An honest discussion of the holocaust story, in so much as it is even possible, is very touchy and could be disruptive to the group. Knowing I was right I did not want to back down but I also did not want to create a contentious atmosphere that could be disruptive of the groups future so I proceeded slowly. At a later meeting I passed a brief description of the holocaust storyline to a single individual who I thought might be open minded enough to recognize how screwy it is. It is a description that I posted on this forum before and will repeat below.
Prominent in that description is Yankiel Wiernik's claim that at Treblinka, Jews were gassed and then burned, not cremated, just burned. Wiernik claims that no fuel was necessary the bodies just burned to ashes. As far as I can tell Wiernik's tale is the accepted holohax description of the Treblinka "death camp". There are very few individuals who claimed to have survived Treblinka. None of these, as far as I've seen, ever gave a description of open air cremation that significantly differs from Wiernik's, His tale is impossible, therefore fictional. Later, the individual to whom I had given the paper responded. He began making changes to Wiernik's description of events. He did not make it clear what his source was but he must know of another alleged witness that I never heard of. If he just knew better himself without such a source he must have somehow been there.
There was one exception to the civility. One individual claimed that he knew someone who was with an Army unit that overran one of the camps in western Germany and saw "bodies in a crematoria." I tried to explain that no one any longer claims that there were mass executions in the camps in Germany proper. The so called death camps were more than 500 miles from western Germany and had all been overrun by Soviet forces at least four months before the first Allied troops ever set foot in western Germany. He called me a liar and said he wasn't going to listen to anything I had to say. He even started blubbering whenever I tried to speak. As a result I did not get a chance to ask him how these few corpses proved that almost six million people were murdered more than 500 miles away and three years to four months earlier. At a later meeting I tried to present him with copies of the USHMM descriptions of the operation of Bergen-Belsen, Buchenwald, and Dachau camps that do not claim mass executions took place in them. He refused to even pick up the papers.
As a side note: The USHMM description of Bergen-Belsen makes some surprising admissions. It acknowledges that less than 50,000 inmates died in the camp, all from disease and starvation caused by overcrowding and a lack of supplies. Ten's of thousands of these died in 1945 just months before it was occupied by the Allies and thirteen thousand died after Allied occupation. Of course the article does not mention that the lack of supplies was caused by Allied strafing and bombing of everything that moved in western Germany. Nor does it mention that Anne Frank was not killed but died of typhus in the camp hospital.
At our next meeting I will advise the group of this forum and this post and invite them to visit it and see what I had to say about them. I will also challenge them to support their position but advise them to try understand the holocaust storyline and its origins before they make a fool of themselves. Also, read the guidelines first.
The following is a brief description of the Holocaust. It is just the basic unembellished Holocaust story in its current form, ignoring previous versions. It is true to the story as I understand it, as much as possible exact and unbiased - unemotional. It is not Holocaust denial; it is not revisionism; it is just the "nuts and bolts" of story in brief.
Parts seem incredible or impossible but that is just the story. It's not something I added. I use "incredible" in the original sense of the word - not believable. In attempting to present the story accurately, I make statements as fact that are not necessarily my views.
What I'm trying to say is that this is the basic Holocaust storyline, but don't take anything I say as suggesting I'm stupid enough to believe it.
What Is the Holocaust?
The Holocaust is the allegation that during World War II the National Socialist government of Germany tried to kill everyone who they identified as a Jew. It is further claimed that this attempted genocide of Jews resulted in the death of 6,000,000 of their number.
When, where, and how did this happen? When, where, and how were 6,000,000 people murdered? This seems to be the place to start in understanding the Holocaust yet I was unable to find a clear tabulation of such information from Holocaust education organizations such as the United States Holocaust Memorial and Museum (USHMM) or Israel’s Yad Vashem. The only such list that I am aware of is from Raul Hilberg’s The Destruction of the European Jews. Table B-1, page 1219, of the 1985 edition of that work, is a summary of Holocaust deaths by camp or specific action. Five major groupings account for well over ninety percent of the victims. These categories are the Action Reinhardt killing centers, Einsatzgruppen executions, Auschwitz gas chambers, general deprivation in ghettos, and the Chelmno and Majdanek camps in Poland. I’ve added an “all other” to account for smaller numbers. The goupings are:Action Reinhardt (Treblinka, Belsec, Sobibor camps) – 1,500,000 gassing victims
The above total is short of the 6,000,000 but that doesn’t detract from the magnitude of the alleged crime.
Einsatzgruppen, executions in towns and villages – 1,300,000 firing squad victims
Auschwitz/ Birkenau – 1,000,000 mostly gassing victims
Ghettorization&Occupation – 800,000 general deprivation victims
Kulmhof/Chelmno and Lublin/Majdanek – 200,000 primarily gassing victims
All other including the well known camps in Germany – 300,000 of various causes
Total 5,100,000
Don't scrutinize the foregoing numbers for complete accuracy. They are just estimates by various researchers and methods. Despite claims that the Holocaust is well documented the opposite is true. There are very few holocaust related documents and most of those are subject to alternate interpretations. None of the executions whether by Einsatzgruppen, in gas chambers, or in the ghettos are clearly enumerated. There are no lists of victims. There is no count of the dead, not even a record of the number of times executions were carried out. The only documented deaths are from disease or other natural causes plus a few executions for disciplinary reasons.
This presentation is purposefully brief only the minimum information that is necessary to answer the questions of “when, where, and how” is presented.
Action Reinhardt Camps
Action Reinhardt with 1,500,000 victims is the largest of Hilberg’s categories. These victims were murdered in the death camps of Treblinka, Belzec, and Sobibor. Hilberg puts the respective deaths at 750,000, 550,000, and 200,000. Combined this is the most deadly Holocaust action. These three camps were located in what is today eastern Poland, not far from its current borders with Belarus and Ukraine. They began operation in March 1942 and were closed in the fall of 1943. These were pure extermination camps. Only prisoners needed to help run the camps were allowed to live. All others were executed immediately upon arrival. What is known about the operation of these camps is largely based on the reports of two Jews who claimed to have been forced laborers at Treblinka -Yankel Wiernik and Chil Rajchman.
In brief the operation was: Jews arrived in trains of twenty or more carloads, disembarked and were stripped of all possessions. The men were then separated from the women and children. Both groups were ordered to remove all clothes to take a shower. Instead they were then forced into a building where they were killed by a poisonous gas. Wiernik said it was diesel engine exhaust gas but Rajchman wasn’t sure. They were all dead within minutes and initially they were buried in large mass graves. In order to eliminate all evidence of this massive crime the later victims were cremated and the previously buried corpses were exhumed and also cremated. Since there were no crematory facilities at any of the Action Reinhardt camps open air cremation was used. The following is part of Rajchman’s description of the cremations:
“He [the “cremation expert”] had laid out more than thirty meters of railway gauge. Right on top of the ground a pair of concrete foundations were cast, both with a height of approximately 50 centimeters. … On top of the foundations six railway rails were placed, that was all. The expert ordered us to put women, particularly fat women, on the first layer on the roast, face down. The second layer could consist of whatever was brought – men, women or children – and so on, layer upon layer like a pyramid, up to a height of two meter.”
“… Then the “expert” ordered us to lay dry branches under the roast and to light them. Within a few minutes the fire would take so it was difficult to approach the crematorium from as far as fifty meters away.”
Wiernik provides a similar description of the cremation. His words were “The workers piled the corpses on the grate and set them on fire.” and “It turned out that bodies of women burned more easily than those of men. Accordingly, the bodies of women were used for kindling the fires.” The cremations resulted in only ashes leaving no recognizable human remains as evidence of the massive crime.
According to Holocaust historians, Belzec and Sobibor were operated the same way. There are very limited eye witness accounts of the operation of these camps. Apparently, the small number and lack of consistency in these accounts leads Holocaust scholars to the conclusion they were operated in the same manner as Treblinka. The United States Holocaust Museum and Memorial (USHMM) descriptions of operation of all three camps are brief but nearly identical.
Einsatzgruppen
The next largest category is the execution by firing squad – 1,300,000 victims. After Germany invaded the Soviet Union in June 1941 special squads called Einsatzgruppen -Operation Groups- rounded up Jews in towns and cities of Eastern Europe, marched them to the outskirts of town executed them and buried them in mass graves. Executions were carried out in groups of various sizes from a few individuals to groups of dozens, hundreds , or even thousands.
The best known execution of this type occurred at Babi Yar, a ravine on the outskirts of Kiev, Ukraine, where 33,000 of the city’s Jewish residents were executed and buried.
However, there are no mass graves to be examined.
In June 1942 Himmler ordered all evidence of the Einsatzgruppen executions destroyed. It is claimed that all bodies were exhumed and burned in a manner similar to the Treblinka cremations leaving absolutely no physical evidence that these million plus murder victims ever existed, not even in Babi Yar whose location is exactly known has any evidence of these murders been discovered.
Auschwitz/Birkenau
Auschwitz, located in what is now southern Poland, was the largest of the German concentration camps. It actually consisted of three camps – Auschwitz I, Auschwitz II (Birkenau), and Auschwitz III (Monowitz). Auschwitz II (Birkenau) was by far the largest of the three. It had the barracks that housed the majority of the inmates and also the four large crematoria/gas chambers.
Auschwitz is almost synonymous with the Holocaust. However, Hilberg found it was only the third most deadly of the major groupings. Here approximately 1,000,000 Jews were murdered in gas chambers between September 1941 and November 1944.
Despite claims of efficient mass murder methods, the so-called “machinery of death” was rather crude. Jews to be gassed were herded into rooms actually built as morgues – “leichenkellar” in German. These rooms had no plumbing thru which the poison gas was introduced. Specifically, they did not have the shower heads, fake or otherwise, often mentioned by Holocaust survivors. Instead, Zyclon B pellets were poured into the packed rooms through holes in the roofs or through windows. Hydrogen cyanide released from the pellets killed all occupants within minutes. Sondercommando workers entered the chambers immediately and carried the bodies to the crematoria located in the same building.
As previously noted there are absolutely no records of the exterminations at Auschwitz. Those deemed useful for labor were selected for registration in the camp and their lives and activities are well documented. All others were sent to the gas chambers. There is no indication that they were even counted. There is not even a record of how often the makeshift chambers were used.
Ghettorization & Occupation
Hilberg attributes 800,000 holocaust deaths to general deprivation primarily in ghettos established for Jews in all larger cities in Eastern Europe. Also, certain Jews from Germany proper were deported to Theresienstadt, a ghetto in the what is now the Czech Republic.
Ghettos existed pretty much from the beginning of German occupation until their retreat. Deaths resulted from disease caused by crowded conditions and general deprivation.
Kulmhof/Chelmno and Lublin/Majdanek
These two camps were similar to the Action Reinhardt camps. Majdanek comes up often the story but I know little about it. The same is true for the less often mentioned Chelmo. Since Hilberg claims 200,000 were killed in them but the USHMM has a death total of 600,000 there are obviously serious unanswered questions about them and there is not space in this summary to go into these questions.
All Others
The concentration camps in Germany proper are in the catch-all category of “All Other”. Total Jewish deaths in these camps were less than 150,000 . The majority of whom died of typhus in the last three months of the war as conditions throughout Germany and particularly these camps deteriorated due to Allied bombing. These were the camps liberated by the Western Allied forces in April and May 1945. The horrible conditions were filmed and used extensively in anti-German propaganda.
Again, there were a number of these camps but the limitations of this brief description does not permit further description.
Problems
I am trying to avoid holocaust denial but many parts of the story clearly violate natural law. Therefore they must be attributed to some supernatural being or force. To the religious that would be God or gods. To the non-religious it would simply be magic.
The first event that I came across that clearly violates natural law is the burning of corpses at Treblinka. It is totally inconsistent with natural law. Animal carcasses including human corpses will not burn as described.
Another such event is the ability of Sondercommando workers at Auschwitz to enter hydrogen cyanide filled chambers in to remove the bodies of Holocaust victims without themselves succumbing to the gas.
Yet another is the complete disappearance victims of the Einsatzgruppen shootings. The mass graves of these alleged victims just don’t exist and the excuse for their absence relies on the same impossible open air cremation tale that Wienik came up with for Treblinka.
There are numerous other incredible events in the story but most require some analysis to explain. The above just so obviously impossible.