Questions about Hitler and Nazi Germany's attempted extermination of Europe's Jews

Testimony is not physical evidence. If there are any mass graves of Einsatzgruppen victims I am not aware of them. It is possible that some exist, but, if it is the case, where are they? I don’t know.

http://www.nizkor.org/hweb/orgs/german/einsatzgruppen/esg/
http://www.idfa.nl/industry/tags/project.aspx?id=43d9fe23-3483-4658-8b2a-8b3ae3184ce6
Mass graves all.

You should try harder to cure your ignorance.

You’ve tried?

There was no physical evidence after they destroyed the evidence? How shocking. Although that kind of sounds like the point of destroying the evidence in the first place. And we know the Nazis disinterred and burned corpses when they were trying to cover their tracks. They did it in the death camps, too. Anyone who wishes to choke back vomit and have nightmares can read Leon Wells’ account of being forced to do this kind of work in “The Death Brigade” and elsewhere.

I’m curious what evidence supports this flat assertion. It sounds like the “burning jet fuel can’t melt steel” claims found in 9/11 conspiracy theories.

Grrr…

Gack I guess you’re young. The generation that lived and fought through WW2 is largely gone, and you have not heard their stories. Indeed a member of this board who fought in WW2 died quite recently. But there are members here who are considerably older than you, which means that we knew the people who fought and lived through WW2. And we did hear their stories. Read my earlier link. Consider that I knew two survivors of the camps (I only know that they were survivors - they did not talk about it), and I’m likely not alone in having known such people. You might also consider that this board has a number of European members, such as myself, and the events of WW2 are perforce rather closer.

Finally, you might consider that it is illegal to deny the Holocaust in Germany. Why do you think that might be?

It is difficult to cremate a body, it takes approx. 2000 deg. F for two hours. You can google up this info. Bodies are cremated in the open air in India, it requires a pyre, that is, the body has to be up in the air because a fire needs plenty of O2 to burn that hot, and the body has to be above the fuel and hence fire.

If you put a body in a pit the O2 access is insufficient, and the fuel and hence the fire is above the body. So just this reasoning from first principles should do it.

And, I actually tried this, put a chicken in the bottom of my Weber with no charcoal, sprayed it with charcoal lighter fluid, lit it, kept spraying, etc. The chicken was hardly singed.

It is illegal to deny the holocaust in many European states and Canada I believe. Why do you think that might be? I believe the reason is that there is a desire to protect the standard narrative from examination.

From wiki …

Holocaust denial is explicitly or implicitly illegal in 17 countries: Austria, Belgium, Canada, Czech Republic, France, Germany, Hungary, Israel, Liechtenstein, Lithuania, Luxembourg, Netherlands, Poland, Portugal, Romania, Slovakia, and Switzerland.[180] The European Union’s Framework decision on Racism and Xenophobia states that denying or grossly trivializing “crimes of genocide” should be made “punishable in all EU Member States”.[181] Slovakia criminalized denial of fascist crimes in general in late 2001; in May 2005, the term “Holocaust” was explicitly adopted by the penal code and in 2009, it became illegal to deny any act regarded by an international criminal court as genocide. The Parliament of Hungary adopted the most recent legislation, which declared denial or trivialization of the Holocaust a crime punishable by up to three years imprisonment, in February 2010.[182]

Consider the Jerfferson quote :

“It is error alone which needs the support of government. Truth can stand by itself.”

I believe this.

As further testimony, my uncle was in the army during WW II, and was in one of the groups who liberated a camp - I forget which one. The parents of one of my best friends met in a camp. His father’s wife and child died there. Quite a while before the end of the war, in fact.

When I was in Berlin they told us that they make a special effort to remove any graffiti from the Holocaust Museum (which is mostly underground.) It has the stories of many of those whose existence Gack denies. The site of the bunker is nearby, and is a scrubby patch of weeds, to keep the neo-Nazi scum away. The Germans, who were there acknowledge what happened.

Well…that’s different…

First off, bodies cremate at 1600 - 1800 F, not 2000 F. And this is just the body. Adding cotton-based or other non fire resistant clothes makes it easier to achieve this temperature because it has a more ready fuel than body fat.

Second, lighter fluid burns at a temperature of 400-600 degrees and is a very light fuel, aka it’s mixed to ignite easy, not necessarily burn forever.

Third, if all they used was gasoline which burns at 1600-2250 F, depending on the type of gasoline and the oxygen available, it could have certainly burned a pit of bodies over a few days.

Fourth: if you are going to cook something, you DON’T pour fuel on TOP (like lighter fuild on top of a chicken), but pump it UNDERNEATH (like charcoal UNDER a chicken). So you dig out the bodies, presumably filled with a lot of air pockets as they covered a mass grave and did not pack it down heavily, and pipe fuel down a nice hole.

The people in India and ancient Europe use a pyre like that because they are attempting to create the perfect conditions to super heat the flame on wood or similar low-temperature combustibles. It’s done that way because they AREN’T using modern fuels that burn incredibly hot.

As an aside, I did not mention human fat burns at 400F, because I assume with Holocaust victims that there’s not much to catch on fire, although I don’t know if these particular victims were regular bodies or emaciated.

My grandmother was at two camps as a young teen. She was at one I cannot remember the name of and was later transferred to Bergen-Belsen where she was liberated. I have heard her stories. I will never doubt their veracity.

Blobel says that the bodies were covered with gasoline, I take that to mean that gasoline was poured on.

Well, my experiment wasn’t ideal, I see now. Blobel says that he used petrol, which I take to be regular gasoline. Could I repeat my experiment using gasoline without undue risk to myself ? How would you add the gasoline, squirt from a bottle as per lighter fluid?

As you yourself stated: Eye witness testimony can be slightly dodgy. They used a fuel and “poured it on”. But did they just pour it over or did they pour it into a hole? The statement could have been mis-remembered, mis-stated or in many ways slightly wrong from the actual events (if he was a digger, he could have been laying down to the side and watching, etc). Small details are the worst remembered and large details “we burned bodies!” are best remembered.

As for the experiment, due to liability reasons I cannot recommend an experiment of that type. Unfortunately, I’m too knowledgeable about fuels in general because of my occupation. I won’t take the risk of A) harming/severely harming/killing someone and B) meeting a friendly police man outside my door with a new set of bracelets.

I apologize that I will not provide this information.

@ Farin

The victims of the Einsatzgruppen would have somewhat normal levels of body fat, they were killed very quickly after the German Army had passed that way. I say somewhat because IIRC there were food shortages in the USSR prior to the start of the invasion.

Capt

However, as I pointed out many posts ago, photographic evidence is the wrong place to start this discussion.

Beyond that, you are still guilty of trying to move the goalposts. The discussion has always been in regards to the overall massacre of 12 million people, nearly 6 million of them Jews, between 1939 and 1945. Focusing on “photographs” and then focusing on work camps distracts from the actual discussion and leaves the impression that whatever facts one might discover about Bergen-Belsen or Dachau could be extrapolated to Auschwitz, Treblinka, Sobibor, etc. This is not a legitimate claim, since the various camps served different purposes and were treated differently by the Nazis.

Where do you get the weird idea that there is no evidence? Are you relying on the Ball nonsense in which he looks at an extremely grainy aerial photograph with the actual ravine in deep shadow, then makes strange declarations about what the photograph purports to demonstrate, even though none of his claims are supported by the actual photo?

Your claim that human bodies cannot be destroyed in fire is baseless and is further contradicted by the testimony of both Nazi and Russian witnesses to the cremations as well as the information provided in this thread. (And your claim about not finding bullets is silly. The ammunition used would have rarely passed through a body and would have been destroyed in the conflagrations.)

My mom’s best friend had the fucking tattoos on her arm from the French concentration camp that killed her parents, brother and much of the rest of her family. Please, by all means, set yourself on fire for slandering her character.

Regardless how repulsive one finds another’s post, it is still against the rules to wish death on another poster.

Please refrain from doing so.

[ /Moderating ]

Why did Einstein leave Nazi Germany if they weren’t killing Jews? And Lise Meitner?
Why did Leo Szilard, Neils Bohr, and Enrico Fermi all flee Europe and go to work on a super weapon, if not from fear for their lives?

If the Nazis hadn’t had a policy of exterminating Jews they would have won. Stupid is as stupid does, no?

You’re right.

But it is just so not an abstraction to me. My mom’s friend had the tattoos on her arm. Does the poster think she and millions of others all decided to get such tattoos deliberately? Laura had such a haunted look on her face sometimes. She was ten years older than my mom and in her teens when the camp was liberated but she might have been a century older than any of us. Her sadness was so palpable.

I’ve only seen the sort of heavy, thick, quiet veil of grief once before: when a friend recounted that she was childless after losing twins at six months and then finding out during the experience she needed a hysterectomy for ovarian cancer.

To doubt her story and then make the people who did that her family out to be heroes is an almost unbelievable desecration. I remember reading once that Germans would never forgive the Jews for the holocaust. Oh so true apparently.

The account you’re quoting says the burn went on for two days, not two hours. If you’re not consistent in your “evidence”, why should we trust you?

This is like the people who build towers out of Lego, throw model planes at them, and think they’re proved something.