The Question of Conspiracy

[bombsaway]

https://codohforum.com/viewtopic.php?p=432#p432

In this thread I asked what I think is an interesting and important question for revisionists

"Out of curiosity, would your belief about the Holocaust change if it was made clear to you somehow that there was no "control of evidence", that no one was suppressing documents and witnesses, that perpetrators who confessed did so under no extrajudicial pressure (the trials were conducted "fairly" in terms of how law conventionally operated in liberal democracies), that individual witnesses were not instructed or incentivized to lie, that documents weren't fabricated, that the archeologists who studied the sites weren't told to lie*, etc?"

As a believer in the mainstream narrative, I answered the converse of this question,

"I would deeply question the mainstream view if I knew there was concerted effort to fabricate documents, coerce and instruct witnesses, suppress documents and other witnesses. Honestly I would become a revisionist, because it doesn't make sense that there would be a need to fabricate evidence if a crime of this magnitude really did happen."

It occurs to me that the existence of a conspiracy more or less proves that the mainstream narrative is false. What I wonder is how the revisionist posters would feel if it turns out my assumptions in bold were correct. If no conspiracy, Holocaust? Maybe this is the whole crux of our disagreement.

* I was told in the other thread that perhaps those who examined the remains weren't lying, but had deceived themselves or were heavily biased, but I'm incredulous about that given descriptions like this, which are more or less quantifiable and clearly indicative of mass body destruction.

Lukaszkiewicz Maciejewski on Treblinka, 1945

In the northwestern section of the area, the surface is covered for about 2 hectares by a mixture of ashes and sand. In this mixture, one finds countless human bones, often still covered with tissue remains, which are in a condition of decomposition. During the inspection, which I made with the assistance of an expert in forensic medicine, it was determined that the ashes are without any doubt of human origin (remains of cremated human bones). The examination of human skulls could discover no trace of« wounding. At a distance of some 100 m, there is now an unpleasant odor of burning and decay.

2 hectares is about the size of 4 or 5 American football fields

[Archie]

You posted that as a reply to me. Here is my original comment (which you evidently did not understand).

Who Controls the Evidence?

"The evidence" doesn't exist in a vacuum. Especially with something like testimonies, most of the ones that are available exist because somebody collected them for a purpose. Understanding that context and selection bias is essential and this point is never addressed on your side. At all. The effort that went into the Nuremberg prosecution and other trials is huge and it dwarfs the cumulative efforts and resources of revisionists many times over. And since then I think it's fair to say that by the time a revisionist gets to see something, an army of Jewish scholars etc have probably picked it over several times. There has possibly been some suppression of documents. The Germans could have destroyed some documents and obviously would done so selectively. And the Allies might have had some incentive to suppress or at the very least not publicize inconvenient documents.

You have failed to understand what I mean by "context" and "selection bias."

Selection Bias

This is not even a controversial point, i.e., it's not just "Holocaust deniers" who say this. The plain fact is that the documents for the war crimes were cherry-picked by the prosecution.

A good deal of non-academic writing about Hitler and the German National Socialists has hitherto been based on what can be termed the 'Nuremberg' approach, an attempt to assemble every unfavourable fact so as to form a prosecution case. (Colin Cross, Adolf Hitler)

Though these documents [the Nuremberg documents] look imposing in their endless volumes, they are dangerous material for a historian to use. They were collected, hastily and almost at random, as a basis for lawyers' briefs. This is not how historians would proceed. The lawyer aims to make a case; the historian wishes to understand a situation. The evidence which convinces lawyers often fails to satisfy us; our methods seems singularly imprecise to them. But even lawyers must now have qualms about the evidence at Nuremberg. The documents were chosen not only to demonstrate the war-guilt of the men on trial, but to conceal that of the prosecuting Powers. If any of the four Powers who set up the Nuremberg tribunal had been running the affair alone, it would have thrown the mud more widely. The Western Powers would have brought in the Nazi-Soviet Pact; the Soviet Union would have retaliated with the Munich conference and more obscure transactions. Given the four-Power tribunal, the only possible course was to assume the sole guilt of Germany in advance. The verdict preceded the tribunal; and the documents were brought in to sustain a conclusion which had already been settled. Of course the documents are genuine. But they are "loaded"; and anyone who relies on them finds it almost impossible to escape from the load with which they are charged. (A.J.P. Taylor, The Origins of the Second World War)

If I had known seven months ago what I know today, I would never have come here.

Obviously, the victor in any war is not the best judge of the war crime guilt. Try as you will, it is impossible to convey to the defense, their counsel, and their people that the court is trying to represent all mankind rather than the country which appointed its members.

What I have said of the nationalist character of the tribunals applies to the prosecution. The high ideal announced as the motives for creating these tribunals has not been evident.

The prosecution has failed to maintain objectivity aloof from vindictiveness, aloof from personal ambitions for convictions. It has failed to strive to lay down precedents which might help the world to avoid future wars.

The entire atmosphere here is unwholesome. Linguists were needed.

The Americans are notably poor linguists. Lawyers, clerks, interpreters and researchers were employed who became Americans only in recent years, whose backgrounds were imbedded in Europe’s hatreds and prejudices.

The trials were to have convinced the Germans of the guilt of their leaders.

They convinced the Germans merely that their leaders lost the war to tough conquerors.

Most of the evidence in the trials was documentary, selected from the large tonnage of captured records. The selection was made by the prosecution.

The defense had access only to those documents which the prosecution considered material to the case.

Our tribunal introduced a rule of procedure that when the prosecution introduced an excerpt from a document, the entire document should be made available to the defense for presentation as evidence. The prosecution protested vigorously. General Taylor tried out of court to call a meeting of the presiding judges to rescind this order. It was not the attitude of any conscientious officer of the court seeking full justice.

Also abhorrent to the American sense of justice is the prosecution’s reliance upon self-incriminating statements made by the defendants while prisoners for more than two and a half years, and repeated interrogation without presence of counsel. Two and one-half years of confinement is a form of duress in itself.

The lack of appeal leaves me with a feeling that justice has been denied. (Charles Wennerstrum, NMT Judge, critical comments to the Chicago Tribune

There was at the very least a skewed selection of documents.

None of this requires a "conspiracy theory." It's just different players acting in their own interests in a very predictable way.

The Allies were not objective and that means that the evidence we have is slanted.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Your_Job_in_Germany

This goes not only for documents but testimonies as well. And it has obviously continued into the "Holocaust studies" era.

Context

An SS man making a statement in private in 1943 is very different from a SS man in 1946 signing a statement written by an Allied prosecutor. Or a statement made in 1964. You have to consider the circumstances and the incentives at play. You generally refuse to do this. One anti-revisionist who did was actually Cockerill. To his credit, he realized the problem with using these statements naively, so his thing was "non-coercive" confessions, which were of course very, very few, usually from decades after the war.

Bombsaway: "It occurs to me that the existence of a conspiracy more or less proves that the mainstream narrative is false."

I do not agree. There is a possible scenario where the Allies could have been doing lying propaganda AND the Germans could still have done some bad things. Pointing out the deficiencies with Nuremberg, the concentration camp "investigations," etc., though important, does not quite disprove the Holocaust. It would be suggestive, even damning, but it would not quite prove the Germans were innocent.

Usually people talk about the hoax aspect like proving this is beyond proving the holocaust is false. Imo, proving that there was a "hoax" of sorts (for lack of a better word) is absolutely trivial and has already been shown many times over, and your side looks ridiculous when you bend over backwards to avoid admitting this. The reason you guys hold the line there (on deception and deliberate falsehood) is that you know that's a dangerously slippery slope.

[bombsaway]

You have failed to understand what I mean by "context" and "selection bias."

I understood, I was more wondering how important an actual conspiracy was to your belief system.

You don't need a conspiracy to put out propaganda, even on the Soviet side with claims of mass gassings at Majdanek or 4 million killed at Auschwitz. For me this could easily fall under the line of "selection bias" and shoddy historical methodology.

Bombsaway: "It occurs to me that the existence of a conspiracy more or less proves that the mainstream narrative is false."

I do not agree. There is a possible scenario where the Allies could have been doing lying propaganda AND the Germans could still have done some bad things. Pointing out the deficiencies with Nuremberg, the concentration camp "investigations," etc., though important, does not quite disprove the Holocaust. It would be suggestive, even damning, but it would not quite prove the Germans were innocent.

This is close to the mainstream view, but I'm going much further than this here, and I again restate my original question

"Out of curiosity, would your belief about the Holocaust change if it was made clear to you somehow that there was no "control of evidence", that no one was suppressing documents and witnesses, that perpetrators who confessed did so under no extrajudicial pressure (the trials were conducted "fairly" in terms of how law conventionally operated in liberal democracies), that individual witnesses were not instructed or incentivized to lie, that documents weren't fabricated, that the archeologists who studied the sites weren't told to lie*, etc?"

With these things that I mention, it is clear that we are dealing with a concerted top down program to "hoax".

I see no reason why governments would do such a thing if the events in question actually happened. If no one believed and you still wanted to prove it, the sites could be opened up for full investigation by numerous national and international bodies. It turns out basically everyone did believe, so within the mainstream view, such investigations weren't necessary.

[PrudentRegret]

The "conspiracy" vs "non-conspiracy" dilemma overlooks the fact that there are other methods of indirect coordination than conspiracy. Stigmergy for example:

Stigmergy is a form of self-organization. It produces complex, seemingly intelligent structures, without need for any planning, control, or even direct communication between the agents. As such it supports efficient collaboration between extremely simple agents, who may lack memory or individual awareness of each other.

Think: an ant releases a pheromone, and other ants respond to the pheromone systematically. There's no "conspiracy" but there's social coordination organized by environmental stimuli.

I keep going back to Ryan Faulk's "Russians in England" video because it's such an excellent case study in this concept. Large numbers of people claimed to witness thousands of Russians being transported through England towards the Western Front in WWI. They even identified specific details like the beards of the Russians:

• "It was said last Friday that 80,000 Russians passed through here, No-one was allowed to see them. But for several days, only one passenger train was running, and the railway would not send luggage in advance."
• "There were no lights in the carriages, but by the light of the cigars and cigarettes they were smoking, the black beards of the Russians could be seen."
• "Only that day I heard from my dentist that a hundred thousand Russians had landed in England; 'a whole trainful of them,' I reported, 'is said to have passed through Stoke, so that is why the Staffordshire people are so whise.' But when I returned to Buxton I learnt that a similar contingent had been seen in Manchester, and for a few days the astonishing ubiquitousness of the invisible Russians formed a topic of absorbing interest at every tea-table throughout the country.
• "In letters from various friends I had heard many rumors of the presence of vast hordes of Russian troops in England on their way to the battlefields of France, but I could not bring myself to believe in the story... But I received on September 3rd a letter from a very old friend, Commander Gerald Digby, who had retired many years ago but was now working at the Admiralty, telling me as a fact that 80,000 Russian troops were embarking at Southampton, truly a marvel."
• "All roads lead to Rome, and the railroad from Archangel led everywhere. The Cossacks were seen - though the blinds were always down - at Peckham, at Evesham, at Peterborough. A grey cloud of fierce, whiskered men went rolling down to Cheltenham, at Euston their passing closed the station for 36 hours; at Rugby they drank great draughts of coffee. In the East End children playing by the railway embankment were gladded with showers of Russian money thrown to them from a passing train. Cossacks swarmed at Southampton, and a London milkman, clattering his cans to salute the dawn, saw the myriads of the north march past him in the silent awful streets."

One of the Newspapers of record wrote of this story:

Whatever be the unvarnished truth about the Russian forces in the West, so extraordinary has been the ubiquity of the rumors in question, that they are almost more amazing if they are false than if they are true. Either a baseless rumor had obtained a currency and credence perhaps unprecedented in history, or, incredible as it may appear, it is a fact that Russian troops, whatever the number may be, have been disembarked and passed through this country...

When finally it was confirmed that there were never any Russians in England, one reporter wrote:

London is depressed today... The Press Bureau has issued an absolute denial of the rumor so widely credited a few days ago that an immense force of Russians had reached the Western Front through this country. Like everybody else, I kept the ball a-rolling... Indeed, looking back on the rumor now, the wonder is how it ever came to be believed in. Why, it not only invited suspicion but shouted for it. The story of railway porters at Edinburgh having had to sweep the snow out of the carriages of the trains conveying the Russians ought to have been sufficient to damn the rumour."

There are many parallels with this story and the Holocaust. There's the reliance on cross-pollinated rumors that motivated a large number of individually unreliable witness testimony. With most admitting they didn't see anything themselves, but they heard rumors, while there are a smaller portion of witnesses who claimed to observe precise details. Like the beards, or coins, or the milk man who saw them march right past him. There's also the RAILWAY PORTERS being involved in the rumor, which apparently featured the Porters cleaning the wagons out of snow (!) brought from Russia.

If you have a large pool of individually-unreliable witnesses you don't have great evidence. The reason for that is not conspiracy. Indeed it's impossible that all these witnesses of the Russians in England were wrong independently. Totally impossible. They were either right, or they were all wrong due to underlying mechanisms of social coordination that go far beyond what is implied by the word "conspiracy." And in this case, it was the latter in remarkable fashion. It's very notable that the Holocaust, like the story of 800,000 people being shunted to the Treblinka Sorting Camp, relies on the same dynamics that carried this story.

And it should be noted that the "Russians in England" story did have a conspiracy component, the number of actual conspirators was very tiny but all the witness testimony that emerged to bring the story to life was not acquired through conspiracy but through other methods of social coordination.

And likewise there are undeniable elements of conspiracy in the Holocaust, the Soviet "Reconstruction" of the Auschwitz Gas Chamber being one example. But you don't need "conspiracy" to explain the transformation of wartime propaganda rumors into unreliable witness testimony.

[PrudentRegret]

The confession of Rudolf Hoss, for example, was outright conspiracy. He was tortured, he was fed a prompt for things that never happened like him visiting Treblinka to decide how to implement gas chambers. But his "confession" was so important that all the downstream behavior of other defendants, courts, and witness testimony is colored by this one conspiracy. There's a ripple effect. Hoss confesses due to a conspiracy. Now Courts observe judicial notice on false facts which were only "proven" by a conspiracy. In this context, you don't need a conspiracy to understand that this is going to influence the behavior, the testimony, the legal strategy of other witnesses and other defendants. It's precisely the reason that modern courts are so adamant about these issues and enforce high standards that were totally tossed to the wayside at the Nuremberg show trials.

[Archie]

Another problem with this straw man about an impossibly elaborate conspiracy is that things that may have originally had disparate motivations were repurposed for "the Holocaust." All that is necessary is for the parties involved to have a bias in favor of playing up German atrocities.

The film footage at Belsen, Buchenwald, etc - The main reason for this was that the Americans and British had just fought a major war and showing "proof" of German barbarism was useful for establishing their own moral superiority and providing an ex post facto justification for the war. They could point to those pictures and say "That's what we were fighting against." Although there were a lot of Jews involved in this early propaganda, the newsreels generally did not emphasize Jews, nor would the public have initially associated the concentration camp propaganda strictly with Jews. I think in the 1945-1946, while it was claimed that the Jews had been exterminated, the messaging was generally more universal than it would be later. Nowadays, if you show random people pictures of bodies at Belsen or wherever, most of them will assume these are pictures of Jews (who were probably gassed). That is a good demonstration of how material that may have had one purpose originally can be repurposed and reinterpreted over time.

The Soviet material, although it is in many ways foundational to many of the core claims, could not really be said to have been a deliberate, planned out effort to fake "the Holocaust." That is anachronistic. They claimed the Germans were exterminating pretty much everybody, including Jews. But it is still true that their "liberation" of Auschwitz was foundational for the Holocaust narrative and over time became more and more associated with Jews (almost exclusively). Actually even Jews seem to vacillate between presenting the Holocaust as strictly Jewish and bringing in other victim groups (gays, gypsies, etc). They go back and forth, seemingly depending on whatever is most convenient in the moment.

[bombsaway]

The confession of Rudolf Hoss, for example, was outright conspiracy. He was tortured, he was fed a prompt for things that never happened like him visiting Treblinka to decide how to implement gas chambers. But his "confession" was so important that all the downstream behavior of other defendants, courts, and witness testimony is colored by this one conspiracy. There's a ripple effect. Hoss confesses due to a conspiracy. Now Courts observe judicial notice on false facts which were only "proven" by a conspiracy. In this context, you don't need a conspiracy to understand that this is going to influence the behavior, the testimony, the legal strategy of other witnesses and other defendants. It's precisely the reason that modern courts are so adamant about these issues and enforce high standards that were totally tossed to the wayside at the Nuremberg show trials.

I know you believe it isn't possible, but again, if you could somehow receive assurance, that there was no conspiracy, no top down program to fabricate a historical event whatsoever, would this change your mind or introduce some uncertainty for you?

I stated in my first post that if I received assurance that there was a conspiracy it would change my mind about what happened.

Remember that we're not just talking about witness statements, but archeological reports (like the one I quoted about Treblinka) and there are documents that revisionists 100% say are forgeries (like the Just Memo or recently unearthed FG report). In a revisionist world of no-conspiracy, these documents would have been fabricated by individual actors, acting under personal motivations.

[SanityCheck]

Selection Bias

This is not even a controversial point, i.e., it's not just "Holocaust deniers" who say this. The plain fact is that the documents for the war crimes were cherry-picked by the prosecution.....

There was at the very least a skewed selection of documents.

'Selection bias' or skewing is really not an issue here. The documents chosen for IMT especially were clearly the tip of an iceberg. The NMT trials used even more documents, but also afforded defense lawyers the opportunities to research in the same collections of files as the prosecutors, which some took up with alacrity.

Subsequent historical research shifted over to using the underlying collections. Anyone who's researched Third Reich era document collections which passed through US hands, whether in the NARA microfilm versions or the restituted files in the Bundesarchiv, has had the experience of seeing 'Nuremberg' (IMT-NMT) documents in their original files or ordering, and also seeing other documents which they might then wonder why they hadn't been spotted back then. The answer is there was simply so much to go through, and the concerns of 1940s prosecutors prevailed, especially after extraditions kicked in.

While a great many key documents for all themes (not just the Holocaust) were first publicised and used at IMT-NMT, it cannot be argued that today these are all that are used.

There is inevitably a 'survival bias' with German documentation because so much was destroyed, but historians are very conscious of this, since surveying the sum total is kind of the point when researching a big project. That requires long hours spent combing through finding guides and catalogues, and their compilation has been an ongoing process, alongside further declassifications or discoveries, so the piles of German documents have grown even in the past 20 years.

There are obvious missing parts, gaps, series which survive in only incomplete form (e.g. Hitler's situation conferences once protocolled by stenographers), and cases where a directive or prior report is referred to, and this doesn't survive, or only the cover letter survives.

Increased exploration of the documentation did force changes to interpretations, especially as the 'dots' thickened. The classic example being the interpretation of when an order for the Final Solution might have been issued, in the first postwar decades this skewed earlier, by the 1980s-1990s the availability of more documents not used in trials made nearly everyone gravitate towards a later date, all generally within one year, which is hardly a huge change. It's therefore unfair to berate earlier historians for not spotting a pattern they couldn't have discerned until various documents came to light in the course of later, and entirely regular, historical research.

Viewed with hindsight, the documents selected for IMT for the Holocaust seem more like illustrations than attempting to piece together a comprehensive picture. Both the US and Soviets were sitting on very significant sources and had either not found them yet or didn't think they needed to belabour the point, which was also potentially influenced by the judges often telling prosecutors they'd heard enough. Certainly there were a number of witnesses brought to IMT who never took the stand for this reason, including survivors of Sonderkommando 1005 at Babyn Yar.

There are many documents in the IMT document code series like -PS which were simply not entered into evidence in the trials, but historians could go through them later alongside regular archival collections. One sees references to unpublished Nuremberg documents all the time. I certainly went through boxes of British copies of IMT documents at an early stage and found various sources like this, which I then could find in their proper homes in NARA microfilm series of the entire runs of records. Going through Nuremberg documents helped as a broad primer to the range of sources in the regular collections, and doing so with photocopies of the originals helped figure out the formatting and other quirks, especially as one could so easily contrast military, civilian and SS/Police records.

The unused NMT documents included some that were selected for potential use against some defendants who did not stand trial - this is especially apparent with NOKW-series documents compared to the High Command Trial. But the documents selected by the prosecution and defense for this trial as well as its preparatory stages correspond entirely to the main series of military records, which are much bigger. The two Wehrmacht NMT trials are microfilmed on 117 reels, including many duplicates/translations and lengthy transcripts, so the document books are a much smaller fraction. Just the ground forces and OKW/OKH series in RG 242 come to 9,582 microfilm reels, and the Americans still didn't copy everything, so the German archive sets are even larger, just considering the same kind of operations-type records, leaving personnel files etc to one side. The NMT trials do include some of the personnel files of the accused, taken from a collection that is 1,849 microfilm reels long.

The selection of cases and defendants for NMT certainly did 'skew' perceptions for a while due to what was and wasn't being prosecuted and highlighted. But as Donald Bloxham has argued in Genocide on Trial, this meant some aspects of the Holocaust were downplayed. This was often because of patterns of extradition - the Polish NTN trials, aka 'Poland's Nuremberg', meant many senior Nazis on a par with NMT defendants were handed over to Poland, so their cases, and the documents the Poles used to prosecute them, were less well known for a short while after the 1940s, but did become known by the 1960s and even more so by the 1990s.

[bombsaway]

Another problem with this straw man about an impossibly elaborate conspiracy is that things that may have originally had disparate motivations were repurposed for "the Holocaust." All that is necessary is for the parties involved to have a bias in favor of playing up German atrocities.

I'm not making a strawman in this post. The conspiracy claims (which eg PR believes in to some extent) are not merely "playing up German atrocities" , they're about a top down effort to fabricate historical events, such as the transport and killing of millions of people in extermination centers.

Revisionists like yourself, aren't saying, the numbers are inflated (playing up), they're saying these events never transpired.

[PrudentRegret]

I know you believe it isn't possible, but again, if you could somehow receive assurance, that there was no conspiracy, no top down program to fabricate a historical event whatsoever, would this change your mind or introduce some uncertainty for you?

How could you assure me that the Soviets/Poles/Jews building a fake gas chamber on top of the remains of a bomb shelter at Auschwitz and then deceptively presenting it to the world as an original structure for decades is anything other than a conspiracy? You can't give me assurance that this wasn't a conspiracy because I know it was. Like you yourself said, if it was Real they would have no need to do something like that.

OTOH railway station workers saying, oh yeah, we totally saw 800,000 people get shunted thataway, trust us I saw numbers written with chalk, doesn't need to be a conspiracy to be false any more than the accounts of English station workers shoveling snow out of wagons brought by Cossacks from Russia.

[SanityCheck]

How could you assure me that the Soviets/Poles/Jews building a fake gas chamber on top of the remains of a bomb shelter at Auschwitz and then deceptively presenting it to the world as an original structure for decades is anything other than a conspiracy? You can't give me assurance that this wasn't a conspiracy because I know it was. Like you yourself said, if it was Real they would have no need to do something like that.

The Polish Main Commission investigation into Auschwitz clearly pointed out that Krema I was converted to an air raid shelter in 1944, they knew this and said so.

The Auschwitz Museum, run by Poles alone without any 'Soviets' and also without any Jews, then tried to convert the air raid shelter back to a crematorium and reconstruct the gas chamber. The ovens were not there in 1944. They explain this today, there may have been times in the past when they did not, and there may well be many visitors who come away with a false impression because they don't read the signs properly. But this does not rise to more than a whine about museum practices. The original crematorium space of 1940-43 was altered in 1944. Altering it back means no absolute certainty, although you guys still haven't explained how cyanide traces ended up being detected there, the only reports of the use of cyanide concern homicidal gassings, no sources about fumigations... so you're a bit stuck.

The only conspiracy here is the conspiracy of dunces stuck in a loop watching David Cole videos from 30+ years ago.

[PrudentRegret]

It's literally the only "gas chamber" that anybody visits of the 5 "extermination camps." The other most significant "homicidal gas chamber" is at Majdanek, which was also fabricated by a deceptive post-war construction project:



Post-war, the Bath House was connected to the gas chambers from the former ENRANCE to Bath and Disinfection I.

So they took the entrance to Bath and Disinfection I. And then they connected it to the "gas chamber" and have millions of tourists towards walk in through what was actually exit TOWARDS the gas chambers at the end of the building. Walking through a connecting structured that never existed.

Literally both of the only "gas chambers" tourists can visit were deceptively constructed in a way that can only be considered conspiratorial and no "Museum practice" explains this.

[SanityCheck]

Sorry, it's still a museum-related issue, because of the 1946 Sehn report. That was republished in an expanded version in 1957, also in German, and the 1957 version also notes the conversion of Krema I to an air-raid shelter. The book used a photo from the Zentralbauleitung album of Krematorium IV, along with some of the Sonderkommando photos, there's no photo of Krema I.

Pressac documented the changes after liberation 35 years ago in his first book - including publishing photos showing the crematorium building before the chimney was reconstructed.
https://phdn.org/archives/holocaust-his ... 0133.shtml
https://phdn.org/archives/holocaust-his ... 0144.shtml
https://phdn.org/archives/holocaust-his ... 0149.shtml

A conspiracy and cover-up would have never admitted Krema I had been converted, reconstructed it silently and then come a cropper with the opening of the former Soviet archives when the ZBL Auschwitz archive was fully opened.

Instead the opposite happened: official Polish publications repeatedly acknowledged that Krema I had been converted to an air raid shelter, necessarily meaning that anything seen afterwards in the museum was a reconstruction, and the museum plus other Polish archives happily worked with Pressac and allowed him to publish photos of before/during/after the reconstruction, thirty five years ago.

What is shown to visitors to museums is ethically and epistemologically entirely different to what investigations claim and what they document.

Try again.

[bombsaway]

How could you assure me that the Soviets/Poles/Jews building a fake gas chamber on top of the remains of a bomb shelter at Auschwitz and then deceptively presenting it to the world as an original structure for decades is anything other than a conspiracy? You can't give me assurance that this wasn't a conspiracy because I know it was. Like you yourself said, if it was Real they would have no need to do something like that.

I think Nick's response is sufficient but I want to get back to the thread question, which no revisionist has been able to answer.

Imagine if somehow you had assurances of no conspiracy for anything. Would this change your mind, like my mind would be changed if I came to believe the converse?

[PrudentRegret]

It should also be noted the Auschwitz Museum made the claim that the restoration of the Zyklon chimneys was made possible by outlines remaining in the ceiling from when they were filled in by concrete in the conversion to an Air Raid shelter. The "reconstructed" Zyklon holes are neatly arranged crosswise, equidistant from opposite walls:



But they botched the "restoration" and knocked down one wall tooo many from the time this room was a morgue. So if these holes had existed in the room at the time it was a morgue they would have been arranged like this:



So the Auschwitz Museum lied about the restoration in an attempt to explain their other lie about this being a real gas chamber, when it is in fact a fake gas chamber.