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naraburns  nihil supernum  1yr ago (text post)   6208 thread views

Quality Contributions Report for December 2022

This is the Quality Contributions Roundup. It showcases interesting and well-written comments and posts from the period covered. If you want to get an idea of what this community is about or how we want you to participate, look no further (except the rules maybe--those might be important too).

As a reminder, you can nominate Quality Contributions by hitting the report button and selecting the "Actually A Quality Contribution!" option. Additionally, links to all of the roundups can be found in the wiki of /r/theThread which can be found here. For a list of other great community content, see here.

A few comments from the editor: first, sorry this is a little late, but you know--holidays and all. Furthermore, the number of quality contribution nominations seems to have grown a fair bit since moving to the new site. In fact, as I write this on January 5, there are already 37 distinct nominations in the hopper for January 2023. While we do occasionally get obviously insincere or "super upvote" nominations, the clear majority of these are all plausible AAQCs, and often quite a lot of text to sift through.

Second, this month we have special AAQC recognition for @drmanhattan16. This readthrough of Paul Gottfried’s Fascism: Career of a Concept began in the Old Country, and has continued to garner AAQC nominations here. It is a great example of the kind of effort and thoughtfulness we like to see. Also judging by reports and upvotes, a great many of us are junkies for good book reviews. The final analysis was actually posted in January, but it contains links to all the previous entries as well, so that's what I'll put here:

Now: on with the show!

Quality Contributions Outside the CW Thread

@Tollund_Man4:

@naraburns:

@Bernd:

@FiveHourMarathon:

@RandomRanger:

@Iconochasm:

Contributions for the week of December 5, 2022

@zeke5123:

@ymeskhout:

@FiveHourMarathon:

@gattsuru:

@Southkraut:

@Bernd:

@problem_redditor:

@FCfromSSC:

@urquan:

@gemmaem:

Sexulation

@RococoBasilica:

@problem_redditor:

Holocaustianity

@johnfabian:

@DaseindustriesLtd:

@SecureSignals:

Coloniazism

@gaygroyper100pct:

@screye:

@urquan:

@georgioz:

Contributions for the week of December 12, 2022

@SecureSignals:

@Titus_1_16:

@Dean:

@cjet79:

@JarJarJedi:

@gattsuru:

@YE_GUILTY:

@aqouta:

@HlynkaCG:

Contributions for the week of December 19, 2022

@MathiasTRex:

@To_Mandalay:

Robophobia

@gattsuru:

@IGI-111:

@NexusGlow:

Contributions for the week of December 26, 2022

@FCfromSSC:

@gattsuru:

@LacklustreFriend:

@DaseindustriesLtd:

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The paper at least mentions Mandelbaum, except for some strange reason without a separate analysis or even mentioning much of his specific testimony

There is an entire trilogy solely dedicated to the various testimonies of the Sonderkommando of Auschwitz.

Here is a PDF of Sonderkommando Auschwitz I: Nine Eyewitness Testimonies Analyzed. Henryk Mandelbaum's various testimonies (including testimony unknown in mainstream historiography and translated by Mattogno) are presented and criticized in a 37-page section in Section 10, starting at page 179.

I am not even aware of Dario Gabbai testimony in the 1940s. AFAIK Gabbai entered the scene along with his brother and cousins, the Venezias, no earlier than 1987. The earliest reference I find on Dario's wikipedia page only goes to 1991.

But the Gabbai's and their cousins are featured along with the other "late testimony" witnesses in Sonderkommando Auschwitz III: They Wept Crocodile Tears. A Critical Analysis of Late Witness Testimonies:

Most of the main and secondary witnesses of the Sonderkommando that I have already analyzed, as many as 17, testified for the first time between 1945 and 1947, and this is perfectly understandable; some waited two or three decades: Paisikovic made his first statements in 1963, Rosenblum in 1970. Inexplicably, a small group of self-proclaimed Sonderkommando members, united by origin – they were all Jews deported to Auschwitz from Greece (Josef Sackar, Jaacov Gabai, Shaul Chasan and Leon Cohen) – decided to tell their stories only between 1987 and 1993, in the form of interviews conducted by Israeli historian Gideon Greif, who then published them in 1995 in German (Greif 1995), and ten years later also in an English translation titled We Wept without Tears: Testimonies of the Jewish Sonderkommando from Auschwitz (Greif 2005). The statements of these late “eyewitnesses” constitute the main subject of this present study.

Since the beginning of the 1990s other Greek “survivors” of the Sonderkommando, who until then had remained silent, suddenly felt the imperative “duty to testify”: Daniel Bennahmias in 1993 (Camhi Fromer), and Leon Cohen, already interviewed by Gideon Greif, in 1996 (Cohen).

The crown of laggards, however, unquestionably belongs to Shlomo Venezia (my emphasis: Dario Gabai's (the actor's) cousin), a Jew with Italian citizenship who was deported to Auschwitz from Thessaloniki. After an insignificant media excursion in 1992, he officially entered the Auschwitz martyrology on 3 December 2000, thanks to three German scholars, Eric Friedler, Barbara Siebert and Andreas Kilian, who interviewed him. But it was only after the 2007 publication of his memoirs – in French and then in Italian – that he rose to a prestigious position in Holocaust memoiology as the last “eyewitness” of the “gas chambers” of Auschwitz. In practice, he waited 55 years to “testify,” if we start counting from the end of the Second World War.

Witness testimony is notoriously considered one of the weaker forms of evidence. This is why the Revisionists emphasize historical examples, like Congressman Tom Lantos procuring an "escapee direct eyewitness" to the Iraqi soldiers removing babies from incubators and killing them, direct eyewitnesses to mass graves of babies, and this story probably tipped the scales of public opinion for waging war on Iraq. Likewise, there were eyewitness testimony to gassings at Dachau and Buchenwald, which are no longer claimed to have happened... although the Dachau museum used to have a sign that bizarrely read GAS CHAMBER disguised as a "shower room" - never used as a gas chamber. That Dachau "gas chamber - never used as a gas chamber" was prominently featured in the Nuremberg Trials by the way.

There were also many eyewitnesses to mass homicidal gassings at Majdanek who testified in 1944 (before the liberation of Auschwitz), in facilities which have been revised to have been real hygienic facilities and shower rooms. Soviet investigators claimed in 1944 that Majdanek featured a crematorium with a built-in gas chamber, which was revised recently and admitted to have never been a gas chamber, before Auschwitz was even liberated.

The suspicious over-reliance on the testimony of witnesses also obscures the evidence of which there is too little, which is why I linked the other book. Most people probably do not know that the British intercepted and decoded the secret communication between Auschwitz and SS throughout the war and period of alleged extermination, but even historians admit "The decoded messages contain no references to gassings."

Likewise, the blueprints and construction documents discovered in the archives by Revisionists show non-homicidal functions for these structures. Revisionists, for example, showed that all the blueprints throughout multiple years of one of the Krematorium shows a swinging door connecting the alleged "gas chamber", which is identified as a morgue in the blueprints, with the ovens. The best Believers can do is just argue that the "swinging door" must have been an error in all the blueprints, because a gas chamber obviously would have required a sturdy air-tight door.

Relying so much on the witness testimony, which has its own major problems, ignores a lot of problems with the documentary and physical evidence, or lack thereof.

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