Callafangers wrote: ↑Fri Feb 20, 2026 7:05 pm
Here's your assignment: name any post-Muehlenkamp scholar quantifying your revised tolls/sites (i.e. for wood/process/graves), or concede the physical debate lost.
I think you've been confusing various time-frames and venues in this debate-about-the-debate.
Revisionism has advanced since the turn of the millennium, with ever greater insistence, various arguments about mass graves and cremation, reacting to historic (1945) crime scene investigations and recent (C21) archaeological investigations. Those have been roundly ignored by the archaeologists themselves, who have thus refused to debate and enter into any kind of nitpicking over hypothetical models, preferring to concentrate on the physical evidence of their findings (artefacts, evidence of building foundations, grave areas detected using bore probes and GPR). The same applies to historians, who have produced dozens of books and many more articles/chapters on the AR camps, including synthesising further sources on the cremations, most of which have been entirely ignored by revisionists, especially Mattogno.
Both the latest archaeological and historical research would need to be considered by Mattogno in his seventies, or a new revisionist kid on the block, so
revisionists have not 'won' anything at all, as they are behind with addressing the totality of the evidence for the AR camps, including the physical evidence.
In July 2026, Caroline Sturdy Colls will publish Finding Treblinka, which will no doubt fail to satisfy Mattogno and provoke a further paroxysm of shrieking from him and other deniers. But this illustrates how the sequence of studies and supposed revisions
isn't over.
Anti-revisionists criticised earlier revisionist arguments, especially in the writings of Roberto Muehlenkamp from 2006-2016. Mattogno followed up with a 2021 update, and there it has remained.
Not being responded to for the time being doesn't mean Mattogno's argument has 'won'. That is last-man-standing nonsense; the test is whether Mattogno's argument might be persuasive for others, and despite the increased number embracing Holocaust denial on some social media platforms, the revisionist thesis is not exactly breaking through to be considered in serious circles (like academia).
In the event that Twitter deniers all start chanting the Mattogno mantras and they are picked up by Candace Owens, Tucker Carlson and others, then one might find more heavyweight responses from the mainstream, much as the mainstream responded to Auschwitz denial from the Faurisson affair to Irving vs Lipstadt. That is the classic pattern with responding to fringe claims. Otherwise they remain at essentially basement level, or under-the-bridge troll level. Most Twitter deniers are stuck on 'first six million' and wooden doors and other memes, so there isn't much of a sense of alarm for now, especially when the mainstream can look back to the failure of the 1970s-1990s denier assault on Auschwitz, due to Irving vs Lipstadt.
From
my perspective, there is little point responding
just to Mattogno's latest claims about the AR camps when the rest of the revisionist oeuvre produced in the past few decades remains also unaddressed in a concise/comprehensive form. These claims range from the absolutely inadequate (the shoddy treatment of Chelmno) to the almost hilariously bad (Mattogno's Einsatzgruppen book) to the tediously long-winded and repetitive, and therefore largely self-refuting (all those Mattogno brochures on Auschwitz). Many claims about mass cremation, Aktion 1005 and so on are repeated across different 'Holocaust Handbooks'. That means there is more value in dealing with more of them simultaneously, which I've sketched out in this thread and other discussions with revisionists on forums. The usual pattern over the past fifteen years is to default back to Treblinka and Belzec primarily, ignoring the other mass graves and mass cremations. There seems to be an abiding faith that by narrowing the 'debate' or battle just to these camps, revisionists can 'win'.
I've mocked that revisionist belief more than a few times, since it produces gibberish when considering the wider record of the extermination of the Jews, mainly because you guys believe by reducing the entire picture to a few camps and a few aspects, everything else will just vanish, somehow. Your manifest failures to produce evidence of hoaxing as well as explain what happened are disregarded in the process, which I now see as almost comic. As I've said several times now, the revisionist argument on cremation zaps the deportees from the historical record all the same. It kills them a second time over, with only minimal care for trying to explain what happened, and introduces numerous hypocrisies exemplified by your vaguebooking of a 'revisionist framework'.
The turn to arguments modelling cremation fuel requirements thus looks from not that far a distance like a desperation move and cope, to avoid dealing with the historical evidence.
As a historian who is now part of a department of archaeology and history, and who has been paying attention to the growth in conflict archaeology of WWII and the Holocaust, the logical thing to do is conduct more research, both into historical sources as well as reading the results of archaeological studies. The research is ongoing, and it's too early to present the findings as a whole which relate to the mass graves and cremation issues.
However, you can see in my past track record that I've found things - including a contemporary German document about the cremation of Jews buried at Kulmhof in field ovens, together with other sources including the diary-notes of a Chelmno resident dating the start of cremations there, and the memoir of a forestry official who admitted supplying firewood to Chelmno. Unsurprisingly, revisionists don't want to talk a lot about Chelmno.
There are more such sources on cremation directly, for the key camps and for other sites. Those all collectively speak to how this was done. For example, Andrej Angrick in his study of Aktion 1005 quotes a RSHA official visiting Warsaw in mid-1943 who witnessed cremation efforts during the aftermath of the Warsaw ghetto uprising, and was told that women's bodies burned better than men's bodies, an observation noted elsewhere including from crematoria stokers and the AR camps. Other witnesses Angrick quotes on the same open-air pyres noted how doors were ripped from buildings to be sandwiched between corpses and large amounts of liquid fuel used. The pattern with eyewitness accounts of different open air pyres stresses liquid fuel (of various kinds) a lot more than the rigid obsession with wood in the 'debate' would have us believe, which is one reason why the attempt to quantify wood is unconvincing; we simply don't know the exact balance of liquid fuel to wood.
The historical evidence now available from the past couple of decades of research, past 10-15 years of digitisation and what I have gathered myself, also helps profile the transports and demographics. The numbers deported to Auschwitz were already quite good for the 1942-May 1944 phase, the understanding of the Hungarian action changed almost 25 years ago to confirm greater selections for work (as noted from the get-go by Dieter Wisliceny and other sources) and thus lower the overload on the peak phase at Birkenau. The Hoefle telegram helped with rescrutinising Aktion Reinhardt deportations.
It turns out that surviving records of Polish municipalities and the German Kreishauptmaenner complement other sources in providing more documented detail on the numbers and make-up of Jewish ghettos before deportation in 1942. There are more such sources in the JSS and JDC records which deserve re-reading for whether they indicate age breakdowns and the balance between male and female Jews. Several such sources cited in the literature in the 2000s and 2010s and now confirmed by fresh finds indicate a disproportion of women over men in a number of ghettos in the 'old' GG. In the Warsaw ghetto as of January 1942, males were only 42.6% of the ghetto population, and among 20-29 year olds women were 65% of the cohort (Kassow, Who Will Write Our History?, p.241). In the Lublin ghetto, women formed 55% of the population at the end of 1941 (cited in Silberklang, Gates of Tears). In the much smaller Konskie ghetto in the Radom district, males were 43.8% of the 7,376 Jews in March 1942. The same sources can also indicate under-10s, thus in Konskie they were 16.8% of the population, whereas in Kreis Reichshof (Rzeszow and 9 other ghettos) in the Krakow district, 15% were 10 or under out of 22,005 Jews registered in May 1942.
The close study of the counties and ghettos then indicates who was held back for work, while close study of the transports indicates reports of breakouts and train jumpers, as previously noted.
More data points can firm up the preliminary generalisation that adult males were disproprtionately held back as forced labourers, that the elderly were more likely to be killed on the spot in their homes, nursing homes or hospitals, and thus that women and children were more likely to be deported. The close study of patterns of escapes as individuals or families might revise this further, but for the time being the conservative assumption is that children were included in those attempting to go into hiding at a similar rate to adults, i.e. as families but also with cases of children being placed with Polish families or rescued by them, even if only temporarily.
Looking more into the profiles of age and sex happens to be worth doing from a conventional POV a well, so whatever emerges from reviewing the literature and locating new sources will be interesting in its own right, and then also of use in revising and refining some of Roberto Muehlenkamp's estimates and calculations, if I am ever so inclined.
The reasons for the disproportion of women over men in ghettos by 1942 were cumulative. Some Jewish men may have emigrated ahead of their families before the war, in a classic migration pattern. Jewish men were called up in 1939 to the Polish Army, and thus were killed or became POWs, meaning many did not return to their home towns in this phase. Others fled east in 1939 - while families did so, there seem to be many cases of single men fleeing more frequently than families. Men were more likely to be killed in the early phase of the occupation, or targeted as members of the Jewish councils, or arrested in spring 1942 in the pre-deportation 'pacifications'. In the Warsaw ghetto, they starved to death at a slightly higher rate than women. From October 1941 onwards, they were likely more often caught foraging for food or black marketeering outside the ghettos - this raises interesting questions historically, to confirm this hunch. Perhaps because of this, some men may also have evaded registration more often than women did, living illegally or underground, but that places them in the overall grey zone of numbers. The disproportion of women over men in registered ghetto populations still stands.
So do my previous points about train-jumpers reducing the numbers arriving at the AR camps, as well as the evidence of uncremated corpses found at Belzec, meaning we can and should reduce the number who were ever exhumed and cremated, even if we're just estimating - which is all we can do. If someone wants to quantify any of this, then all of it matters, and all of it reduces the size of the gruesome task.
But there isn't a coherent way of quantifying this for fuel requirements which can produce reliable results across the larger camps through the sites with five figures of victims to the sites with four figures of victims reported as cremated on open air pyres. There aren't generally surviving records indicating the combination of liquid fuel and wood used, there are sources describing open air cremations over and over, from German, Jewish and other witnesses, contemporary reports, and the post-liberation crime scene inspections, together with some archaeological work, which incidentally for other sites in Poland would support much lower quantities of ash and cremains being generated, compared to the usual Mattognian exaggerations.
As for 400kg/corpse (of what weight? a 40-50kg healthy adult woman? Rly?), please carry on deluding yourself; there are multiple documented examples of much lower wood to carcass ratios for open air pyres, before we even get on to the balance of liquid fuel to wood, effects of decomposition and then the effects of piling up layers of corpses - described everywhere from the 1005 cremations and camps, visible also in the Altmarkt photos from Dresden and from Klooga.
The lack of records of fuel supply is vastly exceeded by the lack of records of *any* supplies of heating fuel and food for the deportees if you wish to claim they mostly survived deportation, or any other records or indeed any sources pointing to what happened to the Jews of Kielce, Czestochowa, Konskie and other towns if they didn't die en route to or at Treblinka, etc.
Viewed historically, there is vastly more evidence and sources pointing to death en route to or at Treblinka, followed by cremation of a significant proportion, than for any other explanation. Indeed, for the AR camps it's striking how Mattogno, Graf and Kues had to resort to rumours about the destinations of deportees from western Europe (none of which even mentioned passing through Auschwitz) and had basically nothing to point to the whereabouts of Polish Jews.
The attempt to evade historical reconstruction and explanation by revisionists is ultimately a deal-breaker for many, as you've found over the years, and can see quite clearly in bombsaway's reactions to revisionism. It also generates a hypocrisy if revisionists like you insist on precise quantification when you cannot manage this for your own 'framework', and ultimately leads nowhere, since you've just addedd some contorted reasoning to reach the same end results: the Jews of Kielce, Czestochowa, Konskie etc are zapped from the historical record, last observed sent to Treblinka, a place found after liberation resembling a moonscape of churned up soil with bones and cremains everywhere.
The arguments don't even help refute the underground reports or eyewitnesses reporting on cremation at Treblinka, since there were manifestly open air cremation at this camp, leaving the physical traces observed and photographed in the 1940s.
The entire argument comes down to scale, and that is what the 'revisionist method' has yet to establish in a reliable way that can be applied everywhere. I keep asking about this, and you keep evading.
On balance, Stubble has the right approach for moving things forward: his incredulity over the size of mass graves and cremation pyres at the 'Bug river camps' means he's been researching where the deportees might have ended up. For a 'field' like revisionism, this is what multiple revisionist researchers should have been doing for the past twenty years, whereas all you got were a few years from Thomas Kues, who has long since disappeared and whose results were woeful. Mattogno in particular seems to have given up for the past decade plus even trying to marshall an argument about what happened, although he supposedly was to speak about this at the recent 'summit'.
