Come on.Nessie wrote: ↑Fri Oct 25, 2024 7:04 amVrba is corroborated about, and is therefore being truthful that Himmler visited the camp and that there were air raids. His credibility, however, is reduced by getting the dates wrong. That does not serious damage his testimony, because most people are poor at remembering dates. We also know that Vrba was actively gathering testimony from others, so much of what he relates is hearsay, he did not see it and so its accuracy is likely to be diminished.Archie wrote: ↑Fri Oct 25, 2024 3:48 am"Revisionist beliefs"?Nessie wrote: ↑Thu Oct 24, 2024 3:38 pm By "known facts" you mean revisionist beliefs that the gassings and cremations were physically impossible and there are no mass graves. That is not corrobroation. Corroboration comes from other contemporaneous evidence. When a Jewish prisoner and Nazi guard both state they saw gassings, that is corrobroation. When a Polish railworker and a Nazi document both record regular mass transports arriving at a location, that is corroboration.
You then dismiss all the witnesses who say they saw mass gassings, thousands being cremated at a time on pyres and mass graves, as liars, because you do not think they are credible claims.
No. By known facts, I mean known facts. Nessie, if you are not going to be reasonable, then you can move along.
Example 1: It is known that Himmler visited Auschwitz in the summer of 1942 and it is also known that the Birkenau crematoria were completed in 1943. Vrba claimed that Himmler came to Auschwitz for a special inaugural gassing at the new crematoria. But when Himmler was there the crematoria hadn't been built yet. Vrba's story is therefore contradicted by known facts.
Example 2: Vrba claimed that he hid in a woodpile during his escape. And he describes an air raid while he was in the woodpile. But there was no air raid at Auschwitz in April 1944. The first bombing of Auschwitz was August 20, 1944. The story is therefore contradicted by known facts.
You have not dealt with corroboration. You have merely shown that he got dates wrong. On the events he is relating, he is corroborated. Memory and hearsay explain why he got the dates wrong. Vrba remains an important witness to general events at the camp and as one of the earliest reports. His testimony does not support revisionist claims that the Kremas had another purpose other than gassings and that there were regular mass transports back out of the camp, of people not selected to work at the camp.
This is not "getting the dates wrong." This is fabricating an elaborate scenario that we KNOW for a fact DID NOT HAPPEN.
Vrba goes on for like three pages about this in his book.
Nessie claims Vrba's story is "truthful" because Himmler did visit the camp. He ignores that Vrba is explicitly claiming another visit. ("visited Auschwitz Camp AGAIN in January, 1943" and "the plans he had outlined in Auschwitz seven months earlier", i.e. in summer of 1942).In fact he [Himmler] was far from satisfied with what he had seen, but it was not the appalling conditions which worried him. It was the grossly inefficient methods which were being used to exterminate the Jews who were beginning to arrive in their thousands from all parts of Europe.
The gas chambers were no more than makeshift affairs. The burning of the bodies in open trenches wasted valuable fuel and caused the Germans who by that time occupied the nearby Polish town of Auschwitz to complain of the stench. To a former teacher of mathematics, the whole business was just too haphazard for words.
And so he gave orders for the greatest, most efficient extermination factory the world has ever known. For the modern concrete gas chambers and the vast crematoria that could absorb as many as 12,000 bodies in twenty-four hours and, in fact, did so. For the machinery that sucked in 2,500,000 men, women and children in three years and puffed them out in harmless black smoke.[...]
Heinrich Himmler visited Auschwitz Camp again in January, 1943. This time I was glad to see him arrive, though not because I still nursed any faint hope that he would improve our lot through benevolence or any sense of justice.[...]
The main purpose of his visit was to see for himself the bricks and mortar which had sprung from the plans he had outlined in Auschwitz seven months earlier.
He was to watch the world's first conveyor belt killing, the inauguration of Commandant Hoess's brand new toy, his crematorium. It was truly a splendid affair, one hundred yards long and fifty yards wide, containing fifteen ovens which could burn three bodies each simultaneously in twenty minutes, a monument in concrete, indeed, to its builder, Herr Walter Dejaco.
This story obviously fails corroboration. Vrba is writing FICTION.
Here is a relevant exchange from the Zundel trial.
When he is caught in the lie, then he tries to say he "heard" it was Himmler and saw the car and so he just assumed. There is not so much as a whiff of this uncertainty in the book. In the book, he tells us what Himmler was thinking, etc.Q: Now, did you say you were witness to a visit by Heinrich Himmler in January 1943?
A: I was witness to two visits by Heinrich Himmler--one was July 1942 when I saw him from quite close.
Q: Where?
A: In Auschwitz I. And the second visit took place some time in '43, but I did not see him directly. I saw his cavalcade, so if it was Hitler or someone else sitting in the car of similar significant dignitary--
Q: Well, I put it to you that Heinrich Himmler, in the Calendarium of the camp that you so far accepted as accurate, visited on the 7th of March, 1941, and the 17th of July, 1942; but he did not visit the camp of Birkenau or Auschwitz in 1943, as you allege in your book.
A: I was informed at that time by grapevine in the camp that Himmler is coming to visit the camp again, and then there was a cavalcade equipped as if it would be Himmler -- in other words, the standard Mercedes and the standard sycophants constantly around, but he didn't come to shake hands with me and to introduce himself to me or to say, "I am Himmler", or he didn't tell me, you know, "Himmler didn't come this time but I am instead of his and this is my name." So you might be quite right that that information might be not perfectly exact, on close to exact.
The Nessie method is actually just to use motivated reasoning to decide what is "truthful" and "corroborated" and work back from that.