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That's a "jet fuel can't melt steel beams" kind of argument. I'm pretty sure that turning bones to ashes only requires a certain temperature and is also an energy positive process by itself, or if not then a rounding error compared to the heat required to evaporate the water. You're welcome to look up the chemical processes involved, for me my back of the envelope calculations and some physics-related common sense provide convincing enough proof that cremation is in fact an energy-positive process, so your "multiply the wood amount by 5000" argument is nonsense.
I'm OK with assuming that the Nazi judge did not relay the boasting about the cremation process by the guy who he had shot in precise enough detail.
It's pretty unbelievable that you make the claim that thousands of people could be cremated simultaneously without fuel (except to start the fire), and that the cremation would be net energy-positive. Then you accuse me of making a "jet fuel can't melt steel beams" argument. You are literally saying that the cremations were magical and the bodies were self-cremating.
Humanity has practiced cremation for millennia. Cremation is not net-energy positive. There are many studies and case studies, especially pertaining to the cremation of livestock during pandemics, and what you are claiming is a fairy tale. Revisionists have also studied cases where extremely hot house or car fires failed to cremate a body, the notion that a body is self-cremating once a temperature threshold is reached is completely asinine.
But just because I asked ChatGPT to weigh in since people are more likely to trust an AI to say the sky is blue than a Holocaust denier:
You have not provided an explanation for how 5,000 could have been cremated every single day, you are providing evidence of how completely absurd the official story is and how detached it is from reality.
The official story is that in a large scale process, the heat from the bodies themselves made the process far less energy intensive than that of civilian cremation.
If they needed 10 kg of coal to burn a body, in addition to say, 8-10 kilograms of fat contained in each body, that'd only have required the use of 10 tons for a thousand corpses, which is just 1/4 of a small coal hopper. (these days apparently up to 100 tons per car).
The transports had up to 150 victims per rail car. Supposed you needed 20 kg per corpse to burn one in an efficient furnace.
That implies 3 tons per victim rail car, so you'd perhaps need one railcar of coal per 15 wagons of victims.
That's not a logistical challenge - not for a country where up to half of rail capacity was used to move coal to generate power.
German coal production was ~250 million tons per year.
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Ultimately, the credibility of that particular piece testimony does hinge on the question of whether it is possible for a meat-powered fire to generate enough heat to self-sustain once it gets started.
But let's actually do the math ourselves, instead of just parroting the arguments of ChatGPT, which is a language model which infamously has trouble telling you which of two numbers is larger unless you tell it to work through the problem step by step.
Enter the bomb calorimeter. It is a reasonably accurate way of measuring the energy content of various substances. Measurements using bomb calorimeters suggest that fat contains 38 - 39 kJ / g, proteins 15 - 18 kJ / g, and carbohydrates 22 - 25 kJ / g.
Humans are composed of approximately 62% water, 16% protein, 16% fat, 1% carbohydrates, and 6% other stuff (mostly minerals). For the cremation story to be plausible, let's say that the water would need to be raised to 100ºC (4.2 J / g / ºC) and then boiled (2260 J / g), and the inorganic compounds (call their specific heat also 4 J / g / ºC -- it's probably closer to 1, which is the specific heat of calcium carbonate, but as we'll see this doesn't really make much difference) raised to (let's say) 500ºC.
So for a 50 kg human, that's
31 kg water: - 12 MJ to raise to 100ºC, 70MJ to actually boil
8 kg protein - 132 MJ released from burning under ideal conditions
8 kg fat - 308 MJ released from burning under ideal conditions
500g carbohydrates - 12 MJ released from burning under ideal conditions
3 kg other - 6 MJ to raise to 500ºC.
So that's about 450 MJ released by burning, of which about 90 MJ goes towards heating stuff and boiling water. That sure looks energy positive to me.
Sanity check -- a tea light is a 10g blob of paraffin wax, which has a very similar energy density to fat. So a tea light should release about 400 kJ of energy when burned, which means that a tea light should contain enough energy to boil off about 150 mL of water, or to raise a bit over a liter of water from room temperature to boiling, if all of the energy is absorbed in the water.
And, in fact, it is possible to boil water using tea lights. A tea light takes about 4 hours to burn fully. That video shows 17 tea lights burning for 8.5 minutes, which should release about 60% as much energy as is contained in a single tea light. It looks like that brought about 400ml of water to a boil, so the sanity check does in fact check out.
I really don't think that random british dude who is showing you how to use candles to boil water during a power failure is in on a global conspiracy to cover up a lack of genocide, but, just in case you think he is, this is an experiment you can try at home with your own materials.
Edit: clarity
I think securesignal's argument has massive holes elsewhere (even in the point under discussion, finding fuel in industrial quantities to burn bodies should not be a problem for a modern state) , but your argument is very theoretical.
I listen to true crime, and I never heard of a murderer burning a body without fuel. Usually it takes them a day of piling on wood on the corpse before it's gone. Is a steak spontaneously combustible? It would seem to have enough energy, yet I have never seen one burst into flames and keep burning if briefly exposed to fire.
ah but this wasn't the claim! @SecureSignals's claim was that the cremation process was energy negative, which has shown not to be the case not only by @faul_sname's calculations but experimentally as well
also while SecureSignals seems to always be insinuating that 1 body was burned at a time... this is clearly not the case as claimed by... well everyone that isn't a holocaust denier
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You have to dehydrate it first, but jerky is in fact flammable. We're not talking about a single body, we're talking about a pile of bodies with fuel and accelerants at the bottom.
SecureSignals keeps coming back to the assertion that "pile a bunch of bodies on a grate, put wood and accelerants below them, and ignite" is not a viable way to burn bodies, and that it is not viable because burning bodies is a strongly energy-negative process, as evidenced by normal cremations taking a lot of fuel. This would actually be a pretty good knock-down argument against the reliability of that testimony if burning bodies was in fact strongly energy-negative.
That jerky is 50% fat. And your theoretical argument claimed it would boil the water away, no need to remove it first. But ok, I'll grant it is possible within certain parameters and I learned something about jerky and the wick effect.
I don't happen to have any lean beef jerky on hand, but I do have some dried shredded squid, which has 0.5g of fat, 25g of sugar, and 16g of protein per serving (and also, according to the back of the packaging possibly some lead, mercury, and cadmium?!), and that burns quite vigorously. That's rather more sugar (and heavy metals) than I would expect my dried squid snacks to have.
I do expect that even lean jerky would burn pretty vigorously once it got going though. I'll actually run the experiment the next time I have some lean beef jerky (that is not, for some reason, full of sugar and heavy metals).
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So your contention is that it takes no fuel beyond body mass to perform a cremation?
Whether or not you can perform a cremation without additional fuel will depend on how much heat is lost to the environment (plus the question of achieving ignition in the first place). My contention is that body mass contains sufficient energy to perform a cremation. This is based on the following logic:
Humans are made of meat
Meat with a nontrivial fat percentage contains enough energy to boil all of the water in the meat.
Meat without the water is called "jerky".
Jerky is flammable.
So you are not saying one way or another whether a cremation requires fuel? Can you cite me any case or example where the cremation of a carcass (livestock for example) did not require fuel to be cremated to ash?
Here's an example by the way of a cremation of a pig with a large amount of wood fuel. It did not achieve complete cremation.
I can cite you several cases where the burning of a body did not require significant amounts of external fuel. Which had already been pointed out to you at the time you made this comment. However, and I will emphasize this because it is in fact an important point:
Nobody in this thread has made the claim, or is currently making the claim, that the pyres did not have any fuel. They are instead saying that your assumption that the amount of fuel required to burn a pile of bodies must scale with the number of bodies is wrong.
The actual specific testimony in question was
You seem to be under the impression, not just that this did not happen, but that this physically could not have happened. That is why people, including me, are pointing out that bodies do in fact contain enough energy that they could burn under the right conditions.
And rather than disputing the math, or making specific claims about why the math does not apply in this situation, you've been doing an awful lot of sneering about how absurd peoples' claims are[1][2][3], and trying to misrepresent what their claims were[4][5][6].
So no, I am not going to engage in the way you want, providing ever more statements for you to make doubtful sneering faces at while avoiding actually engaging with the arguments.
I'm out.
[1] "Your claims are literally absurd. But it's why witnesses thought it wasn't too big of a problem to say that little or no fuel was used, or particularly fat women were used as fuel". (no explanation of why the claim is absurd, just an attempt to distract with other claims by the same person that you find non-credible)
[2] "It's pretty unbelievable that you make the claim that thousands of people could be cremated simultaneously without fuel (except to start the fire), and that the cremation would be net energy-positive" (and your source of why it's unbelievable was... ChatGPT???)
[3] "It's a logistically absurd claim. It's not even close to being possible." (judged absurd by ChatGPT again, of course)
[4] "The suggestion that cremations were burned in the open-air without fuel is of course completely absurd" (that was not, in fact, the suggestion)
[5] "So that's now 3 people who have claimed it takes no fuel to cremate bodies, just for the record." (which was, again, not the claim)
[6] "So your contention is that it takes no fuel beyond body mass to perform a cremation?" (you get the idea)
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You are literally arguing against physics. Again, quick googling told me that: meat energy density is about 10MJ/kg, water heat of vaporization is about 2MJ/kg, humans are 60% water. I don't account for bones but I also don't account for fat and brains. Can you do basic math?
Your argument is that since a proper cremation of a single body requires a lot of energy, a mass cremation of 5000 bodies requires a proportionally prohibitive amount of energy. When I point out that it doesn't scale like that at all because of physics (not to mention that Nazis weren't interested in proper cremations), you make more arguments supporting that cremation of a single body requires a lot of energy.
If the cremation of a single body requires a lot of external energy, then why wouldn't that scale with the cremation of 5000 bodies? It absolutely would. The external energy must have a source to sustain hours of cremation.
Your claims are literally absurd. But it's why witnesses thought it wasn't too big of a problem to say that little or no fuel was used, or particularly fat women were used as fuel. There are also witnesses who say that blood was flammable and used as fuel, but I think even you wouldn't fall for that one.
@johnfabian cited Rajchman's Treblinka memoirs. Here is what Rajchman claims in his memoirs:
Pure fantasy. Just think that he witnessed these things but the OSI didn't get around to interviewing him until 1980, and his first memoir wasn't published until 2009.
Edit: There's also this laughable account from Rajchman showing the propaganda-motive for these tall tales:
Industrial processes when scaled up can be more efficient. Normal cremation process doesn't involve pushing a naked body into an extremely hot oven to be burned as fast and efficiently as possible.
Most of the people they were killing weren't starvation victims. Old people mostly, or very young, easily 15-20% body fat.
I'm probably not far off the mark to say the energy content of fat tissue is fairly near that of hydrocarbon fuel.. I'm not sure how much fat there is per unit of fat tissue, but I'd be unsurprised if it was say, 80%. So someone weighing 60 kg, with a 20% body fat ratio has 12 kg of fat tissue, perhaps 9.6 kgs of fat itself, which translates to 380 MJ of energy.
That's a fair bit of energy. Allegedly, people who aren't complete anorexics have enough energy in them to combust themselves.
The furnaces used were huge, thus kept the heat of the bodies that have already burned before in their brickwork.
Perhaps you can do some research and look around -surely some green zealots have come up with carbon debt caused by each corpse burned, we could derive the minimal energy needed from that.
There was no brickwork. The bodies were piled on outdoor fires because Treblinka like the other two camps did not have a crematorium with modern ovens. The plan was to bury the bodies and the plan changed only in 1943, but no crematoria were built. This was not an "industrial process", it was allegedly done with the most crude methods and none of the modern technology that were used for cremation in the concentration camp. All experience shows that these cremations require a huge amount of energy, and I continue to be surprised that so many people are claiming that the Treblinka cremations were the only cremations in human history that required no fuel. Why? "Industrial processes" or something.
You're talking about the clean-up operation ( Aktion 1005) where they dug up the mass graves from the early extermination camps and then burnt the bodies.
For which as I recall reading trainloads of wood were brought in, the bodies were arranged in a huge pyre and then burnt. Firewood wasn't really in critical shortage at the time.
Auschwitz had large crematoria. Other KZs had smaller ones, but then they weren't extermination camps. If you have to burn a couple dozen dead a day, it's no big deal.
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Have you considered leaving arguing your points to someone better intellectually equipped for that? Because the only thing you have achieved here was making me more sympathetic to SJWs who say that holocaust denialists are too stupid and impervious to logical arguments so instead of engaging them in a marketplace of ideas we should silence them lest they spread their nonsense to other very stupid people. I'm not trying to offend you, I'm honestly informing you about the result your arguments here have achieved.
Don't do this please.
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That's rich coming from someone who is arguing that bodies are flammable and cremation is an energy-positive process, and that the cremations would have required no fuel. Even the informed anti-deniers do not make that argument, they would be embarrassed by your display. But you are so committed to believing witnesses you will believe them even when they make completely impossible claims.
it literally is
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Burning bodies is in fact energy-positive, as worked out in my other comment, and as you could have worked out yourself if you had done the math.
"That's rich coming from someone who is arguing that bodies are flammable and cremation is an energy-positive process" is quite a hostile take. It would probably be a good idea to be damn sure that burning bodies is not an energy-positive process before you drop a take like that.
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