False witnesses are not neutral

[Archie]

I have noticed a few times now that when the credibility of a traditionally major witness is being challenged that people will occasionally attempt to downplay the importance of the witness since "we have a lot of other witnesses." I think there are two major problems with this attitude.

1) It seems to assume that false witnesses are neutral, i.e., the problematic witnesses can just be seamlessly subbed out for other witnesses.

2) It ignores which testimonies received the most weight from the beginning and played the biggest role in forming the story to begin with.

Key Witnesses

Imo, the number one Holocaust witness, by a mile, is Rudolf Hoess. Given his position as commandant of the camp, he must have known one way or the other whether he was running an extermination camp. Not only this, he was also the most important Holocaust witness at the IMT where the Holocaust story was established as fact. And early Holocaust historians like Hilberg relied on him extensively. On key pages discussing gas chambers, Hilberg's footnotes point to Hoess 11 times.

Pg 564: 2 footnotes
Pg 565: 2 footnotes
Pg 570: 1 footnote
Pg 571: 2 footnotes
Pg 572: 1 footnote
Pg 575: 1 footnote
Pg 576: 2 footnotes

In light of this, Hoess's testimony cannot be neutral and cannot be ignored. If it doesn't hold up, that is strongly negative because it means that the IMT, the Supreme National Tribunal, Hilberg, etc all relied on dubious evidence and therefore the entire historiography has a questionable foundation.

Kurt Gerstein is another one. His statement was not used much for the IMT but did feature in NMT Case I. And he is probably the most cited AR witness in the early literature. Leon Poliakov in his book introduced a lengthy three-page quote from the Gerstein statement as follows: "The victims are no longer here to testify; the butchers, too, have either died or gone underground. Among the very few statements that we have on the operations of these camps is one from Kurt Gerstein, a chemical engineer who was a tragic hero in the German anti-Nazi resistance.(pg 192)"

Rudolf Reder is certainly one of the most important Belzec witnesses.

Rudolf Vrba I would say is another of these key witnesses. Filip Mueller.

If the Holocaust is true, these key witnesses should hold up.

Witness Shopping (Post Hoc Analysis)

If these key witnesses that were the basis for the story go down in flames, then the Holocaust is very, very unlikely to be true. This problem cannot be fixed by clinging to your conclusions and hunting around for other testimonies and other post hoc analyses.

[Nessie]

1) It seems to assume that false witnesses are neutral, i.e., the problematic witnesses can just be seamlessly subbed out for other witnesses.

It is odd that you discuss neutrality, when you are far from neutral yourself. Revisionists, as we have discussed before, have concluded that 100% of the witnesses who claimed to have seen a gassing, or who worked at an AR camp, Chelmno or A-B Krema, are lying. The revisionist method for assessing witness truthfulness is flawed, we have been through the reasons why. You are biased against all witnesses who say what you do not believe.

The result is that your premise is wrong, and the witnesses, who you describe as false, are not. That is because their testimony is corroborated. The problematic witnesses are still corroborated, Hoess being the best example of that. His testimony is riven with issues, but there was sufficient corroborating evidence, that millions of Jews had disappeared inside Nazi camps as they were murdered there.

It is because of the revisionist tactic to dismiss witnesses, that they are pointed to other witnesses, then others, and more again. The whole point is to get revisionists to realise the scale of what they are alleging and how unlikely it is. Every single witness lying is a bonkers conspiracy theory, on an enormous scale, impossible to pull off, especially when it included EVERY SINGLE NAZI who was A-B staff. It wasn't just Hoess who accepted mass murder, it was ALL OF THEM. For a camp that size, to produce no witness to a process other than gassings taking place inside the Kremas, and who can explain what happened to all the people who disappeared from the records after entering those buildings, is extraordinary. Only a die hard conspiracist who wants to believe, will uncritically accept and fall for such a claim.

2) It ignores which testimonies received the most weight from the beginning and played the biggest role in forming the story to begin with.

That ignores the corroborating evidence and the weight missing Jews played in forming the narrative, in 1945. Millions of people were rounded up by the Nazis, taken away and never seen again. By 1945, what could have still just been rumours, was clearly true. From the Netherlands to Greece, Jews were not returning home. The camp liberations had only found a few hundred thousand Jews. The displaced persons agencies were only dealing with a few hundred thousand. Every single Jewish survivor reported missing relatives, usually most of them.

When asked what had happened, the Nazis did not point to any infrastructure they had to accommodate so many people. There was no department of resettlement. It ha been their policy to rid occupied territory of Jews. Thousands of Nazis had been responsible for identifying, rounding up, imprisoning, transporting and in certain cases, killing the Jews. The operation was too large to be denied, and they did not deny it, except for those who denied knowing about the killing operations.

Hoess ran the largest camp. It was found virtually empty of people, but it was found to be still full of their property. Personal items that people who were still alive, and resettled, would normally have. No records were found of what happened to hundreds of thousands of people documented to have arrived at the camp. The Construction Office had records of how the Kremas were modified to have gas chambers. Those Kremas were then either modified, or blown up or totally demolished. That is circumstantial evidence equivalent to finding a missing murder victim's clothes at the accused's house along with the remains of a weapon matching descriptions of how the victim had been killed.

If the Holocaust is true, these key witnesses should hold up.

They do. No evidence to the contrary has been found to prove an alternative narrative that did not involve mass murders and instead, millions of Jews were still alive in Nazi camps in 1944 and liberated in 1945. All the evidence traced since 1945 supports the mass murder narrative. The scale of what revisionists allege is off the scale, physically impossible. Your lack of neutrality is why you fail to recognise that.

[Archie]

To clarify (since Nessie seems to have misunderstood my point),

I do not mean "neutral" in the sense of disinterested.

In this post, I mean neutral in terms of impact to the Holocaust debate.

Let consider three cases:

Positive Impact: Good for the Holocaust side
Negative Impact: Bad for the Holocaust side
Neutral: No impact one way or the other

What I am saying is that if a star witness like Hoess is discredited, that isn't a shift from positive to neutral. It's a shift from positive to very strongly negative.

[Hektor]

It also depends on the motives for lying. If the witness was compelled to lie in favor of the side holding him captive, than that's an argument against the position that is sold that way. If they got other hard evidence for their position, why did they compel a witness to lie then?


In the case of Hoess, it's obvious that he was lying to save his skin or at least his family. All kinds of threats were permanently against him until they killed him. Not event the Holocaust industry believe what he was saying. Although not all have gotten the memo yet.

[Nessie]

To clarify (since Nessie seems to have misunderstood my point),

I do not mean "neutral" in the sense of disinterested.

In this post, I mean neutral in terms of impact to the Holocaust debate.

Let consider three cases:

Positive Impact: Good for the Holocaust side
Negative Impact: Bad for the Holocaust side
Neutral: No impact one way or the other

What I am saying is that if a star witness like Hoess is discredited, that isn't a shift from positive to neutral. It's a shift from positive to very strongly negative.

You are always looking for excuses to disbelieve. What you mean is that because you believe that "star witness" Hoess was coerced into lying about gassings at A-B, and that are issues with his evidence over dates and death tolls, then it is OK for you to believe 100% of the witnesses lied. You think that the most problematic witnesses are evidence to prove a massive conspiracy of lying witnesses, rather than there were reasons why their evidence is problematic. In Hoess's case, he was put under enormous pressure by angry captors and he likely knew he would soon be executed. He was confronted with the enormity of his crimes and cracked.

You cannot name a single witness who has a "positive impact" and is "good for the Holocaust side" who you say is being truthful. Instead, you want to create reasons why every single one is negative, especially the "star witnesses".

[bombsaway]

Regarding Hoess, if we knew definitely he was lying about extermination at Auschwitz that would be strong evidence of a conspiracy to fabricate witness statements, which would heavily damage the Holocaust case. The problem is such notions are speculative, same with Reder and Gerstein for that matter.

If you demonstrate sufficient uncertainty about these witness statements maybe that's a negative but doesn't show a conspiracy to fabricate evidence. So such criticisms are easily outweighed by other evidence as well as the gaping flaws with revisionists' own belief system, eg failure to explain physical evidence , viewtopic.php?p=1599#p1599

[Nessie]

It also depends on the motives for lying.

What is your evidence to prove Hoess lied about mass murder at A-B? Where are your witnesses, documents, or other forms of evidence, to prove that no mass killings took place and he lied about what happened at the Kremas?

If the witness was compelled to lie in favor of the side holding him captive, than that's an argument against the position that is sold that way. If they got other hard evidence for their position, why did they compel a witness to lie then?

Did they compel him to lie, or did some of his captors, furious at what he was responsible for, act unprofessionally and exact some rough justice?

In the case of Hoess, it's obvious that he was lying to save his skin or at least his family. All kinds of threats were permanently against him until they killed him. Not event the Holocaust industry believe what he was saying. Although not all have gotten the memo yet.

The reality was that there was sufficient evidence in 1946-7 to convict Hoess for what had happened at A-B. There were already multiple witnesses to the use of gas chambers, German and Jewish, along with the documentary, physical and circumstantial evidence of mass arrivals, selections and people sent to the Kremas disappearing from all records and other traces. Motive had been established. There was evidence of attempts to cover up what had happened and destruction of evidence. Documents recovered from the Construction Office proved gas chambers had been built.

[SanityCheck]

I have noticed a few times now that when the credibility of a traditionally major witness is being challenged that people will occasionally attempt to downplay the importance of the witness since "we have a lot of other witnesses." I think there are two major problems with this attitude.

1) It seems to assume that false witnesses are neutral, i.e., the problematic witnesses can just be seamlessly subbed out for other witnesses.

2) It ignores which testimonies received the most weight from the beginning and played the biggest role in forming the story to begin with.

Key Witnesses

Imo, the number one Holocaust witness, by a mile, is Rudolf Hoess. Given his position as commandant of the camp, he must have known one way or the other whether he was running an extermination camp. Not only this, he was also the most important Holocaust witness at the IMT where the Holocaust story was established as fact. And early Holocaust historians like Hilberg relied on him extensively. On key pages discussing gas chambers, Hilberg's footnotes point to Hoess 11 times.

Pg 564: 2 footnotes
Pg 565: 2 footnotes
Pg 570: 1 footnote
Pg 571: 2 footnotes
Pg 572: 1 footnote
Pg 575: 1 footnote
Pg 576: 2 footnotes

In light of this, Hoess's testimony cannot be neutral and cannot be ignored. If it doesn't hold up, that is strongly negative because it means that the IMT, the Supreme National Tribunal, Hilberg, etc all relied on dubious evidence and therefore the entire historiography has a questionable foundation.

Kurt Gerstein is another one. His statement was not used much for the IMT but did feature in NMT Case I. And he is probably the most cited AR witness in the early literature. Leon Poliakov in his book introduced a lengthy three-page quote from the Gerstein statement as follows: "The victims are no longer here to testify; the butchers, too, have either died or gone underground. Among the very few statements that we have on the operations of these camps is one from Kurt Gerstein, a chemical engineer who was a tragic hero in the German anti-Nazi resistance.(pg 192)"

Rudolf Reder is certainly one of the most important Belzec witnesses.

Rudolf Vrba I would say is another of these key witnesses. Filip Mueller.

If the Holocaust is true, these key witnesses should hold up.

Witness Shopping (Post Hoc Analysis)

If these key witnesses that were the basis for the story go down in flames, then the Holocaust is very, very unlikely to be true. This problem cannot be fixed by clinging to your conclusions and hunting around for other testimonies and other post hoc analyses.

I think you're missing some of the implied points about emphasising other evidence types more. There are a variety of 'hierarchies' which have a plausibility to them and which also pose serious questions, but 'most cited evidence' is not one of them.

1. German documents + photos + physical evidence
These are the hardest forms of evidence available. They set the framework.

For Belzec, as an example, the Hoefle telegram buttressed by Korherr, the Kolomea report and other documents, plus sources indicating the presence of T4 personnel, together with 2 x Sonderbehandlungen and then the physical evidence of the site in 1945 plus Kola's archaeological investigation would lead to the conclusion that a lot of people were deported to this site, the condition of the site and its archaeological condition through to the end of the 1990s indicates mass cremation and the presence of human remains on a very large scale.

There is neither physical evidence nor documentary evidence to point to any other explanation. No amount of jiggery-pokery can avoid this conclusion. If one is focusing solely on these two types of evidence, then there is at best a mild mystery or uncertainty of how it went down.

Expand to all six extermination camps in Poland, and two out of six are identified explicitly using gas, three out of six have documents about crematoria, two out of six have documents about mass graves one of which refers to the burning of the bodies buried there, the range of documents about Sonderbehandlung and other awkward terms increases, as does the physical evidence from 1944-45 and subsequent archaeology, plus several rounds of forensic tests. There are documented transfers within the KZ system (from Majdanek and Auschwitz) and one document about selection at Treblinka for Majdanek, plus more documents about selections at Lublin with the rest being sent to Sobibor. There is no physical evidence or other documentary evidence pointing to any other directions or explanations in a convincing way.

Photographs are included here to document the physical condition of the sites after liberation but also include several albums from Auschwitz generally regarded as pretty telling.

2. Contemporary sources + physical evidence
This fully meets the usual historical methodological standards. For Belzec, contemporary reports point to extermination at the camp and confirm mass cremation there. There is also an indirect report in a contemporay source from a Belzec escapee describing gas chambers, which is superior to the hearsay reports speculating about 'gas or electricity'.

For all six extermination camps in Poland, there is quite the range of contemporary reports from the undergrounds plus multiple fugitive accounts from especially Auschwitz-Birkenau, Treblinka, Chelmno but also Sobibor (including one from a deserting Trawniki). There are also the Sonderkommando manuscripts and photographs from Auschwitz, which are superior to some of the fugitive accounts for proximity to the key locations - certainly better than Vrba-Wetzler. A continuous stream of underground reports note the onset of mass cremation and other developments, as do diaries and accounts from the region, including a diary from Chelmno village

There isn't a comprehensive explanation for all of these contemporary sources, direct and indirect, in tandem with the German documents and physical evidence. One can however now bring in contemporary sources albeit from a distance or which are often contradicted and critiqued by German documents (such as premature reports of deportations from western Europe not confirmed by German sources), and try to spin an alternative explanation of 'resettlement' and 'transit', but with these other sources as subject to skepticism and vulnerable to critique as any other. Numerous groups of victims go unexplained and unaccounted for by the alternative explanation, while there is no confirmation in general on a par with the thickened up conventional explanation.

3. Sources in order of discovery
This is where different 'revisionist' authors have muddled things by taking different approaches. The Butz approach was to focus selectively on published reports in English by and large. The Mattogno approach is to include some confidential underground reports and acknowledge dates of publication. This goes for both the war years and the immediate postwar era.

Even the more restrictive what-was-available-in-the-west approach sets itself up for failure since confidential reports not published at the time become documents and provide external corroboration when they are discovered and published, eg the full contents of the Ringelblum archive, or the 1990s declassifications. But one can also see that in terms of *published* accounts, the sequence would at the very least be Szlamek re Chelmno, Wiernik, then Vrba-Wetzler, before getting to 1945. In practice there were many other published reports (Bund report, November 1942 bundle, accounts reported then and expanded on for the 1943 Black Book of Polish Jewry), and this grows exponentially from 1945.

Regarding witnesses, the Mattogno approach acknowledges investigations in 1944-45, and thus Tauber, Dragon, Jankowski plus others appear before Hoess. Indeed, there are at least 32 SS witnesses testifying about Auschwitz before Hoess is captured, and at least two full trials discussing Auschwitz and Zyklon-B (Belsen trial and Tesch and Stabenow trial) before Hoess is captured.

4. Actually acknowledging the whole of the source and all of the accounts
This is where 'false witness' is a misleading term. A false witness from a conventional POV is an impostor, a fabulist, a con-artist, someone who was not there at all and never was.

This obviously doesn't apply to Rudolf Hoess. It is Rudolf Hess who has attracted conspiracy theories about doubles and impostors, nobody has ever claimed this about Hoess.

So in Hoess's affidavits, statements, pen-portraits and memoirs, we find a great deal of detail on the KZs from his time before Auschwitz, during Auschwitz and while serving as chief of Amtsgruppe D in 1943-45 (with the interruption of the Hungarian action). This detail was conveyed largely from memory, without the benefit of poring over too many documents. So was the detail conveyed about executions, mass murder, gassing and cremation.

As a suspect, Hoess's statements are to be interpreted with an eye for potentially self-serving omissions or concessions, either to attempt a defense or to make himself look good in the eyes of posterity (his self-portrayal). The errors must be compared with other errors on non-contentious issues, thus it's clear he had problems with remembering many dates in 1941-43.

Every form of memory, for dates, distances, durations, faces, names (personal and place), character (friend or foe), bias (how a witness describes other ethnic groups or political adherents, etc), and so on can be subject to conventional error. Determined witnesses can spin stories to their own benefit, direct or indirect, and indeed we have many examples of this from the aftermath of the Third Reich, with Albert Speer, the German generals, and others. None of that makes Speer et al 'false witnesses'.

The same goes for witnesses in denial mode, when their denials can be refuted by other sources (especially documents, but also witnesses), or when they seem to being 'economical with the truth' or resorting to limited hangouts, and other well known tactics.

Conversely, the testimonies of non-perpetrators must be examined as a whole as well, and an acknowledgement made if they identify people, places, organisations, details etc correctly. Which Gerstein, Reder and other 'key witnesses' certainly do. The same issues of memory and detail recall for dates, distances, overall number estimates and more also apply.

Pointing to errors is accordingly not enough; there must be an explanation of why the error was made, and this regarding also things not necessarily in dispute. If Hoess misdated the arrival of Slovakian Jews six months too early, this does not refute their arrival, proven through ample other sources, it shows that Hoess had a poor memory for dates. His IMT interrogators went 'huh?' and asked Wisliceny, who told them the correct answer. Wisliceny was based in Bratislava and would surely know better.

The 'key witness' approach doesn't absolve 'revisionists' of considering other testimonies - averaging out varied descriptive abilities, perceptions and memories is a standard feature of conventional fact-finding approaches. Explaining the sum total of testimonies is also a necessity if one wants to advance a substantiated conspiracy theory. Whether the explanations have any evidence to support them also matters: the typical pattern of insinuations tends to lack any, and is therefore generally unconvincing.

Doubling down on one aspect as a deal breaker doesn't get around this. Conventional fact-finding approaches would consider all sources on a particular point, in context and in comparison where appropriate - which is exactly with this topic covering at least six extermination camps in Poland (and arguably other gassing sites as a minimum, plus other cremation and killing sites). While one can certainly explore the sites/camps in series and in isolation, considering them in parallel is also necessary to see whether the other approaches and arguments stand up.

[TlsMS93]

If most of the testimonies of the main defendants are absurd and unverifiable from a forensic point of view, there is a chance that the narrative is false. Plausibility is never in favor of deconstructing the Holocaust, that is also a belief.

[fireofice]

The whole point is to get revisionists to realise the scale of what they are alleging and how unlikely it is.

There is nothing unlikely about lots of people lying. This man was falsely accused of rape of 3 separate people. The evidence on each accusation pointed to the accusers lying.

https://ycitynews.com/22478/news/young- ... is-summer/

This is someone who is not famous. You are crazy if you think that can't be multiplied many times over just by making the case famous and adding a hysterical atmosphere around it.

[borjastick]

There can be no surprise that the vast majority of jews at the time and to this day go along with the holocaust story. It is in their interests to and they are not stupid. Group think, echo chamber etc all come into play here. The continuous repetition of stories and embellishment of experiences has worn thin but not worn out over the decades.

The problem for the holocaust promotion gang is these stories very rarely stand scrutiny.

[Nessie]

The whole point is to get revisionists to realise the scale of what they are alleging and how unlikely it is.

There is nothing unlikely about lots of people lying. This man was falsely accused of rape of 3 separate people. The evidence on each accusation pointed to the accusers lying.

https://ycitynews.com/22478/news/young- ... is-summer/

This is someone who is not famous. You are crazy if you think that can't be multiplied many times over just by making the case famous and adding a hysterical atmosphere around it.

The lying alleged involves millions of people. Not just the Nazi staff all lying they killed people, but the millions of Jews who went to the death camp and you allege did not die and then they all lied by omission, with no one coming forward to reveal what did happen inside those places. Then, if there had been a resettlement programme, the Nazis who administered that, knowing millions of Jews were in camps in 1944, also lied by omission as none came forward with evidence of that resettlement. To add to that, there needs to be mass lying by the Allied liberators in 1945, as they found millions of Jews, but failed to mention anything! To top it off, there are the occupied nations, who all claimed to have lost most if not all of their Jewish population, lying that many were in fact still alive.

[Hektor]

The whole point is to get revisionists to realise the scale of what they are alleging and how unlikely it is.

There is nothing unlikely about lots of people lying. This man was falsely accused of rape of 3 separate people. The evidence on each accusation pointed to the accusers lying.

https://ycitynews.com/22478/news/young- ... is-summer/

This is someone who is not famous. You are crazy if you think that can't be multiplied many times over just by making the case famous and adding a hysterical atmosphere around it.

And that discounts communities of interests as well as rumor mongering.
And well it isn't that all potential witnesses were actually saying what the Holocaust Lobby alleged or insinuated. The vast majority didn't notice anything like this. So the "Imagine how many people must be in on this" works better with those proto Holocaust Deniers....

[Nessie]

The whole point is to get revisionists to realise the scale of what they are alleging and how unlikely it is.

There is nothing unlikely about lots of people lying. This man was falsely accused of rape of 3 separate people. The evidence on each accusation pointed to the accusers lying.

https://ycitynews.com/22478/news/young- ... is-summer/

This is someone who is not famous. You are crazy if you think that can't be multiplied many times over just by making the case famous and adding a hysterical atmosphere around it.

And that discounts communities of interests as well as rumor mongering.
And well it isn't that all potential witnesses were actually saying what the Holocaust Lobby alleged or insinuated. The vast majority didn't notice anything like this. So the "Imagine how many people must be in on this" works better with those proto Holocaust Deniers....

Around 2.5 million people saw inside of either TII, Sobibor, Belzec, Chelmno or an A-B Krema. Not one single person is a witness to any of those places not have gas chambers and what happened instead. That is lying on a massive scale, which you want to deny, because it shows how improbable Holocaust denial's main claim of no gassings is.

[Hektor]

....
Around 2.5 million people saw inside of either TII, Sobibor, Belzec, Chelmno or an A-B Krema. Not one single person is a witness to any of those places not have gas chambers and what happened instead. That is lying on a massive scale, which you want to deny, because it shows how improbable Holocaust denial's main claim of no gassings is.

So you say there are 2.5 million witnesses that say they saw gas chambers (homicidal?) in those places?

There are a handful of people that allege that they saw homicidal gassings taking place at those places. It isn't exactly unknown that a small amount like this can be pathological liars. Many Holocaust Witnesses were demonstrably exactly that.