General Critique of Nessie's Stock Arguments

Other people who arrived at Sobibor say different. Tell us more about the Trawniki camps. Do some research for a change.

An exchange Gibson and I had elsewhere, that he suggest we discuss further here;

G - If I were to see convincing evidence on the Holocaust at some point (which I feel pretty certain isn't coming since I would have seen it by now if it existed)....

N- What would you regard as convincing evidence?
How would you assess that evidence to establish its accuracy?

G - I would prefer not to totally derail the thread. But I will make a somewhat relevant comment about the demographics vs other categories of evidence (which was broached in the article). My view on the demographics has long been that it's not conclusive. I think it is the least fruitful avenue of inquiry and things will have to be settled elsewhere. In terms of categories, here's how I would score the debate.
Demographics: Inconclusive. Too many uncertainties and contradictions in the numbers.

N - Disagree. The Nazis recorded huge drops in the Jewish population, as did the countries where those Jews came from.

G - Testimonies: Here I regard the revisionist critiques as devastating (and I think the whole thing pretty much collapses with this). I've discussed this quite a bit previously.

N - Disagree. The Jewish testimony is often hyperbolic & figurative, which may be a cultural issue, or how anyone would react to describing the horrific experience they went through. The revisionist critiquing of the witness evidence, ignores well known, well studied witness fallibilities of memory and estimation. It also ignores that the Nazi evidence is far more matter of fact, so it is harder to "critique", so revisionists have to change tactics and dismiss much of their evidence as allegedly coerced.
Your previous discussion is based on you having no experience of and training in, the taking and assessing statements. Revisionist inexperience and ignorance is best exampled by their constant conflation of hearsay and eyewitness evidence.

G - Documents: There are some documents revisionists can't satisfactorily explain (which isn't surprising given the volume of documents). But these gotcha documents are sparse and usually require some amount of projection. We also cannot be sure all of them are genuine. I don't think they are commensurate proof for what is being claimed. On the other side, there are also documents that are not consistent with the holocaust story. Perhaps most important though are the documents that aren't there, the documents we would expect to find if there had been an organized extermination program on the scale alleged but which aren't there. Overall, I score this strongly toward the revisionist side. Many individual documents lean to one side or another.

N - Disagree. Any document that states what revisionists do not want to hear, is doubted using various excuses, such as their genuineness. That many documents you would expect to see are missing, is commensurate with the covering up of an extermination programme. When Mattogno tries to claim documents about the construction of gas chambers inside the Kremas, do not mean gas chambers for gassing people, and there is contemporaneous eyewitness evidence, including from some who wrote the documents, to say they were used for gassing people, then clearly, Mattogno is wrong.

G - Physical evidence: This favors the revisionists. The holocaust side has failed to produce any credible gas chambers or gas vans, nor the expected archaeological evidence, and the cremation claims are also a major problem.

N - Disagree. Again, the state of the physical evidence points squarely at a cover up and attempts to destroy as much evidence as possible. It is reasonable to infer criminal acts from a cover up. It is odd you think the Nazis would leave gas chambers and vans intact to be found. There is significant archaeological evidence of large areas of cremated remains, which revisionists merely dispute, with no experience or evidence.

G - Revisionists tend to favor physical evidence and testimonies (with the trend being toward physical evidence). Pro-holocaust people tend to favor demographics. Both sides will cite favored documents.
Aside from the categories, there's also the politics and historiography of the holocaust as well as the origins of the claims. This I think also strongly favors the revisionist side.

N - The circumstantial evidence of Nazi hatred towards the Jews, their open desire to rid them from occupied territory, their actions to identify, register and imprison them, the removal of all rights and legal protections, the mass theft of their property, their use as slave labourers and the massive decline in the Jewish population, favours the evidenced history of what happened.
You have convinced yourself of the revisionist arguments because you arrogantly think you know better than academics who have studied witness behaviour, historians, archaeologists and other trained, professional investigators.

I favor the revisionist interpretation of the documents because it is more robust. My assumption here is that you cannot hide something on the scale of the holocaust.  It requires resources and organization and that requires documents.  The holocaust side likes to highlight very selective documents that sound bad or that have a particular buzz word and point to this as proof.  But even their best documents like say the Posen speech do not on their own prove the holocaust.  They are perhaps suggestive but it is not robust evidence, i.e., it is not commensurate proof.  The lack of documents suggesting any program for gas chambers on the other hand is extremely robust and forces us to at the very least assume that the gas chambers were constructed on the fly with almost no planning.  We didn't get to see the blueprints for the "gas chambers" until 30 years after the war.  And ... they weren't gas chambers, at least not by design, which required a radical change in the story.  On a related point, the records of registered deaths at the camps show that the Allies misrepresented the camps at the end of the war and they provide an alternate and more plausible interpretation for many things.  In line with this, Auschwitz was given orders in Dec 1942 to lower the death rate at the camp.  Records of numerous surgeries being performed at the camp hospital are likewise totally at odds with the "extermination camp" story, and this is confirmed by many Jewish personal histories like Anne Frank, Elie Wiesel, Rudolf Vrba, Jankel Wiernik, etc who discuss getting medical treatment. The "final solution" documents likewise simply do not correspond to the classic story.  This also has also force radical rather desperate revisions by the orthodox scholars.  When I say the revisionist interpretation is more robust, I mean the documents that are relied upon are more numerous, more related, more consistent, and hence have a low risk of misinterpretation or falsification as opposed to the one-off "Vergasungskeller" type documents cited by the other side.