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naraburns  nihil supernum  1yr ago (text post)   29600 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of February 6, 2023

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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.

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:

“At one time we put up a roast beside a large grave, into which more than 250.000 corpses had been thrown. The roast was loaded as usual and lit in the evening. There was a strong wind, and the fire burned so intensely, that it spread to the large opened grave. The blood from a quarter of a million human beings went up in flame and burned until the evening of the following day.

All of the leading camp staff came to take a look at this wonder. They marveled at this fantastic fire. The blood rose to the surface of the ground and ignited like fuel.” (p. 119)

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:

“Reichman also said the Nazis had prepared a special incinerator in Treblinka for British Jews, who were to be deported under Adolf Hitler's masterplan for a Jewish-free Europe.

‘This was the incinerator for the British Jews,’ he said, pointing to a diagram of Treblinka. ‘The Germans planned to bring them there when they captured Britain. It was built in a very solid manner and could not be moved. It remained there until the end.’”

The mere notion that the Germans three months after Stalingrad would entertain hopes of defeating Great Britain and have all Jews of the island nation shipped over to Europe to be gassed is nothing else than laughable.

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.

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.

The furnaces used were huge, thus kept the heat of the bodies that have already burned before in their brickwork.

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.

The bodies were piled on outdoor fires

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.

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.

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.

Have you considered leaving arguing your points to someone better intellectually equipped for that?

Don't do this please.

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.

cremation is an energy-positive process

it literally is

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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