A response to «SirMosley», a «White Nationalist»

As narrated on a thread of the RODOH forum pointed out here, I have been posting on the «Holocaust Thread» of the «Stormfront White Nationalist Community», for the reasons and with the results described in more detail in my RODOH posts # 7345, # 7370, # 7392, # 7412 and # 7416. Basically the record is that my posting gave the White Nationalists too much trouble, whereupon the moderator decided to add another restriction to my being outnumbered and my posts subject to moderator approval, by imposing a limitation to five posts per day on me. Unwilling to accept this cowardly dictate, I cancelled my posting on that thread after the second enforcement of said dictate and informed the WN’s accordingly. I also invited them to discuss with me on the RODOH forum, but this invitation was rejected, mostly under pretext of the beaten “you are not worth discussing with” – excuse. After I had already announced my departure, the moderator, as punishment for my having clearly told one of the fellows what I thought of him, quite unnecessarily tightened the restriction to just 4 posts per day. In RODOH post # 7416, I told the gentleman what he could do with every one of those 4 posts.

One of the WN regulars, who posts under the handle «SirMosley», seems to particularly like me, or then he is obsessed with his inability to best me in debate, which I presume makes a dent in his «White Pride» self image. Not only does he continue rambling against me after I have left (to which I respond on the above-mentioned RODOH thread), he also dedicated me an article on his own blog, which can be read here and was kindly pointed out to me by our reader True Voice. This article, the contents of which have already been addressed in two posts of mine on the SF board that were not published on the «Holocaust Thread» due to the aforementioned restriction and are now transcribed in my RODOH posts # 7393 and # 7397, I will now comment on.

Read more!



SirMosley (hereinafter "SM")

A Response to "Cortie", an Exterminationist
by SirMosley

"Cortie" is a diminutive of the handle I used on the SF thread, Cortagravatas. I don’t remember having kept pigs together with any of these people to warrant such familiarity, but OK. "Exterminationist" is one the designations that the adepts of the "Revisionist" religion invent for their opponents. Others include "Holohoaxer", "Holocaust Enforcer" and similar crap.

SM

Exterminationists like to explain away the absence of any genocidal activity in the aerial photography of Auschwitz

Oops, first mistake already. As we will see later, there are only two air photographs of Auschwitz-Birkenau corresponding to a set of days for which major extermination activity is documented. And as we will also see, both of these photographs show signs of that activity.

SM

on the grounds that there would be no visible traces of such activity most of the time anyways, and that it would be an incredible coincidence for the planes to have flown over at the moment killings were occuring.

I wouldn’t speak of an "incredible coincidence", but I maintain that the overflight of a reconnaissance plane need not have coincided with a period in which there was visible killing and/or body disposal activity on the ground at Auschwitz-Birkenau. This, in turn, is perfectly sufficient to counter the claim that air photography calls in question the accuracy of the overwhelming documentary, eyewitness and also physical evidence to the killing of hundreds of thousands of Jews at Auschwitz-Birkenau in the late spring and summer of 1944.

SM

An example is the following:

Quote:
Deniers claim that between April and October 1944 there is not one aerial photograph that shows extermiantion activity. First of all, we do have photographs of people in long lines being marched towards Crematorium V, where the gassing would have taken place. But, as for direct evidence, what could we realistically expect to see? The undressing, gassing, and cremation were all done inside the crematoria buildings. It was highly unlikely that an Allied plane would have flown over at the same time as smoke was coming out of chimneys or from an open-pit burning. Indeed, it would be an extraordinary coincidence if we had such a photograph. - Shermer and Grobman. Denying History. p. 150

As I said before, I don’t agree with Shermer and Grobman in what concerns the "extraordinary coincidence", nor is that necessary.

SM

A second example is taken from Wiernik, the lunatic who speaks of Jewish girls flying over ten foot barbed-wire fences:

This remark refers to the following episode of Chapter 8 of an English translation of Wiernik’s A Year in Treblinka available online:

When they had eaten and drunk their fill, the Ukrainians looked around for other amusements. They frequently selected the best looking Jewish girls from the transports of nude women passing their quarters, dragged them into their barracks, raped them and then delivered them to the gas chambers. After being outraged by their executioners, the girls died in the gas chambers with all the rest. It was a martyr's death.

On one occasion a girl fell out of line. Nude as she was, she leaped over a barbed wire fence three meters high, and tried to escape in our direction. The Ukrainians noticed this and started to pursue her. One of them almost reached her but he was too close to her to shoot, and she wrenched the rifle from his hands. It wasn't easy to open fire since there were guards all around and there was the danger that one of the guards might be hit. But as the girl held the gun, it went off and killed one of the Ukrainians. The Ukrainians were furious. In her fury, the girl struggled with his comrades. She managed to fire another shot, which hit another Ukrainian, whose arm subsequently had to be amputated. At last they seized her. She paid dearly for her courage. She was beaten, bruised, spat upon, kicked and finally killed. She was our nameless heroine.

Note the intellectual dishonesty of SirMosley, who makes a single episode into several by speaking of «Jewish girls flying over ten foot barbed-wire fences».

The episode of the girl "leaping" over a barbed wire fence is not necessarily as preposterous as it appears at first sight, for the following reasons:

• The "girl", as becomes apparent from the context, was actually a young woman.

• The statement that this young woman "leaped" over the fence, in the English text, may be a mistranslation from the Polish original of Wiernik’s account, which may have referred to her having quickly climbed over the fence.

• The fence was not as aggressive as an ordinary barbed-wire fence because, being obviously one of the fences of the Treblinka "tube" through which the victims were taken to the gas chambers, it was clad with saplings so as to prevent its being viewed through. It may have looked like this reproduction of a similar fence in the Sobibor death camp in the movie Escape from Sobibor.

• The fence was not as high as the witness erroneously, or hyperbolically, stated it to be. On page 42 of Yitzhak Arad’s Belzec, Sobibor, Treblinka. The Operation Reinhard Death Camps, we read the following (bolding emphases are mine):

Transport Square in the Lower Camp was connected to the extermination area by the "tube", or, as the Germans in Treblinka called it derisively, "the road to heaven" (Himmelstrasse). The tube was nearly 100 meters long and 4.5 to 5 meters wide. It began near the women’s undressing barrack, continued east and then south to the extermination area. It was fenced on both sides with barbed wire 2 meters high and intertwined with tree branches so that it was impossible to see in or out. The "tube" crossed a grove of trees, which continued eastward up the camp fence. At the entrance to the "tube", near the women’s undressing hut, a sign said: "To the Showers" (Zur Badeanstalt)

But let’s assume that this part is absolute nonsense. Let’s assume that there is other nonsense in Wiernik’s account as well. So what? There’s also much in Wiernik’s account that is clearly not nonsense, for it is not only plausible but also confirmed by evidence independent of Wiernik. I provided examples of such convergence in my SF post # 13119 and in my article Historiography as seen by an ignorant charlatan …. That’s what counts for history, and why I think dismissing Wiernik altogether on account of one or the other nonsense in A Year in Treblinka is throwing out the baby with the bath water.

SirMosley quotes the following passage from Chapter 9 of A Year in Treblinka:

Work was begun to cremate the dead. It turned out that bodies of women burned more easily than those of men. Accordingly, the bodies of women were used for kindling the fires. Since cremation was hard work, rivalry set in between the labor details as to which of them would be able to cremate the largest number of bodies. Bulletin boards were rigged up and daily scores were recorded. Nevertheless, the results were very poor. The corpses were soaked in gasoline. This entailed considerable expense and the results were inadequate; the male corpses simply would not burn. Whenever an airplane was sighted overhead, all work was stopped, the corpses were covered with foliage as camouflage against aerial observation.

and comments as follows:

SM

Such nonsense is offensive. Covering a cremation pyre heaped with thousands of corpses, using foliage, really.

Careful, SirMosley: where is Wiernik talking about pyres heaped with thousands of corpses here? He is referring to the first experiments that the SS made in burning the bodies; these need not have been on a very large scale and probably were not, as the SS might have wanted to ascertain if the method worked before they wasted many gallons of gasoline on pyres that would not burn satisfactorily because they were missing an essential factor, the draft (which the grids later provided). And he’s also not saying that the cover-up operation was effective, only that the SS scrambled to cover up the still unincinerated heaps – if they were already burning they would have had to put out the fire before. Once they had worked out the right method and were able to burn thousands of bodies a day, one thing they obviously had to do as well was say «Fuck aerial observation, nothing to do about it» (I don’t think there was much if any enemy aerial observation in Poland in early 1943 anyway; the planes must have been Luftwaffe planes, and the concern was probably about Luftwaffe officers asking what was going on rather than about the enemy spotting anything.).

SM

The following was a response to the exterminationist "Cortagravatas", aka Roberto, a frequent Stormfront and RODOH poster.

Frequent RODOH poster is correct. As to Stormfront, I wrote well over 100 posts there, but my stay with those beautiful people lasted only from 22.10.2006 to the early morning (GMT) of 06.11.2006, thanks to the moderator’s above-mentioned policies.

SM

This is exactly what he [Cortie] thinks was happening at Auschwitz.

That is, to put it plainly, a lie. I never claimed that the Birkenau incineration pits were covered up to hide them from air reconnaissance, as SM well knows. Like other "Revisionists" I have observed over the years, SM obviously prefers to argue against claims he would like his opponent to have made rather than those his opponent actually did make.

SM

Let's think about those pits for a second.

Note that the smoke in the May 31st, 1944 picture only corresponds to an area of about 50 square meters on the ground, meaning that they could be from 50 bodies at most.

SM’s claim is duly noted, evidence and calculations supporting that claim would be appreciated.

SM

If 50 were being done at a time, then for the 5,000 plus a day being burned, there would have to have been 100 different cremations. To cremate a human being requires a temperature of 1600 degrees farenheit for at least 2 hours, though most crematoria will tell you it takes five hours for them to cremate a body with all of their modern cremation techniques.

Two or five hours? Where did SM get that from? According to a participant from a British cremation conference in 1975, quoted by "Revisionist" guru Carlo Mattogno and referred to in John Zimmerman’s article Body Disposal at Auschwitz, the cremation of one body in a coffin takes one hour:

Mattogno cited a participant from a British cremation conference in 1975 who stated that the "thermal barrier" for a cremation was 60 minutes. [106] He ignored the comments of another conference particpant who suggested that most of the burning occurred in the first 30 minutes:

After about half an hour, whether the furnace has gotten up to a temperature of 1100°C or whether it is 900°C, there is a rapid fall away, and I think the investigations should be concerned with the last twenty minutes or so of the cremation cycle. At that time you have in the cremator a very small quantity of body material...roughly the size of a rugby football, about twenty minutes from the end of the cremation, and this is the thing which is most difficult to remove. [107]

SM

So, even saying just two hours per each cremation in these pits, that means to dispose of 5,000 bodies with 50 bodies at a time for two hours each, would take 200 hours, or 8 1/3 days of 24 hour operation.

What makes SM think that all pits were of the size he surmises, or that the smoke seen on the photograph of 31 May 1944 is even from the whole of one incineration pit? It might as well be that what we are seeing is a pit much bigger than corresponds to the size of the smoke plume, which has only started burning at one of its ends so far.

SM

We know that most of the cremation would be going on in these pits owing to the non-functioning of most of the other crematoriums.

What is "most of the other crematoriums" supposed to mean, and where’s the evidence? We know that Krematorium IV went out of order soon after it was commissioned, and Krema V was also out of order or didn’t work properly at the time of the operations in question, which was one of the reasons why incineration pits were used. But what about the two big crematoria, Nr. II and Nr. III? What evidence is there that they were not functioning at the time?

SM

Of course, the whole concept of burning these bodies in pits is stupid. It adds nothing to the process.

Burning bodies in pits is stupid? Not necessarily, as the walls of the pit would prevent heat loss. The only problem would be the draft, which would require careful configuration of the pit and constant tending of the fire. In his otherwise unremarkable article about Combustion Experiments with Flesh and Animal Fat, Carlo Mattogno quotes an expert in carcass incineration, the German engineer Wilhelm Heepke:

"This type represents the most widespread and the most modern method of individual burning and, if properly done, yields remarkable results. The carcasses are burnt in or above pits, the purpose of which is to concentrate the heat upon the object as much as possible, i.e., to improve the economy of the operation, and to allow an autopsy of the carcass to be made without having to worry about spreading the infection by squirting blood or by body parts set aside. Regarding the layout of the pits, essentially the same considerations apply as for burials, except that the pits have to be made deeper by 0.5 - 1.0 meters, to a total of 1.5 - 2.0 meters, in order to allow for the ash generated. The choice of a suitable place depends primarily upon the prevailing wind.

The simplest procedure is to dig a pit 2.5 m long and 1.5 m wide and deep in the vicinity of the carcass and to fill it almost completely with firewood logs about 1 m long. In order to achieve a good draft, the wood must be stacked lengthwise and crosswise in alternate layers; it must first be soaked in petroleum to ensure good and rapid burning. The easiest way to do this is by means of a narrow pail or bucket filled with petroleum, with both ends of each log being dipped into the liquid. It is also recommended to line the sidewalls of the pit with such logs placed vertically and close together.[…]"

If I understand Heepke correctly, he is not saying that burning carcasses in or above pits is particularly efficient or particularly "stupid". He’s just saying that it is a widely applied method.

SM

Now, Cortie says that this whole thing was so quick that it only took a short amount of time such that a plane would not notice it.

Oh, did Cortie say that? Cortie doesn’t remember, even though he usually has a good memory.

SM

Let's say it took two hours in total to dispose of the average of 5,000 bodies killed a day. The average volume of a human body is .07 m3, so 5,000 bodies pressed together and allowing for skinny bodies and fat bodies would be 350 cubic meters. Let's say, as Bendel does, that there's 3 pits of 72 m2. That's 216 m2.

Note that Bendel, whose pertinent statements are quoted here and who wasn't necessarily good at estimates of this kind, was just referring to the pits behind Krematorium V (which he called Krematorium 4):

The twin Krematorien 3 and 4 (IV and V), more commonly known as the "forest Krema" (they were located in a pleasant clearing) were of more modest dimensions, and their eight furnaces could handle one thousand bodies a day.(13) At the time I entered the Sonderkommando, the throughput of these furnaces had been deemed insufficient (14) and they were replaced by three cremation pits, each 12 meters long, 6 wide and 1.5 deep.

There were further incineration pits near "Bunker V", one of the farmhouses used for gassing in 1942 that had been reactivated for the same purpose at the time of the deportation of the Hungarian Jews between May and July 1944. Henryk Tauber is one of the witnesses mentioning these pits:

At the same time, the old Bunker 2, with its incineration pits, was also made ready for re-use. I never worked there.

There is at least one element of evidence suggesting that the incineration facilities by "Bunker V" were at least as large as if not larger than those behind Krema V. The notes written by Rudolf Höss in the sequence of his interrogations by Polish examining judge Jan Sehn, which are transcribed here, contain the following statement (my translation):

The burning capacity near V was practically unlimited as long as burning could be carried out day and night.

At any rate, it is manifestly false to assume that all bodies incinerated in the open were incinerated in the pits behind Krema V, described by Bendel among other witnesses.

SM

They'd have to be nearly a meter and a half deep just to fit the bodies, and obviously they would not be absolutely compressed together, or there'd be no draught; so for allowing whatever grilling/grating arrangements that you want, it would probably have to be at least five meters deep.

SM’s claim that the pits would need to be at least five meters deep is taken note of, but it is worthless without evidence and calculations underlying this figure, which SM did not provide.

SM

Do you think burying something five meters deep in marshy ground is going to burn well? So much so that it's all done in two hours? Most of the bodies would not even be hot.

Here comes the old "marshy ground" herring. Cremation specialist Heepke, quoted by Mattogno, mentioned a procedure that was worked out to match the contingency of marshy ground:

"Now many cases of carcass disposal occur in swampy areas such as meadows, moors, or river valleys. In these areas the high water table makes it impossible to go down to 1.5 m, and thus one would have to abandon the idea of using an efficient procedure, such as case B in Table I. In their effort to allow such a method to be used also in swampy terrain, Drs. Profé and Lothes, in their further experiments carried out in 1903, used [iron] beams laid across a pit only 0.75 meters deep to support the carcass. A collapsible windscreen, about 1 m high and made from iron plate, was then placed all around the pit. 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. 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.

From the above data one may conclude that it is possible, in the open, to burn carcasses efficiently, economically, and in a relatively short span of time, provided that methods B or C are used. These methods, according to Tables I and II, yield the following for 1 kg of carcass:

a fuel requirement of 0.5 kg of wood having a vaporization power of 4.5 kg and a heating power of 775 kcal [Translator's note: the author has apparently corrected fundamental scientific data for various types of losses].

a duration of the process of 45 seconds

a cost of 1.33 pfennigs"

As to the "marshy ground" itself: there was a drainage system at Birkenau for drying up the marsh, and in another article Mattogno mentions a «catastrophic» fall in the ground water table around Auschwitz in early 1944:

Furthermore, a "catastrophic" fall in the ground water table in the area around Auschwitz had already been noted in February 1944. This is evident from a letter from the head of the Central Building Administration Jothann "to the Regierungspräsidenten - Division IIIQ - Kattowtiz" dated 10 February 1944, which begins as follows:[9]
"As a result of the catastrophic fall in the ground water level in the area around Auschwitz, the wells sunk to supply the concentration camp and related operations are no longer sufficient." (See Fig.1)

The water level might again rise a little in the spring, but not necessarily enough to compensate for the «catastrophic» fall mentioned. Then, in the summer, it would again drop considerably, maybe to the «catastrophic» level mentioned.

So no, the incinerations were not necessarily done in marshland.

SM

Let's say they figured that out and so made these pits particularly shallow, a half meter deep maximum. But that would require making the pits much longer or wider to fit 5,000 bodies, since a half meter x 216 m2 would only be 108m3 of volume, whereas we'd need 350m3 to fit the bodies packed together. Assuming five meters of depth space to fit the bodies and all the grills and all the relevant spacing in a 216m2 trench, the surface area would have to increase by 10 fold to bring the depth down from 5 meters to .5 meters and and to still be able to fit the 5,000 bodies with the grill, so that's 2,160m2 of pits.

Assuming SM can prove his 5 meters depth postulation, that is.

SM

Do I see a 2km area of pits on that picture?

Well, there would be several pits, some of which would be in the area of «Bunker 5», which is not visible on the picture, while others would be near Krema V. All of them together would, assuming SM's claim about the depth is correct, need to have an area of 2,160 square meters (to put this into perspective, that’s about 30 % of the area of an average soccer field).

SM

No.

How can SM say that so categorically? How can he tell whether or not how many pits of what sizes are visible on this air photograph?

SM

So apparently they were covered up. By huge tarpes? A 2km2 square tarp would be noticeable.

Sure about that? It wouldn’t be one tarp with an area of 2,160m2, by the way. It would be several tarps on several pits in two wooded areas, that of Krema V and that of «Bunker V», of which only the first is visible on the photo. The other is somewhere at the end of the arrow pointing from the square labeled «Execution Area» on the photo as shown here, but you don’t see it. There’s a close up here, which I would like SM to look at and tell us how he established that there are no pits and no tarps in the area where the smoke comes from. I submit you can’t tell from that photo whether or not there are pits there.

SM

Foilage? 2km2 worth of leaves?

As much as you would need to cover 30 % of a soccer field, but I don’t think there was any cover-up.

SM

Preposterous, as it would not cover up hardly anything at all unless you had another few thousand pounds of it on hand. In any case, 2km worth of piled up leaves would be about as noticeable as possible.

In a wooded area? I don’t think so.

SM

And why would there be such pits? Burning massive amounts of bodies in an open pit is the singularly most stupid way of desposing with corpses.

Nonsense, see above.

SM

If the pits were not this size, then the cremation would have been very much a day-long affair.

Assuming SM can substantiate his five meters depth claim and give us a calculation of how long incineration would last under his assumptions. Just saying so doesn’t make it so.

SM

If the planes could capture people marching and people registering, they could certainly capture this.

Sure, assuming it was an all-day affair, which SM hasn’t yet demonstrated.

SM

If they were being burned about 50 at a time, as the May 31st photo indicates

No, it doesn’t, see above.

SM

if it is taken to be smoke from cremated bodies (an unjustified assumption, of course),

Why, what else would it be?

SM

then it would take over 8 days to clean up one day's worth of gassing.

As the assumption that the plume of smoke on the 31 May photo shows all they had pit-wise is without foundation, so is the conclusion.

SM

So, that leaves the pyres. Thousands of bodies as well as the wood, 650 pounds of wood for 5,000 people = 3,250,000 lbs of wood. Let's say that, due to German engineering genius and the working of at least some of the crematoriums, only 1/3rd of that amount was needed. An average 2x4x8 weighs about 7 pounds. That's 464,285 2x4x8s worth of wood, for a total volume of 29,714,285.714 cubic feet of wood, or 5627 cubic miles. For a warehouse 100 feet wide and a 30 feet tall, that's almost 2 miles long to contain all that wood. And that is for one days work.

My calculations are the following: assuming that these 5,000 bodies weighed 45 kg on average, which I consider reasonable given that they were mainly of women and children, we have 225,000 kg of body mass that required burning every day. Assuming 2 kg of wood per kg of body weight (which I consider the upper range for mass incinerations, based on the data mentioned in section 4.2 of my article Carlo Mattogno on Belzec Archaeological Research), that would be 450,000 kg or 450 tons of wood per day – 10 five-ton trucks, nine trips. Let’s assume they brought in dried birch wood for the job, which according to this site weighs 2840 – 3650 pounds or 1,288 to 1,656 kg per cord. We take the lower value, to that we need more cords, which favors SM’s argument. 450,000 kg of wood is thus 349 cords. 1 cord is ca. 3.6 cubic meters, 349 cords is 1,265 cubic meters.The small appartment where I live has about 100 square meters and is about 3 meters high, that’s 300 cubic meters. Little more than 4 times this would be sufficient to store the wood required, according to my calculations.

Now I’ll do it with SM’s assumptions: about 1,100,000 pounds of wood is about half a million kg or 500 tons of wood, corresponding to 388 cords of wood or 1,406 cubic meters of dry birchwood. SM’s warehouse would be ca. 30.5 meters (100 feet) wide, 9.1 meters (30 feet) tall and 3,218.7 meters (2 miles) long. The volume of that warehouse would be 893,350 cubic meters. My 1,406 cubic meters would fit in there more than 635 times. I think there’s something wrong with SM’s calculation. According to mine, his warehouse needs to be no more than about 5 meters (ca. 16.4 feet) long.

SM

So, for a week, you'd need several two mile long warehouses. And where are they? That's a million pounds of wood.

No, for a week you’d need just about 10,000 cubic meters. That’s about 7 warehouses 31 meters long, 5 meters wide and 9 meters tall, or 9 meters wide and 5 meters tall. But what makes SM think they’d stockpile for a week and not just a day or two?

SM

A million lbs of wood was just moved back and forth quite casually, and was placed in storage so nobody would see it, in buildings 2 miles long, that were also hidden.

Nonsense, see my above calculations.

SM

No Cortie, the trenches pictured there could not possibly accomodate enough bodies to burn so quickly that the whole operation could be done and cleaned up such that a plane never once saw what was going on. The pits and the crematorium capacities are simply not big enough.

That’s what SM hasn’t yet even come close to demonstrating. I’m especially interested in how he established that no trenches of the size required according to his calculations, for which he also still owes the backup, can be seen on this photograph or this closeup thereof. My take is that one cannot tell from that picture what pits are there or not let alone how big or small they are. And keep in mind that the picture shows only one of the two pit areas.

SM

Therefore, it would take multiple "runs", with an absolute minimum of two hours just to burn the bodies, and another hour to set everything up properly and get it going. Two runs would not be sufficient; with 180m3, it would take at least 3 runs to dispose of 350m3 of bodies with the appropriate grills set up (since you could not pack 180m3 of bodies in with no space each time, or nothing would burn; it would be at least half that). That's a minimum six hours out of a twelve hour day. We also have to include the gassings and all that in this time. Now we're getting into something that, assuming an impossible speed of cremation (two hours each), would turn into an 8-9 hour operation, out of a 12 hour day (this being May-June).

A 12 hour day in May-June in Poland? I think 15 or 16 hours of daylight is more appropriate at that time of the year, and there’s no reason why they shouldn’t have taken advantage of all of it. There’s also no reason why they shouldn’t have taken advantage of the nighttime to do at least a part of the work of bringing up the wood to the incineration sites and building the pyres.

SM

Therefore, it does turn into an all day operation, meaning that a plane flying over at any part during the day would catch at least some part of the operation, especially when there are photos from a number of days.

Well, even according to SM’s calculation there are 3 daytime hours in which a plane would catch nothing at all (according to mine that would be 6 or 7 hours). As to there being «photos from a number of days»: there are photos photos made by Allied planes on May 31, June 26, July 26, August 23, August 25 and September 13, and a photo made by Luftwaffe on July 8.

June 25 and June 26 there were no gassings, so forget the June 26 photo.

There were also no gassings on 26 July, and there was only on small gassing on 25 July, so forget the 26 July photo, too.

August 22: at least 759 Jews from Mauthausen were killed in the gas chambers, according to Danuta Czech’s Calendarium, see the Veritas Team 3rd Response of the “Scholars’ Debate” on the RODOH forum, (Steve Mock’s post # 891). August 23: no gassings mentioned. The photo of 23 August 1944 shows a large plume of smoke, which probably comes from the burning of the bodies of the Jews gassed on August 22.

Then we have 25 August 1944. On this day, as explained in more detail in the Veritas Team 3rd Response, there may have been a gassing of 1,500 registered prisoners at the camp, but this is not certain. Even if this gassing took place, the cremation could have taken place during the night, and even if this comparatively smaller operation (by the Birkenau standards of 1944) took place during the daytime, a coincidence between a reconnaissance plane’s flying over the camp and smoke coming out of the chimney of one of the two large crematoria (it would not have been necessary to use the incineration pits) would still be more improbable than probable, because of two "technical" scenarios explained in the Veritas Team 3rd Response and also because the cremation of 1,500 corpses in 30 furnaces à 4 bodies per hour would not necessarily take up all of the daytime hours on a day with early sunrise and late sunset. Add to this the fact that, according to photo analyst Lucas, only a part of the photograph is "good quality photography", and the chances of not seeing eventual incriminating features like smoke on the photograph are even higher.

As to the last photograph, taken September 13, these are the data from Danuta Czech’s Calendarium, mentioned in the Veritas Team 3rd Response:

September 12: 300 Jewish children from Kaunas are gassed.
September 13: On 13 September 1944 one transport has joined Birkenau with a total of 929 men and boys registered and, more importantly, as Danuta Czech informs us, 900 women and girls from the former Theriesenstadt Family Camp were put into Birkenau sector B-Iid, i.e., not gassed.

Most probably the bodies of 300 Jewish children were quickly burned on September 12, so no signs of this gassing would show on the September 13 photograph. On September 13, there were no gassings.

This leaves us with just two photographs, those of 31 May and 8 July, that correspond to a set of days in which there was gassing on a large scale.

SM

Of course, it would take much longer than two hours for each cremation in reality, and would probably take several days (just burning one in a normal, modern crematorium normally takes five hours, and that is with specialized equipment) of continuous operation for the whole thing.

The "modern crematorium" nonsense was already discussed above.

SM

If it was somehow super quick (two hours or less, assuming appropriate use of fat people and other apparently self-combusting bodies), taking only one run, then you'd need to show much bigger pits then these narrow trenches to fit all the overflow from the crematoriums in them in one go.

Readers may wonder where SM got "these narrow trenches" from. The answer is in the report of an air photo analyst by the name of Carroll Lucas, who located the following on the 31 May 1944 photograph:

Situated within the northwestern perimeter of the Birkenau complex, across the road from a line of barracks and adjacent to, but south of, the two buildings designated as Crematoria IV &V, are series of narrow trenches excavated in echelon within a large area of bare soil. Twelve of the trenches (having a total length of approximately 800 feet) are open, whereas another 9 trenches (totaling approximately 650 feet) appear to have been filled in. The open trenches appear to be shallow but precisely oriented, with little scattered soil. They appear to have been dug by hand, with the excavated soil stored between the trenches. These have all the appearances of hand dug, mass grave sites used to dispense the residue from the adjacent crematoria.

However, the location of these trenches is not compatible with eyewitness testimony regarding the location of the pits behind Krema V. So whatever these trenches are – if they are actually trenches – they are unlikely to have anything to do with the incineration pits. In the Veritas Team 3rd Response, this issue was addressed as follows:

Thus the air photograph can be considered further independent corroboration of Tauber’s testimony regarding the location of the pits and of Pressac’s identification of this location. On the other hand, this means that the “series of narrow trenches excavated in echelon within a large area of bare soil”, identified by air photo analyst Carroll L. Lucas “adjacent to, but to the south of, the two buildings designated as Crematoria IV & V” (Zimmerman, Holocaust Denial, page 291) are not the “mass grave sites” that Lucas assumed them to be or, at any rate, none of the incineration pits mentioned by Tauber.

SM

And even then, with two hours out of a twelve hour day, that's a 6 - 1 shot at catching them right in the act at every photo, and of course we have more than six photos.

No, we have only two photographs that correspond to a set of days in which there was gassing on a large scale. Both of them show smoke. None of them shows smoke corresponding to full-scale operation of the incineration pits (though I think the July 8 photo, see here a closeup, shows a larger plume of smoke than the one of 31 May) but that only means the camp was photographed at a time when the incineration pits were not operating full scale, either at the start or towards the end of the incineration process.

SM

It would be extremely *unlikely*, even at the most absurd estimate of burning, for the planes to not catch one sight of it.

Yeah, a 6:1 shot would be reduced to a 3:1 shot, according to SM’s probability calculations, which are not exactly convincing, in my opinion. For unless it can be demonstrated that the planes flew over at very different times on each day while the gassing and body disposal process took up exactly the same hours of every day on which major extermination operations took place, the number of overflight days wouldn’t necessarily increase the probability of taking a photograph at the "right" moment.

SM

Given a realistic number, assuming huge pits and the million pounds of wood, it would take four or five hours for the burning, and another few hours for the gassings and transport, thereby making the odds closer to 66-70% of flying over while some visible part of the operation was going on.

SM is assuming a total of 8 out of 12 hours on a day of major gassing and incineration during which either or both would be going on. With my 15-16 hours of daylight in summertime Poland, which I think are more reasonable than his 12 hours, the chance of the plane taking pictures on 31 May or 8 July 1944 would be closer to 50 %. But even if SM’s odds were the right ones, and even if the odds were higher in favor of photographing at the «right» moment, this wouldn’t necessarily mean it happened. And with all the eyewitness and documentary evidence pitted against him, with no plausible, evidence-backed alternative scenario as to what happened to 300,000 Hungarian Jews who got into Auschwitz-Birkenau but never got out, I’d say SM needs a 100 % certainty, and even then he would still have a lot of explaining to do.

SM

But every time the dice rolled in the favor of the Nazis. Odd how you're God takes care of his chosen people; perhaps this is why Wiesel had his crisis of faith.

A Jew-hater’s horseshit, not worth wasting a comment on.

SM

How bodies were burned in pits anyways is, of course, absurd.

Nonsense, as already explained.

SM

So with no pits,

SM hasn’t demonstrated this.

SM

no pyres (since there was not sufficient wood;

SM hasn’t demonstrated this either.

SM

you can find you're picture of stacked up wood from Pressac if you want, I certainly doubt it is a million pounds worth),

Certainly not, but there’s absolutely no reason why there should be a photo showing 350-400 cords of wood around.

SM

and barely functioning crematoria,

Another of SM’s unsubstantiated claims.

SM

how were the bodies disposed of again?

As described by many witnesses, the plausibility of whose testimonies SM hasn’t ruled out so far. A more interesting question would be: what, if not murder, happened to the overwhelming majority of the Hungarian Jews deported to Auschwitz-Birkenau, who were never again seen alive. Out of 508,861 Jews deported from Hungary to Auschwitz-Birkenau or to Austria, only about 126,000 returned to Hungary after the war or emigrated to other countries (data from Laszlo Varga, "Ungarn", in: Wolfgang Benz et al, Dimensionen des Völkermords. Those who returned had either been registered at Auschwitz-Birkenau as able to work, or sent from there to other camps, or sent directly to other camps without passing Auschwitz-Birkenau. What happened to the rest?