Our greatest taboo should be permitted for investigation and debate

== Rebuttal == My opponent, in his intro, says I unfairly paint his authors as Holocaust deniers and horrible people. That's because they are. For example, Robert Faurisson traveled to Tehran in February 2012 to receive an award for his Holocaust denial from President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. That is not exactly good company to find oneself in. {{{ The Nuremberg Trials }}} My opponent makes the classic Denier argument that Hoess was tortured and thus his testimony is worthless. There are a number of problems with this. First, Hoess never disavowed his testimony after the fact. Rather, he wrote, in detail, about the gas chambers and killings in his memoirs. [1] Second, he was only tortured – by Jewish sergeants in the British army – when he was first captured. They wanted revenge, not false testimony. [1] Third, Hoess says in his memoirs that he was treated well after being handed over to the Poles. [1] He testified at Nuremberg while in Polish custody. In addition, his testimony is corroborated by hundreds of others, which my opponent makes no attempt to indict. Pery Broad, an SS officer at Auschwitz, also wrote about the gas chambers in his memoirs. [1] Johann Kremer wrote about the gas chambers in a diary he kept as an Auschwitz physician. [1] The testimony of the Auschwitz guards at the Belsen trial of 1947 all corroborates Hoess' testimony, as does the testimony of the 20 members of the SS who were tried in Frankfurt. [1] In addition, my opponent doesn't respond to the other testimony I posted last round. If the entire case for the Holocaust rested on Hoess, we might doubt his motives. But when his account is corroborated by everything else, there's no reason to doubt him. My opponent then claims that testimony was false because it contained things that cannot be true. I'll refute each claim specifically. 1) Gas trucks cannot exist Gas trucks used carbon monoxide to kill their victims. Carbon monoxide (CO) binds to hemoglobin and prevents it from transporting oxygen, causing the victim to suffocate. My opponent's Denial website hinges on the claim that there is not enough CO in diesel exhaust to kill someone. News stories where people used their cars to kill themselves or their spouses disagree. [2] Before catalytic converters, CO made up 25% of diesel exhaust and leaving the car running with the garage door closed was a common method of suicide. [3] It was used often during the Great Depression. Carbon monoxide was the preferred method of gassing in Treblinka, Belzec, Chelmno, and Sobibor. [1] A "Top Secret" memo from SS Lieutenant August Becker, dated May 16, 1942, confirms the use of trucks: "to come to an end as fast as possible, the driver presses the accelerator to the fullest extent. By doing that the persons to be executed suffer death from suffocation and not by dozing off as was planned." [1] Shimon Srebrnik, the survivor I cited last round from the Chelmno death camp, also discussed the use of gas trucks. A report from the Reich Main Security Office, dated June 5, 1942, said that in occupied Minsk, from December 1941 to June 1942, 3 gas vans were used to kill 97,000 civilians. [1] The report also mentions, "[i]n order to facilitate the rapid distribution of CO ... two slots ... will be bored at the top of the rear wall." [1] 2) Zyklon B kills in 3 to 15 minutes This is consistent with times of death when the US still used the gas chamber. [4] 3) The guards would have died when removing the bodies First, guards used gas masks when handling corpses. [4] Second, the dose makes the poison and Zyklon B would have dissipated as soon as the chamber was opened. Releasing cyanide gas into the open air doesn't kill people, whereas in an enclosed chamber it does. It's the same as with car exhaust. 4) There is no iron-cyanide residue in the gas chambers Iron-cyanide residue formed in *some* delousing chambers (which were used to kill lice on clothing). The conditions for its formation are not fully known. Richard Green, who got his PhD in chemistry from Stanford, says that iron-cyanide likely formed blue residue in delousing chambers and not gas chambers because 1) the amount of Zyklon B needed to kill lice is *much* larger than the amount needed to kill humans, and 2) if proper delousing protocol were followed, the walls in delousing chambers were exposed to Zyklon B for 20 hours at a time, whereas the gas chambers enjoyed shorter exposure. [4] In addition, Jan Markiewicz, Wojciech Gubala, and Jerzy Labadz of the Institute of Forensic Research analyzed wall samples from the gas chambers at Auschwitz compared to control samples from the dormitories and found that only the gas chamber samples contained cyanide, meaning Zyklon B was used there. [4] My opponent claims Zionism is a reason to lie, but the Jews could hardly have known that they would receive Israel as a Jewish state when survivors and perpetrators first started telling their stories. This lie would also require massive coordination, which again, makes Denial just another conspiracy theory. {{{ Documentation }}} My opponent makes a bunch of claims here. First of all, you have to remember that the Nazis tried to destroy all the documents relating to the genocide, as I mentioned last round. They knew they would stand trial. Documents found without cover pages or "years later" is not surprising since the main archives were destroyed. 1) The Jager report It is false that both sides agree this is a forgery. My opponent continually asserts Denier claims as if they should be accepted fact. A search for "Jager report forgery" will yield only Denial websites. 2) Mass graves don't exist The Nazis also tried to conceal the mass graves, even at the camps. At Treblinka, for example, they tore down the gas chambers. "They dismantled the buildings and planted trees. They then created a farmhouse and installed a Ukrainian farmer and his family there. It was a ruse." [5] New technology has discovered evidence, in 2012, of mass graves at Treblinka. [6] However, Jewish law prohibits exhumation of the dead. [6] There are, also, numerous pictures of mass graves from the Nazi footage in the Nuremberg prosecution video I posted last round. Digging up all of Europe searching for mass graves would be silly and disrespectful to the dead; it would be an attempt to satisfy Denialists, who like all fringe movements, simply move on to different tactics when one fails. Most mass graves were in isolated, non-populated parts of the countryside. People do, however, stumble upon mass graves from time to time, such as in Romania in 2010, in a forest. [7] My opponent at one point claims that no blueprints of gas chambers were ever found. This isn't quite true. "An inventory list from the [Auschwitz] camp authorities for Corpse Cellar 1 of Crematorium III lists ‘14 showers' and one ‘gas tight door.' Deniers have had a difficult time explaining why a shower and a gas tight door would be in a corpse cellar." [1] "Kampfgruppe Auschwitz", a resistance group in Auschwitz, smuggled out photographs of the gas chambers and the Germans burning the dead bodies. [8] They were trying to convince the Allies, at the time, of the atrocities committed. Keep in mind that the Allies did not believe reports about the Concentration Camps, until they saw them with their own eyes. These photographs also serve as evidence. [8] Here is one such photo of the Nazis burning the dead after they were gassed. http://tinyurl.com... In essence, my opponent's categorical response to all perpetrator testimony is: coerced. His response to all victim testimony is: they were lying to steal Israel. And his response to all documentation is: forgery. Utter nonsense. [1] http://tinyurl.com... [2] http://tinyurl.com... [3] http://tinyurl.com... [4] http://tinyurl.com... [5] http://tinyurl.com... [6] http://tinyurl.com... [7] http://tinyurl.com... [8] http://tinyurl.com...