Greg Gerdes

In his post of Tue May 13, 2008 2:45 pm on the "CODOH Revisionist Forum", a bigmouth who calls himself Greg Gerdes blustered away as follows:

Now let's look at what that incredible dullard - Roberto Muehlenkamp, has to say about the "huge mass graves" of Sobibor: (from: http://holocaustcontroversies.blogspot.com/2006/09/more-of-same-trash_18.html )

Quote:
"As before in regard to Treblinka and Belzec, Mr. Ugly Voice tries to take his readers for a ride by "estimating" the burial space available at Sobibor... it seems there are viewers blind and/or stupid enough to let themselves be taken in by such a kindergarten-level hoax. Which is not surprising, by the way, to who has spent some time looking at the world of "Revisionist" lunacy, which is full of fanatics eager to switch off their tiny brains in order to believe what they would like to believe.

...If, on the other hand, you use the plausible densities mentioned in the same article, you get the following:

• At 8 bodies per cubic meter (Mattogno’s "maximum capacity"): 99,592 bodies

• At 10.7 bodies per cubic meter (Alex Bay’s calculation): 133,204 bodies

• At 14.8 bodies per cubic meter (pursuant to Charles Provan’s experiment: 184.245 bodies.

So we can see that, even by the lowest calculation that can be considered reasonable, the American Football spectator crowd of about 80,000 people that Mr. Ugly Voice tries to impress his gullible viewers with could very well fit into the burial space available at Sobibor, as established according to Prof. Kola’s above-mentioned findings. Unsurprisingly, Mr. Ugly Voice has it all wrong once again."

So the dullest of all the holocaust controversies dullards claims that the estimate of 80,000 buried in the "huge mass graves" of Sobibor is a hoax and also sneers at the figure of 100,000. He goes on to estimate 133,000 to 184,000 bodies are buried in the "huge mass graves" of Sobibor.

Of course, this begs the question - Even if the maximum figure of 184,000 are buried in the "huge mass graves" of Sobibor, then why do so many hoaxers claim that the figure is 250,000?

But of course, the real question is, a question that even a kindergartener would ask: IF the official Sobibor holocasut story is true - Then where EXACTLY are these alleged "huge mass graves?"

And a question:

When is Kola going to publish the results of this investigation?

Read more!


Never having met this Gerdes fellow before, I wondered why he was mad at me, as his mouthing suggests he his.

Was it only because I had referred to "Revisionist" nonsense in general and denierbud’s video clips in particular in rather unflattering and equally appropriate terms? Or was there more behind Gerdes' anger?

The latter is suggested by the fact that, as I found out by running "Greg Gerdes" on the Google search engine, our friend is the "president" of the so-called "National Association of Forensic Criminologists, Archeologists, Skeptics and Historians" (NAFCASH), whose mendacious "challenge" was appropriately commented by Sergey Romanov in this article. My own article Polish investigations of the Treblinka killing site were a complete failure … incidentally punched further holes in what these NAFCASH people (whose multi-colored and multi-sized collection of long-debunked "Revisionist" manure, such as the irrelevant "diesel gas chambers" baloney, is so shrill as to make it look like their initials actually stand for "National Association of Fish-Wives, Cretins and Screaming Hysterics") tell their readers about there being "no trace of mass graves" at Treblinka, by showing – on hand of a site investigation report quoted by "Revisionist" gurus Mattogno & Graf, who however failed to understand its significance – that the size of the presumable mass graves area of Treblinka extermination camp (an area of ca. 20,000 square meters covered by human ashes, bones and skulls, according to said report), as well as the likely depth of the mass graves established during the investigation (7.5 meters, go figure!), are compatible with the order of magnitude of mass murder at Treblinka that becomes apparent from documentary evidence. Another nail in NAFCASH's coffin was my recent article Gold Rush in Treblinka, with its mention of documentary evidence about the postwar digging-up of the Treblinka killing site by treasure hunters and the opinion of an expert in ground-penetrating radar (GPR) technology, both of which are further confirmation that NAFCASH’s poster-boy Richard Krege is, if not an inveterate liar, then at least an incompetent bungler who doesn't know much about GPR soil examination.

If Mr. Gerdes has read the above-mentioned articles – which I hope he has – that would explain his diatribes against Holocaust Controversies in general and "that incredible dullard" in particular even better than his anger at my having called a spade a spade in my article More of the same trash ….

Now, let’s look at Mr. Gerdes’ comments about the excerpt from that article quoted in his above-mentioned post, item by item.

Gerdes:

So the dullest of all the holocaust controversies dullards claims that the estimate of 80,000 buried in the "huge mass graves" of Sobibor is a hoax and also sneers at the figure of 100,000. He goes on to estimate 133,000 to 184,000 bodies are buried in the "huge mass graves" of Sobibor.

I refrain from calling Gerdes the dullest of "Revisionist" dullards because he has some stiff competition among his coreligionists, to say the least, but the fact is that the fellow is obviously too dumb to even read my article correctly.

I’m not arguing that the estimate of ca. 80,000 dead bodies buried in the Sobibor mass graves is wrong let alone a "hoax", and I am also not estimating that "133,000 to 184,000" dead bodies were buried in those mass graves. My argument is that, according to the measurements of the mass graves found in 2001 by Polish archaeologists, the Sobibor mass graves were large enough to hold more or much more than the number of dead bodies reportedly buried in them before the camp staff switched to incinerating the bodies instead of burying them. This in turn means that there is nothing implausible about these mass graves having contained about 80,000 dead bodies.

Maybe such elementary reasoning – if the mass graves could have held more corpses than they are reported to have held, then there’s nothing implausible about the reported figure – is too complex for a "Revisionist" simpleton like Gerdes to grasp.

Gerdes:

Of course, this begs the question - Even if the maximum figure of 184,000 are buried in the "huge mass graves" of Sobibor, then why do so many hoaxers claim that the figure is 250,000?

Besides misreading my article, Gerdes apparently didn’t understand the video clip that this article refers to, which starts with the following quote from page 177 of Yitzhak Arad’s book Belzec, Sobibor, Treblinka. The Operation Reinhard Death Camps:

Only one-third of the 250,000 victims in this camp had been killed and buried before the cremating began. Those who were gassed there afterward, in the period between October 1942 and October 1943, were taken directly from the gas chambers to the cremating sites.

Even denierbud, though not the sharpest tool in the shed, realized that this meant ca. 83,000 bodies buried before cremation became the body disposal method at Sobibor, whereas the remaining 167,000 were incinerated right after they had been killed, without ever being dumped into a mass grave. For Gerdes, on the other hand, even this simple reasoning seems to have been too much. Or then he didn’t even bother to watch denierbud’s video clip (not that he would have missed anything of value).

The number given by Arad is the highest estimate of the number of victims of Sobibor that I know of. A more cautious estimate was made at the trial against former members of the Sobibor staff before the District Court in Hagen, Germany, which concluded that at least 150,000 Jewish civilians had been killed at Sobibor. As I mentioned in this article, an expert report provided during this trial managed to reconstruct (with remarkable accuracy, as a comparison with documentary evidence discovered decades after this trial shows) the dates and places of origin of the transports included in the minimum number of victims assumed by the court. So despite the Nazis’ documented attempts to get rid of as much evidence as possible, enough documents and other evidence survived to allow for a court expert’s detailed reconstruction of transports to Sobibor, adding up to about 150,000 people, at a trial held more than 20 years after the end of the war.

This leads us to a question far more pertinent that Gerdes’ high-handed (and already answered) question:

But of course, the real question is, a question that even a kindergartener would ask: IF the official Sobibor holocasut story is true - Then where EXACTLY are these alleged "huge mass graves?

The more pertinent question is this: if, as claimed by "Revisionist" fantasists like Gerdes, Sobibor was not an extermination camp but a transit camp from which Jews were distributed to ghettos or labor camps further east, then which were these alleged ghettos or labor camps, what evidence is there that shows large numbers of Jews from Sobibor being transported to these places and accommodated there, and what evidence is there regarding what eventually became of all those Jews?

Common sense alone (which is something alien to "Revisionist" thinking) already tells us that, if Sobibor had been a transit camp and large numbers of Jews had been transported somewhere further east from there, Mattogno & Graf (the only "Revisionists" who, to my knowledge, have tried to come up with something like an answer to this question) would be able to reconstruct these transports at least as precisely as German court expert Wolfgang Scheffler managed to reconstruct transports to Sobibor at the above-mentioned trial, all the more so as the Germans would have had no reason to keep resettlement transports from a Sobibor transit camp a secret or to destroy the related documentary evidence, as they are known to have done with most of the documents pertaining to the Aktion Reinhard(t) camps Belzec, Sobibor and Treblinka. Had a massive resettlement operation via these three "transit camps" actually taken place, Mattogno & Graf wouldn’t be reduced to citing a handful of eyewitnesses about a few small transports from Sobibor to other places, as they do in the excerpt proudly quoted by Gerdes in his opening post of Tue May 13, 2008 1:38 pm (regarding the mendacity of Mattogno & Graf’s claims based on these selectively quoted testimonies, see Jonathan Harrison’s article Mattogno and Graf: Reverse Logic). Nor would these "Revisionist" gurus have to vaguely babble about Polish Jews deported to Ukraine or White Russia, only to be screwed by their own source (apart from shamelessly misrepresenting the writings of German historian Christian Gerlach, as I may demonstrate in a future article). If Mattogno & Graf’s lame endeavors quoted in Gerdes’ OP are the best that "Revisionists" have got by way of an answer to the essential question what, if not mass murder, is supposed to have happened to the Jews deported to Sobibor and the other Aktion Reinhard(t)camps, then one can only feel sorry for these faithful folks and the lunatic creed they embrace.

Gerdes ends his rambling with the following question:

When is Kola going to publish the results of this investigation?

Well, I suggest that Gerdes contact Prof. Kola and ask him this question, which I don’t think anyone else can answer.

Is the absence of a publication similar to Kola’s report about Belzec supposed to mean anything, like there being something wrong with Kola’s announcement of the discovery of mass graves at Sobibor and the measurements thereof? Only in the conspiraloon cloud-cuckoo-land of "Revisionism" could this be seriously claimed, also considering that Prof. Kola is a renowned archaeologist and that his findings are matched by all other evidence to what happened at Sobibor. Gerdes would also be shooting himself in the foot by arguing thusly, insofar as Richard Krege has not yet published the results of the touted "detailed forensic examination" he is supposed to have conducted in 1999. One might say that what's sauce for the goose is sauce for the gander, except that there's a significant difference between the findings of a renowned professor of archaeology at Sobibor and those of a "Revisionist" nobody at Treblinka: the former are in line with all known evidence about Sobibor that has been investigated and researched by criminal justice authorities and historians over the past six decades, whereas the latter are at odds with all known eyewitness, documentary and physical evidence about the mass murder at Treblinka.

Gerdes seems to be fond of challenging others, namely Michael Schermer, to debate him.

So here’s a challenge to you, Mr. Gerdes:

Come out and debate the "incredible dullard" about any subject of your choosing related to your "specialty", the Aktion Reinhard(t) camps.

I would reply to you on CODOH if I could post there, but webmaster Jonnie "Hannover" Hargis banned me from that lovely place some years ago, obviously because neither he nor any of his acolytes could handle my arguments. But there’s a forum, owned by a "Revisionist", that offers open and uncensored debate. This forum, which Hargis is so afraid of that he made his software automatically change its name into "shills", is called RODOH, which stands for "Real Open Debate on the Holocaust" (the pun on the falsely so-called "Committee for Open Debate on the Holocaust" is intended).

I’m waiting for you on RODOH, Mr. Gerdes.