Wetzelrad wrote: ↑Sat May 10, 2025 6:58 am
ConfusedJew wrote: ↑Fri May 09, 2025 11:04 pm
I think it is unsurprising to me. I wouldn't be confident in death tolls right after a war ended, but we've had almost 80 years for historians to refine their methodology, collect more information, and update their analysis of what happened. By now, it is much more likely that false information would have been weeded out and estimates should stabilize unless even more information comes out or new techniques for estimating things get developed.
Early reports during and immediately after World War II sometimes included inaccurate or confused claims about how mass killings were carried out in Nazi camps. During wartime, information was scarce, censored, and often secondhand. People inside ghettos or camps reported what they saw or heard, sometimes misinterpreting what they witnessed.
Examples: Reports of “steam chambers” or “electrocution rooms” emerged from early rumors or secondhand testimonies, often passed through multiple sources (e.g., Soviet investigators, partisans, escapees). This does not discredit later evidence; it reflects the fog of war and the challenge of reporting atrocities happening in secret, high-security extermination centers.
Early misreporting does not discredit thoroughly verified history. In fact, this is how rigorous historical methods work: initial uncertainty is refined over time with better sources.
Regarding the human soap, as early as World War I, there were already false reports of Germans making soap from their war dead. This WWI propaganda likely influenced how later claims were interpreted. Some soap bars in the ghettoes were marked with “RIF”, which people believed stood for “Rein jüdisches Fett” (Pure Jewish Fat). In reality, it stood for “Reichsstelle für industrielle Fettversorgung” – a state agency for industrial fat supply. This enabled rumors to spread that victims’ bodies were being turned into soap. At that time, people believed the Nazis were capable of anything, and they were often right.
However, during postwar trials, evidence emerged that Professor Rudolf Spanner conducted limited experiments using human fat to make soap for anatomical use (e.g., cleaning cadavers). The Nuremberg trials acknowledged this, but concluded it was not part of a mass extermination effort or industrial soap production.
While this is my personal view and subjective, that doesn't really change much for me.
This is less your personal view and more ChatGPT's. That aside, I thought your response would grapple more seriously with the absurdity of what Nessie has written, because it was posts exactly like his that disillusioned me on the Holocaust. It can't be simply brushed aside that people who were opposed to the Nazis falsified innumerable reports and death statistics. It would be like having a giant plagiarism scandal at a school, not punishing anyone for it, then in the next school year pretending it couldn't happen again. Utterly ridiculous.
The Soviet exaggerations and inaccurate early information about the death camps has clearly not been brushed aside, since that information is still readily available. How could the Soviets be punished for providing a false death toll for Auschwitz? Why would you punish those who passed on inaccurate hearsay, who at the time were acting with the best intentions?
Saying that later reports were more accurate than early reports defies history and common sense. The earliest reports, especially those during the war, should have been the most accurate, because witness recall is best in the immediate aftermath of events.
You are revealing your ignorance of investigations and how evidence is gathered. During their operation, the only information about the AR camps that could be gathered, were rumours and some witness evidence, much of it hearsay, from escaped prisoners. Poles living locally to the camps had to be very careful about gathering information, since, if they were caught, they would likely be shot. No Nazi was openly admitting to what was happening, as they too risked being shot.
You are correct about witness recall. The shortest time gap between event and giving evidence, were the Sonderkommandos who worked in the Kremas in 1944, who gave evidence in 1945. There was no eyewitness who gave evidence within days, if not hours of what they saw.
Your AI will admit this if you press it to do so.
AI can be manipulated by its questioner. The Holocaust was a huge event, spanning multiple countries, over a period of years, that involved numerous smaller operations, often unconnected with each other. It stands to reason and common sense, that it would take time to gather evidence to build a history of events.
But even if you believe that over time the witnesses and authorities became more serious and applied more rigor, more refined methodology, how would you differentiate between rigorous verification and rigorous fabrication? Why should a person who is motivated and able to lie not make the effort to craft a more impregnable lie?
The methodology used has always been to gather evidence. There have been some improvements, in particular the ending of the Soviet Union, which allowed access for better resourced archaeological examinations of the death camp sites and to archives in the east. If the Holocaust was a Soviet hoax, it would have collapsed with the SU. The newly independent countries such as Latvia, Lithuania and freed Romania would have no reason to continue to support a Soviet hoax that had them murdering hundreds of thousands of their Jewish citizens. Or, do you accept the evidence of mass murder of Jews in those countries?
This question is beside the point anyway, because we know as a matter of fact that the authorities still rely heavily on the least credible witnesses like Rudolf Hoess, Kurt Gerstein, Filip Mueller, Henryk Tauber, Rudolf Vrba, and Alfred Wetzler. If the historians that you say refined their methodology over 80 years can't even cut the obvious falsifiers out of their narrative, then we know their methodology isn't any good.
Can you name six eyewitnesses, who worked at any of Chelmno, an AR camp, or at the A-B Kremas, who you say are credible?
When you say those named are the least credible, how have you determined their credibility?
