curioussoul wrote: ↑Fri Feb 14, 2025 11:12 pm
Nessie wrote: ↑Fri Feb 14, 2025 4:08 pmNo, I am saying that camp staff operated in the knowledge that gassings were to be belt as secret as possible
Purported secrecy does not explain why the Germans were internally discussing corpse storage in the morgues if they were in fact not morgues used for corpse storage.
Yes it does and in any case, they were not discussing storing corpses, they were discussing sending corpses.
The dead of the camp were being sent to the Kremas to be cremated along with those who were murdered in the gas chambers.
Then why are the Germans discussing the morgues in terms of corpse storage, their stated purpose in extant documentation? You still have no explanation.
At no point is the word storage, or anything similar, used. They discuss where to send corpses to and not what then happens to them.
So, they are aware of the secrecy of the operation. Hence many documents refer to "special" action or treatment of people who were sent to the Kremas.
You've already abandoned your original, pained hypothesis. The camp staff and members of the ZBL are discussing normal corpse storage inside the morgues. That has nothing to do with secrecy.
No, I have just given you another example of secrecy, by referring to something as "special" rather than describing the operation.
Examples of why Soviet reports are not useless
Oh, so they're not useless anymore? That's what you claimed earlier in the thread. Make up your mind, Nessie.
You are playing semantics, as you demand that Soviet reports are either black or white, totally useless or highly useful.
their inflated death tolls, the poor quality of their work and their political motivations.
Right, so inflated death tolls, poor quality work and political motivations are legitimate reasons to discard or deem "useless" a particular party to the conflict, in terms of its evidentiary value for the Holocaust? Would that be fair to say?
Yes, though I would not totally disregard them, as nothing is black and white and there is still context and there may be important details therein. I know, it is more complicated than you would like.
I give you specifics and you move the goalposts.
You did not give me specifics, you gave me a list of vague, broad categories of alleged accusations, "undressing", "selections", etc. Those are not specifics. I asked for specifics as to what Vrba and Hoess alleged that had been corroborated and by who, specifically. I'm not interested in vague claims.
Undressing is a specific part of the process. Please give me an example of what you regard as specific and then I will look for corroboration.
If you want to provide a specific claim by Vrba and Hoess, I will look for you, to find corroborating evidence, since you clearly do not know how to do that and need spoon fed.
You're the one making claims you refuse to back up. I'm simply asking for you to put your money where your mouth is.
I provided you with a specific, which since you reject it, it is your job to come up with another. I know what you are up to, you want me to run around doing research for you. I see that a lot with revisionists, it betrays their lack of training and experience. You need me to do the work as you cannot.
You clearly do not understand how investigations work. If a historian finds a witness who lied and is not a witness, they are not then used as a witness. Historians include witnesses such as Vrba, who provides mainly hearsay evidence, and Hoess who made clear mistakes and whose testimony was in part under torture, because of the context they provide. They are an important part of the developing narrative, the history of the history of the camp. Plus, their evidence is, for the main events, corroborated.
Again with the circular reasoning. If witnesses are in fact analysed and discarded, where are these analyses and the historians who conducted them?
Historians do not normally publish why they chose not to use certain witnesses.
You're being very contradictory. On the one hand, you know of no witnesses who have been exposed as liars, but on the other hand, Holocaust historians are allegedly discarding unreliable witnesses like normal historians do, but where are these historians and where are the discarded witnesses, and why were they discarded? Enlighten us, Nessie.
I have done, with Elie Wiesel. I have not seen many of the Holocaust memoir writers being used as witnesses in the histories. That will because, as survivors, they often did not see the heart of the action and instead speak to the well known grind of daily life in the camp. They also clearly mix hearsay with what they saw and use highly emotive, bordering on atrocity descriptives of the cruelest and harshed events in the camps.
The Nazis, who were often at the heart of the action, saw and knew far more about what was happening and are less emotive in tehir descriptions, make for better witnesses.
A witness who is discarded is, by the nature of being discarded, not used.
A discarded witness was discarded for a reason, right?
Obviously. Many are discarded because they add nothing to what is already knwn.
Historians would read a witness, decide that they are lying, or just not credible, so they just do not use them.
Fantastic, so where are the analyses of witnesses and the reasoning for them getting discarded?
You would need to get in touch with each historian for that. I have never heard of a history that comes with an appendix that lists the evidence assessed and then not used.
Revisionism is entirely about assessing and giving reasons for rejecting every single witness, resulting in a non-history, with no evidence to conclude what happened.
It is the opposite to history, which is about assessing and establishing the truthfulness of a witness in relation to the events they describe, to determine what happened.
Elie Wiesel comes to mind as a witness who I have never heard of being used by a historian. Fake Holocaust witnesses are themselves a subject of studies;
That's very funny. Your only example of a Holocaust liar is one of the most famous Holocaust witnesses ever. Says a lot, I suppose.
Bear in mind, historians approach witness evidence very differently from revisionists.
Yes, I think that's quite clear from your statement that no Holocaust witness has been exposed as a liar by a historian. That's breathtakingly inept.
Revisionist assessment of witnesses is unique, as it is designed to discredit and disbelieve with the aim of leaving no witnesses at all, who are considered to be truthful.
On the flip side, orthodox hisorians do not critically assess witness statements at all, and you've been unable to find even one witness analysed by a historian that was then discarded as a witness.
Now, that is very dishonest of you to accuse me of only producing one example witness and then you cut out another three. I gave you a link to the study of three witnesses who lied about their experience in the Holocaust, but since you want to believe there is no critical assessment by historians, you need to edit that out!
https://www.jstor.org/stable/24585354
"Translating the Self: False Holocaust Testimony"
That is an example of the critical assessment of witnesses. Those witnesses will not be used by any historian, after it is established they lied. Those historians will just not use them, so they become an example of what I was referring to, whereby they are discarded without the need for further comment.
Revisionist witness assessments are industry standard in any investigatory or historical field.
The actual process was that rumours and information started to circulate that certain camps had gas chambers and mass killings took place. Step 1 is to identify who was inside those camps, step 2 is to interview them and step 3 is to gather other, non witness contemporaneous evidence pertaining to that camp and its operation. If people who are proven to have been at the camp, speak to gas chambers, and the remains of a building are found where they said the gas chambers had been located, that witness is corroborated and their truthfulness established. If excavations and geophysics locate disturbed ground and cremated remains where the witness states mass graves were located, that is corroboration. If a witness claims ovens had more than one corpse cremated at a time and a document is found that refers to multiple corpse cremations, that is corroboration. If a witness refers to people undressing in a specific room prior to being gassed and a document is traced that records a heated undressing room in that building, that is corroboration.
That is the investigative standard, and revisionists do not use it.
