Auschwitz question [Causes of death]

[AxisHistory2006]

Do you know any ill or old survivors that were at Auschwitz? The argument I am in with someone is saying they were taken to the gas chamber right off the train, is there any counter evidence?

The burden of proof always lies on the person making the accusation. The Holocaust is no exception of this. You should not ask what is the evidence that Jews didn't get killed right off the train. Rather you should seek evidence that it did happen.

Yes, and the person I'm arguing with is saying eye witnesses tell us so. Is there any other evidence that suggest otherwise?

[Archie]

As soon as Jews were brought to Auschwitz, were most of them led off the train, and into the gas chamber to die? According to Source: Anatomy of the Auschwitz Death camp, p 390 and p 392

and is there any evidence that Nazis tended to hide deaths through lethal injection under the guise of “typhus” and other “natural causes"

I do not think they were using typhus to cover for other causes of death. If anything, it might have been the opposite, i.e., they understated the typhus problem. Cause of death is not always an exact science. There can be difficulties with determining a sole cause of death, primary vs contributory causes, etc. And this is especially a problem if there is some incentive to play up or play down something. (There has been much discussion of this recently with COVID).

There is an article by Holocaust apologist John Zimmerman which claims that typhus accounted for only a minor fraction of deaths, based on data from the death books.
https://phdn.org/archives/holocaust-his ... -disposal/

Nevertheless, the nearly 69,000 death certificates available afford researchers the opportunity to see exactly what was killing registered prisoners. It is now known on the basis of these certificates that very few prisoners died from typhus. [32] They show that only 2060 of the 68,864 deaths were from typhus.

The flaw in Zimmerman's analysis here is that he takes the official cause of death at face value and hastily concludes that the typhus problem was minor. He is even so bold as to declare this "The Myth of Typhus." Zimmerman would have us ignore the fact that the camp was placed under quarantine in the summer of 1942 and the fact that deaths swelled right at that time. He would have us believe this was simply a total coincidence! It is more plausible that the peak in deaths during an epidemic was not a coincidence at all and they simply tended to list more generic causes of death on the official certificates.

[Hektor]

Death Book's cause of death would be based on pathological examinations. So highly unlikely they would write 'typhus' as cause of death, but what appears to have cause the death more directly.

The general assumption in medicine still is that typhus is caused by lice transmitting pathogens on the patients.
There is however also the view that other factors CAN play a role in this. As psychological conditions leading to 'mass psychogenic diseases'. This may however be the case with other seemingly infectious/communicable diseases as well. Sick people in ones social surroundings can stimulate this, people thinking they will get sick and subsequently the indeed get sick. Diseased emerge on a sub-microscopic level. So even those in medicine would not know how that really is caused. They will think and tell others what they've learned during their studies, from books or journal articles. Lots of this is based on consensus and not really scientific, even if it is called 'science' by almost everybody. There is reasons why this kind of diseases are emerging in settings of mass detention or in armies. Physical factors can play a role, but so can psychological ones. War conditions place additional stress on people, but also create physical factors conducive to disease.

[greatmystery]

Do you know any ill or old survivors that were at Auschwitz? The argument I am in with someone is saying they were taken to the gas chamber right off the train, is there any counter evidence?

The burden of proof always lies on the person making the accusation. The Holocaust is no exception of this. You should not ask what is the evidence that Jews didn't get killed right off the train. Rather you should seek evidence that it did happen.

Yes, and the person I'm arguing with is saying eye witnesses tell us so. Is there any other evidence that suggest otherwise?

I will do my best to help you with your Holocaust discussion. I run a website that I built in order to foster such discourse, holocaust.claims. The articles are short and you may be able to get the person to read them. If you want to be better on debating the Holocaust I suggest you check it out as well.

Here we go:
What is eyewitness testimony when you have nothing to back it up? You can't just make 6 million bodies disappear off the face of the earth. In the case of Auschwitz/Birkenau that's over 1 million people. On average the ash remains of a person is five pounds. That's roughly 5 million pounds of ashes. You can't just put them in the river to make them disappear. The three Operation Reinhard camps were alleged to have cremated about 900,000 people. On top of the human ashes there would have been wood ash as the claimed they were burned on outdoor pyres. None of these ash remains have been found.

Also, much of the eyewitness testimony contradicts other eyewitness testimony and it often times defies reality. You must also remember that the Jews had motivation to lie about the Germans.

Here are some articles I've written about problematic testimony:
https://www.holocaust.claims/survivors/ ... testimony/
https://www.holocaust.claims/auschwitz- ... testimony/
https://www.holocaust.claims/revisionis ... in-russia/

Here is a series about the extent of the investigations done in the operation Reinhard camps. None of which showed evidence for the amount of murders claimed.
https://www.holocaust.claims/treblinka/ ... -part-one/

[Hektor]

....
Here we go:
What is eyewitness testimony when you have nothing to back it up? You can't just make 6 million bodies disappear off the face of the earth. In the case of Auschwitz/Birkenau that's over 1 million people. On average the ash remains of a person is five pounds. That's roughly 5 million pounds of ashes. You can't just put them in the river to make them disappear. The three Operation Reinhard camps were alleged to have cremated about 900,000 people. On top of the human ashes there would have been wood ash as the claimed they were burned on outdoor pyres. None of these ash remains have been found.
...

Correct. But if those were people dying all over Europe it would be another matter, they just would be buried on cemeteries or war graves. This is however not the claim being made. The claim being made is:
a) people killed at concentration camps.
b) people shot in mass execution by "Einsatzgruppen".

And for that you either need to have a feasible way of body disposal that can cope with the volume. Or you need to have the remains somewhere.
They have neither. They don't admit this, but continue peddling the story, which happens to be a major accusation. Atrocity propaganda, hence a actually slander. Gas Libel, if you want.

The same people that are up in arms, if somebody claims Jews are involved in ritual murders (and call this 'blood libel'), are the ones that push this 'gas libel' the most.