The Holocaust happened

TheTroof has written up a more substantive response than before, so I'll number and label items here for greater coherence. (1) Eyewitnesses beyond Tauber. Yes, of course there are other witnesses. Next is Miklos Nyiszli, who was a doctor under Josef Mengele in Krema II after being deported to Auschwitz in mid-1944. He published a memoir on his experiences there. A representative sample is here: http://www.auschwitz.dk... Longer, probably illegal excerpts here: http://www.nas2endwork.org... Importantly, Tauber and Nyiszli agree that Leichenkeller 1 in Krema II was a homicidal gas chamber. Of course, there are also others. Perhaps you could tell me how many eyewitnesses you'll need to hear from? (2) Terminology. I can see where TheTroof is going to go with this, which I suppose is to weigh us down in a semantics argument. To avoid thisin the future, I will use the term HGC (homicidal gas chamber), although it should be noted that I never use the term "gas chamber" to denote a delousing chamber. Thus, TheTroof ought not run himself aground on this point in the future. (3) Cremation speed. It's a good thing that TheTroof and I aren't the first two people to have this argument. In fact, the argument is so old, that one of the better Web pages for information on the topic is no longer online. Luckily, we have the Internet Archive: http://web.archive.org... "The temperature at which cremations are done vary based upon the retort manufacturer, but most machines operate between 1,500 to 1,900 degrees F. The actual cremation time again varies depending upon the type of machine. Low capacity retorts take approximately 3 hours to complete a cremation while high capacity machines take less than one hour. In addition to the type of retort, the size of the individual and the number of cremations conducted during the day also affect the time. For example, in the retort we operate, the first cremation of the day takes about two hours and the second takes about an hour. That is because the retort already has a high internal temperature at the beginning of the second cremation." So TheTroof is high-balling the figure; in fact, the process can take only an hour. And that's still including heating and cooling the oven to a sufficient extent that the ashes can be removed safely for further disposal, bearing in mind that ashes cannot be mingled among decedents. Plus, today's crematoria are generally gas-fed because it's cheaper and cleaner; these ovens burn at 1,500"F. The ovens at Birkenau were coke-fired, and coke burns at temperatures up to 40% higher than gas. Now, consider the weight of the person being cremated. The average person being cremated at Birkenau wouldn't weigh the same amount as in a normal situation because the vast majority of people cremated at Birkenau were of four varieties: women, children, the elderly, and people who had already been working for weeks or months on a diet of 1,400 calories per day. Are these four types going to be more or less than average, do you think? What does that come to? Well, first we jettison your one every seven minutes for something more realistic. As a back of the envelope calculation, let's say the 2,400 per day I cited in my last post is equivalent to 100 per hour, divided by four crematorium buildings at Birkenau for 25 per hour per building. With 15 muffles in Krema II, that's 1.7 bodies per muffle per hour, or a body every 36 minutes, which frankly seems perfectly reasonable to me given everything above. By the way, all this was explained in detail years ago: http://www.holocaust-history.org... (4) Ash and bone disposal. One of the jobs of the Sonderkommando was to pulverize the larger bones among the cremains. The process was recounted by Filip M"ller, who was at Auschwitz between April 1942 and January 1945 and who worked on the Sonderkommando, first at the Auschwitz main camp and then at Birkenau. During the Hungarian Aktion of the spring and summer of 1944, when cremations reached their maximum, this was a team of 25 men. Regarding where the ashes then went, here's a map of the area: https://www.google.com... Look at how much water there is around, including the Vistula and Sola rivers where they meet. Bearing in mind that not until 1944 were the crematoria taxed to their limit, disposing of ashes posed no problem. (5) Forgeries. TheTroof alleges the that memo from Kurt Pr"fer of Topf on the cremation capacity of Birkenau that I produced above is "a hoax." His reasons for this accusation are several, one of which is several lines of text which he blocked as if quoted. The sole source cited however, is this: "Search online:"'In a crematorium with five furnaces and fifteen muffles, fifteen corpses were burned.'" That's not a source, and I hope TheTroof knows that. Moreover, the lines following in the block quote make the same disproved allegations already made by TheTroof. The one innovative argument -- that you'd expect cremation rates to decrease with number of muffles -- presumes that these ovens would use the same amount of fuel, which is an unfair assumption. In fact, without some information on the fuel capacity of the ovens being discussed, it's hard to draw any conclusions at all. However, when I crunched the numbers, then the cremation power increased with muffle number, as I intimate above: ~1.75 per hour in the first case; ~2.25 per hours in the second; and ~4.17 in the third. His other reason for it being a "hoax" seems to be that the document wasn"t found until many years after the war. I'm uncertain why this proves it's a hoax. Apparently, TheTroof doesn't understand German, know Cold War history, and or appreciated how historians work. If he understood German, he's know that the Th"ringisches Hauptstaatarchiv is the state archive of Thuringia (of which Erfurt is capital). If he knew Cold War history, he'd know that Thuringia is in former East Germany and that many archives in that part of the world were closed to western historians until the 1990s. If he apprecited how historians work, he'd know that archives all over the world sit as dumping grounds for documents still waiting to be examined, classified, interpreted, etc. Doing these things is part of what historians actually do.Finally, if TheTroof wants to allege a hoax or forgery, then he should be prepared to state who perpetrated this hoax and, more importantly, prove it. An allegation without proof is worthless here. (6) Preponderance of evidence. Again, had TheTroof put some energy into reading my introduction, he wouldn't waste time and energy on an argument such as "In one case, a fumigation chamber was called a 'Vergasungsraum,' so there were no HGCs." What would be more useful would be to examine cases of use of the verb "vergasen" in situations in which we are unclear what was meant. Since many words in many languages can have more than one meaning, we should only hesitate when the word seems out of place. Were it the case that we have this Vergasungskeller document and no other proof of HGCs, it would indeed be reasonable to assume that the room was a delousing chamber. However, two factors lead us away from that conclusion: first, the delousing chambers far more often used "entlausen" (delouse) rather than "vergasen"; second, there's a ton of evidence that this room was an HGC. So when we find a document that refers to "vergasen," we're gonna go with HGC. We don't assume it was a morgue, because the blueprint is literally the only time the room is referred to as a morgue. We don't assume it was a delousing chamber because the delousing chambers are in a different building and are often referred to with completely different terminology. (7) Conspiracy. Yes, the Nazis conspired to keep knowledge of what they were doing limited, mainly from the intended victims, the Nazis' enemies, and the home front. This was pursued with varying levels of success. I'm not sure how this implies that they were "complete idiots," especially since it is hardly the claim that the subterfuge was the only one of its kind. (8) Cyanide levels. If the room were used for delousing, it would look like this:http://jan27.org... That's Germar Rudolf at Auschwitz standing in a delousing chamber. See how small? Also, see all that blue stuff? That's what happens when you allow hydrogen cyanide to contact brick for hours on end. If, however, you allow the gas to contact the brick for a half hour at most, then use a ventilation system to remove the gas (did I mention the ventilation system?), and then, after removing the bodies, wash down the room, then you're not going to get that blue staining. That's how we know it wasn't a delousing chamber. How do we know it wasn't a morgue, by the way, on this basis? I mean, as you point out, we do have a document -- and an important one at that, the blueprint -- that marks this room as a morgue. But again, there's no testimony to that effect. Regarding the quote, it is very much not saying that the morgue and Vergasungskeller are the same thing. It's saying that one of the morgues is actually a HGC.Here's the blueprint in question: http://www.nizkor.org... See how there are two rooms labeled "Leichenkeller"? One of them was the Vergasungskeller. We know that from the document. (9) A final question. You are aware that English and German are different languages, right? So where are we? Ah yes, trying to prove there was a HGC in Krema II. We now know it wasn't a morgue or a delousing chamber. Want to try again or do you want to concede this was a HGC and move onto the next?