Callafangers wrote: ↑Tue Feb 03, 2026 10:07 am
Why does SanityCheck (anti-revisionist 'Holocaust' academia's leading man) so strongly avoid all matters of physical evidence with regard to 'Holocaust' evidence? In the past, one could give the benefit of the doubt because there were other anti-revisionist scholars at least engaging in the physical debate, when the debate appeared evolving or inconclusive. During this time, one could interpret SanityCheck's silence on all physical evidence matters as being due to his reasonable deference to others like Roberto Muehlenkamp, who was the HolocaustControversies blog's unofficial physical evidence specialist until the mid-2010s. But after revisionism's more recent works -- and especially following C. Mattogno's "The Operation Reinhard Camps" -- Muehlenkamp went radio silent and there has been no anti-revisionist scholar capable of producing (nor even attempting) a compelling rebuttal on any of the physical arguments.
Not on FeCN levels nor crematoria use/maintenance at Birkenau...
Not on grave volumes nor contents at any of the major camps...
Not on fuel needs and evidence at any of the major camps...
It certainly appears that there are no counter-arguments to the current revisionist position on physical evidence (and lack thereof) for the 'Holocaust'.
This seems to concede that this paramount category of the debate has been won, completely -- even after stress-tested to the maximum by anti-revisionists giving it their best shot.
If SanityCheck evades the physical evidence debate, that's fine -- but he should at least be able to name one single person who
does not evade and can refute it meaningfully.
You're conflating and confusing several issues here, as is the case with various others in this thread.
I've hardly been silent on physical evidence when discussing denial over the past almost twenty years (on and off) on different forums. If I don't engage every single time a denier brings up the same arguments as the past twenty times I discussed them, go figure. That goes especially for the victory-dancing and deluded 'I won' style you're repeating above and elsewhere.
Nessie raised the question of 'expertise' in this thread; it's a misplaced point, since essentially none of the revisionists have qualifications of relevance, or prior experience with the issues being debated. Germar Rudolf is the only real exception, and his interpretations were contradicted by other trained chemists.
Rudolf's arguments, and Leuchter's before him, about Prussian Blue do not convince in the slightest, not just because neither demonstrated why Prussian Blue would
necessarily form or persist in the ruins and buildings they examined 40-45 years after the events. Mainly because the reported homicidal gassings lasted a much shorter time than prolonged use of Zyklon B in delousing chambers, which explains the visible-to-the-naked-eye difference between blue-stained buildings and those without. Wow! Such forensic derring-do! Kremas IV and V were levelled to their floors, the Bunkers as well, Kremas II and III left partially open to the elements, Krema I was only sporadically used, Block 11's basement once. The fact that all concerned found
any traces of cyanide
at all, 40-45 years after the war corroborates the Polish 1945 investigation stating they found cyanide traces on ventilation grates.
The critiques of Leuchter and Rudolf were very numerous in the 1990s and early 2000s, and while not all points made seem valid to me, more than enough are to make this a 'let me look into it, ah OK they're full of shit' issue. I did assemble a wealth of academic journal articles on HCN, Zyklon B, fumigation delousing, and indeed Prussian Blue, just under twenty years ago, but frankly the historical evidence of the rhythm of gassings plus sources on washing and also whitewashing the insides of the chambers make the claim even more implausible.
'No holes' was never even remotely valid for Kremas IV and V or the Bunkers, and dubious already in the 1990s before McCarthy, Keren and Mazal plausibly located holes in the ruins of Kremas II and III, correlating them very straightforwardly with the ground level and air photos. Denier whining after this is just sour grapes. No doubt it needs to be restated a few more times for the Hiroo Onodas out there.
Revisionist interpretations of the documentary paper trail about the gas chambers and crematoria of Birkenau are also not convincing, and frankly ludicrously long-winded. They also play an entirely pointless game of interpret-the-documents away from other types of evidence (the contemporary manuscripts and reports, and the post-January 1945 testimonies), which
nobody is obliged to do. The fact that revisionism is stuck with a methodology that can only consider different source types (or collections) in isolation from each other is a screaming red flag.
This also goes for the interpretation of the paper trail about cremation capacity, but this is where considering other historical evidence reinforces the common-sense interpretation: these crematoria burned multiple corpses simultaneously. This is also reported from T4 centres, using mobile Kori furnaces, and obviously is in multiple documents for Auschwitz, in addition to the many testimonies about this. As with other aspects, revisionist works become entirely tl;dr and unconvincing for why they need to witter on at such length to wish away the consilient, concise, corroborated explanation.
In general, there is no shortage of material online addressing revisionist claims about Auschwitz, with the Auschwitz Museum being a little more proactive in recent years compared to 20-30 years ago, adding to the many websites like the Holocaust History Project (in its archived version) addressing the 'technical' issues. The range means the info is pitched at various levels, as one would expect, from quick Q&A rebuttals on the museum website and on hdot.org, to longer articles. Irving vs Lipstadt and the appeal really were the end to much of this.
It's true that revisionists, especially Mattogno and Rudolf, have continued to churn out books on Auschwitz in the past 25 years, but the proliferation doesn't make for a convincing impression. Maybe if one of them could sum up all of the valid and relevant arguments in one volume (without simply referring readers to the existing repetitive sprawl) this might help.
One of my most-repeated points in forum discussions is the need to consider the full range of sites and camps involved in the extermination of the Jews (and targeting of other groups)
together. This goes for every possible angle: if revisionists want to advance a conspiracy claim then they need to consider all the camps together, alongside the shootings; and to consider gassings and shootings aimed at non-Jews (e.g. T4) as well as those aimed at Jews.
This also includes considering what happened to the remains of the victims and thus, physical evidence and considerations about it. Much of the time, revisionists prefer to lead with the biggest camps and thereby neglect the rest. This is problematic for a host of reasons.
Firstly, there are the numerous mass graves which were not exhumed by the Germans to try and cover up deaths, which characterises most provincial towns across Poland and the Soviet Union. These were identified by Polish and Soviet investigations, with some towns seeing reburials in a proper cemetery. In many cases in Poland, the local Jewish cemetery
was the execution site if the numbers were smaller. In other cases, Polish researchers taking an increased interest in the commemorative landscape and in the "archaeology of crime" have shown that authorities reburied victims in new mass graves where current memorials are located. The interest in Poland has become especially acute, and encompasses both grave sites of Polish victims of German terror as well as 'Holocaust graves'. The efforts of Jewish cemetery surveys combine in many places in Poland with local history interest. In Ukraine, Belarus and elsewhere, there are also the efforts of organisations like Yahad in Unum, who have relocated grave sites using Soviet Extraordinary Commission reports (which as can be seen on various entries of Yad Vashem's Untold Stories site, could well include sketch maps), in the 2000s interviewing local residents adding to the general upsurge in such interviewing.
Secondly, there are the killing sites and mass graves exhumed as part of Aktion 1005, which include sites of burial of non-Jewish victims of terror and Soviet POWs as well as 'Holocaust sites'. The general pattern was that the local Security Police command organised a 1005 detachment and did what it could in 1943-44, inevitably missing many graves and often barely getting beyond the bigger cities. Due to the timing of Soviet offensives, Ukraine saw less such efforts than Belarus or Poland, but nowhere did the Germans succeed in erasing all 'Holocaust graves'
Research into Aktion 1005 (notably Andrej Angrick's 1400 page study from 2018, building on past surveys) thus converges with the turn towards studying the 'archaeology of crime', memorials, the aftermath postwar, phenomena such as grave-robbing which were reported from the AR camps and elsewhere, plus the impact of these camps on local populations (who contended with the stench of decaying corpses as well as the smell of human corpses being cremated).
There hasn't been a systematic revisionist reckoning with all of this work, beyond relatively superficial polemics at Father Patrick Desbois and some rote kneejerk denials. It's especially problematic for the territory of contemporary Poland given the general turn towards local history and microhistory there, which tends to yield studies showing how much immediate postwar documentation was generated, and track cases of killings of fugitive Jews in the countryside (which could result in a postwar exhumation of a single known victim, in classic murder case style). There is also now work on the records left in local archives from communal, mayoral and county level authorities, in addition to studies which might be able to note the deployment of the Polish construction service (Baudienst) to dig mass graves from surviving records, or in one case to use the full population register for a county to note cases of executions of Jews noted in the registry.
This attention to the 'departure' points, the shtetls, ghettos, provinces, was always there within Jewish historiography, since memorial books were compiled and published about individual towns, small and large, from the 1940s.
Aktion 1005 is also informative in other ways: it provides many more examples of open-air cremation pyres and burning sites, with thus more evidence of how open air cremation worked. This seems like a much more profitable line of research than remaining fixated on Treblinka, extending what has already been discussed about the cremation of 6,865 victims of the bombing of Dresden in the Altmarkt in 1945.
Thirdly, seeing the key camps as nodes in a network formed by the departure points and the regions is now the conventional norm. The USHMM Encyclopedia of Camps and Ghettos, vols I-IV, is open access at Project Muse; Yad Vashem's Untold Stories site has so far added 1200 towns within the 1941 borders of the Soviet Union. One can easily find more material on these towns online, whether from translated memorial books at jewishgen.org, dedicated sites for specific communities (some genealogical, some local history oriented), and find more in digitised archives or in actual archives.
This means that short-circuiting the discussion to fixate solely on the arrival ends of Treblinka, Belzec, etc, will no longer fly. This is also because the death tolls estimated for these camps is derived from knowing how many were deported to them, modified by locating information about breakout attempts en route, selections for some of the camps (Treblinka and Sobibor). If someone can find evidence that transports went elsewhere, or there were more selections for work camps within the Government-General, then this is what will modify the currently accepted death tolls.
The regions and networks involve are especially telling with Belzec. Andrzej Kola's team identified the size of the mass graves there in the late 1990s, at a time when the 1945 estimated toll of 600,000 was still widely used, maybe modified down to 550,000. The research on Eastern Galicia in particular in the 1990s reined in the temptation for some to speculate about higher death tolls, as seen with the frosty reception to articles by Robin O'Neill, who observed the archaeological investigations but misinterpreted some local killing actions in Galicia as deportations. Then Steve Tyas located the Hoefle telegram giving the figure of 434,000 for 1942.
Belzec closed to new transports at the end of 1942 precisely when the grave space was exhausted and when cremation began. In the first half of 1943, over 100,000 Jews in Eastern Galicia were murdered within that region, and not by deportation to any camp. While there were open-air cremations in Stanislawow and Lwow (near the Janowska camp in the 'Piaski' sands killing and burial area), the provincial ghettos were liquidated by shooting actions close to these towns. The graves were identified in 1944.
Belzec makes little sense as a transit camp to begin with, when up to 250,000 Jews were deported westwards to it from Eastern Galicia in 1942 - why not simply get SSPF Galizien to establish their own transit camp in the region and send them further east, if that was the policy? It makes even less sense when it closed entirely and the Germans returned to mass shootings in Galicia.
There are contemporary German documents, some cited as far back as Hilberg's 1961 edition, about the chaos of the deportations from Galicia, which saw mass breakout attempts from the trains, and thus bodies littering the sides of the rail lines. Other documents give snapshots of 'train jumpers' shot while leaping from the trains. The study of escapees from the AR deportation transports by Franziska Bruder found more survivor accounts for trains to Belzec than any other camp. There are thus very good reasons to think that thousands of the counted deportees, within the 434,000 Hoefle figure, never reached the camp at all, but died en route and their bodies lie elsewhere.
Cremation at Belzec began in November 1942 according to multiple witnesses, enough to take more of the edge off the 434,000 figure, while the work force for the gruesome clean-up would have also come from within the 434,000 figure.
The capacity of the graves identified by Kola is thus perfectly sufficient to have held the bodies of the victims, especially considering the effects of decomposition, and profile of the deportees skewing towards children given the patterns of selection from the regions affected. The rising and swelling of graves was reported at Belzec, and is known from other mass grave sites.
Revisionist arguments that the graves could have only held 3, 5, 8 or whatever corpses/cubic metre inject assumptions that are not in the slighest bit warranted. Either revisionists provide evidence for the whereabouts of some of the deportees from the Galicia, Krakow and Lublin districts, or there's nothing more to talk about.
Fourthly, your third bulletpoint about 'not on fuel needs and evidence at any of the major camps' partially shifts away from physical evidence to repeat a 'lack of records' argument, which is entirely historical. Since the records of the AR camps were destroyed and noted as being destroyed, this is a non-argument. Because of the destruction of records,
we do not know how much fuel was supplied and in what form to the camps, or how much could be gathered by local efforts - some were practically self-sufficient with such foraging, others would indeed have needed supplying.
The supply of Chelmno with firewood was discussed in the 1945 memoir of the local German forestry official H. May, rendering the argument moot for Chelmno - and we also have a contemporary German document stating that the guard force "re-exhumed the Jews buried in a little wood near Kulmhof and had to burn them in specially constructed furnaces" (as highlighted on HC in 2016 and 2017).
For the Birkenau open-air cremations starting in autumn 1942 to early 1943, several forest details (Forstkommandos) were established in the area of Oberforstamt Pless, at Altdorf, Radostowitz and Kobior.
https://muse.jhu.edu/document/1377
https://muse.jhu.edu/document/1409
The 1944 open air cremations not only show up in one of the air photos, but were also observed by officials of the Reich Justice Ministry, who filed a report after their tour of Auschwitz in June 1944 (i.e. the precise moment of the 'Hungarian Action') mentioning the open air pyres.
For the AR camps, we know that some wood was self-supplied locally with woodcutting details. I have a testimony about the supply of extra wood by cart for Treblinka. Further research might well find more such snippets. Unlike for Chelmno and Birkenau, where we have an idea that the local forestry offices supplied at least part of the necessary wood,
we do not know whether the SS contracted with local forestry offices or arranged shipments from farther afield. There were a variety of SS estates in the GG, especially in the Lublin district, and the SS also ran a sawmill in Pulawy as a sub-camp of Majdanek.
We do know that cremation took place at the AR camps. This was reported in 1944-45 after liberation and in the investigations then, and further documented for the camps due to the grave-robbing of local residents, and is confirmed by the archaeological investigations, including Kola's bore probe investigation of Belzec, and the archaeological reports from Sobibor and Treblinka.
The general fact of cremation at the AR camps has led to an inconsistency in revisionist arguments, a motte-and-bailey seesawing. On the one hand, there are the outright denials that there were ever any graves or cremation there, exemplified by Richard Krege's GPR lawnmower of death and the colossal embarrassment his claims caused. Krege's work was touted in the edited version of M&G's Treblinka in the early 2000s, and the footnote still wasn't taken out in subsequent reprint editions.
On the other, there is the ok-yes-well-there-were-some-cremations line, seen from MGK at various times, but a strenuous denial of mass cremation.
These arguments are
not historical. For a historical argument, you need sources, which means showing the deportees were offloaded before reaching these camps, or were sent onwards from them.
The argument is by analogy, a form of modelling, which can be valid to establish whether past practices were possible (archaeologists and others in historical sciences have done this), but the modelling has to be done accurately. That hasn't happened.
The projections of how much fuel/wood is needed to cremate a human corpse are grossly exaggerated: firstly, the live bodyweight of the victims is averaged far too high considering the composition of children and other contemporary surveys of height/weight; secondly the mix of wood and liquid fuel isn't precisely knowable; thirdly the descriptions of open air cremations match those from multi-corpse crematorium cremations, in that bodies were stacked and layered so as to contribute more of the fuel for the pyre than would be the case in an individual Hindu funeral or indeed, a cremation pyre to incinerate cattle culled in a foot-and-mouth disease epidemic, which have not involved multiple layers of bodies - as seen in the photographs from the Dresden Altmarkt in 1945 and from Klooga in 1944.
Moreover: the exaggerated claims of how much wood is needed to cremate a human corpse are repeated by Mattogno in his book on the Einsatzgruppen, where he repeats a figure of 250kg/corpse whenever he feels like it, thus inextricably linking the shooting sites to the death camps by this argument.
And yet the standard exaggerated estimate is contradicted by historical data from other open air cremations and experiments, showing much lower ratios. Is cremating thousands of human corpses on pyres possible? Yes! The Germans did it on the Dresden Altmarkt in 1945. They did it elsewhere.
So no, the cremation argument is not even vaguely conclusive or "settled science".
