Answer
They did use bullets to execute many people, but it was too slow and inefficient and they were needed for the war. (Well duh.) Also too many of the soldiers refused to murder civilians and POWs. Remarkably, not one of the 135 known cases of troops who refused to perform illegal executions were killed for their acts of resistance, although they were often punished severely.
Even the Nazis recognised that the average German soldier would not be up to the mass murder of tens of millions of prisoners and civilians, which is why they looked for more efficient, industrial methods of murder that didn't require large numbers of riflemen.
Tabun expensive and difficult to make which is why they only managed to make 12,500 tons. They had severe problems with it degrading during storage. The army wanted to keep it as a deterrent in case the Allies attacked with poison gas. It can be slow acting: even a fatal dose can take 1-2 hours to kill a person.
Cyanide-based Zyklon-B was much cheaper, could be purchased from civilian manufacturers as a ready-to-use product, was much easier to handle, and more certain in its effects: it killed in under 20 minutes. It was anything but inefficient. It was easy to handle, could be used with a minimum of training, it was much safer to dispose of the corpses (the Sonderkommandos typically only needed to wear gas masks to handle the dead).
Not all the dead, Jews and non-Jews, foudn their way into a crematoria?
Answer
Not all of the murdered Jews were cremated. Not even a majority. According to the German records themselves, the five crematoria at Auschwitz-Birkenau were capable of processing approximately 2-3000 bodies a day. (They had been designed to handle around 12,000 bodies per day, but simply failed to cope with that many.) They operated for about 18 months or so, so that gives around 1.3 million cremated bodies, not 6 million. More accurate estimates suggest that only 900,000 bodies were cremated.
The 30kg of coal (coke) to burn a body is incorrect. That's a number that David Irving invented, from thin air. It has no basis in science or fact. He just made it up. According to the crematoria manufacturers Topf & Sons themselves, the crematoria were designed for continuous use, saving about 1/3rd of the fuel that would otherwise be needed.
Henryk Tauber, one of the crematoria operators, testified that not only did they keep the crematoria running continuously for long periods, but they supplemented the fuel with wood and straw. Most of the heat came from the burning body fat of the bodies themselves, with the coke and other fuels just needed to start the process going.
Due to the failure of the crematoria to keep up with the volume of bodies, most of the dead at Auschwitz were disposed of in open-air burning pits, using alcohol, oil and human fat as fuel. None of these fuels leave any ash behind.
There are ZERO mentions of any cermulators at any of the camps in the whole of holocaust literature.
Answer:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sonderkom ... n_camp.jpg
Holocaust denialists: "The Nazis couldn't have run death camps because they were fighting a war!"
Holocaust denialists: "Even though the Nazis were fighting a war, it would have been easy for them to pull hundreds of thousands of SS troops from the front to murder Jews and Slavs by hand, one at a time."
Answer
When you are killing that many people at that sort of scale, there are only two alternatives: you either have hundreds of thousands of cold blooded killers shooting them, or you find some way to kill in industrial quantities using a much smaller number of people. Which is what they did.
Even then, the sheer volume of victims needing transport was a huge drain on Germany's ability to fight war.
It really isn't that easy to find killers willing to murder people in cold blood. In the heat of action, yes, in the middle of mob violence, yes, but to line up time and again, day after day, for months at a time, and cold-bloodedly shoot women and children and babies, over and over again, no.
Burn-pits are efficient enough that they are still used today to dispose of trash if you don't care about the health of the people around them, which the Nazis didn't. (Apparently neither does the US government and army.) The efficiency also comes from the fact that most people, if they haven't been starved almost to death, have more than enough body fat on them to not just burn themselves but also another body, provided you collect it and don't just allow it to run off and be lost. The additional fuel is only needed to get the initial combustion going. We have photos of the burn pits in action.
Human tissue -- all that fat and protein -- contains more energy than is needed to evaporate the water in the body. You just need a sufficient high temperature to dry off the water and ignite the corpse, and you can use human corpses for fuel:
https://www.salon.com/2014/05/18/will_t ... ad_bodies/
https://www.nbcnews.com/id/wbna45526347
The trick is that a single body takes a lot of heat to dry out and ignite, but once that ignites, that can be used as fuel for the second body, and the second for the third, and so on. The more bodies you have, the more efficient it is. It is like burning green wood: it is very, very hard to ignite green wood, but if you get it started, you can keep throwing green wood onto a fierce fire and the process is self-sustaining.
The Nazis experimented with this and found that the most efficient method was to stack the bodies in layers: fat corpses followed by emaciated corpses, in alternating layers, would provide an even heat that needed only a relatively small amount of fuel to get started. Especially since they prepared the pits with channels so that melted fat could be collected and dropped back onto the pile. Waste not, want not.
So much ash was dumped in the rivers, marshes, and fields around Birkenau that to this day, the soil in the area is a different colour and texture to the surrounding land. Anyone says that the ash has just mysteriously disappeared is lying. Its right there, in the ground.
You can put your hands into the soil and see and feel the ashes. This is the direct proof you wanted. You wanted to know where the ash went, it is right there, in the soil, where you can see and feel it. You don't need "chemical testing" to recognise that the topsoil there is full of ash and is very different from the surrounding area. You just need to open your eyes and look.
Denialists ask were all the ash went. It went right there, into the ground, where to this day you can feel it and see it and sometimes even smell it. And your response is to call it "grasping at straws". Only one of us is grasping at straws, and it isn't me.
Ground radar conclusively shows that the ground around Treblinka has many large pits. The soil contains recognisable fragments of bone in such large quantities that they can only have come from a mass murder site.
https://www.bbc.com/news/magazine-16657363
Rudolf's arguments are untrustworthy. Rudolf is often self-contradictory, for example he claims that chemistry is not an exact science and cannot be used to rigorously prove or disprove the Holocaust, while also claiming that throw chemistry he has rigorously disproved the Holocaust. The man is confused about his own ideas.
https://phdn.org/archives/holocaust-his ... chemistry/
Rudolf frequently makes unsupported, evidence-free claims with nothing backing them up, such has his assertion that it would take "2 hours" to ventilate the gas chambers before it was safe enough for the Sonderkommandos to enter. There is nothing backing up that number, and the real figure is more like 20 minutes even under conservative assumptions.
He often misrepresents his sources. For instance, he references Pressac, who states that it takes about 15 minutes for the air extraction systems at Auschwitz to reduce the concentration of cyanide to a level safe to enter, but misrepresents him as saying that it takes 15 minutes for one single air exchange. Since Pressac is very clear about his calculation, we must conclude that Rudolf is deliberately misrepresenting him.
Regarding the presence of Prussian Blue, Rudolf himself acknowledges that Prussian Blue is unlikely to form. It formed in the delousing chambers, where the conditions were very different from the execution chambers. In particular, the delousing chambers were exposed to cyanide for many hours at a time, compared to only a few minutes for the execution chambers. (Insects are much more resistant to cyanide than people.) And the execution chambers were frequently washed down with water, which inhibits the formation of Prussian Blue. The delousing chambers were not. So it is hardly surprising that no Prussian Blue formed.
But why look only at Prussian Blue? That is only one of many cyanide compounds, and you don't need sophisticated chemical analysis to spot it, it is obvious to the naked eye due to its vivid blue colour.) The Institute for Forensic Research in Cracow tested for other cyanide compounds, and found that the execution chambers do contain cyanide. Leuchter and Rudolf are simply mistaken. Case closed.
https://phdn.org/archives/holocaust-his ... e-science/
30k Eisnatzgruppen that allegedly shot 1.3 Million Jews.
Answer
The Einsatzgruppen operated for six years. they frequently complained about battle fatigue and mental anguish caused by shooting large numbers of women and children. The majority of them weren't monsters or psychopaths they still had human feelings. Even the most enthusiastic soldiers can suffer from mental distress from killing, especially when they are murdering helpless people in cold blood, and even more so when they are women and children.
A significant minority of SS troops refused to take part in the killings at all. In August 1941, Himmler witnessed an Einsatzgruppen mass execution and concluded that shooting Jews was too stressful for his men. By November he made arrangements that all SS men suffering ill health from having participated in the executions were to be provided with rest and mental health care, and ordered to a transition to gassing, especially the women and children. He also ordered the SS to recruit expendable auxiliaries who could assist with the murders. But even the gas vans didn't help -- SS-Gruppenführer Otto Ohlendorf complained to Himmler that his men found cleaning out the gas vans horrible, and besides they were far too inefficient, only killing about a dozen people at a time.
Plus:
The SS soldiers were needed for the war.
Mobile killing squads were needed for the Soviet Union, where the Nazis had not taken control yet, but would be wasteful for the rest of Europe.
Why send mobile squads to search for victims, when you could use civilian police in the occupied territories to detain undesirables, and ship them to concentration camps for mass industrial murder?
Gassing victims fit right in with the world-view of the leading Nazis, especially Hitler and Himmler who considered Jews and Slavs "vermin".
Hitler himself had a special horror of gassing due to his experiences in WW1 and would have thought it especially apt to murder Jews and Slavs by a means too horrible to use against people.
