The Kola Study - An Own Goal by Team Holocaust

[TlsMS93]

Instead of discussing layers of ash with soil, the size of the more than 30 trenches, where local residents dug the earth in search of precious metals or the rain may have affected their distribution, you do not demand a complete excavation, examination of the saponified remains, determination of how much real ash there is. It is easy to pass the blame to the revisionists after they build stone monuments at the site making forensic investigations almost impossible or the old excuse that the number of dead has already been determined (which is not true and they know it, some even providing higher numbers than the official ones, Pressac settled for 150 thousand), and we should respect the victims and survivors because of that.

[bombsaway]

Instead of discussing layers of ash with soil, the size of the more than 30 trenches, where local residents dug the earth in search of precious metals or the rain may have affected their distribution, you do not demand a complete excavation, examination of the saponified remains, determination of how much real ash there is. It is easy to pass the blame to the revisionists . . .

I'm not passing blame, I'm pointing to a wall you guys seem to be hitting.

W regards to Kola's results, I think there's only 3 ways for committed revisionists to think about what he found

1) Kola's study was incompetently conducted/compromised, therefore the findings are inaccurate, and merit no response

2) there are reasonable explanations within the revisionist framework, which can be provided

3) Despite all efforts a reasonable explanation cannot be offered

[Nessie]

4) The Kola graves are haphazard. They do not show much intelligent design or planning. See the OP.

I don't understand this argument. They were improvising as they went. Therefore, there was not much in the way of planning.

Yeah it's a strange point to make considering the graves are real, enormous, and contain human remains...

It is explained by the revisionist reliance on the argument from incredulity. Any excuse is used by them, to find something too hard to believe, so they can dismiss it as false. They have to rely on that argument, because they cannot evidence their claims about what did and did not take place.

[bombsaway]

They have to rely on that argument, because they cannot evidence their claims about what did and did not take place.

Nessie, this goes without saying. My point, which you too are distracting from tbh, is that they don't even have a testable hypothesis for Kolas results. The problem is more fundamental than absence of evidence. Either they are being unreasonably obstinate in refusing to provide an explanation that might be easily given, or the results are so anomalous and strange one cannot be provided. The revisionist concession here would be that something extraordinary, even in the context of the war, happened concerning the graves at Belzec.

[Archie]

Instead of discussing layers of ash with soil, the size of the more than 30 trenches, where local residents dug the earth in search of precious metals or the rain may have affected their distribution, you do not demand a complete excavation, examination of the saponified remains, determination of how much real ash there is. It is easy to pass the blame to the revisionists . . .

I'm not passing blame, I'm pointing to a wall you guys seem to be hitting.

W regards to Kola's results, I think there's only 3 ways for committed revisionists to think about what he found

1) Kola's study was incompetently conducted/compromised, therefore the findings are inaccurate, and merit no response

2) there are reasonable explanations within the revisionist framework, which can be provided

3) Despite all efforts a reasonable explanation cannot be offered

The contested points are 1) the number of dead, 2) the causes of death.

In the revisionist view, the Kola data, if reliable, indicate a vastly lower number of bodies were buried at the camp. This has already been explained. I will add that there are additional considerations with outdoor cremation and fuel requirements that further reinforce the revisionist interpretation of the Kola data.

As far as cause of death, the Kola study will not tell us much on this point. This will come down to analysis of witness statements.

Your distinction between 2 and 3 is arbitrary ("reasonable") and will depend on the level of detail demanded which will depend on the documentation available and is also arbitrary. Your idea that revisionists have to document X, Y, Z and if not the standard version must be true is an argument from ignorance fallacy. The documentation may be too thin to provide a reconstruction sufficiently detailed to satisfy you, but that doesn't mean the standard story is true.

With the major concentration camps, there are death books etc that allow us to estimate deaths. For many other camps (not just Belzec) none of that exists. But it's a safe bet that people died at all the camps. At Belzec, we know that there was a labor camp there as early as 1940. And we know it was part of AR in 1942-43. There is no basis upon which to draw any firm conclusion about how many died. Probably a few thousand, possibly in the tens of the thousands.

[Archie]

I remember when this topic came up on the old forum. I brought up the burial density problem and bombsaway just pretended he couldn't understand what I was saying. In this OP, I made a point of mentioning the decomposition argument to draw attention to Muehlenkamp's desperation and amusingly both Nessie and BA now seem to have eagerly latched on that argument like a life raft. When I read Muehlenkamp's argument, I literally lol'd at the gymnastics he was engaging in to try to get the numbers to work.

[Nessie]

...I'm not passing blame, I'm pointing to a wall you guys seem to be hitting.

W regards to Kola's results, I think there's only 3 ways for committed revisionists to think about what he found

1) Kola's study was incompetently conducted/compromised, therefore the findings are inaccurate, and merit no response

2) there are reasonable explanations within the revisionist framework, which can be provided

3) Despite all efforts a reasonable explanation cannot be offered

The contested points are 1) the number of dead, 2) the causes of death.

In the revisionist view, the Kola data, if reliable, indicate a vastly lower number of bodies were buried at the camp...
There is no basis upon which to draw any firm conclusion about how many died. Probably a few thousand, possibly in the tens of the thousands.

The 21,000m3 of disturbed ground Kola identified, or 8.4 Olympic sized swimming pools, puts Belzec into one of the largest mass grave sites in history. TII, Sobibor and Chelmno are the only comparable others.

There is a lot of evidence, to act as a basis upon which we can draw firm conclusions as to how many died and how they died. You just chose to ignore that evidence, such as every single Nazi who worked at the camp and what they say happened, even as they were being acquitted by a German court.

If a US archaeologist uncovered what Kola found at Belzec and it was Soviet guards admitting to killing hundreds of thousands of German civilians, you would accept the evidence as a basis to conclude mass murder was proven. You just let your bias get in the way.

[Nessie]

... I literally lol'd at the gymnastics he was engaging in to try to get the numbers to work.

I lol at the mental gymnastics revisionists use to dismiss the evidence of mass graves and mass murder at Belzec. You claim that 100% of the witnesses lied, something you have previously tried to deny and that 21,000m3 is not that big a volume for graves, when only three other places are known to exist that are equivalent, and they are not coincidentally contemporaneous to Belzec. You then fail at the basic task of any investigation, as you cannot evidence what did happen at the camp, leaving you without a completed conclusion.

[bombsaway]

Your distinction between 2 and 3 is arbitrary ("reasonable") and will depend on the level of detail demanded which will depend on the documentation available and is also arbitrary. Your idea that revisionists have to document X, Y, Z and if not the standard version must be true is an argument from ignorance fallacy. The documentation may be too thin to provide a reconstruction sufficiently detailed to satisfy you, but that doesn't mean the standard story is true.

It does not mean orthodoxy is true, but you should be able to explain the findings within your framework, otherwise that framework needs to be changed. And again, I'm not asking you to provide documentation, witness evidence, anything like that, just a hypothesis which can be examined.

Has there been an explanation that covers the following? Do you have one?

• Explain why graves that could house 200,000 bodies (according to revisionist projections) would exist at a camp this small
• Explain the need for the vast majority of bodies to be destroyed
• Account for the systematic nature of the deposits (the layering)
• Provide a logical reason for mixing cremains with sand
• Fit all this into a coherent explanation that aligns with the transit camp thesis, or any other thesis you think is solid

[Numar Patru]

The matter of the minimum number of bodies that could be accommodated by the graves at Belzec identifed by Kola is really a major point, in my opinion, since it really puts to the test the Durchgangslager thesis of the Reinhard camps. I don't think any person sustaining an argument in favor of transfer could see sufficient space for 200,000 dead bodies at a single site and conclude that transit was anything less than an abject failure, particularly given that we're fully aware of the number of people actually sent to that camp. A death toll at or near 50% isn't an argument against extermination so much as a reluctant admission that it was the practical outcome of what happened regardless of the intentions. That is, of course, not the "exterminationist" thesis either, but it's a hell of a lot closer to it than to the "muh transit camps" thesis.

[bombsaway]

The matter of the minimum number of bodies that could be accommodated by the graves at Belzec identifed by Kola is really a major point, in my opinion, since it really puts to the test the Durchgangslager thesis of the Reinhard camps.

We don't know the minimum or a maximum.

https://holocausthistorychannel.wordpre ... bic-meter/

From here we get real world numbers about burial of livestock the 2001 UK FMD epidemic. For sheep and pigs that number is 425kg per cubic meter. The revisionist treats this as a maximum, but we don't have any information on the packing efficiency. Maybe that could have been considerably greater if grave space was limited, such as in a camp like Belzec. The size of the graves there too, their depth, suggests they were maximizing grave space. It's much harder to dig deeper. At the Chelmno forest for example the graves were shallower than what Kola describes at Belzec.

So the notion that only say 20,000 were buried here is illogical given what was achieved in the UK (without necessarily maximizing efficiency). At UK rates 2000 cubic meters of space would be necessary to house this many bodies.

But this is only the beginning for the revisionists, who then have to explain why the bodies were extracted, destroyed, and the ashes diluted with sand. Since they haven't done this, they without doubt are "losing" when it comes to Kola's report on Belzec. They can criticize the Orthodox narrative, but they lose by default by not providing any possible version of events that can even be tested. As I said before, they can make any favorable assumption they want, disregard the lack of evidence, just provide something or admit that they can't, or call into question the accuracy of the study itself. No other option as far as I can see.

[Archie]

So the notion that only say 20,000 were buried here is illogical given what was achieved in the UK (without necessarily maximizing efficiency). At UK rates 2000 cubic meters of space would be necessary to house this many bodies.

Argument from incredulity.

There are lots of mass graves that have rather low corpse densities. Hyper-efficient corpse packing isn't the norm, especially if the deaths are spread out over a period of time.

But this is only the beginning for the revisionists, who then have to explain why the bodies were extracted, destroyed, and the ashes diluted with sand. Since they haven't done this, they without doubt are "losing" when it comes to Kola's report on Belzec. They can criticize the Orthodox narrative, but they lose by default by not providing any possible version of events that can even be tested. As I said before, they can make any favorable assumption they want, disregard the lack of evidence, just provide something or admit that they can't, or call into question the accuracy of the study itself. No other option as far as I can see.

Why would burning the bodies be a problem for the revisionist thesis? You realize this was done regularly in the non-extermination camps, right? So why do you think cremation is per se proof of exterminations?

[TlsMS93]

So the notion that only say 20,000 were buried here is illogical given what was achieved in the UK (without necessarily maximizing efficiency). At UK rates 2000 cubic meters of space would be necessary to house this many bodies.

Argument from incredulity.

There are lots of mass graves that have rather low corpse densities. Hyper-efficient corpse packing isn't the norm, especially if the deaths are spread out over a period of time.

But this is only the beginning for the revisionists, who then have to explain why the bodies were extracted, destroyed, and the ashes diluted with sand. Since they haven't done this, they without doubt are "losing" when it comes to Kola's report on Belzec. They can criticize the Orthodox narrative, but they lose by default by not providing any possible version of events that can even be tested. As I said before, they can make any favorable assumption they want, disregard the lack of evidence, just provide something or admit that they can't, or call into question the accuracy of the study itself. No other option as far as I can see.

Why would burning the bodies be a problem for the revisionist thesis? You realize this was done regularly in the non-extermination camps, right? So why do you think cremation is per se proof of exterminations?

They have to prove why the hell most of the extermination was concentrated in places where there wasn't even a muffle furnace and relying on inadequate open-air cremations, without enough fuel and without transport logistics, just for Treblinka there would be 200 thousand trucks harvesting nearby brushwood and taking it to camp for the 800,000 unfortunates, first being harvested in winter and then transported over muddy roads during the spring thaw.

Why was the cleaning in Belzec not as good as they say it happened in Treblinka when it was closed relatively early compared to other extermination camps?

[Numar Patru]

There are lots of mass graves that have rather low corpse densities. Hyper-efficient corpse packing isn't the norm, especially if the deaths are spread out over a period of time.

You should refresh your memory about how mass graves were created outside Kyiv and Riga. Practical experience gained by Friedrich Jeckeln in Ukraine in September 1941 was applied two months later in Latvia. Belzec did not start receiving trainloads of Jews until March of the following year — plenty of time for those methods to be communicated from Reichskommissariäte Ukraine and Ostland to the Generalgouvernement.

[Numar Patru]

They have to prove why the hell most of the extermination was concentrated in places where there wasn't even a muffle furnace and relying on inadequate open-air cremations, without enough fuel and without transport logistics, just for Treblinka there would be 200 thousand trucks harvesting nearby brushwood and taking it to camp for the 800,000 unfortunates, first being harvested in winter and then transported over muddy roads during the spring thaw.

Again, this is a fundamental misunderstanding of how things were done. Staffing for the Reinhard camps came from Aktion T4, which had lots of experience with gassing and not nearly enough with large scale body disposal. So there was a lot of improvisation and learning as they went.

The locations were chosen based on a combination of proximity to rail access and major cities, and yet far enough that information spread about the camps could be limited. They were therefore situated near Lviv, Warsaw, and Lublin, mainly to the east and thus closer to the Soviet border.

Why was the cleaning in Belzec not as good as they say it happened in Treblinka when it was closed relatively early compared to other extermination camps?

Do you really not know this?

There was a revolt in Treblinka, which is why it closed when it did. Belzec remained open much longer than it was operational because of the need to dispose of the bodies. This process was built into the system at Treblinka.