Callafangers wrote: ↑Fri Mar 06, 2026 10:00 pm
SanityCheck wrote:...
Dr. Terry, your latest response to me (here:
https://www.codohforum.com/viewtopic.php?p=22691#p22691) concedes even more ground on physical predictions (e.g., "unquantifiable" variables, incomplete cremation/escapes as "refinements") while evading quantification entirely -- precisely the thread's thesis. Sturdy-Colls' Finding Treblinka (2026) is already anticipated and rightly ridiculed in-advance; her prior work (2014-2020) yielded economic debris/sparse remains,
corroborating revisionism's sparsity prediction and falsifying extermination-scale traces (no mega-graves/pyres matching Hoefle). Muehlenkamp's 2006-2016 critiques predate TORC (2019/2021) and >400kg-per-corpse evidence via peer-reviewed data (ca. 2021) and ignore Mazurek's Sobibor contradictions (detailed below). Aktion 1005 remains Soviet-origin hearsay (no veritable documents, improbable logistics, zero unearthed graves at scale); Einsatzgruppen shootings face identical/overlapping issues (inflated tallies, sparse forensics).
Your "networks"
multiply unproven claims without AR resolution --
revisionism nullifies extermination first via physical impossibilities; "where 100% went" (transit/labor/disease) is secondary.
Still Unchallenged Specifics (Since OP):
- FeCN/Prussian Blue (Birkenau): Rudolf's modeling (exposure/kinetics/stability) predicts detectable FeCN akin to delousing chambers; Markiewicz's unbound-HCN (volatile, per your concession) undermines itself. Direct refutation?
- Birkenau Crematoria Capacity/Maintenance: No refractory brick records/air-photo pyre activity for 1.1M; T4 irrelevant to scale.
- Overlapping Cremations Math: ~10-15% max time reduction (lean corpses ~40k kcal avail., 54% efficiency → 30-40k usable vs. 200-330k demand); multi-corpse losses negate more.
- Sobibor Graves: Mazurek excavations empty Kola's "dense" Graves 1/2/7; objective max ~2.7k-17k corpses (charitable per-grave ranges).
- AR Fuel/Wood Scale: Treblinka ~350kg/corpse × revised toll = still unprecedented 100sM kg (largest burning ever); "local" unevidenced, no endless smoke witnesses.
- Falsifiability: Monuments block decisive digs (Lukasciewicz/Mazurek/Sturdy-Colls: economic ops, not mass graves); "convergence" excuses non-risky claims.
Assignment (Repeated): Quantify your revised tolls/sites (wood/process/graves at Treblinka/Belzec), or name a post-Muehlenkamp scholar who has. Child skew (~12% volume reduction, pre-factored) and "Z%" unexhumed don't suffice -- provide calculations.
Your evasion persists unchanged which confirms again that your position has the physical debate lost. Revisionism's testable sparsity is
corroborated, and extermination's mega-traces is falsified.
Lastly, are you really involved now with the archaeology department at your university? That's especially shocking and further highlights the concerns addressed in this thread. The world's premier anti-revisionist historian (you),
who has repeatedly evaded questions on archaeology especially with regard to precision, is now also involved in archaeology as a profession. Your excuses (stated or implied) for evading these issues revisionists have put forth continue to dwindle.
Still the premature victory-dancing. Let me try to boil down the issues to a few numbered points, without the aid of AI:
1. Revisionism, including Mattogno, has yet to respond to/comment on a great deal of historical and archaeological work on the AR camps (and other Holocaust sites). Some of this work is due fairly soon, such as Caroline Sturdy Colls' Finding Treblinka.
2. A great deal more information is available on the deportation ends and circumstances of transports, i.e. the profiles of the communities which were destroyed in 1942-43 in the course of Aktion Reinhardt. This includes more detail on fugitives/escapes before deportation and during transports, shooting actions at the departure ends, conditions of the transports, the few known selections, and the demographic profiles of the communities, including disproportions of women over men. Fully researching this will take time, so requests for quantification of what will still be estimates won't be replied to for the foreseeable future.
3. The core revisionist argument that cremating a corpse on an open air pyre requires substantial quantities of wood (300 now 400kg of wood/corpse) is already refuted by documented cases of much lower fuel ratios for comparable incinerations of animal carcasses.
4. The condition of the AR camp sites as observed, investigated and photographed after liberation indicates cremation of human remains took place there, leaving cremains, bones, skulls and partial human remains to be found. Later archaeological investigations, especially Kola's bore probes of Belzec, found uncremated corpse layers in wax fat transformation at the bottom of many graves (10 of 33). Therefore human remains were buried at these camps and also cremated at them. The presence of unburned remains at these sites indicate also that cremation was less than total.
5. The records of the AR camps were destroyed, as noted in Globocnik's final report. No records of fuel deliveries, whether of liquid fuels or wood, have so far come to light. Cremations were noted in contemporary underground reports, without noting quantities, which would be unrealistic to expect - the same sources note 1005 cremations all over Poland, and indeed further east. Eyewitness descriptions do not provide detailed quantities for fuel, either, and this is quite normal for not only other German-instigated open air cremations, but also many others in the modern era.
6. Therefore, any attempt to quantify is speculative, or might be considered to apply a model or argument from analogy.
7. This leads to the chief problem with the revisionist exaggeration of fuel requirements, which is that it doesn't in turn lead to any precise degree of quantification, so that revisionists or other researchers could find actual corroboration of the negative claim and locate the deportees somewhere else, alive or dead, since nobody apparently knows how many to look for, as revisionists concede convenience figures of some % or a few tens of thousands, without having any direct evidence to back up and quantify their 'correction'.
8. The generalised 300-400kg/corpse claim for wood then fails to even begin to work with other open air cremation sites under the auspices of Aktion 1005, which did not reach all mass graves, so the greater balance of Holocaust victims as well as non-Jewish victims whose corpses were sometimes cremated under 1005 (Polish victims of terror and Soviet POWs especially) aren't even vaguely explained.
9. Revisionist claims continue to fail corroboration since the deportees to the AR camps haven't turned up elsewhere, alive or dead, which is a bigger problem for your side than the mainstream. The mainstream located some of the deportees trying to escape trains and being killed in the process, or dying later on, well away from the AR camps. That is already more progress than revisionism has managed. The mainstream knows cremation took place at these camps where very large numbers disappeared from the historical record, their murder described in numerous sources. Revisionism 'knows' only that this "didn't happen", but cannot clinch the case with evidence pointing to another historical reconstruction.
The evasion of historical reconstruction and historical explanation seen with the revisionist fixation on cremation is manifest. You guys turning around and saying 'quantify the unquantifiable!' makes you look like perseverative loons.
As a reminder, several revisionist arguments against Chelmno were either already falsified when advanced by Mattogno in 2009, or have since been falsified. Firstly, the use of field crematoria at this site is recorded in a contemporary German document, contrary to Mattogno's assertions. Secondly, fuel supply was already accounted for since the local forestry official May described delivering firewood to the camp. So that's a fail for revisionism right out of the gate, stumbling over the very first extermination camp.
Similarly, open air cremation pyres were noted in a report by Justice Ministry officials visiting Auschwitz in June 1944 - a document which may well have first been unearthed by a revisionist, Udo Walendy. This is somewhat problematic for revisionism, as the death rate among registered inmates had fallen to a much lower level by this time, and the open air cremations were then visible on some air photos plus the ground level Sonderkommando photos through the summer of 1944. The earlier cremations in 1942-3 and their resumption in 1944 are also massively attested in camp underground reports and by eyewitnesses.
It's funny to see you repeat Mattogno's ill-advised claim from 2002 that Aktion 1005 was a Soviet invention, when there are not only several dozen German documents referencing 1005 and locating its operations in many cases, but many contemporary *Polish* as well as Soviet plus German contemporary sources about the exhumations and cremations. This means investigations after liberation were divided between the USSR and Poland, with Polish archaeologists able in this century to further explore sites involved in terror against Poles (Chojnice in Pomerania, Dzialdowo/Soldau). The primary investigations of Aktion 1005 personnel weren't Soviet, but West German. That multiplies the size of the conspiracy you guys have to rely on quite considerably.
Then there are the contemporary German and collaboration administration documents about mass graves - these are copious for Lithuania, exist also for Dnepropetrovsk in Ukraine
and for Treblinka.
As another reminder, historical reconstruction means proceeding chronologically and geographically. The end of 1942 is an excellent point at which to consider what had happened in 1941-42: the murder and deaths of about 3.7 million Jews, using Hilberg's year by year breakdown (1.1 million in 1941, 2.6 million in 1942). This estimate can be refined with the further data we have since Hilberg produced his final edition in 2003, but the order of magnitude is about right. It certainly includes the Warsaw ghetto, Aktion Reinhardt, Chelmno and the Warthegau, the 'second sweep' in the Soviet Union, and the 1941 escalations, including by Croatia and Romania. There was a transport pause from mid-December, most killing actions 'locally' were also paused.
There are also a host of documents counting the remaining Jews in work-ghettos, camps and regions, for the turn of 1942/43, contrasted with a huge volume of documents counting Jewish communities and ghettos before the onslaughts, earlier in 1942, with all the many German documents, contemporary non-German reports, diaries, letters and eyewitness testimonies explaining the decrease: mass murder with a side order of 'natural' deaths from harsh conditions and underfeeding in camps and ghettos.
(Anticipating Aktion 1005 in 1943-44, on top of these Jewish deaths we need also to consider the terror actions against Poles, euthanasia in Poland and the USSR, terror actions in the USSR, and especially the mass starvation of Soviet POWs coupled with their executions as commissars/undesirables, including singling out Jewish soldiers.)
The properly historical approach and question to revisionists would be, what evidence do you have that as of the end of 1942, before the onset of mass cremations at many sites or the start of really systematic cremation at Treblinka, the Jews reported as murdered and which have disappeared from before/after comparison documents were in fact alive or dead anywhere else?
Can any of this be quantified?
If the answer is 'dog ate my homework, don't have any, let me vaguebook excuses and make up numbers without any hard evidence' then we can proceed to consider 1943 cremations knowing you guys are full of shit.
