bombsaway wrote:Lamprecht wrote:Speculation is necessary here since you refuse to provide a case for the pits.
I don't know where you're getting this impression. I'm just trying to answer your questions at this point, and I'm sorry for not responding to everything or even most of what you have to say. I simply don't have time (your posts can be very long, and if I wanted to answer sufficiently, my responses would be much longer).
I will now provide my case in very broad strokes and hopefully you understand where I'm coming from. I believe in the orthodox hypothesis in a probabilistic sense, based on a few things:
1, the collective strength of the witness and documentary evidence that supports this hypothesis. Testimonies and documents don't carry much weight alone, but when combined with others the probative value increases incrementally. If there are hundreds of documents or testimonies, the evidentiary case becomes very strong.
2, I don't believe there are any documents that strongly contradict the orthodox, and very few that do in a modest way (one example would be Himmler's "transit camp Sobibor" )
3, that no viable counter hypothesis has been presented really dampens the overall revisionist critique. As I said before I have a strong assumption that in modern times, the fate of millions will be traceable in terms of witness and documentary evidence. So any hypothesis that doesn't fulfill this condition is untenable for me. It's not that it has been proven false, just that I can't accept it as true, especially if it's competing against a theory that does explain in detail what happened to these people.
As for the pits themselves, they are part of the orthodox narrative. I think if one accepts the historicity of a genocidal program at extermination centers, the existence of pits at these camps automatically becomes likely. That witness testimony and documents exist evincing mass burial and body disposal makes this likelihood an all but certainty for me.
Thank you for this outline. With the below, I refer only to homicidal gas chamber claims.
1. people going missing + a rumour extant in the camps = conclusion = over time people believing it to be the truth. as for documents, see point two.
2. orthodoxy provides zero documents explicitly referring to gassing, even in the British decodes. if "liquidieren" is code, why is it so obvious; if it is not code, why not say one of these words with clearer meaning. And why does the original German word differ so much over the body of documents. It should be explicit and clear with no room for misinterpretation.
töten - kill, kill off, deaden
umbringen - kill, murder, slay, make away with
vernichten - destroy, annihilate, crush, kill, exterminate, obliterate
erschlagen - kill, slay, strike dead
killen - kill, murder, do in, hit, bump off
totschlagen - kill, swat, beat to death
schlachten - slaughter, butcher
zerstören - destroy, ruin, demolish, wreck, spoil, raze
morden - murder, kill, slay
erlegen - kill, shoot, bag
zunichte machen - destroy, negate, cancel out, undo, wipe out, kill
there are many documents showing no gassings to the same degree as the orthodox documents show gassings. e.g. postcards from camps; aerial photographs of camps; Red Cross examinations. there are also a lack of documents where we may expect to see them, were gassings taking place, e.g. letters sent abroad from contractors who visited the camps to deliver goods or repair equipment or utilities; a mention of gassings in Churchill's The Second World War (although he may have wanted to avoid drawing attention to "G-Day," which is almost completely buried to this day); personal letters sent from camp staff to their relatives telling them of the gassings and to keep it a secret. remember that civilian international mail was not censored or restricted.
3. I understand your position. and for a while I grappled with that too. But remember the iron curtain. also all the people who were reunited. and the people who died from disease. is it possible the British understated the number that died at Bergen-Belsen, for example, to avoid embarrassment, despite that it was already higher than the German figure there. The counter-hypthesis is simple: where are the bodies at Treblinka? 650,000 buried there. show it to be true and I will probably shut up for good...
You're right that it isn't proven false. But to consider something proven true with eyewitness and document presumption... this was in the 1940s, not the 1800s. We should have something scientific to back up the claims.
