Archie wrote: ↑Thu Nov 28, 2024 12:04 am
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.