scale and/or were expected to be already inured to such killing. Oberhauser was one of the few who had actually seen combat duty as a member of the Waffen-SS, but in November 1939, as mentioned in his short biography available here, he had been detached to Aktion T4 and worked as a “burner” at the “euthanasia” killing centers Grafeneck, Brandenburg and Sonnenstein.
   
   So the answer is that those weren't "elite soldiers" who went with Reder. Why they went to load tin sheets is anyone's guess: perhaps the business was urgent and there weren't other available people, perhaps they themselves didn't load anything and went mainly for entertainment (Reder says that he was left alone with a guard while all the others "went for entertainment" - quite possibly, they went immediately after arriving in Lvov), or maybe they just thought that a little bit of physical exercise was good for their health.
   
   
3. With five able-bodied men, was it necessary to bring Reder along, particularly when he was sixty-one years old?
   
   The question assumes that at sixty-one years old Reder would be weak or infirm, and this is obviously not necessarily so. So why bring Reder along? Perhaps there were no other available guards that day, and it was a six-man job. Perhaps the guards "trusted" Reder more than other prisoners for some reason unknown to us. Perhaps they figured an old man would be expendable. Or perhaps Reder was a strong and healthy man, despite his age, and he was chosen to aid in this job, again, despite his age. All of these are, at the very least, possible explanations for why Reder was brought along. Just because we may not know all the details, Reder's story doesn't become somehow absurd.
   
   
4. How could a guard fall asleep?
   
   He had worked all day, he and Reder were not speaking, and it was nighttime. Figure it out.
   
   
5. Why was Reder so concerned about pulling his hat down so no one would see his face?
   
   Actually, the whole bit about covering his face is the UV's interpolation. All Reder says is this: "I pulled my hat over my eyes; the streets were dark and nobody saw me" (qtd. in Arad, p. 265). And given that it was November in Poland, he'd probably have been wearing a coat over any prison uniform, if such uniforms were even issued in the Reinhard(t) camps, which by many accounts they were not.

So these probing questions by the UV are hardly as revealing as he'd like us to believe.

The UV returns to the Oberhauser clip from Shoah before talking about the camp boundaries. (By the way, am I supposed to be made to feel sorry for Oberhauser by these repeated clips from Shoah? Even if the UV were 100 percent correct -- and let's be abundantly clear that he isn't -- and no Jews were killed at Belzec, the man still willingly worked at a camp where Jews were wrongfully sent and he was still in the SS, an overtly anti-Semitic organization. Are we supposed to forget that, even if we have a complete psychotic break from reality and dismiss the murder charges against him?)

During his discussion about the camp's security the UV says the barrier was merely a barbed-wire fence. Again, he's lying or he hasn't read Arad's book, particularly Chapter 3, entitled "Belzec: Construction and Experiments." Here's what's in Arad's book about the barrier; the person speaking is a Polish prisoner, Stanislaw Kozak:

During the time that we Poles built the barracks the "Blacks" [Ukrainians] erected the fences of the extermination, which were made of dense barbed wire. (qtd. in Arad, p. 25).

A mere two pages later, we get more detail on the barrier: "It was surrounded by a high fence of wire netting, topped by barbed wire and camouflaged with netting" (p. 27). Why doesn't the UV tell us about this high fence, which would make simply lifting the barbed wire and letting a fellow escapee through rather impossible?

Two more quotes, this time from the above Web site on Belzec, tell us more about the barrier:

The entire camp occupied a relatively small, almost square area. Three sides measured 275 m; the fourth, south side measured 265 m. An adjoining timber yard was incorporated into the camp, which was itself surrounded by a double fence of chicken wire and barbed wire. The outer fence was camouflaged with tree branches. During the later reorganisation of the camp, the space between the two fences was filled with rolls of barbed wire. On the east side, another barrier was erected on a steep slope by the fixing of tree trunks to wooden planks. During the second phase of the camp's existence, a wooden fence was built along the side of the road at the foot of the steep eastern slope. A line of trees was planted between the western outer fence and the Lublin - Lviv railway line.

The decommissioning of Belzec commenced in Spring 1943. The elaborate system of fences and barriers, the barracks and gas chambers were all dismantled and items of use were taken to the KZ Majdanek. The entire area was then landscaped with firs and wild lupines. Wirth's house and the neighbouring SS building, which had been the property of the Polish Railway before the war, were not demolished.

Despite all this evidence that disproves the UV's lies, the UV sarcastically tells us that the "barbed-wire fence" had "tree brances woven into it." He points out that during Christmas, his Christmas tree gets dry and brittle. Well, at the AR camps they had the same problem, and at Treblinka they solved it by constantly replacing these tree branches woven into the barbed wire fence to prevent outside observation, as mentioned on p. 110 of Arad's book:

Since it was constantly necessary to replace dried-out branches with fresh ones, the camouflage work was continuous.

Although Arad only mentions Treblinka, it stands to reason that the SS wouldn't have allowed the tree branches on the fences drying out and thus losing their camouflage function at Belzec and Sobibor either. This argument has also been treated at length here.

One final point about this section: Before returning to the clip from Shoah, this time showing Oberhauser being confronted with a photo of Christian Wirth, we are told that the tin that Reder et al. were sent to fetch was "obscure." Has the UV seen his own film? He should look at Episode 24, or at least keep track of his lies as he goes along. In Episode 24, he cites p. 176 of Arad: "removing the remains of the charred bones from the grill and placing them on tin sheets" (emphasis mine).

Well, now we can make a reasonable guess about why they went to Lvov for tin, don't we?

And when the UV returns to Oberhauser for the last time, the UV asks, "Does this look like a man that would choose barbed wire with tree branches propped into it for security in a top-secret death camp?" Well, we know that this was not the complete composition of the barrier. But am I supposed to be able to look at a bartender and tell whether he's smart enough to built a sufficient barrier for a concentration camp? I have no freaking idea.

The final scene of this part of the film is a quote from Anton Spiess, a German State Prosecutor in the death camp cases, also from Shoah. Spiess says that Oberhauser was a driver for Odilo Globocnik, who was in charge of running the Reinhard(t) camps.

Let's take the quote at face value for a moment. Apparently, the UV is unaware that Globocnik is as important a figure in Holocaust historiography as he is, or else he wouldn't have included this clip -- twice in a row, I might add, presumably for emphasis -- without any comment as if to demonstrate that Oberhauser was an unimportant person. He was only unimportant if being the adjutant to the head of the whole Reinhard(t) operation (as the "literal" interpetation of Spiess' words entails) was insignificant. Here's a clue for the UV and his believers: it wasn't insignificant. I guess the UV would know Globocnik better if he'd read Arad's book. The man is mentioned on 40 separate pages of a 400-page book, or 10 percent of the text.

Of course, there is no reason to think that Oberhauser ever worked as Globocnik's driver. Probably, all Spiess meant by "former driver" was that he was Globocnik's driver during that specific trip to Treblinka in 1942 (we know that Oberhauser accompanied Globocnik on that trip, see Michael Tregenza's article "Christian Wirth. Inspekteur des SS-Sonderkommandos "Aktion Reinhard", Zeszyty Majdanka, vol. XV, 1993).

So much for your subtle, sarcastic hints, Mr. Ugly Voice.

Many thanks to Roberto for providing the all-important legal history in this piece.

Not all is trash on the Cesspit

While looking through this thread of the RODOH forum’s Memory Hole section for censored posts of mine to be mentioned in the commentary to another of Jonnie "Hannover" Hargis’ mendacious victory dances that can be read in my RODOH post # 7717, I came upon several posts of mine that had been deleted or retained on the thread Laws of nature undo Holocaust story of the Cesspit. These posts that never saw the light of day – only the first message I posted on that thread made it – are recorded in my RODOH posts # 1813, # 1820, # 1821, # 1822, # 1823, # 1828, # 1829 and # 1830.

Read more!


I also found my reference, in RODOH post # 1825, to an interesting new character who, under the handle "mscfs2", had started posting on the "Laws of nature" thread, followed by a quote of this poster’s first message.

That message and the other messages by mscfs2 published on that thread will be quoted hereafter, not only because their quality contrasts with the trash written by his "Revisionist" opponents, but also because they suggest a technically knowledgeable person more than able to paint "Revisionist" pseudo-science into a corner.

mscfs2
Joined: 17 Apr 2004
Posts: 7
Posted: Wed May 19, 2004 8:34 am Download Post Post subject:
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In all fairness guys, I don’t like the original analysis. It misses some points in the mass cremation pyre scenario. A pyre has a vertical configuration (layers of bodies above wood) and in my opinion this is crucial to the analysis.

I apologize for the rather long post, but please bear with me.

First some basic facts:

A wood fire has a range of temperatures. The range is near 1100 F near the coals to about 300 F at the tip of the flame. All these temperatures exceed the boiling point of water (212 F). Therefore all materials within the flame would be undergoing dehydration. Down low near the 1100 F coals it would be more rapid. Up high (2 meters) it would be slower. But all corpses would be in the process of dehydration.

The human body (on average) is about 60% water by weight. If you assume 150 lb average adult then 150 *0.6 = 90 lbs water. 150 * 0.4 = 60 lb of solid matter.

The human skeleton is about 20% total body weight (wet). Therefore 150 lbs * 0.2 = 30 lbs (wet). Since bones contain somewhat less than 50% water content by weight 30 lbs of bones (wet) yields roughly 15 lbs of solid matter. (Astonishingly light weight)

With a total dry weight of 60 lbs, of which about 15 lbs is bone, this leaves about 45 lbs for muscles, organs, sinews, etc. But let’s do calculations on the conservative side and call this 40 lbs.

All of this dry solid matter is combustible.
Of course the “meat” portion is readily combustible.
Small bones (toes, fingers, forearm, lower leg, ribs) are combustible.
High density bones (skull, upper arm, upper leg, vertebrae, and pelvis) are of lower combustibility.

The “meat” is about 40 lbs (dry). The total skeleton is about 15 lbs (dry) with the combustible portion conservatively estimated at maybe 5 lbs (dry). Conservative calculations indicate results of at least 40 lbs + 5 lbs = 45 lbs of dry combustible matter per body. This discounts the lower combustible skull, vertebrae, pelvis and upper limbs. They indeed do burn but require somewhat longer exposure to high temperatures.

Pyre considerations:

As stated earlier the vertical configuration of a pyre is in my opinion crucial to the analysis.

In a mass cremation pyre the lower bodies nearest the wood fire hot coals (1100 F) would dehydrate first. If they dry sufficiently their dry mass (45 lbs) could ignite and become additional fuel contributing their heat to dehydrating the bodies in the upper portion of the pyre. If these lower bodies do ignite and burn they would eventually collapse thereby lowering the overall vertical dimension of the pyre bringing the remaining upper bodies closer to the hot coals.

Fuel volumes and masses:

About what is the volume of the 45 lbs of dry organic matter generated by the dehydration of a corpse?

The specific gravity of organic materials ranges from 1.0 to 1.2. Taking a middling value of 1.1 (seems fair) this works out to 62.4 lbs/ft3 * 1.1 = 68 lbs/ft3. Therefore the conservatively calculated volume of the dry matter is roughly 45/68 = 0.6 cubic foot (ft3).

If the pyre includes a total of say about 2000 bodies, they could potentially generate about 90,000 additional lbs (45 US tons) of fuel. At 0.6 ft3 per body * 2000 bodies = 1200 ft3 of additional dry organic matter. I believe the original thread indicated 480 ft3 * 0.5 airspace = 240 ft3 of wood. The dehydrated bodies volume therefore almost quintuple (5x) the volume of combustible wood (1200 / 240 = 5).

Conclusions:

Therefore the crucial point in my analysis is whether the initial 240 ft3 of wood is enough to dehydrate some of the lower elevation bodies in the bottom of the pyre sufficiently enough to allow for them to ignite. The dehydration and ignition of subsequently higher elevation layers of bodies could then continue in an upwards direction through the vertically configured pyre.

To calculate that only the wood contributes to the cremation is a remarkable over simplification. There may be other sources of combustibility.

Like I said in the first paragraph, I don’t like the original analysis as it completely misses some points in the mass cremation pyre analysis. It considers only the volume of wood as a potential source of heat. It does not include the generation of additional fuel, the vertical configuration of a pyre, the sequential combustion of a pyre, the combustion process of dehydration leading to dry matter leading to ignition, the distribution of temperature over the height of the pyre, nor changes in pyre configuration over time.

I still don’t have any idea if this is enough wood fuel to initiate combustion of the entire pyre, but any analysis of this sort must include, in my opinion, at least some acknowledgement of the above referenced points.

mscfs2
Joined: 17 Apr 2004
Posts: 7
Posted: Sun May 23, 2004 8:53 am Download Post Post subject:
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Let's take a closer look at the initial geometric and dimensional information of the original post. I believe there is an alternate geometric configuration that more fully uses the given information and results in a more functional "roaster".

The initial conditions as stated in the original post are:

Quote:

....The cremating structure consisted of a roaster made from five or
six railroad rails on top of three rows of concrete pillars each 70 cm
high. The facility was 30 meters wide.


It plainly states the number of rails, 5 or 6. The original poster interpreted this to mean:

Quote:
The system with three parallel
tracks can only have two spaces between them, one track on either side
with the space between divided by the third rail.


I interpret this information a bit differently. I believe there are 5 or 6 rails ( lets say 6 for ease of this discussion) each about 30m long, 18 concrete support pillars at 70 cm height each, parallel rails separated by about 30 cm (1 foot), the pillars arranged in three rows of 6 in each row providing support at the end of each rail (6*2 = 12) and one pillar in the middle (6*1 = 6) of each rail ( near the 15 m mark).

This geometric configuration results in full use of the given information. It also creates a roaster that is 5 feet wide (6 parallel rails with 5 one foot separations between each rail). A roaster that is five feet wide certainly provides better support for bodies than the originally proposed roaster that is only 2 feet wide.

A 30 m rail does sound a little long, however I have personal experience in providing geotechnical engineering services for the construction of a railroad right of way that was being built with 24 m rails. I understand that in the USA standard rail lengths are 10m, 14m, and 24m. I also understand that rail manufacturers will make rails of darn near any custom length because the production method is a continuous extrusion process. Therefore, I do not find a 30 m rail length to be out of the realm of possibility.

As stated earlier, this geometric configuration results in a roaster of 5 feet width rather than 2 feet. This results in a 2 1/2 fold increase in the volume beneath the roaster. Maintaining the original stated criteria of 50% airspace for the wood material this results in an increase in volume of 2.5 fold (2.5x). Therefore the initial wood load is raised from 240 ft3 to 600 ft3. That is a huge increase in the btu available for dehydration.

mscfs2
Joined: 17 Apr 2004
Posts: 7
Posted: Sun May 23, 2004 9:22 am Download Post Post subject:
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The original poster stated:

Quote:

Having seemingly seen it all in debating the cremation aspect of the Holocaust story I would recognize that as the classic 'Holocaust bodies burned like wood' hypothisis. That is the ultimate recourse defenders have to resort to.

Ah yes, HOLOCAUST BODIES BURNED LIKE WOOD. When all else fails that's the ultimate desperation.

mscfs2 replies:

Nowhere in my post did I state that "bodies would burn like wood". In fact I was rather careful in using terminology like dry organic matter, dry solids, dry solid matter, (wet), (dry), etc. Nowhere did I say corpses would burn like any type of wood. I did not imply it. The original poster inferred that statement and it is an improper and unsupported inference.

mscfs2
Joined: 17 Apr 2004
Posts: 7
Posted: Sun May 23, 2004 11:40 am Download Post Post subject:
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For Hannover.

Sorry for the delay in response to your questions. I am involved in a project at work that requires me to be out of town. I am home on the weekends (at the most) until this project moves along a little further.

I have very limited time and opportunity at the current time to work on these posts. However, the post will pop to the top of the forum list as I make subsequent posts.

This is an interesting question that will take some time to develop an answer. Please give me time.

An interesting set of questions from me would be to ask if you think there is inadequate timber in eastern Poland? Do you think there was inadequate manpower available to the SS to perform the lumberjacking work? Do you think the road network in eastern Poland was inadequate to transport the timber from the cut site to the camp location if that was needed?

At this time I just have hunches, but in my opinion there is plenty of timber in eastern Poland. The SS had several hundred young men arriving daily on transports that might be used as slave labor. The road network was apparently sufficient to support a national economy of a somewhat modern European country.

As mentioned in my RODOH post # 1826, I tried to get in contact wish mscfs2 via PM. At that time Hargis still allowed the PM facility to all posters (he later restricted it to members of the "Revisionist" family, IIRC), and mscfs2 thus got the message. On 2 December 2004, I received the following e-mail message from him:

Date: Thu, 2 Dec 2004 08:12:26 -0800 (PST)
From: [e-mail address omitted] Add to Address Book Add Mobile Alert
Subject: looking for mscfs2??
To: cortagravatas@yahoo.com

Roberto/Cortagravatas,

I am mscfs2 of The Revisionist Forum (TRF).
I am NOT a Holocaust revisionist.
I am NOT a Holocaust denier.
Quite the opposite, actually.

I am a geological engineer in the United States with a great interest in reading the history of WW2. During the past year I have become interested in reading of the Holocaust. I became aquainted with denial through a book by Michael Shermer. On a regular basis I visited TRF so as to gain an appreciation of the most current "arguments" of the deniers. I eventually registered at the site under the handle "mscfs2". (An odd handle indeed, but it stands for Microsoft Combat Flight Simulator # 2. It is simply a computer flight simulator that I used to play and this e-mail account and handle were readily available.)

This relationship with TRF did NOT last long. A forum member started a thread about burning Holocaust corpses (Treblinka I believe). His post was a shallow, half baked analysis developed from eyewitness testimony. The original poster had done a pathetic job of interpreting the given information. He also tried to develop an analysis of burning corpses that was severely flawed.

My original post was to suggest an alternate configuration of the "roaster" that used the given eyewitness information more fully. It also suggested that the original post was simplistic in its analysis of the burning of organic material on pyres. My "alternate configuration" post then came under broad attack even though not one single forum member could counter any of the specific statements I made in my posting. Hannover challenged me with several off topic questions and accused me of "dodging" his questions.

I prepared a multi-part engineering analysis that addressed the corpse burning question. If I remember correctly it had separate posts discussing:

1) roaster configuration
2) timber requirements to fire the roaster
3) manpower requirements to harvest the required amount of timber
4) security requirements to supervise the "lumberjack" kommando
5) transportation requirements to transport the cut timber
6) thermal characteristics of wood fires
7) thermal characteristics of the burning of corpses

My plan was to make sequential posts allowing time for counter arguments from board members between topics. I submitted the "timber requirement" analysis. It established the total timber requirement for firing the roaster as about 180 acres. That is about 0.3 square mile. Not even remotely close to the "vast deforestation" claim made by Hannover.

Of course the post is reviewed by a "Moderator" before posting. The Moderator accused me of performing an analysis of "modern timber harvesting" and refused to make my post public. It was deleted, or more correctly never saw the light of day. I submitted several demands to the "Moderator" that my "timber requirements" submission be posted and to let the board membership argue its merits. None of these requests saw the light of day. Within several days my account was also dead.

So much for the claim of fair and open debate.

Recently, an aquaintance saw mention of my handle (mscfs2) at a web site with a statement that a Roberto was trying unsuccessfully to contact me by e-mail. I recognized your handle from TRF. My aquaintance could not remember at which web site he had seen the post but wrote down and delivered to me the Cortagravatas e-mail address. My aquaintance also stated the topic had something to do with destruction of Holocaust bodies and The Revisionist Forum.

I know it has been months since my banning at TRF but I thought I should contact you. I hope this address is correct and still current.

[Name and e-mail address omitted, as I don’t have the sender’s authorization to make his name public.]

As I had suspected, mscfs2’s apparent failure to respond to his opponents’ later posts had been due not to his having given up the fight, but to what is the usual cause for such outcome on "Hannover" Hargis’ forum: cowardly censorship of an inconvenient poster, who was eventually banned.

What is more interesting, though, is that mscfs2, who is a geological engineer, had made a calculation of the timber requirements for the roasters at Treblinka which, if I understand his e-mail correctly, points to a much lower amount of wood than I calculated in my article about clip # 23 of the One Third of the Holocaust video. This calculation, if accurate, would confirm the assumption, expressed at the start of my article about clip # 25 of the same video, that my calculation of the required amount of wood is on the high side. According to this site, the estimated saw-log volume in a North American pine forest is 14.5 cords per acre, which would mean that the 180 acres calculated by mscfs2 correspond to 2,610 cords of wood. The amount I calculated in this article, 30.9 cords of pine wood per incineration or 23,175 cords for an assumed 750 incinerations of 1,000 corpses each, is almost 9 times higher. Even if they incinerated about 2,000 corpses at a time and thus required only 375 incinerations to burn 750,000 corpses, the amount of wood according to my calculation would still be more than 4 times higher than the amount calculated by mscfs2, assuming that he made his calculations for 750,000 corpses like I did.

It would be interesting to see how mscfs2 (who is identical with the Axis History Forum poster "Pangea" I mentioned in this article, by the way) arrived at his result and explained the technical plausibility thereof, which is why I hope that he will visit our blog for a discussion about this matter.