General Critique of Nessie's Stock Arguments

He goes on this rant:

Which means that people, like Gibson and others who have found that questions need to be asked is met with this "firewall" of emotional perversity. You and I have admitted that some terrible things happened and wish to find the truth. Nessie is just intent to promulgate his version of the holocaust, the narrow narrative. Any diversion from his holocaustian world view is met with such derision as quoted above.  Intelligent people see right through Nessie.

I have established that there is a high probability that people got off the Treblinka destination trains at the various locations where labour camps or Zwangarbeitslager were. It is not just a coincidence there were on the same route in all directions. I have shown that the camps located further west as the war progressed and that Jews were often in transit. Prior to me telling him, this person had no idea of the existence of those camps, nor of the camps in Ostland and Ukraine.

If one has watched the TV show "Naked and afraid" one realized how hard it is to survive without normal human comforts. While not quite the Amazon jungle or the bayou of Louisiana, most people in Europe were displaced including Jews. There were no shops, no shelter, no medicines, no food, no fresh water. I suspect that most of the mayhem occurred post war. We all know what it is like when we lose power for a night in winter. Imagine this with no food, no shelter in a European winter for a year. This is the course of my next investigation sequence.

You seem to be conceding that the Jewish testimonies are a bit dodgy.  But you think there is enough other evidence to corroborate the general picture?  In principle, I would not object to that.  But that only works IF the other evidence is indeed overwhelming.  If I look at the history books however, I see that they DO rely heavily on statements by people like Wiernik.  

If the investigations of these camps were done to a high standard then we could have more confidence in the story.  But who was it that took over these camps from the Germans and investigated what happened there?  It was the Soviets.  Below is from their report at Majdanek (issued jointly with the Poles).  

The Soviet "technical experts" are claiming four bodies at a time could be burned in only 15 minutes.  That is beyond the realm of possibility.  Are these investigations reliable?  

You also said you use German confessions for corroboration.  Okay, I agree these are a potential source of evidence for your side, but these statements have their own problems.  In particular, we have the fact that these statements were collected in the context of war crimes trials.  Many of these are not technically confessions because the person testifying to gas chambers etc wasn't always the one in the dock.  I myself would describe these as "cooperative" witnesses.  There are actually many potential reasons a German under Allied occupation might want to cooperate with the new regime.  Hoettl for example was an SS man but when the new sheriff was in town he switched his allegiance rapidly.  He signed a statement claiming that he "heard" Eichmann say 6M Jews had been killed.  Did he actually hear that or was he just ingratiating himself?  There are also legal reasons why a defendant might take the Allied narratives for granted and argue narrowly to minimize individual guilt.  

Fritzsche and at least one other Nuremberg defendant complained on the stand about how statements were extracted.  Below he says that his statement was written by a Russian interrogator and that they made him sign it.

"That extract contains rather the thoughts which the interrogating Russian officer entertained in respect to my testimony. After it had been drawn up, the record was submitted to me for my signature."

"I am protesting against everything, particularly against the expressions applied here which I have never used."  (IMT, Vol 17, 214)

This specific testimony is not of great relevance for proving or disproving the holocaust but the methods of collecting statements are a general issue. 

To summarize:  Can we really "corroborate" fanciful Jewish testimony with Communist propaganda and postwar confessions?  Do you not see the problem here?  

I am not aware of those Soviet claims, but due to the unreliability of the Soviets, I would want all claims to be thoroughly checked.



Yes, the Topf & Sons engineers. As eyewitnesses, they are compelling, as they knew exactly what was happening inside the Kremas.



I regard the Topf & Sons engineer evidence as truthful, because their claims are corroborated by other witnesses independent of them, in particular the Jewish witnesses. Furthermore, documentary evidence recovered from the A-B construction office and Topf & Sons, also corroborate their claims. The circumstantial evidence of mass arrivals, selections, people not needed for work sent to the Kremas, the mass cremations and the theft of all their property, provides even more corroboration.

The hearsay evidence about hearing what others said, is weak and I would disregard it. You spend too much time looking at the weakest evidence and ignoring the strongest evidence.

Graf has a good discussion of Prüfer in Holocaust Handbook #36.  I shared this before with Nessie and as I recall he did not have much of a response.  Prüfer's "confession" was made in Soviet custody.  

The self-flagellation here is over-the-top.  These are the words of a Russian, not a German.  A German would not likely talk about "the Germans" as an enemy.  Also note that Prüfer "confesses" to designing crematories, including at Dachau and other non-extermination camps.  This is a weird thing to "confess" to seeing as there's nothing inherently criminal about designing crematory ovens.  

Gibson, this thread is where you examine the methodology I use. So far, you have done little of that and instead you have explained, yet again, the reasons why you are inclined to disbelieve the evidence traced by historians and other investigators. I do not need you to repeat your incredulity about that evidence. I know why you are incredulous about it.

It is clear that you are unable to critique my arguments, as you call it, because the methodology I use is sound. I gather evidence, verify and assess it, logically and chronologically piece it together, look for corroboration, look for unevidenced claims and then converge on a logical and evidenced conclusion. That is the methodology taught at university and in the police.

You have dodged answering my questions about your training, so it appears you have had none, which makes you ability to critique me limited. There is not much point going on, until you stop dodging my repeated questions about how you would go about investigating what happened. So, regarding the AR camps and A-B Kremas, describe your methodology for determining what happened at those place.

I do not focus on credentials.  Maybe I'm a rocket scientist, maybe I deliver pizzas.  Why does it matter?  I will tell you that I have taken several university-level math courses that covered logic and mathematical proofs.  What is your training in logic?  

Nobody has formal credentials in history, demographics, archaeology, chemistry, toxicology, engineering, etc., all of which are relevant to revisionism.  In some cases it matters.  I do not have the chemistry background to have written Germar Rudolf's book.  But that's a technical subject.  History does not have the same high technical barriers and lots of history is written by people with no academic historical training.