Seems Roberto Muehlenkamp isn't impressed. Here is one quote from his latest blog entry.
What is worse than these and other ongoing blunders (or falsehoods), as concerns Mattogno's scholarship, is that Mattogno continues peddling his claim that "the alleged activity of Blobel at Chełmno is not confirmed by any document, but only by a single testimony, that of Rudolf Höss, the commandant of Auschwitz (confirmed, long after the fact, by one of the architects of the Auschwitz crematoria, Walter Dejaco)" (section 8.2, page 76), conveniently omitting the testimonies of Fritz Ismer and Julius Bauer, which are mentioned in Hoffmann's book and in my blog Mattogno on Chełmno Cremation (Part 1).
Here is what Ismer said, as quoted by Roberto.
Chełmno became Blobel’s experimentation site for devices and methods of which those considered efficient were later applied at other extermination camps and at the massacre sites of mobile killing units in the occupied Soviet territories. He tried fire bombs, but these caused large fires in the surrounding woods[12]. According to Höß he also tried blowing up the bodies, with unsatisfactory results. [13] Another of Blobel’s creations was presented to a number of high-ranking SS-officers (SS–Obersturmbannführer Höß, SS-Untersturmführer Hößler and SS-Untersturmführer Dejaco) during a visit to Chełmno on 16.09.1942, mentioned by Höß[14] and in a report prepared by Dejaco on 17.09.1942. [15] At the trial against Dejaco and Ertl in Vienna in 1972, Dejaco described the device as having had the aspect of a round coal furnace (Kohlenmeiler) and a diameter of 4 to 6 meters, in which the corpses had been burned alternated with layers of wood. Blobel is supposed to have stated that the installation was not suitable for rapid corpse cremation because combustion was slow, but that the principle of alternating corpses and wood should be maintained.[16] Yet another Blobel contraption was described by SS-man Fritz Ismer, a member of the Chełmno staff. When working on the removal of the mass graves at Chełmno, this witness had watched an experiment in which Blobel had attempted to set corpses in a mass grave on fire with a flamethrower-like apparatus that the witness described as having the aspect of an enlarged blow torch. The flame had not been very strong, and the witness concluded that the experiment must have failed. He had heard of no further experiments by Blobel. However, he added, "We in time developed a certain technique in burning corpses on the grids<" ("Wir entwickelten aber im Laufe der Zeit eine gewisse Technik bei der Leichenverbrennung auf den Rosten).[17]
Here are the footnotes.
[12] Yitzhak Arad, Belzec, Sobibor, Treblinka. The Operation Reinhard Death Camps, Indiana University Press, Bloomington and Indianapolis 1987 (hereinafter "Arad, Reinhard"), p. 171; see also the blog "The Germans wouldn’t have done it that way".
[13]Höß, Endlösung, Kommandant in Auschwitz p. 244.
[14] As above.
[15] Reisebericht über die Dienstfahrt nach Litzmannstadt, Nuremberg Document NO-4467.
[16] Jean-Claude Pressac, Os Crematórios de Auschwitz. A Maquinaria do Assassínio em Massa (hereinafter "Pressac, Crematórios"). Translated by António Moreira, 1993 Editorial Notícias, Lisbon, p. 100.
[17] Hoffmann, Aktion 1005, p. 81 (interrogation of Fritz Ismer on 1 August 1961, criminal case 141 Js 204/60 Vol. 4, fl. 1419ff.).
So how did Arad know about what was going on in Clemno with faulty experiments setting fire to woods? Probably based on some trial testimony. Googlebooks didn't have page 171 of Arad's book available for preview. However, anytime someone says, ACCORDING TO HOESS, I have to be wary because we all know Hoess was tortured into signing his confession and that a lot of other nazis were tortured and threatened. The 13th and 14th footnotes come from Hoess so we can ignore that. 16th footnote comes from Pressac. As for Ismer himself, I don't think anyone knows what happened to him in terms of what year he died or what he was even sentenced to. I can't find anything. But just because Hoess was tortured as were other nazis, we shouldn't just throw out confessions as soon as exterminationists would accept them. Just sit on the fence and keep digging on a particular affidavit. We know Hoess is compromised because we have it on record that his torture was admitted. So revisionists win on that front. Even Bernard Clarke admitted it in his book. So my question is, is there anything comparable to that with regards to Ismer?
Also, Roberto takes issue with Mattogno allegedly inflating the average weight of the jewish camp inmate in order to justify a necessity for a large quantity of wood to burn the bodies which no one saw. Roberto says no one saw this much wood, because it wasn't needed.
As concerns cremation logistics, Mattogno had in the Italian version (section 9.2, pp. 114-15) calculated that the burning of 145,000 corpses would have required 21,750 tons of wood, assuming 150 kg of wood for a corpse with an average weight of 45 kg at the time of cremation (down from an assumed average life weight of 60 kg, as a part of the corpses had lain in mass graves some months before being burned).
My calculations, based on a life weight assumption closer to the reality of starving Polish ghettos than Mattogno’s flagrantly unrealistic 60 kg, on the weight loss due to dehydration of the corpses that had been buried prior to cremation, and on the wood-to-carcass weight ratios achieved in the animal carcass burning experiments by Dr. Lothes and Dr. Profé in the early 19th Century (which Mattogno ignored and continues ignoring in this context, even though it was his mention of these experiments in Combustion Experiments with Flesh and Animal Fat that brought them to my attention), point to a requirement of ca. 2,451 metric tons of dry wood or 4,657 tons of fresh wood for burning the corpses of the about 150,000 people killed in the first phase of extermination operations at Chełmno, between December 1941 and March 1943 (see the blog Mattogno on Chełmno Cremation (Part 2), figures in tables 2.11 and 2.12).
In the English version of his Chełmno book (section 9.2, p. 89), Mattogno further inflates his already overblown calculations of wood requirements by assuming, pursuant to considerations in the Sobibor book by Mattogno, Graf and Kues, that the corpses weighed 60 kg on average at the time they were cremated and that the wood used was fresh wood with a calorific value of only 2,000 kcal/kg. He thus arrives at a wood requirement of 53,000 metric tons for the cremation of 152,000 corpses (350 kg per corpse), more than ten times the amount I calculated for 150,000 corpses assuming the use of fresh wood. Instead of becoming more realistic, Mattogno’s figures have become even more unreasonable than they were before.
Even if Mattogno is engaging in gymnastics, which he may be, what about Roberto? From Thomas Dalton.
"Muehlenkamp also accepts the average weight of Provan's group - 77 pounds - as representative of the mass of Jews. In other words, miniature people.
In terms of volume density, Provan claims to have packed eight people into 0.42 cubic meters, equivalent to a density of 19 per cubic meter. Muehlenkamp generously uses only 15 per cubic meter in his subsequent calculations. The reader is invited to build a one cubic meter box out of wood, find 15 of the skinniest people around, even 15 children, and try to fit them all in.
Since the Jews were miniature people, the bloggers claim, their bodies decayed more quickly, leaving less mass to be burned away to nothing. In order to estimate wood and ash conditions we need an idea of how much wood it takes to cremate a given unit of organic flesh; in other words, what is the nominally required 'wood to flesh' ratio? Revisionst estimates run from 3.5 : 1 up to 11:1. So the complete burning, down to ash, of a 45 kg corpse would take between 158 and 495 kg of wood.
Muehlenkamp thinks it much easier to burn rotting flesh. After running through some analytical gyrations he decides the range is only between 1:1 and 2:1 (We can assume the mid range value of 1.5:1). For death camp like conditions this is highly unlikely. To be taken seriously, the bloggers would have to conduct careful experiments under scientific conditions to prove this claim.
MUehlenkamp then argues that the corpses decayed down to 25kg each, in contrast to the revisionist 45kg. Based on his 1.5:1 ratio, it only takes him 38kg of wood to burn a typical body - merely one quarter of the minimum revisionist requirement. Consequently, only one quarter of the ash is produced (see Muehlenkamp 2006b). This, then, is the essence of the traditionalist reply, such as it is: tiny, easily burned bodies. At best this only alleviates the problems, it doesn't eliminate them.
However, Muehlenkamp claims to have found a scientific report that justifies his lower ratios. And Mattogno still is ignoring this.
holocaustcontroversies.blogspot.com/2009/12/animal-carcass-burning-experiments-by.html
As far as I know, I have heard of nothing from Thomas Dalton on this report. Has any revisionist addressed these? If so, can someone give me a link. If not, then how come?