Why does SanityCheck evade the Physical Evidence Question?

[Nazgul]

Thanks, Dr. Terry. I hope this summary captures your latest arguments effectively:

I appreciate Callafangers’ thoughtful summary and critique of SanityCheck and Dr. Terry’s discussion. Your post highlights clearly how historical narrative, witness testimony, and archival research intersect with technical and physical evidence — and the care required to navigate these different types of claims.

It’s a helpful reminder that forum debates can benefit from both empirical grounding and methodological awareness. Narrative and archival evidence provide context and depth, while attention to scale, logistics, and quantifiable details ensures that interpretations remain rigorous.

Reading your post encourages a more structured, focused engagement, reminding participants to address the core issues rather than getting lost in side arguments or assumptions. Friendly discussions like this are exactly what help make complex historical topics approachable without oversimplifying.

[Nazgul]

Dr Terry, I'm surprised at you Sir.

Stubble, thanks for your post — you’ve clearly highlighted the importance of grounding historical claims in concrete, physical evidence and the need to be specific when asserting large-scale events. Your analogies and examples make the point about plausibility very clear and emphasize why careful verification matters.

It’s a helpful reminder that even when documents or narratives suggest something occurred, location, scale, and verifiable physical data are essential for interpreting history rigorously. Observing these distinctions keeps discussion focused and prevents debates from drifting into generalizations or assumptions.

Friendly reminders like yours help maintain clarity and focus in complex discussions like these.

[Callafangers]

Sanity Check focuses on detailed historical and physical evidence, citing witness statements, wartime records, and archaeological investigations to support mainstream narratives, while critiquing misapplications of principles like falsifiability.

Let's be clear, as it seems you are suggesting that SanityCheck has properly applied Popperian falsification and is critiquing 'misapplication' (he is not; rather, he is misapplying). A claim is scientific only if it makes risky, testable predictions that could conceivably be falsified by evidence. Historical claims aren't "pure science" but must still be evidentially vulnerable to qualify as robust historiography. Dogmatic myth does not qualify.

My position throughout the discussion on falsification has been to highlight the matter of risk exposure. Exterminationism has predicted massive, detectable traces (bone/ash volume equivalent to cities' populations) however repeated tests (Lukasziewicz, Sturdy-Colls, etc.) fail to corroborate the alleged scale, not remotely.

SC/Terry redefines falsifiability as "historical convergence" (that is, between witnesses, partial digs, and 'stench reports'). He acknowledges that excavations have happened but calls the sparse results "confirmation", which renders his position as unfalsifiable pseudohistory.

Revisionism predicts sparse remains -- a testable, risky prediction -- which digs have confirmed. This is scientific -- falsifiable and corroborated.

Exterminationism, on the other hand, predicts industrial slaughter traces -- this is falsifiable only in theory however it has failed corroboration (no fuel records, minimal corpse remains, etc.) once tested. Social systems (law, etc.) block decisive tests, which protects from further refutation (totally non-risky; unfalsifiable in practice).

[Stubble]

Fangers, I think all three of Herr Wraith's posts need to be read together, you may want to combine those posts.

Unless I am mistaken, you have slightly misread his intention.

Dr Terry, I'm surprised at you Sir.

Stubble, thanks for your post — you’ve clearly highlighted the importance of grounding historical claims in concrete, physical evidence and the need to be specific when asserting large-scale events. Your analogies and examples make the point about plausibility very clear and emphasize why careful verification matters.

It’s a helpful reminder that even when documents or narratives suggest something occurred, location, scale, and verifiable physical data are essential for interpreting history rigorously. Observing these distinctions keeps discussion focused and prevents debates from drifting into generalizations or assumptions.

Friendly reminders like yours help maintain clarity and focus in complex discussions like these.

Thank you Mr Wraith. I'm giving it my best.

[Callafangers]

Fangers, I think all three of Herr Wraith's posts need to be read together, you may want to combine those posts.

Unless I am mistaken, you have slightly misread his intention.

I was just going off of the actual words used. Perhaps Nazgul said this in error?:

Sanity Check focuses on detailed historical and physical evidence, citing witness statements, wartime records, and archaeological investigations to support mainstream narratives, while critiquing misapplications of principles like falsifiability.

[Stubble]

I read it differently. My interpretation could be wrong and was based on reading the rest of his rapid posts.

I read that as from Nick's perspective, not 'in fact'.

/shrug

Perhaps I was blinded by the kuddos from him. The words are literally there.

Wait, were those posts 'brought to us by ChatGPT'? Re reading them, they read funny and uniformly.

[Nazgul]

Wait, were those posts 'brought to us by ChatGPT'? Re reading them, they read funny and uniformly.

No. It just came across to me as several people talking over each other rather than a single, uniform voice.

I was trying to read the intent behind each post and put a constructive spin on what I thought they were saying. For example, Dr Terry tends to write like a historian, while Nessie was doing what Nessie usually does — leaning hard into methodology.

So the summary reflected different styles and emphases, not a generated or “flattened” take.

[Nazgul]

Let's be clear, as it seems you are suggesting that SanityCheck has properly applied Popperian falsification and is critiquing 'misapplication' (he is not; rather, he is misapplying). A claim is scientific only if it makes risky, testable predictions that could conceivably be falsified by evidence. Historical claims aren't "pure science" but must still be evidentially vulnerable to qualify as robust historiography. Dogmatic myth does not qualify.

My position throughout the discussion on falsification has been to highlight the matter of risk exposure. Exterminationism has predicted massive, detectable traces (bone/ash volume equivalent to cities' populations) however repeated tests (Lukasziewicz, Sturdy-Colls, etc.) fail to corroborate the alleged scale, not remotely.

I think you’re pushing Popper a bit harder than the subject allows.

History isn’t lab science. You don’t get clean predictions and decisive tests, you get partial traces and probabilities. That doesn’t turn it into “pseudohistory”.

The idea that extermination has to leave city-scale physical remains is an assumption, not a given. If there are known reasons why evidence would be destroyed or disturbed, then sparse remains aren’t automatically a refutation.

On the flip side, predicting “sparse remains” isn’t exactly risky either — it fits almost any result.

So this isn’t science vs dogma. It’s just people disagreeing about what kinds of evidence we should expect and how much weight to give them.

At least 20 million people died in the Euro-Russian theatre of war, probably more, and in most cases there is barely a physical trace of their deaths. Absence of vast remains decades later isn’t unusual — it’s the norm in large-scale conflicts.

[Callafangers]

You’re overextending Popper here.

Falsification works cleanly in experimental science; history works with cumulative, uneven evidence. That doesn’t make it “pseudohistory,” it just means different standards apply.

The question of whether there are millions of Jews under AR camps is not exclusively historiographical -- it is a matter which extends quite cleanly into fields of experimental science. When SC/Terry makes the claim that 'the Holocaust happened', he is necessarily (per his own narrative) claiming there are millions of Jews under these camps.

The claim that extermination must leave city-scale physical remains is a straw model.

What?

Destruction, cremation, disturbance, and post-war modification all directly affect what survives.

Yes, in predictable ways.

Sparse remains aren’t automatically disconfirming unless the expectation of abundance is well-grounded to begin with.

Likewise, predicting “sparse remains” isn’t a risky prediction if it fits almost any outcome. That’s resilience, not falsification.

"Sparse remains" absolutely does not fit almost any outcome. Should so much as 50% of what the 'Holocaust' narrative entails be found in actual measured quantity underneath AR camps, this would no doubt suffice. Yet, not so much as 5% has been reasonably confirmed, and arguably much less (fitting quite cleanly within a revisionist framework, and starkly opposing an 'extermination' one).

This isn’t science vs dogma — it’s a disagreement over how evidential limits in historical cases are being framed.

It's science versus non-science or anti-science. Exterminationism is necessarily one of the latter, unless you wish to make the case how -- by any reasonable interpretation -- it could be considered "scientific".

[Nazgul]

It's science versus non-science or anti-science. Exterminationism is necessarily one of the latter, unless you wish to make the case how -- by any reasonable interpretation -- it could be considered "scientific".

As you know I do not agree with Dr Terry or Nessie for that matter. However, at least 20 million people died in the Euro-Russian theatre of war, probably more, and in most cases there is barely a physical trace of their deaths. Adding another six million people — of any nationality, soldier or civilian — doesn’t materially change the scale of that catastrophe. Millions died and will never be individually known.

[Callafangers]

As you know I do not agree with Dr Terry or Nessie for that matter. However, at least 20 million people died in the Euro-Russian theatre of war, probably more, and in most cases there is barely a physical trace of their deaths. Adding another six million people — of any nationality, soldier or civilian — doesn’t materially change the scale of that catastrophe. Millions died and will never be individually known.

That's true but doesn't diminish that a precise scale and range of corpses are claimed at very specific locations, e.g. Treblinka. But further testing beyond the extremely-sparse findings already unearthed there is now forbidden/non-risky/unfalsifiable. This matters for the question of what actually did (or did not) happen at these locations and, by extension, with regard to 'the Holocaust'.

[Nazgul]

That's true but doesn't diminish that a precise scale and range of corpses are claimed at very specific locations, e.g. Treblinka. But further testing beyond the extremely-sparse findings already unearthed there is now forbidden/non-risky/unfalsifiable. This matters for the question of what actually did (or did not) happen at these locations and, by extension, with regard to 'the Holocaust'.

I want to be clear up front: I’m talking history here. My focus, like yours Fangers is on documented events, transport records, labour camps, and the overall scale of wartime deaths.

At least 20 million people died in the Euro-Russian theatre of war, probably more, and in most cases there is barely a physical trace of their deaths. Adding another six million — of any nationality, soldier or civilian — doesn’t materially change the scale of that catastrophe. Millions died and will never be individually known.

I’ve posted transport documents showing trains to Treblinka stopping for about an hour at specific locations — either known labour camps or major railway junctions. I’ve also acknowledged that Treblinka had a labour camp and two Judenlager. Given that, it’s entirely unremarkable that people disembarked there. That follows directly from the site’s documented functions.

I agree with you: if 700,000 people were murdered at a place like Treblinka, it should be backed by hard evidence, not innuendo or mere testimony. That evidence isn’t available. Until it is, no amount of pontification or bluster changes my findings about transports stopping at major labour camps.

Like you, I’m interested in uncovering reality, not half-baked pseudo-history. We’ve been doing that hard work already, especially you with the Ukrainian camps for road works. Yes, people died — I don’t care about nationality, religion, civilian or soldier.

I wish Dr Terry would focus on researching the real causes of deaths in places like Kaiserwald — under-resourcing, disease, and other documented factors — rather than speculating.

[Nessie]

I read with interest the discourse above between Fangers, Sanity, and Nessie.
These posts illustrate complementary approaches in Holocaust discussion forums.

Sanity Check focuses on detailed historical and physical evidence, citing witness statements, wartime records, and archaeological investigations to support mainstream narratives, while critiquing misapplications of principles like falsifiability. Nessie, in contrast, emphasizes debate methodology and expertise, highlighting the limits of non-experts debating highly specialized historical topics and noting how discussions often shift strategically to perceived advantages.

Together, they offer two lenses on the same issue: one grounded in empirical and archival analysis, the other in methodological and epistemological caution. Both contribute to evaluating revisionist approaches, but from different perspectives — one examining the historical record, the other examining the framework of the debate itself.

Conclusion: Both approaches serve an important role in understanding complex historical topics. While one provides detailed evidence and analysis, the other encourages careful consideration of argumentation and methodology. Observing both can help participants engage more thoughtfully and critically, without oversimplifying or misrepresenting the discussion.

That is very well put. The revisionists are happiest when they encounter Sanity Checks's evidence approach and do not like my methodological approach, when discussing the physical evidence question. Revisionists need to show that their physical evidence questions are valid, logical and have any evidential value, since without that, none of their investigations are worth anything. A scientist needs to prove that their testing methods are valid and will produce accurate results, before they run any experiment. Otherwise the entire experiment is a fail.

[Callafangers]

I agree with you: if 700,000 people were murdered at a place like Treblinka, it should be backed by hard evidence, not innuendo or mere testimony. That evidence isn’t available. Until it is, no amount of pontification or bluster changes my findings about transports stopping at major labour camps.

Like you, I’m interested in uncovering reality, not half-baked pseudo-history. We’ve been doing that hard work already, especially you with the Ukrainian camps for road works. Yes, people died — I don’t care about nationality, religion, civilian or soldier.

I wish Dr Terry would focus on researching the real causes of deaths in places like Kaiserwald — under-resourcing, disease, and other documented factors — rather than speculating.

Fair enough, this has been my understanding, although you did "throw me off" a bit with the hand-wave at falsifiability and the significance of this with regard to AR camps and other alleged crime scenes. I do agree that the scale of Jewish suffering regardless is just one piece in the larger mosaic of WW2.

[SanityCheck]

Sanity Check focuses on detailed historical and physical evidence, citing witness statements, wartime records, and archaeological investigations to support mainstream narratives, while critiquing misapplications of principles like falsifiability.

Let's be clear, as it seems you are suggesting that SanityCheck has properly applied Popperian falsification and is critiquing 'misapplication' (he is not; rather, he is misapplying). A claim is scientific only if it makes risky, testable predictions that could conceivably be falsified by evidence. Historical claims aren't "pure science" but must still be evidentially vulnerable to qualify as robust historiography. Dogmatic myth does not qualify.

My position throughout the discussion on falsification has been to highlight the matter of risk exposure. Exterminationism has predicted massive, detectable traces (bone/ash volume equivalent to cities' populations) however repeated tests (Lukasziewicz, Sturdy-Colls, etc.) fail to corroborate the alleged scale, not remotely.

SC/Terry redefines falsifiability as "historical convergence" (that is, between witnesses, partial digs, and 'stench reports'). He acknowledges that excavations have happened but calls the sparse results "confirmation", which renders his position as unfalsifiable pseudohistory.

Revisionism predicts sparse remains -- a testable, risky prediction -- which digs have confirmed. This is scientific -- falsifiable and corroborated.

Exterminationism, on the other hand, predicts industrial slaughter traces -- this is falsifiable only in theory however it has failed corroboration (no fuel records, minimal corpse remains, etc.) once tested. Social systems (law, etc.) block decisive tests, which protects from further refutation (totally non-risky; unfalsifiable in practice).

You've got yourself into quite the pickle with falsification, by ignoring how historical claims can be made with different lines and types of evidence. The death tolls for the extermination camps are one example - they are not made based on counting corpses, or quantifying ash and cremains, but from documents, reports and eyewitness accounts which have been cross-checked against each other.

The fact of cremation at these camps is apparently conceded by revisionists, but they dispute the scale (quantity), while failing to confirm their own predictions, i.e. the documented, named deportees and prisoners showing up somewhere else statistically or physically in the historical record.

Since 1945, new historical sources have routinely deflated initial estimates for the camps, or thickened up newer estimates by corroboration. The classic example is the discovery of the Korherr report a few years after the 1945 Polish investigations had used various methods (Chelmno - killing capacity multiplied by lifespan; Auschwitz - cremation capacity; AR camps - estimates of numbers arriving on transports, largely from witnesses and broad projections) to estimate death tolls. This deflated the death toll projection for Chelmno in 1942/43 significantly from the 1945 investigation's far cruder extrapolation method, and meant it was based on a discrete piece of historical evidence.

That is not the case for many other numbers in history, which remain estimates based sometimes on extrapolations, assumptions and projections, where serial data is lacking, and where physical evidence has become unrecoverable or is incomplete.

The conventional revisions to the original claims about the camps (which can be considered 'falsified' in practice) sit moreover in networks of other camps, ghettos, sites, countries, graves, death books, documents and investigations that have contributed to the revisions for the camps, but also revised numbers for countries. Auschwitz was part of the KZ system which left numerous other records, including death books for other camps, so it can often be established that a deported Jew died in Mauthausen, Buchenwald, etc, in 1944-45, after being transferred from Auschwitz following registration there (surviving a selection).

Non-returning deportees and other Jews who died locally, if otherwise not known from sources naming names, are missing presumed dead, as is the case for others who did not return from deportation or military service or who were obliterated or killed fleeing battles and violence.


The significance of the other sites in the networks is far greater than you seem to think; they form over half of the death toll for the Holocaust calculated since Hilberg, the camps under half, and those numbers include deportees to Auschwitz whose deaths are recorded in the incomplete surviving death books as well as deaths of these deportees noted in other KZ death books and lists.

There's also the fact that the Germans practiced mass cremation at a far greater number of sites than just the death camps. For the prewar borders of Poland an incomplete list would include:

Ostland
Vilnius - Ponary
Slonim
Molodechno
Wilejka

RK Ukraine
Bronnaia Gora
Pinsk
Kobryn
Janow
Luniniec
Bereza Kartuska

Generalgouvernement

Distrikt Galizien
Lwow-Janowska-Piaski
Stanislawow

Distrikt Lublin
Belzec
Zamosc Rotunde (also SK 1005A in 6.44)
Szczebrzeszyn
Lublin Krepiecki forest
KL Lublin – Majdanek
Trawniki
Dorohucza (Belzec SS Fritz Tauscher)
Poniatowa (14 days, Gley testimony)
Chelm Waldlager Borek
Sobibor

Distrikt Warschau
KL Warschau
Verbrennungskommando Warschau after 1944 Uprising
Siedlce
Wegrow
Treblinka
Kaluszyn

Distrikt Radom
Radom-Firlej
Radom city
Blizyn
Czestochowa
Kielce
Ostrowiec
Skarzysko-Kamienna

Distrikt Krakau
KL Plaszow, Krakow
Bochnia
ZAL Roszwadow
ZAL Pustkow
TüP Debica, Krolowa Gora
Mielec – Berdechow forest
Szebnie
Tarnow
SD-Schule Bad Rabka
Przemysl
Sanok
Rzeszow
Jaroslaw

This doesn't include the annexed territories and thus doesn't include the Warthegau and Chelmno, Silesia and Auschwitz, etc. Some of these sites and actions involved cremating non-Jewish victims, but the point is to note the widespread practice of cremation.

Conversely, many sites were not targeted for exhumation and cremation, so left intact mass graves to be investigated after the war, through to the current century in some cases (Busk in Galicia and Serniki in Wolhynien, to point out two cases from eastern Poland).

There are further consequences for revisionist 'narrowcasting' to the key camps from pointing out these other cases, notably the expansion of the size of the necessary conspiracy, hypnosis or whatever explanation is required to get yet more Germans to admit to being involved, the need to explain away documents about SK 1005 (which hasn't been provided hitherto), and the need to account for more prisoners who vanish when reported as shot and subsequently cremated, which is especially apparent for Aktion 'Erntefest' across four camps (Majdanek, Trawniki and Dorohucza, Poniatowa). A number of the sites and cases are now pretty well known - think of the snow/ash scene in Schindler's List, portraying the cremations at Plaszow in Krakow - or are a firm part of the conventional account - 'Harvest Festival' has a chapter on it in Arad's Belzec Sobibor Treblinka, among many other discussions and studies.

The sheer range of cremation sites just in the Government-General - approximately 34 more known cases above and beyond the three AR camps - suggests that it was significantly easier to organise open air pyres than is claimed by revisionists and especially by Mattogno. In particular, fuel supply is not noted as a significant issue when one reads the descriptions of each case, it was often sourced locally, but could also be brought in.

A recent Polish archaeological excavation of a burning site in Pomerania of 1939 victims of the Intelligenzaktion, Chojnice ('Death Valley' to the locals), found that Scots pine was brought in to incinerate the bodies. Whereas other killing sites were deeper into forests or already quasi-public, the surrounding trees at Chojnice provided camouflage for the site and were therefore not cut down.
https://www.researchgate.net/publicatio ... ice_Poland

No doubt revisionist dogma will try to apply the exaggerated wood requirements to these and other sites, but that then runs into the problem of ever greater piles of contemporary evidence, including for Ponary contemporary documents about the mass graves there - so they existed, and cannot be wished away as easily as your denier brain is telling you to do right now.

The other sites add to the problem I've been pointing out for years of scale - starting with the most extreme cases doesn't then cause the others to vanish, whereas considering cases from small to large, and the range of types of site (intact one off mass grave, one off mass grave exhumed and cremated, serial burial sites, serial burning sites), is needed to produce a properly scientific generalisation.