The Kola Study - An Own Goal by Team Holocaust

[Nessie]

We are 12 pages into this thread, Archie, can you do me a favor and drop the revisionist stance in here real quick so I can look at it?

My how I don't want to scroll through all these circles.

Honestly, I feel like I pretty much said what I have to say in the OP and in the wiki. See also Mattogno, HH#28, the section on the Kola study.

You have completed a typical revisionist non-history, where you conclude what did not happen at Belzec and fail to reach an evidenced based conclusion as to how many people were buried there.

The rest of the thread is just a series of red herrings by Nessie and BA.

We discuss the evidence as to what did happen at Belzec and how many are buried there. The type of investigation that the police, lawyers, historians and journalists conduct. Only revisionists do a non-investigation.

[Numar Patru]

What's key is the estimated volume loss of 60-70% after 2 months. This brings up the highest feasible capacity to Roberto's numbers. This is without considering there was additional grave space and the bodies weren't initially destroyed, which some witness and documentary evidence suggests. Maybe the AI is wrong, I dunno. I'm not qualified to judge these matters so I can't assess whether revisionists are right or wrong. What I do strongly believe in, is that AI is less biased on this topic than both revisionists and affirmers. I was careful to ask no leading questions.

This depends hugely on conditions. Hint: the level of moisture and other factors matter tremendously. Kola describes the unburnt bodies as being in a state of "wax-fat transformation." This is formation of adipocere via a process called saponification. This occurs in DAMP environments.

Adipocere is formed by the anaerobic bacterial hydrolysis of fat in tissue. The transformation of fats into adipocere occurs best in an environment that has high levels of moisture and an absence of oxygen, such as in wet ground or mud at the bottom of a lake or a sealed casket, and it can occur with both embalmed and untreated bodies.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adipocere

I don't think we're dealing with optimal decomposition conditions here, bombs.

The unrestrained decomposition of a corpse involves the consecutive processes of autolysis, putrefaction and decay. Ideally, decomposition is completed within the regular resting time (15-25 years) and leads to the entire skeletalisation of the corpse. Adipocere, a greyish fatty substance formed during decomposition, is regarded as a spontaneous inhibition of post-mortem changes; it makes the corpse almost entirely resistant to decomposition and makes it impossible to use the same graves again. This creates problems for local governments with regard to the generally growing demand for burial ground. Apart from corpse-specific characteristics (e.g. sex, age, physique, cause of death), method of burial (e.g. material of the coffin, depth of grave, individual or mass grave, clothing) and time of burial, the conditions of the resting place (geology, topography, soil properties and frequency of use, air, water, and heat budget), in particular, have a special impact on adipocere formation. This study summarises the present knowledge on this phenomenon, combining results gained both in forensic medicine and in geosciences.

https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/12883770/

I think your 70% decomposition is total fantasy and wishful thinking on your part. Maybe I could believe that in the Sahara.

I’m nudging this post back up to the top of the queue because I don’t see an effective rebuttal of Roberto Muehlenkamp’s analysis put forward here: https://holocaustcontroversies.blogspot ... 9.html?m=1

I see the good old argument from incredulity but not much else. Specifically, Muehlenkamp refers to the use of quicklime and its role in accelerated decomposition.

[Stubble]

Is billing from the camp extant? If some, how many loads of sand were delivered and how much quicklime?

[bombsaway]

The Katyn graves had about 8.7 bodies per square meter.

What is the body count per cubic meter? Remember we are trying to establish something of a minimum. I thought 1 body per cubic meter (which would correspond 20,000 over Kola's entire described space) would be very low. Area doesn't really apply here because the graves can be of variable depth. I don't know why you would use this metric in your argument, when volume is what really matters.

Nevertheless if you want to go with a few tens of thousands as your estimate for deaths there, we can move on. I suppose they could have died on the trains and then were moved over to the graves upon arrival, this would dovetail with witness testimony about mass death on the trains.

At Auschwitz in 1942, they buried bodies because of inadequate cremation capacity and those bodies were later disinterred and burned. It seems the preference was, where possible, to cremate bodies ASAP, but in instances where this could not be done they buried them (this happened periodically at many camps). And Auschwitz is an example that comes to mind where the bodies were later burned.

Ohrdruf is another example.

I don't know what you're talking about in Auschwitz, please provide evidence of this "buried bodies because of inadequate cremation capacity were later disinterred and burned."

At Ohrdurf, from my brief research, the body destruction happened in the waning days of the war, as SS fled and was attempting to cover up events at the camp. It's important to interrogate the reasons for this for exhumation and body destruction. You're appealing to "norms" of some sort, but actually they seem related to cover up efforts.

[bombsaway]

Is billing from the camp extant? If some, how many loads of sand were delivered and how much quicklime?

Camp records were destroyed by the Germans

"There is one additional factor to be added to the total accounting of "Reinhardt" which is that the vouchers dealing with it must be destroyed as soon as possible after the data have already been destroyed by all other works concerned in this matter."

https://nuremberg.law.harvard.edu/docum ... obocnik%22

[Stubble]

Is billing from the camp extant? If some, how many loads of sand were delivered and how much quicklime?

Camp records were destroyed by the Germans

"There is one additional factor to be added to the total accounting of "Reinhardt" which is that the vouchers dealing with it must be destroyed as soon as possible after the data have already been destroyed by all other works concerned in this matter."

https://nuremberg.law.harvard.edu/docum ... obocnik%22

Why is nothing ever easy...

[Nessie]

...

The Katyn graves had about 8.7 bodies per square meter. And the Katyn bodies had a relatively orderly/efficient arrangement. ...

Which means Belzec had at least 182,700 bodies buried there. That does not even fit with any unevidenced revisionist hypothesis about the function of the camp.

Katyn was a mass grave of only adult males, who were clothed and when exhumed the corpses were decompressed due to being piled on top of each other. They had started to decompose, but not to the extent that they had become one great waxy fat mass.

Belzec was a mass grave of all ages and both sexes, none of whom were clothed, where bodies were compressed and decomposed such that Kola found they had congealed into a waxy fat mass. It would not be unreasonable to double the bodies per square meter to 17.4, so 365,400 buried corpses. That is still off Hofle's total arrivals of 434,508 and the 500,000 generally accepted death toll, but it is still a significant number that revisionists cannot just hand wave away, with their non-history of and hypothesis about the camp.

[bombsaway]

...

The Katyn graves had about 8.7 bodies per square meter. And the Katyn bodies had a relatively orderly/efficient arrangement. ...

Which means Belzec had at least 182,700 bodies buried there. That does not even fit with any unevidenced revisionist hypothesis about the function of the camp.

Nessie, he's talking about area, not volume. But I have no idea where he's getting his numbers from, , and what the significance of looking at area actually is, when volume is a much better metric to use to measure grave capacity. Depth is not important?

This is just foolishness.

[Archie]

...

The Katyn graves had about 8.7 bodies per square meter. And the Katyn bodies had a relatively orderly/efficient arrangement. ...

Which means Belzec had at least 182,700 bodies buried there. That does not even fit with any unevidenced revisionist hypothesis about the function of the camp.

Katyn was a mass grave of only adult males, who were clothed and when exhumed the corpses were decompressed due to being piled on top of each other. They had started to decompose, but not to the extent that they had become one great waxy fat mass.

Belzec was a mass grave of all ages and both sexes, none of whom were clothed, where bodies were compressed and decomposed such that Kola found they had congealed into a waxy fat mass. It would not be unreasonable to double the bodies per square meter to 17.4, so 365,400 buried corpses. That is still off Hofle's total arrivals of 434,508 and the 500,000 generally accepted death toll, but it is still a significant number that revisionists cannot just hand wave away, with their non-history of and hypothesis about the camp.

Dunce cap for you, Nessie.

If we apply 8.7 bodies per square meter to the Kola graves this would be 8.7*5,490 = 47,7663, less than one-tenth of your desired total.

An estimate in the 50,000 range is higher than what most revisionists would estimate for Belzec, but so what? That is by no means an minimum value. Lots of mass graves are less dense than Katyn. This is because the bodies at Katyn were stacked in an efficient, orderly fashion.

[Archie]

...

The Katyn graves had about 8.7 bodies per square meter. And the Katyn bodies had a relatively orderly/efficient arrangement. ...

Which means Belzec had at least 182,700 bodies buried there. That does not even fit with any unevidenced revisionist hypothesis about the function of the camp.

Nessie, he's talking about area, not volume. But I have no idea where he's getting his numbers from, , and what the significance of looking at area actually is, when volume is a much better metric to use to measure grave capacity. Depth is not important?

This is just foolishness.

See the thread I started yesterday precisely for this sort of comparison data.
https://codohforum.com/viewtopic.php?t=189

Bodies per square meter of area is a perfectly good metric to use. For one thing, precise volume measurements are not always available. The depth may be non-uniform. The sides are often sloping. How are we counting the top dirt layer? Etc. The area is nice and simple, and like I said much easier to obtain since it can be estimated from a map or aerial photo.

If you have a grave volume for Katyn and want to do it by volume, go ahead. I'm not stopping you. I don't have the volume on hand and I don't think it makes all that much difference for our purposes here (let me save you some time: it's not going to get you anywhere near 600,000). Note that the difference between using area and volume will just be the ratio of average depth between the two graves you are comparing.

If we use the early Treblinka excavations

2.0/sq m = 10,980
0.95/cu m = 20,245

Crni Vrh (Srebrenica)
3.15/sq m = 17,294
1.05/cu m = 22,376

[Numar Patru]

An estimate in the 50,000 range is higher than what most revisionists would estimate for Belzec, but so what? That is by no means a minimum value. Lots of mass graves are less dense than Katyn. This is because the bodies at Katyn were stacked in an efficient, orderly fashion.

All men, all uniformed.

[Archie]

An estimate in the 50,000 range is higher than what most revisionists would estimate for Belzec, but so what? That is by no means a minimum value. Lots of mass graves are less dense than Katyn. This is because the bodies at Katyn were stacked in an efficient, orderly fashion.

All men, all uniformed.

50,000 vs 500,000 is an order of magnitude different. I don't think uniforms are going to get you there.

[Numar Patru]

No, not all of the way there, but the difference accounted for gets bigger as the number of bodies does. Plus, no women or children in the graves at Katyn.

[Archie]

I don't know what you're talking about in Auschwitz, please provide evidence of this "buried bodies because of inadequate cremation capacity were later disinterred and burned."

At Ohrdurf, from my brief research, the body destruction happened in the waning days of the war, as SS fled and was attempting to cover up events at the camp. It's important to interrogate the reasons for this for exhumation and body destruction. You're appealing to "norms" of some sort, but actually they seem related to cover up efforts.

For Auschwitz, see here which has some references to the HH series (HH17 for instance). Revisionists dispute the scale of outdoor cremations that are alleged in 1944, but most would agree there would have been some before the Birkenau crematoria were operational since the death rates were higher than the cremation capacity.
https://holocaustencyclopedia.com/instr ... tions/733/

Re: Ohrdruf, of course it will be spun as "covering up their crimes." But what were these crimes? Only a few thousand are said to have died at Ohrdruf and the number gassed even according to orthodoxy is zero so far as I know. So what were the Germans trying to cover up exactly?

Wikipedia,

As the American troops advanced towards Ohrdruf, the SS began evacuating almost all prisoners on death marches to Buchenwald on April 1. During these marches, SS, Volkssturm, and members of the Hitler Youth killed an estimated 1,000 prisoners. Mass graves were re-opened and SS men tried to burn the corpses. The SS guards killed many of the remaining prisoners in the Nordlager that were deemed too ill to walk to the railcars. After luring them to the parade ground, claiming that they were to be fed, the SS shot them and left their corpses lying in the open.[3][8]

This says bodies were exhumed for burning. But doesn't this contradict your argument that such burning is NECESSARILY indicative of a camp being an EXTERMINATION camp?

[Nessie]

...

The Katyn graves had about 8.7 bodies per square meter. And the Katyn bodies had a relatively orderly/efficient arrangement. ...

Which means Belzec had at least 182,700 bodies buried there. That does not even fit with any unevidenced revisionist hypothesis about the function of the camp.

Katyn was a mass grave of only adult males, who were clothed and when exhumed the corpses were decompressed due to being piled on top of each other. They had started to decompose, but not to the extent that they had become one great waxy fat mass.

Belzec was a mass grave of all ages and both sexes, none of whom were clothed, where bodies were compressed and decomposed such that Kola found they had congealed into a waxy fat mass. It would not be unreasonable to double the bodies per square meter to 17.4, so 365,400 buried corpses. That is still off Hofle's total arrivals of 434,508 and the 500,000 generally accepted death toll, but it is still a significant number that revisionists cannot just hand wave away, with their non-history of and hypothesis about the camp.

Dunce cap for you, Nessie.

If we apply 8.7 bodies per square meter to the Kola graves this would be 8.7*5,490 = 47,7663, less than one-tenth of your desired total.

An estimate in the 50,000 range is higher than what most revisionists would estimate for Belzec, but so what? That is by no means an minimum value. Lots of mass graves are less dense than Katyn. This is because the bodies at Katyn were stacked in an efficient, orderly fashion.

I did miss that you talked about m2, not m3. That was because talking about an area, when the discussion is about volumes, is moot and rather misleading. You cannot fit 8.7, let alone 1 corpse, into a square meter, since it is a measurement of area. If you piled 8.7 corpses into a m2, you would add height, so you would have a volume, not an area.

You are resorting to strange calculations that make no sense, to avoid the simplest volume calculation of volume of graves and volume of corpses, proves hundreds of thousands of corpses would fit inside the graves.