site banner

Culture War Roundup for the week of July 15, 2024

This weekly roundup thread is intended for all culture war posts. 'Culture war' is vaguely defined, but it basically means controversial issues that fall along set tribal lines. Arguments over culture war issues generate a lot of heat and little light, and few deeply entrenched people ever change their minds. This thread is for voicing opinions and analyzing the state of the discussion while trying to optimize for light over heat.

Optimistically, we think that engaging with people you disagree with is worth your time, and so is being nice! Pessimistically, there are many dynamics that can lead discussions on Culture War topics to become unproductive. There's a human tendency to divide along tribal lines, praising your ingroup and vilifying your outgroup - and if you think you find it easy to criticize your ingroup, then it may be that your outgroup is not who you think it is. Extremists with opposing positions can feed off each other, highlighting each other's worst points to justify their own angry rhetoric, which becomes in turn a new example of bad behavior for the other side to highlight.

We would like to avoid these negative dynamics. Accordingly, we ask that you do not use this thread for waging the Culture War. Examples of waging the Culture War:

  • Shaming.

  • Attempting to 'build consensus' or enforce ideological conformity.

  • Making sweeping generalizations to vilify a group you dislike.

  • Recruiting for a cause.

  • Posting links that could be summarized as 'Boo outgroup!' Basically, if your content is 'Can you believe what Those People did this week?' then you should either refrain from posting, or do some very patient work to contextualize and/or steel-man the relevant viewpoint.

In general, you should argue to understand, not to win. This thread is not territory to be claimed by one group or another; indeed, the aim is to have many different viewpoints represented here. Thus, we also ask that you follow some guidelines:

  • Speak plainly. Avoid sarcasm and mockery. When disagreeing with someone, state your objections explicitly.

  • Be as precise and charitable as you can. Don't paraphrase unflatteringly.

  • Don't imply that someone said something they did not say, even if you think it follows from what they said.

  • Write like everyone is reading and you want them to be included in the discussion.

On an ad hoc basis, the mods will try to compile a list of the best posts/comments from the previous week, posted in Quality Contribution threads and archived at /r/TheThread. You may nominate a comment for this list by clicking on 'report' at the bottom of the post and typing 'Actually a quality contribution' as the report reason.

9
Jump in the discussion.

No email address required.

According to the lore, they didn't use coal, they used freshly cut wood or harvested brushwood.

Only Treblinka is used open air pits and harvested wood. Open air pyres were, a feature of I believe one camp only. Other used specialised cremation furnaces into which bodies were continually pushed as soon as there was enough room. Lot of heat was retained in the furnace itself and so on.

ChatGPT estimates for its part that cremating 5,000 people would require burning 750 cords of wood, or about 1,500,000 kg as a daily requirement.

a) ChatGPT is a lobotomized moron.

b) human bodies, especially of older people who haven't been starved in a camp contains a fair amount of energy. You don't need to spend 300 kg of wood to burn a person, especially not if done in bulk meaning the from the burning doesn't escape as would be the case in a large pile of stacked bodies interspread with wood. With a body fat content of 20%, each 50 kg corpse in essence contains the energy of 10 kg of coke.

Crematoria were made out of heat resistant bricks and accumulated heat in themselves.

Heat of vaporization of water is 2.3 MJ/kg. For a 50 kg body containing 35 kg of water, that's about 81 MJ. Meanwhile body fat of 20% for the same gives you 10 kilograms of fat tissue, which has an energy content of 380 MJ. Heating up the 35 kg of water 70˘C is 10 MJ (4.2 kJ/kg*K). So, there's plenty of energy in a corpse to heat up and water evaporate all its water. In fact, in a non-malnourished person there's several times more heat.

c) burning of corpses using firewood under the open sky was only a feature of one camp, Treblinka, which had a workforce of 1.5-2000 people. Let's say you've got 1k people working on that, each day, 12 hours a day. Even with just hand saws, one person can cut down and strip of branches maybe 6-8 solidly sized (~500 kg) trees without difficulty in that time, probably far more. We're up to 3000 tons of wood this way. Not difficult at all to cremate people with that much wood, they probably only needed a fraction of that because like I said, even slender corpses contain a fair amount of energy.

The quantity of coal mined across the entire German industry doesn't solve the problem of how this small camp cremated 5,000 people per day on crude open-air pyres with nobody noticing and with no shipments of fuel.

With an essentially infinite workforce and large woods adjacent to the camps, that's not a real issue.

with nobody noticing

Pretty sure people noticed the burnt corpse smell, as the nearest village was only 4 km away and according to the few survivors it was so bad that if it was blowing on the sorting camp, work had to cease, but what could the villagers do ? What use do you think it'd be to complain Germans about a bad smell ?

Only Treblinka is used open air pits and harvested wood.

Wrong- Treblinka, Belzec, and Sobibor, together constituting about two-thirds of the total alleged gassing victims, all supposedly used this method. These camps were not constructed with crematoria, raising the peculiar fact that many concentration and labor camps were constructed with state-of-the-art crematoria for the cremation of corpses, in order to manage the outbreak of disease at those camps, but the three alleged "top-secret extermination camps" were built with no crematoria at all and used the most crude method imaginable. According to the mainstream position, most of the gassing victims were cremated with this method.

Treblinka, which had a workforce of 1.5-2000 people. Let's say you've got 1k people working on that, each day, 12 hours a day.

Yitzhak Arad, who wrote the standard work on the three camps named above, put the labor force of the Treblinka "extermination camp" at 500 - 1000, with a Forest Team that:

... numbered a few dozen prisoners, was set up to cut wood for heating and cooking in the camp. It was put to work in the forests near the camp. When the cremation of the corpses was started, this team was enlarged, for it also had to supply the wood for the bonfires on which the corpses were burned.

There are no sources that specify, but even the mainstream apologists admit this team was never bigger than 60 to 80 people, which is less than 10% of your supposition. Jewish "witness" Richard Glazar said there were 25 people on this team.

It so happens the revisionist Carlo Mattogno basically agrees with your estimate of tree felling production, estimating 0.55 tons of wood per man-day in a lumberjack team. Mattogno also ran cremation experiments on animal carcasses, from Mattogno's work on Sobibor:

This result is confirmed by the observation that “approximately 350 kg of ash is produced per tonne of animal.” 394 Since a typical fresh carcass contains approximately 32% dry matter, of which 52% is protein, 41% is fat, and 6% is ash,” 395 it follows that one ton of carcass weight contains (1,000×0,06=) 60 kg of ash, with the remainder of (350–60=) 290 kg stemming from the wood. It is known that, “on the average, the burning of wood results in about 6-10% ashes” 396 with an average of 8%. Therefore the ash mentioned is furnished by (290÷0.08=) 3,625 kg of wood, yielding a specific consumption of 3.6 kg per kg of carcass weight.

Similar data are provided by the description of the incineration of poultry in Virginia: 2,268 tons of carcasses were burned by means of 10,000 tons of wood, 397 i.e. using 4.4 kg of wood per kg of carcass weight.

In Carlo Mattogno’s experiments with waste beef, a weight ratio of wood/flesh of 2.6 was needed in a makeshift closed furnace, of 3.1 in an open furnace and of 3.5 in a pit. 398

For the mass cremation of corpses the above data allow us to assume a ratio of 3.5 on a weight by weight basis. The wood required to burn the corpse of an average deportee with a weight of 60 kg would thus be about 210 kilograms.

In the most famous Revisionist work on Treblinka, Sobibor, and Belzec, One Third of the Holocaust, the revisionist performs an outdoor open-air cremation experiment of a leg of lamb with a 3.6x ratio of dry wood and is unable to cremate the carcass despite tending the fire.

The mainstream claims that about 789,000 people were cremated using this method in this small camp with this small labor force in about 5 months, or over 5,000 corpses cremated per day. Assuming a 40kg average weight of each cremation victim, the total dry wood required for one day of cremations would be 770 tons of dry wood burned per day.

Assuming an 80-man kommando could produce 0.55 tons per man-day, that would be only a production of 44 tons of green wood per day, not taking into consideration the fact that the wood kommando also provided the fuel for cooking, heating the camp, and camp construction of fences and buildings. That's less than 10% the daily requirement assuming 100% production and 100% cremation every single day with no delays caused by inclement weather (Poland isn't known for its perfect weather by the way).

There are 0 witness accounts of the mass deliveries of fuel to the camp, there are 0 documents relating or alluding to the mass deliveries of fuel to these camps, there are 0 references in the standard work- Arad assumes all of the wood was self-sufficiently supplied.

But there's one hiccup in the calculation here, anybody who has sourced their own wood knows there's a major difference between freshly cut green wood and seasoned wood. The former is at least 60% water and would require about twice as much, according to Mattogno's estimates:

It follows that 1 kg of dry wood (20% humidity) with a calorific value of 3,800 kcal/kg is the equivalent of 1.9 kg of green wood.

So the daily fuel requirements would be about 1400 tons of green cordwood, less than 5% of which could have been provided by a theoretical 80-man team (but the 'eyewitness' said it was 25 men).

In practice, anybody who has worked with wood knows the difficulties of burning green, freshly cut wood, and the use of freshly cut wood for the primary fuel source in the cremation of 770,000 people in 5 months is not even within the realm of possibility.

Let's say they did magically have a labor force big enough to fell enough wood every single day. How much area would they have to deforest? From Mattogno's work on Treblinka:

Where did the administration of the Treblinka camp obtain the 139,200 metric tons of wood required for the incineration of the bodies?

According to the witnesses, trees in the nearby forest were felled for the wood supply. The work was performed by a “Holzfällerkommando” (woodfelling unit).445 But the witness reports are extremely vague about the details, which one can well understand. During a period of 122 days, this party would have had to cut down, saw up and haul into the camp (139,200÷122=) 1,140 tons of wood every day! This means that every day it had to fell and saw up at least 760 trees and transport the load on 76 trucks carrying 15 metric tons each. This is decidedly too much, especially if one considers that this woodfelling party is supposed to have consisted, according to R. Glazar, of merely 25 men.87

The environs of Treblinka are today overgrown with fir trees. A 50-yearold fir forest yields 496 tons of wood per hectare.446 For the sake of simplicity, we round this number to 500 tons. In order to obtain 139,200 tons of wood, the SS would therefore have had to cut down (139,200÷500=) 278.4 hectares of forest, which corresponds to 2.7 square kilometers! But such a large deforested zone would naturally have not gone unnoticed by the local Poles, who were questioned by Judge Łukaszkiewicz in his investigations. On the other hand, in the aerial photographs of May and November 1944 a thick forest of approximately 100 hectares can be recognized on the north and east side of the camp, of which at least one hectare is located on the camp area itself.447 The forest stretches beyond the Wólka Okrąglik-Treblinka road, and borders on it for over 2 kilometers. There is no trace of any area where trees have been felled.

The aerial photographs that Mattogno mentions were taken by the Luftwaffe in May 1944, after the supposed cremation operations were over and the aerial photographs prove that there was no major tree felling in the vicinity of the camp.

None of this is even to mention the difficulties that would come with burning the wood, the fuel consumption of which would have been about equivalent to an intense 150m x 150m forest fire. This fire would have been in the immediate vicinity of a civilian rail-line, less than 2 km from a major rail junction, and in the immediate vicinity of several villages which still exist today. No contemporary reports or documentary evidence of this massive tree-felling and cremation operation whatsoever.

There's something about the Holocaust narrative that strikes the cord of religiosity in our psyche, we turn off our brains even though we ought to be able to see what is an obvious and manipulative deception. Even when it's spelled out clearly we think "no, there must be some other explanation."

There are no sources that specify, but even the mainstream apologists admit this team was never bigger than 60 to 80 people, which is less than 10% of your supposition. Jewish "witness" Richard Glazar said there were 25 people on this team.

You're assuming several things here.

  1. whoever who did the research didn't fuck it up.

  2. I'm going to believe you, a person who believes millions of Jews would have just 'left' eastern Europe and moved to ..Stalin's Russia, in the middle of a war, using some unprecedented system of cross-frontline movements, are just not making shit up, wholesale.

The aerial photographs that Mattogno mentions were taken by the Luftwaffe in May 1944, after the supposed cremation operations were over and the aerial photographs prove that there was no major tree felling in the vicinity of the camp.

You're showing a picture of a very tiny portion of the area.

https://en.mapy.cz/turisticka?q=treblinka&source=osm&id=40487565&ds=2&x=21.9935714&y=52.5758397&z=13

There is something like two dozen square kilometers of woods nearby. If you had trucks, you could easily get the equivalent of 2.7 square kilometers of clear-cut forest without even clearcutting anything. Furthermore, there's a railway line.

No contemporary reports or documentary evidence of this massive tree-felling and cremation operation whatsoever.

Funnily enough, the local railway was administered by an agent of the AK... who kept careful notes of the transports, AK forwarded them to London, and being the local boss, even apparently stole a part of the records to prove the cattle wagons that arrived full of Jews were returning empty.

No contemporary reports

Do you even speak Polish ?

There is something like two dozen square kilometers of woods nearby. If you had trucks, you could easily get the equivalent of 2.7 square kilometers of clear-cut forest without even clearcutting anything. Furthermore, there's a railway line.

There is no description of such an operation in any witness testimony. There's no documentary evidence at all, there is no evidence whatsoever of such an operation. What happened was the storytellers had to come up with an excuse for why their atrocity propaganda could not produce forensic evidence of bodies similar to the German investigation of the Katyn Forest massacre. So they made up a lie about digging up all the bodies and cremating them through open-air pyres, sifting through the ashes, etc. to avoid the question you say a million people were murdered here, where are all the bodies?

But in telling such a lie they didn't have the wherewithal to describe what an actual operation of that scale would look like. None of them hint at a labor force of 1000 lumberjacks shipping dozens of trucks with who-knows how many wood haulers every single day. This is a big lie, so their description of the operation totally lacks any reference to what you are presupposing because you tacitly acknowledge that the witnesses' own description of the operation is not possible.

Do you even speak Polish ?

Carlo Mattogno, the revisionist I've cited in this thread who is by far the most prolific researcher in the Revisionist movement, is fluent in Italian, German, Polish, and Russian. He has visited the archives in Moscow and translated large numbers of documents and testimonies that have never been published in mainstream research, including many from Polish witnesses.

In the work on Treblinka I linked to earlier, Mattogno points out (p. 152 Lack of Documentary Evidence for Cremations):

These kinds of enormous pyres, had they actually existed, would obviously have been immediately conspicuous in the area surrounding Treblinka. In reference to this, the witness Kazimierz Skarzyński explained:448

“The bodies were piled on the rails and burned. The glow of the fire was visible at a distance of 15 km. During the day, black smoke spread. With a strong wind, the smell of burning was still perceptible 30 km away from the camp.”

As pointed out in our introduction, the Treblinka camp was surrounded by quite a number of villages and hamlets. Within a radius of 10 km were the small towns of Wólka Ogrąlik, Poniatowo, Grady, Treblinka, Małkinia, Zawisty Dzikie, Rostki Wlk., Rytele, Świeckie, Olechny, Wszołki, Jakubiki, Tosie, Kosów Lacki, Dębe, Żochy, Rostki, Maliszewa, Guty, Bojewo, Brzózka, Kołodziaż, Orzełek, Złotki, Prostyń, Kiełczew.

From every single one of these villages and hamlets one would have seen the glow of the flames from Treblinka for 122 days – how does it happen that there is no mention of this in any of the reports of the Polish resistance movement?

And how is it that Soviet reconnaissance planes discovered no trace of this gigantic cremation operation? Jankiel Wiernik supplies the following explanation for this:63

“Whenever an airplane was sighted overhead, all work was stopped, the corpses were covered with foliage as camouflage against aerial observation.”

This, of course, is outrageous nonsense: in the first place, the planes would already have noticed the smoke from the grates long before they reached the camp, and in the second place, thanks to the great amount of smoke it would have produced, covering the grates with foliage would have been the best method to make them even more visible!

That such a mass cremation of many hundreds of thousands of bodies was not a real event follows, finally, from the glaring contradictions between the different eyewitness narratives...

If you are a critically-minded person, you ought to be able to detect the 'tell' in Jankel Wiernik's wildly absurd description for how they made this operation escape detection: "Whenever an airplane was sighted overhead, all work was stopped, the corpses were covered with foliage as camouflage against aerial observation." It's like when a four-year old tells you something that you just know is a cover-story for something else. This is an example of the witness modus operandi for how they include absurd details like this as a preemptive excuse for something implausible- like this operation escaping detection from aircraft. The fact that the 'witnesses' could not describe a possible operation indicates the entire mass exhumation and cremation story is just cover for the fact that this did not happen, and they are building lies on top of lies to try to explain why there's no trace of it happening other than their own tall tales.

The problem, though, is that none of them could intuit what would actually have to go into an operation such as cremating 780,000 people on open-air pyres in 122 days. So their description of the operation is not even remotely possible. The thing is, witness testimony is the only evidence that this is something which happened, given the total absence of documentary and physical evidence. So the fact they could not describe a plausible operation, an operation that probably looks more like what you have in your imagination, is devastating to the myth.

There is no description of such an operation in any witness testimony. There's no documentary evidence at all, there is no evidence whatsoever of such an operation. What happened was the storytellers had to come up with an excuse for why their atrocity propaganda could not produce forensic evidence of bodies similar to the German investigation of the Katyn Forest massacre. So they made up a lie about digging up all the bodies and cremating them through open-air pyres, sifting through the ashes, etc. to avoid the question you say a million people were murdered here, where are all the bodies?

You haven't looked for it. Don't lie. You don't even speak Polish.

From every single one of these villages and hamlets one would have seen the glow of the flames from Treblinka for 122 days – how does it happen that there is no mention of this in any of the reports of the Polish resistance movement?

a) You mean the Polish resistance movement that was ruthlessly suppressed by the Stalinist government ? Gee, why weren't they writing more. Yet some of them did write down what happened after situation cooled off in Poland, as I already mentioned..

b) have you even checked? Because I checked. Within five minutes I found a TV interview of a woman who was a teenager then, lived cca 10 km away, who said her village was smelling smoke from the camp almost every day during the camp operation, and that the sky was partly obscured because of it due to a smoky haze.

c) you are, to me, just incredibly weird. How are you going to explain, for example, Lanzmann's film - which featured secret recordings of known perpetrators, guy who were tracked down, sentenced to prison, then went out - in which they admit what they've done ? Few of them were okay with being filmed during the interview, so he mostly lied and recorded them secretly.

He recorded more than 350 hours of footage, Israeli gov't told him to go to hell, that he's too slow, apparently it's all digitalized and has the original German in it. Surely as a fan you speak that language. You ever watched those secret recordings ?

Lanzmann was apparently even prosecuted by the notoriously privacy-minded German state for the secret recording when one guy discovered it and assaulted him.

If you are a critically-minded person, you ought to be able to detect the 'tell' in Jankel Wiernik's wildly absurd description for how they made this operation escape detection: "Whenever an airplane was sighted overhead, all work was stopped, the corpses were covered with foliage as camouflage against aerial observation."

As a 'critically minded person' I know that witness testimony can be often pretty bad. You cannot discount an entire event because some witnesses have weird memories or make weird claims for whatever reason. Wiernik was obviously deeply messed up. Suchomel, on the other hand worked at Treblinka, only got several years in prison over it - the only person to get life was the deputy commander- and was pretty lucid when interviewed and said nothing outlandish..

Lot of people (e.g. all the Treblinka survivors), and a whole bunch of perpetrators did say the camp existed and operated. That one of them - a carpenter, so probably a uniquely dim Jew, apparently very much traumatized did write some nonsense is supposed to completely invalidate the testimony of everyone else, the records that exist and all that ?

But there's one hiccup in the calculation here, anybody who has sourced their own wood knows there's a major difference between freshly cut green wood and seasoned wood. The former is at least 60% water and would require about twice as much, according to Mattogno's estimates:

Mattogno is not very bright , you know?

I had to look up wood energy content myself because we use it for heating at a property. You only need 15% more wood if you're using raw. Because nobody measures wood by weight, it's always measured by volume, usually as stacked cubic meters, sometimes loose cubic meters.