While I have never debated with Mr. Harrison, I did make several observations of his post. Let us see where the fallacies really are.
1. 'The fact that there is no evidence that the Reinhardt Camps were transit camps is not evidence that they were not transit camps'. This argument is a perverse application of Carl Sagan's dictum that 'absence of evidence is not evidence of absence'.
As far as I know, most revisionists accept that there is not complete documentation to support our resettlement thesis, but that there certainly exists evidence from which allows us to make a reasonable judgment. Mattogno goes more into this in his Treblinka work which we will come back to later.
The dictum was infamously deployed by Donald Rumsfeld in 2003 to claim that absence of WMD being found in Iraq is not evidence that WMD were never present. It has also been deployed in medical discussions, such as here, to claim that the failure of a product to produce a demonstrable effect is not evidence that such effects are always absent. Such claims have been debunked brilliantly by Dr. Marvin J. Schissel here. Schissel points out that:While absence of evidence is not absolute evidence of absence, it is generally evidence of a high probability of absence.
Really? Odd that a believer would express such sentiment, especially when such logic would cut the Holocaust story in half.
No more Hitler order.
No more Zyklon-B homicidal gas chambers.
No more CO gas chambers.
No more 1-2 million Einsatz victims.
No more gas vans.
With reference to the Reinhardt camps, we do, of course, have a convergence of evidence
Ah yes, the magical convergence of evidence! Let's see where it takes us, and hopefully not down the road with Dachau gas chambers and Treblinka steam chambers.
from transport records
It would greatly help his case if Mr. Harrison were to provide a little more elaboration here. Does he focus on the shipments to the Reinhardt camps? If so, how do simple transport records show mass murder?
A leap of the strongest faith, and of the weakest evidence.
And what does Mr. Harrison have to say regarding the records of Jews not to these 'death camps', but to points further east?
contemporary documents
Again, it would help his case if Mr. Harrison were to narrow just what contemporary documents he is referring to.
the Korherr Report
Which offers no proof of 'exterminations' but rather of transportations.
This has been discussed various times at this forum.
the Hoefle Telegram
Much like the Korherr report, its more favorable to transportation instead of 'exterminaton'.
eyewitnesses, perpetrators and site investigations which shows, beyond reasonable doubt, that over a million Jews were murdered at the camps.
General evidentiary statements will not do to show anything. All these forms of evidence have been dealt with by revisionists, and shown to be absurd.
Revisionists have had over sixty years in which to find records of tranports taking Jews from the camps to the USSR, or records of resettlement, or even eyewitnesses of such resettlement, but have been unable to uncover any such evidence.
On the contrary, evidence has been found. Here are a few exceprts from Mattogno's book showing such. http://vho.org/dl/ENG/t.pdf
"Therefore, of the 217,748 Jews evacuated, 35,810 came to the Lublin district and 75,312 to the eastern territories. Nearly half of the total – 106,626 Jews – were lodged in the ghettos of Theresienstadt and Litzmannstadt.
Do the deportations into the eastern territories and the Lublin district constitute the prelude to a policy of extermination? The transport lists cited permit us to answer the question with an unequivocal NO. Even after the opening of the so-called eastern extermination camps, most of the transports were conducted particularly into the regions, in which there were Jewish residential settlements.
For example, after the commencement of operations in Bełżec, approximately 30 transports arrived in such areas. In almost the same way, between the opening of Sobibór and the arrival of the first transports in that camp (June 1, 1942), many were reaching these areas and a further six after this date. Furthermore, after the opening of Sobibór, at least 20 transports had as their destination locales situated farther to the east of it. And not only that: After Treblinka began operations on July 23, 1942, at least 15 transports were headed for zones located farther eastward. It is valid to suggest that the direct
transports to Minsk arrived first in Warsaw and ran over the Siedlce-
Czeremcha-Wolkowusk line, so that they were traveling past Treblinka at a distance of approximately 80 km (Siedlce railway station) and about 140 km from Sobibór."
(p.245)
"On April 29, 1942, the German embassy in Bratislava (Pressburg) sent the Slovakian government a verbal note containing the following:
“The Jews who have been transported out and those yet to be transported
out of the territory of Slovakia into Reich territory will be coming
into the General Gouvernement and into the occupied eastern territories
after preparation and retraining for work assignment. The accommodation,
feeding, clothing, and retraining of the Jews, including their relatives,
is incurring expenses, which cannot presently be covered from the initially
small labor output of the Jews, because the retraining bears results only
after some time and because only a portion of the Jews, who have been and who are going to be transported, is capable of working.”
(p.247)
There is no reason of any kind to doubt that the indications of a program
for renewed deportation of the Jews to the east correspond to the truth. This is incidentally confirmed by an article of October 16, 1942, in the Israelitisches Wochenblatt für die Schweiz (Israelite Weekly for Switzerland). The paper reported:
740
“For some time there has been a trend toward dissolution of the ghettos
in Poland. That was the case with Lublin, then it was Warsaw’s turn. It is
not known how far the plan has being carried out already. The former
residents of the ghetto are going farther to the east into the occupied Russian territory; Jews from Germany were brought into the ghetto to partlytake their place."
(p.254)
Citing the major 1943 demographic study by International Labour Office member Prof. Eugene M. Kulischer, Kulischer writes:
"“Some of the Jews from Belgium were sent to a neighbouring part of
Western Europe for forced labour, but generally speaking the tendency has been to remove the Jews to the east. Many Western European Jews were reported to have been sent to the mines of Silesia. The great majority were sent to the General Government and, in ever growing numbers, to the eastern area, that is, to the territories which had been under Soviet rule since September 1939 and to the other occupied areas of the Soviet Union. During the early period, deportation meant removal to the General Government, but since 1940 the deported Jews have tended more and more to be sent exclusively to ghettos and labour camps.”
(p.271)
Looking for names? Here is some from Sobibor:
"Cato Polak, deported on March 10, 1943, remained in Sobibór one or two
hours and was then transferred to Lublin with 30 women and 12 men. They returned home to Holland by way of Trawniki – Auschwitz – Bergen-Belsen – Theresienstadt.757 Bertha Jansen-Ensel and Judith Eliazar, who had arrived in Sobibór on March 10, 1943, were likewise transferred to Lublin. Both returned to their homeland via Auschwitz. Although they had alluded to gas chambers and cremations, they declared:758
“Sobibor was no camp, rather a transit camp.”
Jules Schelvis, deported to Sobibór on June 1, 1943, was transferred to
Trawniki three hours after his arrival there and returned to Holland via Auschwitz.
759
Mirjam Penha-Blitz gave a statement that was summarized as follows:760
“Deported by train from Westerbork on March 10, 1943. Arrival in Sobibor
about March 13, 1943 (via Birkenau – without a stop – to Sobibor).”
Four or five hours after arrival at the camp, the witness was deported to
Lublin. Her return home occurred via Birkenau.
Sientje and Jetje Veterman, sent to Sobibór on April 6, 1943, were sorted
out together with 28 other women for work and transferred to Trawniki with them. They returned to the Netherlands by way of Auschwitz-Birkenau.761
Elias Alex Cohen, deported to Sobibór on March 17, 1943, spent only a
few hours in the camp and was sent to Lublin with 35 other Jews.762 Sophie
Verduin, deported on March 10, 1943, was transferred to Lublin after a few
hours; her return home to Holland took place by way of Auschwitz-Birkenau.
763
Jozef Wins de Heer, deported on May 11, 1943, went from Sobibór to
Doruhucza. He returned home to the Netherlands by way of Lublin-Majdanek.
764"(p.259-260)
And from Treblinka:
"In the official compilations of the interrogations,872 which we have in our possession, the names of the witnesses have been rendered unreadable, so that we refer to the respective date, on which the interrogation occurred.
Interrogation of December 12, 1979: The witness was deported in April
1943 from Warsaw to Treblinka. On the next day he was transferred to Majdanek, where he spent 6-7 days; afterward he went to Budzyn for approximately a year. From Budzyn he was sent to Wieliczka (in the vicinity of Krakow), from there to Flossenbürg in mid-1944, and finally to Leitmeritz.
Interrogation of December 17, 1979: the witness was deported from Krakow to Płaszów, and from there to Auschwitz. After that he went to Oranienburg and finally to Flossenbürg. He stated that he spent one single day in Treblinka without giving details.
Interrogation of January 3, 1980: the witness was taken prisoner in May
1943 in Warsaw and sent directly to Majdanek, from where he was later transferred to Budzyn.
Interrogation of March 7, 1980: The witness was deported in April 1943
from Warsaw to Treblinka, where he remained for only one day; afterwards he was transferred along with 180 other prisoners to Majdanek. After two days the trip continued to Budzyn, where he spent two years. He was liberated by
the Soviets from an unnamed German concentration camp.
Interrogation of March 11, 1980: the witness was sent to Treblinka in April
1943, where he remained for only a day. Transfer to Majdanek, thence to
Budzyn, where he was interned for about a year. Liberated on May 5, 1945, from Mauthausen.
Interrogation of July 18, 1980: the witness was deported on April 18, 1943, from Warsaw to Majdanek. After 5 weeks he went to Auschwitz and then –toward the end of 1944 – to Gusen (a subcamp of Mauthausen) where he was liberated.
The verdict of the Jury Court of Düsseldorf determined, plainly and
clearly, on September 3, 1965, that
“coming from Treblinka, several thousand people are said to have arrived
at other camps.”87"
(p.286-87)
Postcards were also written by those resettled to the East and sent back to their families. Of course believers charge these to be frauds, on little evidence to do so.
3. 'The story keeps changing'. As with the burden of proof fallacy, this claim appeals to an audience that is ignorant of historical method, legal procedure and the sociology of knowledge. There is no historical event which is currently interpreted in exactly the same way that it was in 1945. Demanding that the Holocaust 'story' remains static is thus bone-headed.
Speaking of remaining static, how is that one can lower death toll by nearly 3 million at just one camp (Auschwitz), and remain at six million? What about the others such as Majdanek where the estimate has changed from 1.4 million (Dawidowicz) to now some 78,000? What happened to those 1.3 million victims? Coem back to life?
It isn't so much that the history is changing that bothers revisionists. Of course we realize that like any historical event, it will continually be revised. Yet how can something undergo such dramatic changes, and with the importation of new discoveries (such as lack of cyanide on gas chamebr walls) undergo a more fundamental change of history?
4. 'The Soviets lied about Katyn and the Ukrainian famine so they could have fabricated the Holocaust and lied about that too.' This fallacy ignores two obvious facts. Firstly, evidence of Katyn and the famine did reach the west, both at the time and since
And yet the West sat quietly as eyewitnesses testified to the supposed Nazi murders at Katyn, while the real culprits walked.
and the Russians did eventually admit to Katyn in the post-Glasnost era,
Yeah, more than 40 years later. And as with the Demjanjuk, it shows that the Soviets were not reluctant to fabricate documents when they so wished.
5. 'The allies fabricated propaganda of German atrocities in World War I so obviously did so in World War II as well.' There is no evidence cited to support this claim, and it ignores the fact that many Nazi atrocities were documented by the Nazis themselves. Deniers are falsely equating atrocity stories from WWI that never had supporting evidence with a historical record from WWII that contains an overwhelming convergence of evidence.
While I would like to see more evidence for his "Nazi atrocities were documented by the Nazis themselves" claim, there most certainly was evidence of Allied atrocity propaganda against the Germans.
Victor-Cavendish Bentinck, chief of British Joint Intelligence Committee during World War II wrote in a a secret memo:
"In my opinion it is incorrect to describe Polish Information regarding German atrocities as "trustworthy". The Poles, and to a far greater extent the Jews, tend to exaggerate German atrocities in order to stoke us up. They seem to have succeeded.
Mr. Allen and myself have both followed German atrocities quite closely. I do not believe that there is any evidence which would be accepted in a Law Court that Polish children have been killed on the spot by Germans when their parents were being deported to work in Germany, nor that Polish children have been sold to German settlers. As regards putting Poles to death in gas chambers, I do not believe that there is any evidence that this has been done. There have been many stories to this effect, and we have played them up in P.W.E. rumours without believing that they had any foundation. At any rate there is far less evidence than exists for the mass murder of Polish officers by the Russians at Katyn. On the other hand we do know that the Germans are out to destroy Jews of any age unless they are fit for manual labour.
I think that we weaken our case against the Germans by publicly giving credence to atrocity stories for which we have no evidence. These mass executions in gas chambers remind me of the story of employment of human corpses during the last war for the manufacture of fat, which was a grotesque lie and led to the true stories of German enormities being brushed aside as being mere propaganda."
http://fpp.co.uk/Auschwitz/docs/Cavendish/Bentinck.html
