The usual "Revisionist" victory dancing ...

... started right after the debate between Friedrich Berg and me on Deanna Spingola's radio show.



First to crow victory was Steven Willow.

SW:

Just heard the debate and can honestly state that it was a resounding defeat for the forces of the Hoax and a triumph for Mr Berg.

SW's capacity for wishful thinking is amazing, especially considering Berg's puny efforts to explain where the "Hoax" is supposed to have come from. IIRC he babbled something about Polish courts inducing witnesses to tell lies. Apart from the fact that he didn't manage to demonstrate that any witness to homicidal gassings lied (except maybe for exaggeration-prone Gerstein, whose testimony, as I pointed out, is only used by historians insofar as corroborated by more objective witnesses like Pfannenstiel and Schluch), Polish criminal justice authorities cannot have been that prone to influencing depositions by witnesses and suspects if one looks at, for instance, the highly inconvenient information provided to them by Auschwitz commandant Rudolf Höss, who had the cheek to tell them that the 4 million estimate of people killed at Auschwitz-Birkenau (endorsed by Poland until the fall of the Iron Curtain) was way above the mark. The statments of Höss in the document The Final Solution of the Jewish Question in Auschwitz read as follows in Constantine FitzGibbon's translation (Commandant of Auschwitz, pp. 193-194, emphasis added):

I myself never knew the total number and I have nothing to help me make an estimate of it.
I can only remember the figure involved in the larger actions, which were repeated to me by Eichmann or his deputies.
From Upper Silesia and Polish territory under German rule … 250,000
Germany and Theresienstadt … 100,000
Holland … 95,000
Belgium … 20,000
France … 110,000
Greece … 65,000
Hungary … 400,000
Slovakia … 90,000
I can no longer remember the figures for the smaller actions, but they were insignificant in comparison with the numbers given above.
I regard a total of two and a half millions as far too high. Even Auschwitz had limits to its destructive possibilities.
Figures given by former prisoners are figments of the imagination and lack any foundation.

Mr. Willow (or Mr. Berg) may want to explain why the Poles allowed Höss to throw in their face an Auschwitz death toll figure of little more than a million and call the much higher figure they maintained "figments of the imagination" that "lack any foundation", if they were inclined to make those they interrogated tell them what they wanted to hear.

Pfannenstiel and Schluch testified before criminal justice authorities of the German Federal Republic, by the way. And Gerstein submitted his reports in French captivity, IIRC. All fanatics bent on denigrating poor Nazi Germany, in Berg's hollow fantasies. And working in coordination with the supposed Polish fanatics, at a time when the Iron Curtain was going up or long in place. Yeah, sure.

SW

Mr Berg raised the critical point that jews have used the excuse that the dead must not be disturbed in their eternal rest to justify the namby pamby exploration of so called mass graves at Sobibor.

Looks like we have here another self-appointed archaeologist like Berg, who thinks he gets to decide what is a proper and what is a "namby pamby" archaeological investigation. As concerns the supposed "excuse" used by "jews" (note the spelling), SW is invited to read the blog Belzec Mass Graves and Archaeology - Continuation (1), where I discuss with Carlo Mattogno under which conditions dead bodies may be disturbed according to halakhah. Archaeological investigation is none of them. And SW's derisive blather doesn't help him over the fact that Prof. Andrzej Kola's "namby pamby" core drilling in 2001 found 7 grave pits containing human remains (including whole corpses in wax-fat transformation at the bottom of 4 gravea), which had a total volume of about 12,750 cubic meters. The largest grave had about 6,800 cubic meters of space available for burial. As I pointed out here, certain "Revisionists" apparently expect people to believe that the SS made such enormous graves because they liked to keep their Jewish labor force digging all the time, or because they enjoyed the healthy exercise themselves or were so fond of handling excavators that they made enormous graves just for the fun of it.

SW

Roberto Muehlenkamp hid behind this ruse, too, as Mr Berg had him cornered around the issue that there are plenty of jews who were shipped to AR camps only to be discovered among the sea of happy survivors who owe their lives to kind treatment at these camps.

Actually I pointed out to Berg that, besides the graves identified by archaeologists at Bełżec and Sobibór being large enough to accomodate hundreds of thousands of bodies, there is documentary evidence whereby 1,274,166 Jews were shipped to the Aktion Reinhard camps in 1942 alone. With this many deportees to account for just in 1942, and with all other documentary as well as eyewitness evidence pointing to the murder of these people, the best evidence in support of his case that Berg could offer was ... Mrs. Zelda Gordon, a single and moreover dubious witness who, IIRC, claimed to have been taken from Treblinka to Majdanek. If those camps had really been transit camps en route to the Nazi-occupied Soviet territories, Berg wouldn't have been reduced to his lame blather about Zelda Gordon (plus "countless other witnesses" he quickly dreamed up so Zelda wouldn't be so lonely). He would be wading in solid documentary and abundant eyewitness evidence of the kind mentioned in my Challenge to Supporters of the Revisionist Transit Camp Theory. Care to take the challenge, Steve? And what about you, Mr. Berg? Berg had me "cornered", yeah. Sweet dreams, Steve.

As concerns mass grave investigations, I suggest that Steve and Berg watch this clip expecially the sequences from 3:23 to 4:30. And here they may find further information about how Father Desbois established that the skeletons he found at Busk were of local Jews murdered by the Nazis (and not, as Berg tried to insinuate, victims of Soviet killings). Further images of Jews and others murdered by the Nazis can be found in the blogs collected here. Careful, some of the images are quite graphic ("Revisionists", as is well known, tend to be sensitive people).

Next victory dance, please.

Oh, here is Fredo himself:

I did make the point that if one went along with the weird notion that gravesites of Jews should never be opened, then every site containing unknown human remains anywhere would have to be kept sealed as well for fear that some of the dead might be Jews.

Is that showpiece of silliness supposed to be a "point"?

Religious-minded Jews might object to excavations if they have reasons to believe that Jewish burial laws might be violated, but unless they can provide such reasons they should be wise enough to shut up. And unearthing corpses within the scope of criminal investigation would fall under "public need" and thus be allowed under halakhah, see the blog Belzec Mass Graves and Archaeology - Continuation (1). Archaeological investigation apparently does not qualify as an exception, however.

I was most surprised by Muehlenkamps's firm but silly belief that there was absolutely no shortage of gasoline in Germany in 1942 and at other times. What war had he been reading about?

A shoddy misrepresentation of my point, which was that in 1942 the German military (and hence the SS for its extermination work, which was considered part of the war effort) had sufficient gasoline at its disposal. I was referring to what I had written in the blog Mattogno, Graf & Kues on Aktion Reinhard(t) Cremation (2):

Would the RSHA have a problem with granting Globocnik’s request? Hardly so, considering what is known about the amount of motor gasoline (Vergaserkraftstoff) delivered monthly to the General Government. About 6 million liters were delivered in July 1942 alone, thereof 2,935 t for civilian authorities and 3,612 t for military authorities^[148]. German authorities didn’t consider it a waste to spend 68,000 liters of gasoline within 13 days^[149] to burn the bodies of civilian air raid victims at Dresden in February/March 1945, at a time when the Reich had lost almost all of its petrol resources and its war machine was bogging down for lack of fuel. Why should they have minded allotting higher amounts of gasoline^[150] to a state project of vital importance like the extermination of a minority of perceived dangerous subversives and useless eaters harmful to Germany, and that moreover at a time when the Third Reich still had access to its main sources of petrol, especially the Romanian oilfields? The daily petrol requirements of a single armored regiment were higher than those of corpse cremation at Sobibór if carried out with petrol as the main combustion agent, and even the daily requirements of Treblinka shown in Table 3.23 would have been below those of the 21st Panzer Division^[151]. Globocnik’s request would thus have hardly been outrageous. Who claims that the Third Reich could not have "wasted" gasoline or other liquid fuels "in such a manner" fails to take into account Nazi Germany’s overall fuel resources and expenditure at the time on the one hand and the importance that the Nazis gave to this particular project on the other.

I look forward to Fredo parading some more of his strawman arguments.

The poster after Berg did something useful: he posted a link to the debate's recording.

Update, 23.06.2012: Fredo's post commented above was so far followed by some inane mumblings from "haarp", a more intelligent comment (for a "Revisionist") from blake121666, an amusing reply thereto by the fervent (and not very bright) true believer Steven Willow, and some more bigmouthed bluster from Berg himself.
Not being allowed to respond to these loads of rubbish (blake is just the one-eyed among the blind) on the CODOH forum, and so as not to make this blog too long, I shall comment the aforementioned posts and those that may follow on the thread A Radio Challenge of the Skeptics Society Forum, to which Berg has been invited. The invitation is hereby extended to the aforementioned members of Berg's cheering crowd, though I doubt they will accept it. Berg may not be afraid of open debate, but most CODOH "Revisionists" prefer to shoot the bull in Jonnie Hargis' warm and cozy Führerbunker.

Update, 24.06.2012:
On the Skeptics Society Forum, see posts # 135 and # 136 of the thread A Radio Challenge.
On the "CODOH Revisionist Forum", the crowd of cheering morons has been joined by "Moderator" (obviously the deplorable Jonnie "Hannover" Hargis, judging by the gibbering hatred of my humble person that transpires from his back-slapping of Berg) and my old friend Wilfried "neugierig" Heink, aka the Waldheini.
I'll have some fun with these fellows and their predecessors (and eventual successors) tomorrow, as time permits.

Update, 27.06.2012:
On the Skeptics Society Forum, see posts # 150, # 151, # 152, # 153 and # 156 of the thread A Radio Challenge.

Update, 02.07.2012:
See post # 160 on the Skeptics Society Forum. No further updates over the weekend because I was busy with this other guy and doing more pleasant things, such as watching my team win the Euro Football Championship. But my old friend Fredo is not forgotten.

Update, 05.07.2012:
See post # 161 on the Skeptics Society Forum.

Update, 08.07.2012:
See post # 162 on the Skeptics Society Forum.

Update, 22.07.2012:
Some self-projecting pep-talk from poor attention-seeking Fredo, who hasn't yet even tried to answer my follow-up questions, which I asked after providing a comprehensive answer to Berg's follow-up questions.
A month having passed since our friendly conversation on Deanna Spingola's radio show, I thus feel tempted to paraphrase the question that Georgi Dimitroff reportedly asked Göring at the Reichstag Fire Trial in 1933 (William Shirer, The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich, Simon & Schuster New York 1960, p. 193):
Are you afraid of my questions, Mr. "Hoaxbuster"?
And by the way, why don't you make the radio debate's transcript yourself, instead of asking one of your coreligionists to do that for you?