Meanwhile, on the "CODOH Revisionist Forum" ....

... Friedrich Paul Berg indulges in some of his hilarious wishful thinking, as he writes the following:

Roberto Muehlenkamp has agreed to debate me on the Deanna Spingola Radio Show. The date and time are still to be decided but a late June debate seems highly likely.

This should be an important confrontation between myself and probably the most ardent and "scholarly" of the holocaust-believing crowd, or what is left of it. Many years of internet debates between Muehlenkamp and myself came to a sudden end with the demise of the RODOH discussion forum. I suspect that the major reason for why RODOH ended was that I thoroughly crushed Muehlenkamp. The record was there for everyone to read on RODOH--but not any longer because of the disappearance of RODOH.

Sorry to burst the bubble of Fredo's mendacious bragging, but as he well knows, the RODOH forum went off the web long after Fredo and I had exchanged the last posts there. The reason given for the forum's deletion by Yuku (as can be confirmed by the extinct RODOH forum's owner, Fredo's "Revisionist" buddy Scott Smith) was the misbehavior of certain posters - apparently some of Fredo's brothers-in-spirit went too far for Yuku's taste with their racist/anti-Semitic baloney.

I for my part regret the loss of the RODOH forum, especially insofar as it contained well-read reference threads (which have been reconstructed in the meantime on this blog's forum) and the "Memory Hole" section dedicated to documenting moderating practices on the "CODOH Revisionist Forum" (which fly in the face of that forum's claim of offering "open debate") and discussing CODOH rubbish whenever my name was mentioned in it, including but not limited to Jonnie "Hannover" Hargis' somewhat-less-than-honest victory dances and the mendacious smear of H.E.A.R.T. psychopath Carmelo "Blogbuster" Lisciotto. An attempt to reconstruct the "Memory Hole"'s central thread A message to Jonnie "Hannover" Hargis on a RODOH successor forum was cut short when that forum was also deleted (presumably for reasons connected with the smear tirades posted there by Lisciotto under several of his "hateblogwatch" aliases), but the CODOH highlights of Hargis', Lisciotto's and other pathetic individuals' "wisdom" will be recorded on this blog as time permits.

It is also a pity that my long discussions with Fredo (essentially about his obsession with the color he thinks people gassed with engine exhaust should have had) are no longer online, as each of these discussions was an instructive showpiece of Fredo's blundering and dishonesty, saturated with the colorful invective whereby Fredo insists in showing what makes him tick. Fortunately Fredo showed some rare good sense in preserving one of my RODOH posts on his website. I shall reproduce that post below, in case Fredo should change his mind and remove it from his site. A broken link to the extinct RODOH reference section could be replaced by a link to the thread reconstructed on the HC forum, but links to RODOH discussion posts are unfortunately broken for good.

On the "CODOH Revisionist Forum" you opened a thread with the same title as the present thread, and in your post of Fri Jan 08, 2010 1:31 am on that CODOH thread you wrote the following:

FPB wrote:

________________________________________

By embracing the gasoline engine alternative theory, the exterminationists have simply given themselves some other very serious problems because victims of gasoline exhaust exposure are bright cherry red with only few exceptions. The witnesses that Muehlenkamp and Romanov cite from National Socialist Mass Murders with Poison Gas by Kogon, Langbein and Rueckerl are easily exposed as outright liars. They are even easier to expose than the witnesses to supposed diesel gassings such as Kurt Gerstein. Gerstein claimed the corpses were blue and so did some of the gasoline exhaust witnesses also. Some claImed there was nothing noticeable about the appearance of the corpses. None claimed the victims were red except--for one case for Sachsenhausen witnessed allegedly by a forensic doctor (Dr. Kurt Leidig?) who would have known the right answer.

Having discussed this issue with you at length here on RODOH, I can't but express my contempt at the superficiality of your "analysis" and the eagerness with which you jump to faith-conform conclusions based on very little if anything at all, not to mention the mendacity of some of your claims (as you well know, Pfannenstiel and Schluch said nothing about gasoline engines and also didn't mention "blue" corpses - what they said was that some of the corspes had a bluish tinge in some parts of their faces, a phenomenon that Pfannenstiel expressly attributed to their having died of asphyxiation).

Once again, here's what you have to do before you can claim that the witnesses were either mistaken about the discoloration of the victims or embellishing their accounts in this respect:

1. You have to rule out the possibility that the victims, or at least a considerable part of them, succumbed to suffocation rather than to carbon monoxide poisoning. It stands to reason that the rapid introduction of gasoline fumes into a closed space where oxygen was sparse and CO2 was high anyway, due to the breathing of people packed in there like sardines in a can, might bring the oxygen and CO2 concentration to such levels that all or most of the victims would die before carbon monoxide poisoning could take effect - as seems to have happened in many cases in the gas vans used by the Einsatzgruppen in the Nazi-occupied territories of the USSR, judging by Dr. August Becker's complaint that "In order to come to an end as fast as possible, the driver presses the accelerato to the fullest extent. By doing that the persons to be executed suffer death from suffocation and not death by dozing off as was planned." Just like the EG gas van drivers, the SS folks at Belzec, Sobibor and Treblinka wanted to "come to an end as fast as possible" with each gassing and may thus have killed their victims, or at least a large part of their victims, by suffocation rather than by carbon monoxide poisoning.

2. If and when you have demonstrated that most of the people gassed with gasoline engine exhaust must have succumbed to carbon monoxide poisoning and not to suffocation, you must - taking into consideration sources like the article by Risser et al scanned on your own website, the article by G.F.Findlay quoted in my post of 9-Dec-2006 11:29, among others, and the medical sources referred to in Charles Provan's article The Blue Color of the Jewish Victims at Belzec Death Camp - and Carbon Monoxide Poisoning, as well as the proportions of different color perceptions according to this post by Ostgebeit - demonstrate that the "cherry red" discoloration associated to fatal carbon monoxide poisoning would necessarily have been recognizable

a) right after the victims had died, which is when witnesses describing their impressions of corpses being taken out of gas vans or gas chambers got to see them, and not just some hours after death, which is when coroners usually examine dead bodies (mind that Risser et al's article is about corpse discoloration at the stage of livor mortis);

b) to the average human eye of a casual observer, and not just to the trained eye of a coroner performing a detailed visual examination of the body (Findlay's study suggests that the average human eye may often not be able to recognize the cherry-red discoloration in fatal cabon monoxide victims).

3. Finally, when you have demonstrated that the victims must have died of carbon monoxide poisoning and the telltale "cherry red" discoloration should have been recognized right after death and by any casual observer under normal conditions (i.e. if the victims had been well-fed, healthy and relaxed), you must rule out the possibility that the particular victims in question, due to anemia and/or other conditions induced by the prolonged malnutrition to which the overwhelming majority of them had been exposed in Polish ghettos, alone or together with the state of exhaustion they were obviously in when standing in the gas chambers after a harrowing train journey, would have been killed by a concentration of carbon monoxide lower than that required to produce a prominent "cherry red" discoloration, and/or failed to show the color due to an already reduced ability to oxygenate and/or because insufficient haemoglobin was present in their blood to display the color. Two sources are of particular interest in this respect. One is the article by Risser et al quoted on your website (emphases added):

The older the victim, the lower the carboxyhemoglobin level, which decreased by 0.16 % per living year [...], a finding which may be explained by the fact that many elderly people with coronary artery, heart or lung disease already have a compromised ability to oxygenate.[...] There was a strong association between the carboxyhemoglobin level and the cherry-pink coloring of livor mortis [...].3 corpses with 18, 28 and 31 % caboxyhemoglobin, respectively, showed no cherry-pink coloring of livor mortis.

The other is quoted by Charles Provan (emphases added):

Forensic Pathology, by Bernard Knight MD, MRCP, FRC(Path), Barrister, Oxford University Press, New York, 1991, p. 507:

"At autopsy the most striking appearance of the body is the color of the skin, especially in areas of post-mortem hypostasis. The classical 'cherry-pink' color of carboxyhemoglobin is usually evident if the saturation of the blood exceeds about 30%. Below this, familiarity and good lighting are needed and below 20%, no coloration is visible. As these low concentrations are rarely fatal, however, little is lost. Sometimes, darker cyanosis tends to mask the skin color, but the margins of the hypostasis and the internal tints are usually apparent. When the victim is anaemic the color may be faint or even absent because insufficient haemoglobin is present to display the colour. In racially-pigmented victims the colour may obviously be masked, though may still be seen on the inner aspect of the lips, the nail-beds, tongue, and palms and soles of hands and feet. It is also seen inside the eyelids, but rarely in the sclera."

The relation between malnutrition and conditions probably hindering a prominent "cherry red" discoloration in fatal carbon monoxide poisoning is addressed in my posts of 22-Oct-2007 09:41, 3-Nov-2007 23:21, and 9-Nov-2007 22:40, among others.

Now, let's assume that you manage to tackle all three steps described above and demonstrate that gassing with gasoline exhaust would have killed the majority of victims through carbon monoxide poisoning rather than suffocation, and that the victims, despite being mostly in a grievous state of malnourishment and exhaustion, would have displayed a prominent "cherry red" discoloration, recognizable by casual eyewitness observers, right after they had been killed. What would you thus have demonstrated?

You would have demonstrated that eyewitnesses who described the victims as blue or bluish or sometimes having a bluish tinge on their faces, or who described no discoloration particularities, either did not pay much attention to this detail (hardly surprising for who witnesses scenes as traumatic as what these witnesses were confronted with) and for this or some other reason failed to recollect a certain discoloration or wrongly recollected a blue or bluish discoloration. This, of course, would be far from justifying the conclusion that the witnesses "lied" about this particular detail, not to mention the conclusion that they made up the whole of their account, which would be even further away. Witnesses tend to get all sorts of details wrong without this meaning that they are wrong about the whole of the event they describe. The witnesses who described the immediate result of a gassing with gasoline exhaust could easily have seen or recalled a blue or bluish discoloration where a coroner's examination would have detected the "cherry red" discoloration held to be characteristic of fatal carbon monoxide poisoning - just look at this photo on your own website that is mentioned, along with two photos of asphyxiation victims, in my post of 7-Nov-2007 10:36.

If you want to discredit an eyewitness and present that eyewitness's account as essentially a product of fantasy, you have to do a lot more than just yell "he got the color wrong, so he must have been lying about everything". In his recent blog Irene Zisblatt, the "Diamond Girl" - Fact or Fiction?, Dr. Neander provides a brilliant example of how a competent and honest scholar dissects a dubious eyewitness account. I suggest you read that blog, Mr. Berg. Read and try to learn something from a master.

As to Sachsenhausen witness Dr. Kurt Leidig, you better support your claim that he was telling what someone wanted to hear with something better than your wishful thinking. Otherwise you'll have a witness who, even according to your sloppy reasoning and "research", credibly testified to a homicidal gassing in a gas van.

I may soon be able to discuss all the above with you where you posted it, by the way. When I looked in there yesterday I saw a post by our fellow poster Hans, who, IIRC, had been permanently banned from that lovely place just like me. This gave me hope that Jonni "Hannover" Hargis has either finally grown a pair or been replaced by a less cowardly and censorship-prone moderator, and so I registered under my full name.

If my hopes are not disappointed, I will also have some fun over there with my old friend Greg Gerdes (when he gets back, that is), who can give you lessons in redundancy as he repeats his dreary "show me just one this and that" mantra over and over again in his desperate yelling for attention on various CODOH threads, and whose apparent eagerness to believe that I'm posting there as "AHolland" suggests that I still figure prominently in his nightmares.

While the CODOH moderators make up their minds about whether or not to let me in, you should start doing your homework, Mr. Berg. And be careful that the new face of "Revisionism" doesn't mistake you for a Jew ... .

The discoloration of the bodies of people gassed with engine exhaust is also briefly addressed in the HC critique of Mattogno, Graf and Kues (pp. 328-333).

PS, 20.05.2012: This blog led to some more of the mendacious whining whereby Carmelo "Blogbuster" Lisciotto, like so often before, tries to ingratiate himself with his "Revisionist" buddies (apparently without much success judging by the lack of replies - maybe even the CODOH regulars are getting tired of this "Blogbuster" freak).

Compulsive liar Lisciotto tells two lies in the thread linked to. I'm not blaming CODOH for Yuku's having pulled the plug on the original RODOH forum, already because the "Revisionist" jokers who must have gone a bit too far in their slobber on RODOH were not exactly prominent CODOH posters as far as I know, if they posted on CODOH at all (CODOH "truthseekers" tend to show a notorious reluctancy to venture outside the warm and cozy Führerbunker into the realm of open debate). And I don't consider smear posted by Lisciotto sockpuppets like "Herodotus2010", "IPT" and "Boaz" to have had any influence on the deletion of the original RODOH forum, though it is likely to have been a major factor in Yuku's decision to remove the RODOH successor forum called "RODOH2". I wouldn't put it past Lisciotto to have appealed to Yuku for deletion of RODOH2 - perhaps because he got cold feet after my posts scanned below and the self-revealing reply thereto by his "Herodotus2010" alter-ego. The images below can be enlarged by clicking on them.