Monday, November 17, 2014

On the Treblinka Narrative

I consider myself a strong supporter of Israel who doesn't have an antisemitic bone in his body, but there are aspects of the Treblinka narrative (the notion that 750,000 Jews were gassed to death via diesel exhaust in 6 modestly sized bedrooms, buried into several pits, exhumed several months later, cremated via outdoor fires - multiple hundreds at a time, and then reburied - all in the span of 6 to 7 months) that just don't add up. a) Diesel gas is easily the least efficient way to kill people via this manner in that it has very little carbon monoxide and actually emits air (you need to be exposed to it for hours just to get a headache). b) The Germans had access to thousands of wood gas generators which would have been far more effective (these produce a hundred times more CO than diesel engines do) than diesel engines and as far as we know they never used them. c) Open air cremations are exceedingly difficult (the assertion here is that they burned hundreds of bodies at a time, piled on top of each other while only using a 3' flame) and time consuming (12 hours just to cremate a pig and you've still got the bones left) and the possibility of cremating the equivalent of the entire population of Austin, Texas in this way, and in 6 months, seems almost incredible. d) A water well at Treblinka existed smack-dab in the middle of the burial pits and the assertion that hundreds of thousands of rotting bodies never contaminated that well also stretches credulity................................................................................................Look, I don't doubt that a lot of folks died at Treblinka. But the much more logical explanation for me is that most of them died from disease (typhus, most specifically), malnutrition (which sadly was at least partially caused by Allied bombing), shootings, and hangings....And of course just the mere fact that they were rounded up and interned in the first place was itself a war crime. But the truth does matter here and in that regard I firmly believe that the truth has been short-changed.................................................................................................P.S. And why in the hell would you cut somebody's hair right before you gassed them (as opposed to cutting it to reduce the likelihood of lice)? Does that charge even remotely make sense?

4 comments:

BB-Idaho said...

Apparently, it is thought that the few surviving witnesses testimony was flawed according to
a recent film which seems driven
by those in the denial camp.
The only witness I ever knew was a guy that lived up the street when I was a little kid. We were warned that he was 'not right in the head', having been among the first of Patton's troops to entire on of the many camps throughout the Reich.

Will "take no prisoners" Hart said...

There are a lot of nuts in the denial camp for sure, BB (Ernst Zundel being one of the far more odious ones). But a lot of the folks who get tarred by that brush really aren't deniers but rather people who question certain aspects of the Holocaust such as the number of deaths, the manner of deaths, etc........And don't you find it kind of troubling that this is the ONLY event in the entire history of the world in which you cannot debate and in which people actually go to jail for (the U.S. actually deported Germar Rudolf back to Germany so the dude could go to jail simply for doing an experiment)?

Will "take no prisoners" Hart said...

This is MY Sister Souljah moment. This is MY Nixon goes to China moment....Not that it's going to make me popular, mind you.

BB-Idaho said...

Never heard of Rudolf, so I checked out his story. A chemist.
I worked with a chemist who was a holocaust denier (he passed out leaflets in the cafeteria). I was a chemist myself, and we do sniff
strange stuff sometimes. What was most interesting to me however, was Rudolph's work on Zyclon-B,
the sodium cyanide shipped into
Auschwitz by the ton, regarding
any traces still in the ruins.
The rub was naturally occurring
ferric cyanides (think Prussion Blue, for example), which defused his data. To the extent that he
was kicked out of the prestigious
Max Planck Institute. Some of my
former work involved the waste
destructions of cyanides used copper plating: between my findings, the ferric cyanides,
the fate of those and active ionic cyanides and the EPA I was
one frustrated lab rat. (their
scientists agreed, their lawyers didn't) Apologies, sometimes your
articles send me off on oblique
tangents)