Challenge to bombsaway on allegedly convincing "confession"

[Hektor]

First off, the argument is that Germany itself wasn't even responsible (remember: at Nuremberg, it was claimed only 100 or so people were aware of the alleged extermination) for this.

Thats' true...

"not over 100 people in all were informed about the matter."
- U.S. Judge Leon W. Powers, Nuremberg show trial, April 14, 1949

....

And even that is an overstatement. They yet have to show ONE PERSON that ever said that there was such 'a matter'.
There is plenty of witnesses that testify to the contrary, but that is virtually totally ignored or explained away by the Holocaustians.

[PrudentRegret]

Bombsaway, do you put any weight on the people who did not confess, including some of the highest-level officials put on trial like Goering, Hans Frank, Oswald Pohl? They all, without any doubt, would have known much more about the final solution than any of the low-level guards being put on trial decades after the fact. But none of them confessed to any knowledge or participation in an extermination plan.

How does a denial from these key figures play into your calculus?

Lastly, it should be noted that the basis for the entire Holocaust narrative was built on the confession of Rudolf Hoess at Nuremberg, and it is now acknowledged that his confession was extracted by days of torture. If you torture someone into admitting to a conspiracy that did not happen, that puts significant pressure on other alleged co-conspirators to cooperate with the prosecution in the hope of receiving lighter sentences.

The tortured confession of Hoess included his claim of witnessing extermination at Treblinka. Even if the defendants in the Treblinka trials did not face torture themselves, the confession of Hoess, who was tortured, was considered very important evidence against them. Evidence which they could not dispute because it had already been recognized by the court.

If the leader of the Oathkeepers confessed to a conspiracy, and lower-level members thereafter also pled guilty while minimizing their involvement, and it later turned out that the leader's confession was extracted through torture, wouldn't you be inclined to toss out the guilty pleas of all the other members whose plea was based on tainted evidence presented by the prosecution? Clearly, the other members would see it's impossible to deny a conspiracy that has been confessed by the leader, so they would just try to downplay their involvement and otherwise cooperate in order to receive the lightest sentence possible.

At the very least you should be vigilant about false confessions and closely analyze the claims of the accused. If the claims do not make sense or contradict each-other, it should raise your suspicion that the alleged co-conspirators were coerced into a false confession by the invalid nature of the evidence being used against them.

[Lamprecht]

Bombsaway, do you put any weight on the people who did not confess, including some of the highest-level officials put on trial like Goering, Hans Frank, Oswald Pohl? They all, without any doubt, would have known much more about the final solution than any of the low-level guards being put on trial decades after the fact. But none of them confessed to any knowledge or participation in an extermination plan.

How does a denial from these key figures play into your calculus?

Typically it's either:
1. They are denying it (lying) because they don't want to get in trouble / trying to cover for the NSDAP (he does not seem to recognize that they would lie to say it happened as a defense)

2. They only denied knowledge, not that it was happening (although, in many cases, they would have known; further, it wouldn't make for an Auschwitz guard to say nobody was gassed at Sobibor)

Most of them did deny the claims when not coerced into "confessing" (any statement after an arrest is coerced).

Dr. Horst Pelckmann, defense counsel for the SS at Nuremberg, exposed the fact that over 97% of the SS men who mentioned "The Jewish Problem" denied that it was to be solved by extermination:

"On the question of whether the SS members recognized the destruction of Jewry as an aim of the leaders, 1,593 out of 1,637 affidavits which mention this problem state that the Jewish problem was not to be solved by killing..."
(21 August 1946, IMT Proceedings, vol. 21, p. 368)

I recommend:
The Psychology of False Confessions / Why people confess to crimes they did not commit
viewtopic.php?t=12804

"Why Didn't Any Nazi Deny" and the scope of the "conspiracy"
viewtopic.php?t=12287

[bombsaway]

Bombsaway, do you put any weight on the people who did not confess, including some of the highest-level officials put on trial like Goering, Hans Frank, Oswald Pohl? They all, without any doubt, would have known much more about the final solution than any of the low-level guards being put on trial decades after the fact. But none of them confessed to any knowledge or participation in an extermination plan.

If they had denied it yeah, eg if Hans Frank said he had investigated a supposed extermination camp and found nothing to be amiss, then that would be strong evidence. But all he says is he didn't know about it for certain, though he heavily suspected it was true.

Perhaps it should raise your eyebrows that generally speaking, the people who confessed were those directly implicated in the crimes through documentary or witness evidence. Frank and Goering weren't, Pohl most definitely was, and he did confess. https://forum.axishistory.com/viewtopic.php?t=54569 So one theory that I think is plausible is that they pleaded ignorance when they thought they could get away with it.

At the very least you should be vigilant about false confessions and closely analyze the claims of the accused. If the claims do not make sense or contradict each-other, it should raise your suspicion that the alleged co-conspirators were coerced into a false confession by the invalid nature of the evidence being used against them.

The expectation would be that witnesses would contradict themselves https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eyewitnes ... eliability It would be more suspicious, I think, if everyone had the exact same story. But yeah at a certain point testimony has to be thrown out entirely. I think revisionists overstate the problems though. When you're cherry picking accounts, things seem pretty bad, but when viewed in their entirety most testimonies become much more believable for me. This is a judgement call though, I'll admit that.

Again Bombsaway shows his confusion, and fails to give a single name so we can go into specifics about this particular "confession" in a West German trial.

As far as I can tell, transcripts for the West German Trials are not available online (perhaps in German if someone can find them, and we could machine translate), so all we have is excerpts, which is not ideal. The reason I brought these trials up was because I think they were conducted more fairly than the Nuremberg trials (eg Judicial notice doesn't seem to have been taken).

If you want to go through a detailed testimony concerning a single alleged extermination camp (with extensive mention of grave sites etc) I would suggest this  http://holocaustcontroversies.blogspot.com/2011/09/great-lie.html . According to Mattogno/Kues, Chelmno had a very similar function to the Reinhard camps. In my opinion it is the best evidenced of these camps in terms of documents so it might be interesting for us to take a longer look at.

I was also doing some research and saw that the general public had access while excavations were being carried out. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nxM9z7KaY3Y
According to the guy who shot the video, there are bone fragments all around, or at least there were. The site doesn't appear to be closed off, so available for people to go there and examine the ground non-invasively. 

Again, this was all happening as Germany was under military occupation

What's the evidence that West Germany was under military occupation through the 1960s? (definitionally that the US/GB/France were the "ruling power") https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Military_ ... 20occupant.

[Lamprecht]

You claim there was no judicial notice taken, but it was. The claim that there was a "murder every last Jew" policy called the "Final Solution" (a real policy, but that description is inaccurate, see: viewtopic.php?t=14859) was something judicial notice was taken of.
In fact, the alleged purpose of the trials was just to establish individual guilt, rather than to prove that extermination of Jews took place.

West Germany was certainly under military occupation. Germany still is, today. The proof is the presence of US military bases. The post-WW2 government was installed by foreign powers. It was not a free society at all.

Pohl most definitely was, and he did confess

I disagree entirely. That's not a confession, that's a defense strategy.

there are bone fragments all around

I'm sure there are. That is the topic for another thread however.

If you want to go through a detailed testimony

You can go make a thread on a testimony you find so convincing that it makes the case for massive pits at Treblinka, Sobibor, Belzec, or elsewhere.
Personally, I find testimony (by the aggrieved/victim party) describing pits that allegedly exist to this day rather useless, given that the pits can actually be analyzed archaeologically.