Re: Why does SanityCheck evade the Physical Evidence Question?
Posted: Mon Feb 09, 2026 11:00 am
Actually, we have considerable numbers of such statements for Treblinka and Belzec especially, where the stench of decomposition was greatest. You may wish to check out Jacob Flaws' recent book Spaces of Treblinka (2024), especially Chapter 5 A Sensory Space, just as a starting point for this particular angle, but it is also addressed in the literature on Belzec, and continues to accumulate with the turn to studying these camps in their local context, during the war and afterwards.Callafangers wrote: ↑Mon Feb 09, 2026 2:07 am Nor does this explain why we have so few witness statements from the thousands of Polish residents and others surrounding these camps (not even post-war), when you allege there should have been non-stop foul/acrid smoke blowing into their windows for months/years at a time as they ate dinner with their families, with a relentless mushroom-cloud-of-death clearly as the culprit, just a few miles from their homes and local businesses. See: viewtopic.php?p=20087#p20087
For Treblinka, the complaints reached the local Wehrmacht commandant, Ortskommandantur Ostrow, who reported "that the Jews in Treblinka are not sufficiently buried and therefore an unbearable smell of corpses befouls the air", as noted in the war diary of the quartermaster of the Wehrmacht commander of the Government-General.
As before, you're misapplying falsifiability to the temporal physical situation: in effect you're arguing that for any mass grave no matter the cause of death to be open for inspection and investigation in perpetuity, otherwise historical claims about them are not legitimate/scientific. If you qualify this by saying only mass graves which failed to meet a particular standard of past investigation or documentation can be legitimately/scientifically sealed off and treated as cemeteries/memorials, then this still extends to masses more cases than your apparent desired targets (Nazi extermination camps). The very act of establishing a memorial, a widespread practice, would somehow render historical claims about mass graves illegitimate.Now, back to the matter of falsifiability: you seem to believe that we could find evidence reflecting millions of corpses buried under the AR camps. OK, well then entertain me: how exactly could we conceivably (in-practice) prove your theory as false?
We both know this isn't possible. Beyond the laws/policies preventing this, the camps have 'monuments' installed over them which now prevent further excavation from ever occurring again. This means your view is not falsifiable, which means it isn't legitimate/scientific.
(This position of yours incidentally ignores the problems with mass slaughters in urban built environments, where burial sites may simply have been built over with the growth of a city or town, or be buried deeply inside cities, although this precise scenario is why archaeologists might be called out to excavate significantly older burial sites uncovered during construction and the digging of foundations.)
My position, and that of the mainstream as a whole, is that evidence reflecting large-scale burial and mass cremation has been found at the AR camps and Chelmno. This was found in the 1940s while the numbers were revised through other means (written records) subsequently; and confirmed by archaeological investigations over the past forty years (starting with Chelmno). The use of historic air photos and mapping techniques are a further part of this work; they obviously weren't available in 1945 to the Polish investigations. For some sites, memorials overlapping with the grave areas were erected sixty years ago (Treblinka); for Belzec and Sobibor, investigations were done prior to the erection of memorials.
The argument is thus about the interpretation of historical-temporal records of physical evidence (1940s investigations etc and more recent archaeological investigations), as part of interpreting a much larger set of source material. This is no different in principle to interpreting other sets of mixed historical sources about other events, including of other massacres. But those must by your logic be as 'falsifiable' as the AR camps, otherwise you're misapplying falsifiability here. And we've seen from your Waterloo debacle what happens when you assume that checks could be made in the present of past mass graves that turn out to have become unrecoverable due to past historical processes (filching bones).
The current cycle of revisionist arguments about the AR camps especially kicked off with two strikingly contrasting developments. On the one hand, there was the Richard Krege fiasco from the denier side, asserting boldly that GPR scans showed no disturbance in the ground around the memorials at Treblinka since the last ice age. That was so overblown it was quietly dropped in the 2000s, despite evident endorsements (articles in revisionist journals edited and published by Germar Rudolf, the mention of an intent to disseminate Krege's results in the same publication series, in the introduction of M&G's Treblinka right through to the 2024 ARMREG edition).
On the other hand, Carlo Mattogno reacted to the publication of Andrzej Kola's investigation of Belzec in 2000 with vol.9 of the Holocaust Handbooks series, originally published in June 2004. The arguments ever since have been about a now historical investigation between 1997 and 1999. How to interpret the Kola team's findings? Matttogno's apparent acceptance of the Kola results but modification of their implications to argue for very few bodies being buried in enormous mass grave areas have not been that convincing, as we see every time bombsaway raises a skeptical eyebrow at a revisionist asserting that a conveniently low fraction of the number deported there were buried in the graves.
You continue with this vibe-based convenience-driven take when you say "corpses should have also ended up at these sites under a revisionist framework". Apparently all one needs is a 'revisionist framework', not any actual empirical evidence from historical sources. You have to resort to this routine, pretending these were prehistoric sites predating the availability of written records, because the historical sources are totally against you. You end up with a circular argument whereby your interpretation of the archaeological evidence from 1997-1999 supposedly refutes the historical sources and yet still requires you to say something to explain away the evidence of human remains and cremains, without having anything to back up the assertion (as seen from Stubble, Kues and others, maybe conceding 5% or some other low figure).
Which is why in almost 22 years since Mattogno's Belzec, revisionists are no better off than they were in 2004, having failed to revise the history or located the whereabouts of the deportees, or seemingly even bothered to look.
Mattogno was ignorant in 2004 of the 2001 publication of the Hoefle telegram, which specified a figure of 434,000 as the 'Zugang' to B[elzec] in 1942, which given the closure of the camp placed a definitive maximum on the potential number of victims. This revised the maximum down to 72% of the 1945 estimate of 600,000. Mattogno was also ignorant of the full range of work on Eastern Galicia in particular available as of 2004, and made no mention of how killings there continued locally in 1943.
Thus, the mainstream 'hypothesis', historical explanation or historical narrative is actually not just about Belzec, but about the regions connected to it by deportations, with mass grave sites at the departure ends, becoming significantly larger for Eastern Galicia because of the 1943 elimination of ghettos and reduction of the Jewish population down from 161,000 to 21,000 (Korherr vs Katzmann report). Moreover, the mainstream explanation notes that many Jews deported to Belzec, especially from Eastern Galicia, died while trying to escape the trains, and thus their bodies never were anywhere near the mass graves investigated by Kola and his team. A proportion survived, most likely dying elsewhere, with 77 known survivors of train escapes. It can further note that cremation started in November 1942 according to reports, meaning that the 9,200-12,200 deportees in December 1942 were never buried, along with some portion of the 50-60,000 deportees in November 1942. Finally, the size of the Belzec camp workforce likely increased around this time to meet the labour demands of burning the bodies, going by reports from 1943 noting thousands of Jewish workers there. All of this is noted already in conventional studies, with reexamination always possible to clarify and sharpen the picture. (Stubble, 'build your own Holocaust' = doing research. That happens for all largescale events and has happened with the Holocaust.)
Further research can examine whether graves of train-jumpers along the railway lines were located after the war, as has been found for some graves on the lines towards Treblinka, suggesting thousands were so buried. The scrutiny of reports of killings of fugitive Jews further afield would also indicate if deportees escaped for a short while then were killed elsewhere. Currently it is not thought that anyone deported to Belzec was selected for a labour camp or that there were any such selections en route; this is always revisable if new evidence comes to light.
Already thirty years ago, Dieter Pohl could note that research to the 1990s had identified at least 179 mass shootings in the Galicia district, together with 129 deportations conducted also with shootings, concentrated then at final railheads into at least 65 deportation transports to Belzec. One of which was the Kolomea-Belzec transport that saw massive attempts to escape, the guards run out of ammunition, and a quarter of the 8000+ deportees failing to break out and reported as DOA.
This brings us back to the vaguebooking of "corpses should have also ended up at these sites under a revisionist framework" , and to the question of why the fuck revisionists have remained stuck on the camps and not sought to fully falsify the conventional historical explanation of violent deportations converging on a camp, by showing where the dead who you argue were never buried or never cremated at the camp actually ended up.
Your position ends up with 'unfalsifiable' appeals to vague background conditions and generalisations ('Jews went where Jews are', transports were routine in wartime and thus passed unnoticed, etc). It just sets up the doom loop in which online discussion has been for 20+ years.
'Technical arguments', most certainly including Rudolf's blether, run into this wall constantly. That much was obvious to me way back when and nothing you guys have argued ever since, whether in the Holocaust Handbooks or on forums, has changed that. Appealing to technical arguments doesn't change the overall outcome, which is the vanishing from the historical record of communities, transports and individuals, last recorded en route to these camps or arriving at these camps. In which case one can stand back and point this out, leaving revisionists to splutter the same platitudes as the last hundred times this was pointed out to them. The 'technical arguments' won't become more convincing by being elaborated at ever greater length or reasserted over and over.
And yet, in the same time of the past 20 or so years, my knowledge of actual physical evidence for killings in the Holocaust has increased, along with my knowledge of sources about the camps, including further recent archaeological investigations as well as the postwar condition of the sites, and wartime sources on smell, stench, cremation at them.
