Saturday, October 25, 2008

Photographic Evidence of Mass Shootings: 4. Ivangorod

One of the most famous images of the Holocaust can be viewed here. The provenance of the photograph is described in this link. Holocaust Museums and Internet sites displaying this image often only show this portion of the photograph. This is misleading because it omits the two rifles on the extreme left of the photograph, and the gravedigging scene on the right.

Wednesday, October 15, 2008

Father Patrick Desbois - Part 3: Belzec

On page 22 of The Holocaust By Bullets, Desbois interviews the village priest of Belzec, now aged 91. The priest describes how, along with other villagers, he had watched executions from his roof. He also says that his mother "couldn't bear the smoke" so had to shut herself up in the cellar.

On page 154, a peasant explains that the commander of Belzec camp requisitioned his wheat and barley sorting machine. When he went back to collect his machine, after the deportations had finished, he found that ten such machines were being used to sift Jews' ashes.

Father Patrick Desbois - Part 2: The Requisitioned

Eyewitness testimony from requisitioned civilians broadens our knowledge of Nazi killing methods. This blog discusses one example. Desbois found that, in shootings that deployed the Jeckeln method ('Sardinenpackung'), young girls were often used as 'pressers' to level off the graves by packing the bodies and pouring sand on to each layer for the next batch of Jews to lie upon.

Read more!

The Jeckeln method is described by Holman as follows:
During the course of his work, Jeckeln had designed a highly efficient methodology for mass execution called the 'Jeckeln method' or 'Sardinenpackung' - sardine-packing. This involved marching the people to be killed to the killing site where pre-dug grave pits awaited them. They were forced to undress and lie face-down in the graves in layers, whereupon they were shot in the back of the head. Then a new layer of victims was forced to lie on top of the just killed lower layer and shot, with the process being continued until the grave was full.
Our previous knowledge of this method, as referenced by Ezergailis [accessed by clicking the 'Chapter 8' hyperlink shown on this page], came from the "Aråjs Trial Records, Deposition of Degenhart in the Aråjs files, Hamburg pp. 11952-61." It is inconceivable that a Ukrainian non-academic would have read these records. Yet Desbois interviews a witness, Petrivna (pp.83-86), who describes how she performed the pressing role in the massacre at Ternivka. Hence we have a convergence of independent testimony about a killing method used by the senior SS and Police commander in Ukraine.

How do deniers respond to this evidence? Their only possible response is the logical fallacy known as the Argument from Personal Incedulity. This is all that Faurisson offers here, along with his usual selective quoting method. According to Faurisson, there was nothing in Jewish religious law to prevent Desbois excavating each grave in full and counting the bodies. Not only is this false, but it ignores Desbois' insistence that he only wishes to ascertain the correct locations of the graves. Faurisson feigns incredulity that a girl with bare feet could pack bodies that have been shot. He ignores the fact that the bodies were laid face down on sand and that shots were fired to the head, not the torso. Even by Faurisson's standards, it is a feeble response, showing that deniers are in a quandary about Desbois.

Tuesday, October 14, 2008

Father Patrick Desbois - Part 1: Introduction

The English translation of The Holocaust By Bullets was published in the USA in August 2008. This series of blogs analyzes its findings and their implications for the historiography of the Holocaust.

Read more!

Desbois and his colleagues make four major contributions that I will discuss in these blogs. Firstly, they uncover a new category of witness: the requisitioned:
civilians, mostly children, who had been requisitioned for a day or a week (p.75).
Dieter Pohl, who met Desbois at a presentation in Munich, acknowledged the power and uniqueness of the testimonies that Desbois drew from these witnesses:
"Father Desbois, I had never heard anything about the witnesses you found, especially the requisitioned; they are not mentioned in any German archive" (p.104).
The crucial middleman in this requisitioning process was the desiatnik:
He performed his functions for a cluster of houses (usually ten, hence the name is derived from the Russian word for "ten"). The desiatniks had been kept in place by the German occupiers. Certain tasks of the desiatnik during the war were linked to the executions. He often had to store the spades and organize the labor to dig or fill in the pits. His orders, often given under threat of death, came directly from the German authorities or the mayor (p.226, n.5).
The second major contribution is a method of verifying that a particular grave contained the victims of a German shooting using the positions of spent German gun cartridges. Desbois and his ballistics expert used the GPS (Global Positioning System) to record distances between the cartridges and the burial pits. This method confirmed that the graves could only have been created via executions, given that the positions of shooters and victims matched those of standard execution procedures.

Their third contribution is to demonstrate how openly the Nazis carried out their killings in Ukraine. Killing sites were often overlooked by farms, schools and residential buildings which were not always systematically evacuated prior to killing actions. Killings often took place in towns, not always in forests. Moreover, for every witness who saw a killing, there were often many others who heard the shots and/or smelled the scent of corpses being burnt.

The fourth contribution is the depth and range of testimony. By the Spring of 2007, Desbois had interviewed 460 witnesses in Ukraine (p.xix). Most had never previously been interviewed. They did not usually seek out Desbois. Many of the older witnesses (some in their nineties) still feared the NKVD, and only opened up after long questioning by the priest. These survivors of Stalinist-induced famine and persecution were clearly not pro-Soviet. On the contrary, they would have had every reason to pin the killings on the NKVD, given the animosity between Ukrainians and Russians. Ukraine is not a philo-Semitic country. Consider also the internal prohibitions that these Ukrainians would have against lying to a Catholic priest. Yet deniers cannot produce Ukrainian witnesses of their own who tell the story that they want to hear.

Could witnesses commit errors 60 years after the event? Of course. Would they incorrectly identify a murder committed by Russians as a murder committed by Germans? Not a chance. Yet deniers would have to claim that 460 witnesses all made this mistake.

Friday, October 10, 2008

Photographic Evidence of Mass Shootings: 3. Liepaja

Liepaja is an excellent example of how photographs can form part of a convergence of evidence alongside such phenomena as diaries, testimonies and demographic studies. This is discussed here and here. Note again that non-German units took part, in this case Latvian.

Photographic Evidence of Mass Shootings: 2. Ponary

An excellent gallery of Ponary photographs can be found here. Three larger-sized examples from that gallery are shown here and here and here. Details in the photos match eyewitness testimony given to West German prosecutors that is reproduced here. See for example the book-keeper's statement that "The other nine walked one behind the other, stooping and holding on to the man in front with their hands because they could not see." Finally, note again that this massacre was not carried out by a unit of Einsatzgruppen acting alone. Lithuanian collaborators played an essential role in this murder.

Photographic Evidence of Mass Shootings: 1. Sdolbunov

In October 1942, Jews from the Mizocz ghetto were murdered at a ravine in the Sdolbunov Gebietskommissariat, south of Rovno, by members of the German Gendarmerie and Ukrainian Schutzmannschaft. Photographs of the shootings are reproduced here.

Read more!

The USHMM explains how the photographs came into the public domain:

According to the Zentrale Stelle in Germany (Zst. II 204 AR 1218/70), these Jews were collected by the German Gendarmerie and Ukrainian Schutzmannschaft during the liquidation of the Mizocz ghetto, which held roughly 1,700 Jews. On the eve of the ghetto's liquidation (13 October 1942), some of the inhabitants rose up against the Germans and were defeated after a short battle. The remaining members of the community were transported from the ghetto to this ravine in the Sdolbunov Gebietskommissariat, south of Rovno, where they were executed. Information regarding this action, including the photos, were acquired from a man named Hille, who was the Bezirks-Oberwachtmeister of the Gendarmerie at the time. Hille apparently gave the five photos (there were originally seven) to the company lawyer of a textile firm in Kunert, Czechoslovakia, where he worked as a doorman after the war. The Czech government confiscated the photos from the lawyer in 1946 and they subsequently became public. That the photos indeed show the shooting of Jews in connection with the liquidation of the ghetto was also confirmed by a statement of Gendarmerie-Gebietsfuehrer Josef Paur in 1961.
Confirmation of the authenticity of the photos was thus provided by a perpetrator, Josef Paur.

Thursday, October 09, 2008

How Many Perpetrators in the USSR? - Part Nine: Denier Deceit

The mendacity of deniers when discussing the Einsatzgruppen is encapsulated in Graf's screed, Giant with Feet of Clay, which consists of dishonest, ill-informed attacks on the late historian Raul Hilberg. Graf, whose mendacity has been discussed in several previous blogs, 'quote-mines' Hilberg to create a Straw Man version of the historiography of the Einsatzgruppen.

Read more!

The analysis given below demonstrates how Graf uses quotes by Hilberg that refer to the personnel composition of the Einsatzgruppen, whilst misrepresenting the instances where Hilberg discusses killings by other agencies, and where Hilberg emphasizes the Einsatzgruppen's utilization of large numbers of Order Police and native auxiliaries. In many cases, this misrepresentation can be shown to be deliberate, because Graf refers to specific killings that are discussed by Hilberg in inter-agency terms. Graf wants the reader to believe that Hilberg is claiming these were exclusively Einsatzgruppen killings, when Hilberg's text actually says the opposite.

Graf sets up his Straw Man as follows (p.40):
The claimed numbers of victims of the Einsatzgruppen are impossibly large. The largest of the four, Einsatzgruppe A, had 990 members. If we subtract from this the 172 vehicle drivers, 3 women employees, 51 interpreters, 3 teletypewriter operators and 8 radio operators, there are about 750 combatants left to use for the mass killings (p. 303; DEJ, p. 289). Up to 15th October 1941, Einsatzgruppe A supposedly killed 125,000 Jews (p. 309; DEJ, p. 289). Considering the fact that the mass murders first began in August (p. 307; DEJ, na), the overwhelming majority of the 125,000 victims, let us say 120,000, must have been killed in a period of ten weeks.
Graf's decision to focus on Einsatzgruppe A exposes his stupidity as well as his mendacity, because even a reader with minimal Holocaust knowledge will be aware that this unit operated in the region with the largest proportion of native collaborators. Moreover, Graf gives this game away himself when he discusses the involvement of native Baltic citizens in pogroms (p.36):
In addition, thousands of Jews were killed in pogroms initiated by the native populations following the German invasion. After they had been freed from the Bolshevist yoke, Latvians, Lithuanians, Ukrainians and others took revenge on Jews because the Red terror machinery had been led mainly by Jews, and this retribution unfortunately fell also on Jews who had nothing to do with the Communist crimes.
Graf is thus skewered by his contradictory aims. In order to promote his antisemitism, he needs to show that the natives hated Jews, but, in order to maintain his Einsatzgruppen Straw Man, he also needs to claim that all killings must have been done by Einsatzgruppe A acting alone.

Hilberg's actual text is clear that Einsatzgruppe A needed local assistance (Note: all quotes below are taken from the 1985 student edition). Hilberg writes that "The importance of the auxiliaries should not be under-estimated" (p.122). Summarizing the actions of Ek 3 in September 1941, Hilberg notes that:
The operations assisted by the Lithuanians accounted for more than half of the Einsatzkommando's killings by that date (p.122)
On the same page, Hilberg makes this point about Ek 4a in Ukraine:
The Ukrainian auxiliaries appeared on the scene in August 1941, and Einsatzgruppe C found itself compelled to make use of them...Thus Einsatzkommando 4a went so far as to confine itself to the shooting of adults while commanding its Ukrainian helpers to shoot children.
Graf's mendacity increases even further when he discusses shootings in large cities (p.38):
Here are the victim counts Hilberg gives for several cities:
33,000 victims in Kiev;
10,600 victims in Riga (this Einsatzkommando numbered only 21
men!);
23,600 victims in Kamenets-Podolsk;
15,000 victims in Dnepropetrovsk (p. 311; DEJ, p. 298);
15,000 victims in Rovno (p. 312; DEJ, p. 298);
10,000 victims in Simferopol (p. 391; DEJ, p. 373).
What does Hilberg say about each of these killings?

Kiev: "two detachments of Police Regiment South helped kill over 33,000 Jews" (p.110);

Riga: "In the northern sector the Higher SS and Police Leader (Pruetzmann), assisted by twenty-one men of Einsatzkommando 2 (Einsatzgruppe A), killed 10,600 people in Riga" (p.110; note how Graf quote-mines the "21 men" but omits the prefix "assisted by"!);

Kamenets-Podolsk: "Next Jeckeln struck at Kamenets-Podolsk, shooting there a total of 23,600 Jews" (p.111; no mention of Einsatzgruppen being involved, because this action was perpetrated mainly by Jeckeln's own forces assisted by Police Battalions 45 and 303);

Dnepropetrovsk: "In Dnepropetrovsk...Jeckeln slaughtered 15,000 Jews..." (p.111);

Rovno: "In its report about Rovno, Einsatzgruppe C stated that, whereas the action had been organised by the Higher SS and Police Leader and had been carried out by the Order Police, a detachment of Einsatzkommando 5 had participated to a significant extent in the shooting" (p.111);

Simferopol (pp.115-116): "In Simferopol, the Crimean capital, the Eleventh Army decided that it wanted the shooting to be completed before Christmas. Accordingly, Einsatzgruppe D, with the assistance of army personnel and with army trucks and gasoline, completed the shootings in time to permit the army to celebrate Christmas in a city without Jews."

Graf has therefore lifted these death figures from Hilberg without acknowledging that each of the killings was instigated by the Higher SS and Police Leaders and/or the Wehrmacht, and was carried out by forces that were often primarily non-Einsatzgruppen personnel.

This dishonest denier apparently has no shame.

Wednesday, October 08, 2008

How Many Perpetrators in the USSR? - Part Eight: Baltic States

The two main killing actions in Latvia were the Rumbula Action and the Liepaja action. The Rumbula action has been studied in detail by Ezergailis, whose findings can be viewed in a Word file by clicking the 'Chapter 8' hyperlink shown on this page, whilst Liepaja has been discussed in this blog. The main action in Lithuania was the murder of Vilna Jews at Ponary, described here and depicted in these photographs. Additional comments on each of these massacres are given below.

Read more!

Ezergailis gives an overview of the Order Police in Latvia as follows:

Before the Aråjs commando was trained, it was the 9th Battalion of the Ordnungspolizei that performed most of the killings for Stahlecker. The 9th Battalion units that were in Latvia during July and August had moved on, following Stahlecker to the environs of Leningrad. At the end of November there were at least two kinds of Ordnungspolizei units in Rîga under the command of Lieutenant Colonel Flick: the Schutzpolizei, headed by Major Heise, and the Gendarmerie, under Captain Rehberg. At least several hundred were posted to assure order (“obtain and maintain a German character”) in Rîga, as in Latvia at large. In addition to overseeing the Latvian precinct police, the Ordnungspolizei was also in charge of the ghettoization of Jews, and after October 25 the guarding of the ghetto. During the initial phase of the ghetto the SD were not involved. The Ordnungspolizei's involvement with the ghetto also predetermined their assignments in the liquidation of the ghetto.

The 2nd company of the 22nd Reserve Battalion from Rîga supplied about seventy men, and the 3rd company of the 22nd Reserve Battalion from Jelgava supplied another seventy men. The 2nd company was employed in overseeing the clearing of the Jewish apartments, organizing the Jews into marching columns, and accompanying the columns to Rumbula. The 3rd company was used to guard of the periphery at Rumbula. The chief Ordnungspolizei activist was Major Heise, and it appears that he was also the liaison person with the Latvian Schutzmannschaften.

In addition to the 22nd Battalion from Rîga and Jelgava and the men of the Gendarmerie, Jeckeln had at his disposal another five regiments of Ordnungspolizei, but we do not know which, if any, of them he used. In general, Jeckeln was against involving the Wehrmacht.
A West German trial of Order Police defendants included a description of Jeckeln's organization of the Rumbula action, provided by the defendant Friedrich Jahnke. Ezergailis also discusses the strong Latvian presence at Rumbula, including the planning meeting:
Various German witnesses mention the presence of Latvian officers in the preparatory meeting. Although the only name mentioned is that of Osis, the head of the Latvian Schutzmannschaften, the names of the other Latvians present at these meetings can easily be identified, for the choice is a very narrow one. The only ones who could have been there in addition to Osis, were Aråjs, Ítiglics, and the head of the Latvian ghetto guard, Danskops.
At Liepaja, there an initial killing action in July 1941. A notable feature of this action is that it was ordered by a naval commander, Kawelmacher, as Ezergailis again describes:
The pace of shootings was not fast enough for commandant Kawelmacher (a.k.a. Gontard). On July 22 he telexed the commanding admiral of the Baltic fleet in Kiel, requesting 100 SS- and 50 Schutzpolizei troops “for rapid execution [of the] Jewish problem. With present SS-personnel, this would take one year, which is untenable for [the] pacification of Liepāja.” His request was promptly granted; the notorious Latvian SD Commando under Viktors Arājs arrived from Riga, shot about 1,100 Jewish men on July 24 and 25, and left. Meanwhile the 2nd Company of Police Battalion 13 under SSHauptsturmführer Georg Rosenstock had arrived, primarily for patrol duty and to a lesser extent for executions. From then on, the Navy played a less active role, leaving the persecution of Jews in the hands of Kügler and his superior, SS-und Polizeistandortführer Dr. Fritz Dietrich, who arrived in mid-September.
As was noted in this blog, Dietrich's arrival was crucial because he kept a diary of subsequent events. The main December massacre was ordered by HSSPF Jeckeln, carried through by Dietrich, and photographed by Strott and Sobeck, as Ezergailis describes:
No ghetto had yet been established in Liepāja, but Dietrich ordered a 2-day curfew for Jews. Thus confined to their apartments, they were methodically rounded up by Latvian police and taken to the Women’s Prison. From there they were marched to the Šķēde execution site, ordered to undress, and were shot in groups of 10 by three firing squads, two Latvian and one German. All together, 2,749 Jews were shot on December 15–17. They were mainly women and children, who had been largely spared until now. Kügler’s deputy SS-Scharführer Carl Emil Strott, as well as SSOberscharführer Sobeck, photographed the executions. An audacious Jew working at the Security Police, David Zivcon, got hold of a 12-exposure film by Sobeck long enough to make copies, which have been widely reproduced and exhibited after the war.
Several of Strott's photographs, linked by Roberto here, and also discussed here, clearly show Latvian police taking women and children to the killing area. Strott's trial, at which he did not deny the photos, is here.

For Ponary, an excellent gallery of photographs can be found here. Three larger-sized examples from that gallery are shown here and here and here. Details in the photos match eyewitness testimony given to West German prosecutors that is reproduced here. See for example the book-keeper's statement that "The other nine walked one behind the other, stooping and holding on to the man in front with their hands because they could not see." Finally, note again that this massacre was not carried out by a unit of Einsatzgruppen acting alone. Lithuanian collaborators played an essential role in this murder.

Tuesday, October 07, 2008

Mass Graves at Sobibor – 9th Update

Original article

1st update

2nd update

3rd update

4th update

5th update

6th update

7th update

8th update

10th update


In Greg Gerdes' posts of Mon Oct 06, 2008 2:05 pm and Mon Oct 06, 2008 5:43 pm on the CODOH thread Kola, Arad, others demolished on Sobibor 'gas chambers', the lamentable hysteric tried to rationalize a video about ongoing archaeological research at Sobibor , featured by the Maurice Greenberg Center for Judaic Studies at Hartford University, and an article on that entity’s site related to that same research.

The result of this attempt, as always when Greg Gerdes opens up, is a comedy of feeble-minded nonsense, which I shall now take a closer look at.

Read more!


Gerdes
YOU HAVE TO WATCH THIS!!

New Sobibor video:

http://admission.hartford.edu/judaic-studies/video2.html

CAUTION!!!

Please have a puke bucket handy, especially at the end.

Not an iota of human remains!
.

In my post # 1405 on the VNN thread Archeological Investigations of Treblinka, I had commented a similar "no human remains" remark by Gerdes as follows:

Maybe that’s because the authors are not as obsessed with human remains as Gerdes is but more interested in the camp’s structures such as the gas chamber building (why would they have a gas chamber building at a "transit camp", Mr. Gerdes?)

Or because a geophysical survey is likely to detect metal and other objects (for the excavation of which permission has already been obtained, if they are not lying close to the surface) and show ground disturbances, but less likely to pinpoint human remains let along bring them to the surface, excavation or core drilling for human remains requiring a permission that has not yet been granted.

Which in turn would mean that, if he has not shot himself in the foot by quoting the above, "forensic historian" Gerdes has at least shown that he knows as much about forensics and archaeology as he knows about history, i.e. as much as a pig knows about Sunday.


After Gerdes didn’t come back to the "human remains" issue in subsequent posts, I thought he had got the message and accordingly wrote the following, in my post # 1416:

Regarding the Hartford article under http://www.hartford.edu/daily/news.asp?id=4581 , I note that the cowardly charlatan is dodging (his favorite sport) a question I asked him in post # 1405:
Quote:
Quote:
Originally Posted by Gerdes
Nothing.
… is a proper description for the contents of Gerdes’ empty skull. Maybe he can start explaining why the artifacts found include artifacts from the small railway that, according to eyewitness testimonies before West German courts, brought the infirm to the killing area. And what such small railway would be needed for in a "transit camp".


That’s just one of the very many questions chicken-shit Gerdes has run away from since we started this discussion.

But at least Gerdes seems to have understood that electromagnetics, magnetometry and ground-penetrating radar equipment are not exactly suitable to detect human cremation remains, judging by his having dropped the "no human remains mentioned" BS. To find such remains, you have to drill. That’s how any archaeologist in the world does it, as I have been informed.


Gerdes’ howling on CODOH now suggests that I was wrong about Gerdes having understood the possibilities and limitations of non-invasive ground survey technology – unless he was referring to human remains lying above the ground.

Gerdes
What happened to all the bone fragments that were supposed to by lying around?


They are probably still where shown on photographs and mentioned in the Wikipedia page about Sobibor, see this article's 3rd update. However, the archaeologists currently mapping the site are obviously less interested in picking up bone fragments from the ground than in finding personal objects from the victims, camp structures and objects related to the camp's operation, as the Hartford video suggests.

Gerdes
Not one single word about the "huge mass graves" allegedly located by Kola. (They mentioned mass graves, but just in relation to the "green areas."


Poor Gerdes seems to have no problem contradicting himself in the same sentence, and he still has no even remotely plausible explanation as to what, other than mass grave areas, the distinctly greener areas visible on air and satellite photography might be, let alone an explanation as to why these areas, visible with the naked eye on a satellite photo stupidly provided by Gerdes himself:



happen to coincide with four of the mass grave areas identified by Prof. Andrzej Kola in 2001, as I pointed out in previous updates.

Gerdes
But do notice the grid map they had.


Whoever has understood what the poet is trying to tell us here may explain it to me.

Gerdes
Also, the "huge mountain of human remains" didn't have a polished concrete cover. (Which is yet another of the jews lies.) It was only white rock.


Gerdes is obviously referring to an e-mail message he received on 01.09.2008 from Yoram Haimi, which he mentioned in his thread My email to archeological 'expert' Yoram Haimi. In that e-mail Yoram had written (emphasis added):

Concerning the 'huge white mound' in the photo - this is a polished monument which partially covers the remains of ash and human bone fragments (the mass grave). In the photo you should be able to make out three green concentrations of ash and human bone fragments located beyond the monument.


Nothing about concrete here, as we can see – that was again Gerdes’ fantasy at work (readers of the 1st update may remember that Gerdes spun a conspiracy theory about a "concrete top" having been placed on the “ash mountain” monument "to prevent it from being investigated"). And the term "polished" in Yoram’s e-mail, as the same explained to me in a subsequent Skype conversation, was meant to say "Polish" – a Polish monument.

Gerdes
So the "huge mountain of human remains" could be verified by a retarded blind man with a toy plastic shovel.


One could certainly dig into the "ash mountain" and analyze the results – but only after obtaining an official permission to remove the white rock covering the "ash mountain" and to do excavation underneath, which shouldn’t be exactly easy to obtain considering the Polish government’s touchiness about this "holy Polish ground" area. Gerdes’ idea of the real world doesn’t seem to have progressed beyond kindergarten level yet.

Gerdes
Quote from the film:

"We really don't know why these depressions are here."

Phil Reeder.

Say what? They were in the exact area where the "huge mass graves" are alleged to be!


I don't think the video shows if the depressions are in the parts of the area around the monument where Prof. Kola identified mass graves in 2001, but even if they are they may or may not be related to the excavation and backfilling of the mass graves or to subsequent robbery digging. Mr. Reeder is stating that the nature of these depressions must be analyzed instead of jumping to conclusions about what they mean, something that an unscientific howler like Gerdes obviously has trouble understanding.

Gerdes
Remember, Muehlenkamp claimed that there were graves up to 7 meters deep, and all we heard was "it looks like the edge of a TRENCH."

LOL!!!


Muehlenkamp never claimed anything other than what he knows from Prof. Kola’s study or the current archaeological excavations, and Gerdes is obviously trying to make believe that the trench suggested by the GPR and described in the Hartford video by geophysicist Paul Bauman is a) not so deep and b) the only one in the area around the monument. Actually neither of both can be inferred from Mr. Bauman's statements or other parts of the video (i.e. Gerdes got carried away by his wishful thinking), while on the other hand it is significant that a ground pattern suggesting a trench has been detected by GPR in what is possibly one of the mass grave areas identified by Prof. Kola, four of which are visible on my edited enlargement of the pertinent section from the above-mentioned satellite photograph:



If the trench mentioned by Paul Bauman is in one of these areas, the GPR has provided further evidence to the presence of mass graves. Unsurprisingly, Gerdes is unable to grasp this simple logic.

Gerdes
Quote from the film:

"To test the accuracy of the imaging equipment, the research team is probing several target locations."

Say what? Why didn't they test the accuracy of the GPR with the alleged core samples allegedly taken by Kola?


Gerdes knows as well as I do, from our long discussions on VNN, that the current archaeological investigators don't have any core samples from Prof. Kola’s archaeological investigation at their disposal, or even information as to the exact spots in the area where these samples were collected (which would be the minimum they need to match GPR finds with core drilling finds). In other words, the liar is (again) trying to make believe, against better knowledge, that Prof. Kola's investigation in 2001 and the current archaeological research, which are actually unrelated to each other, are part of one and the same undertaking.

The "alleged core samples" that Gerdes refers to are the following, already shown in previous updates:







Readers of the aforementioned VNN thread may have noticed that Gerdes has still not managed, or even tried, to provide a plausible alternative explanation as to what, other than ashes of human bone and tissue, the light-gray substance visible on the first two sample photos might be. Or what, other than either lime or bone ash, might be the white substance visible in the third sample. Those core samples must be giving him nightmares, like the satellite photo he shot himself in the foot with.

Gerdes
No wonder Muehlenkamp tucked tail and ran from me - again.


The "again" is referring to my having ignored the last copy-and-paste repetition of Gerdes' list of imbecilic question in post # 1039 on page 51 of our Topix discussion, after having pointed out several times – last in my preceding post # 1038 – that and where those questions had been answered, and commented that

Copying and pasting the same beaten crap, the same idiotic and already answered questions, is all he [Gerdes] can do.


It takes a lot of "Black Knight" over-optimism and wishful thinking to interpret my contemptuously ignoring yet another repetition of Gerdes’ thrashed antics as "running away". Poor Gerdes seems to have damn few if any experiences of success in his miserable life to be seeking for one so badly.

The "tucked tail and ran", as I also just found out by reading Gerdes’ VNN post # 1447, refers to the following statement at the end of my post # 1442:

That’s it for now, folks. I may not visit you every day in the future because you're not on top on my list of priorities (there are more challenging "Revisionists" on RODOH, and my load of serious work has increased, leaving me less time for hobby activities), but I’ll drop by whenever I have time, to laugh at your repetitive antics.

Meanwhile, please keep jumping up and down and showing what a bunch of retarded fanatics you are. The world is watching in amusement.


I’ll let our readers decide if Gerdes' wishful thinking kept him from reading beyond the first sentence, or if he's just lying through his teeth (again).

Gerdes
WARSAW (Reuters)

Quote:

"Polish archaeologists excavating the Nazi death camp in Sobibor said on Friday they had found mass graves at the site. The excavations were the first since World War Two at the former camp, which was subsequently forested over. They could provide valuable new evidence on the number of victims, mainly Jews, who died in the Sobibor gas chambers. According to official Polish accounts, 250,000 people were killed in Sobibor.''We uncovered seven mass graves with an average depth of five meters. In them there were charred human remains and under them remains in a state of decay. That means that in the final stage the victims were burned,'' archaeologist Andrzej Kola was quoted by the Polish PAP news agency telling a news conference. He said the largest grave measured 70 meters by 25 meters, the others 20 by 25 meters.

So why didn't the GPR pick up any of these alleged "huge mass graves?" Or any of Kola's alleged "excavations?"


Well, the GPR picked up at least the trench mentioned by Paul Bauman, see above. And there's nothing to suggest that it's the only trench in the area, however hard Gerdes tries to make believe otherwise.

Gerdes
BTW, Richard Freund (see above - Mapping the Legacy of Sobibor - article), the director of the Maurice Greenberg Center for Judaic Studies at the University of Hartford, is an ordained rabbi.

Gee, a jewish rabi wouldn't lie to us about the Sobibor holocaust, would he? ( http://www.cnn.com/services/presents.opk/after.jesus.intl/bios.htm#richard )


Just in case anyone was wondering what makes Gerdes tick and what the foundations of his "skepticism" are.

Gerdes
More claptrap about this here:

http://www.hartford.edu/greenberg/events/sobibor.asp

"Just as important, Patt says, is the project’s attempts to reveal what the Nazis literally covered up. “There are Holocaust deniers who say, ‘Survivors are making it up. There never was a camp there, who knows if there was an extermination center? These are fantastic, made-up stories.’ And that feeds right into what the Nazis were trying to do,” Patt says. “Being on the site and seeing how successful they were at covering up the crime, makes it that much more important to do this work. Part of my motivation is to say, 65 years later, ‘No, you’re not going to get away with hiding this from history... In a very short time, we’re going to be without any survivors,” says Freund. “It’s important to create a scientific method to investigate survivor accounts, because Holocaust denial is growing.”

That tells you why they are so desperate to create new cognitive illusions.


Ignoring Gerdes’ idiotic conspiracy theory about "cognitive illusions", there’s something I’d like to tell Messrs. Patt and Freund:

With all due respect for what you are doing, if you want to seriously fight Holocaust denial, the scientific method you’ll have to apply is this:







You should obtain the required government permissions and do exhaustive core drilling in the known mass grave areas at Sobibor, and also as much digging as you can.

You should bring the contents of the mass graves to the surface, have the human cremation remains analyzed by a forensic expert to certify that they are human remains, quantify them as precisely as possible, and thoroughly document with reports, photographs and video clips every step of the process, ever single core sample, every layer of human ashes and every human bone, bone fragment and tooth that you find.

If you do that you can deal a deadly blow to Holocaust "Revisionism".

If you don’t, your hard work won’t be worth the effort. Take this from someone who has been debating "Revisionists" and dissecting their arguments for the past eight years.

That said, I’m off to Archeological Investigations of Treblinka to give those lying crackpots another direct thrashing.

Monday, October 06, 2008

Friday, October 03, 2008

How Many Perpetrators in the USSR? - Part Seven: Infantry Regiment 727

The following figures were compiled for a criminal investigation into Infantry Regiment 727 by the West German authorities (ZStL) and are reproduced on page 132 of Hannes Heer's chapter in The German Army and Genocide

Read more!

30/10/41: Niesvicz ghetto; 4,500 Jews murdered by 8th Company;

2/11/41: Lachovichi ghetto: 1,000 Jews murdered by 8th Company;

5/11/41: Yaremichi & Svierzna & Turec ghettos; 1,000 Jews murdered by 8th Company;

9/11/41: Mir ghetto: 1,500 - 1,800 Jews murdered by 8th Company, assisted by Belorussian auxiliaries;

13-14/11/41: Slonim ghetto: 9,000 Jews murdered by SD and Order Police, assisted by 6th Company;

8/12/41: Novogrudok ghetto: 3,000 Jews murdered by SD and Order Police, assisted by 7th Company.