Skeptic Project

On 6 million:
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A supposedly Jewish CT, Jeff, is saying not 6 million and is pointing to random census information about Poland.

Can you point me to some primary sources showing that, before WWII, there were around 3.3 million Jews in Poland (or more than 1 million or so) that you'd think he might accept (well, they never accept) or give him pause?

He also claims Germans were receiving 800 calories/day while camp prisoners received 1700 calories. I'm not sure where he gets this. Perhaps he thinks the nice Nazi guards went hunting, gathering and farming outside Auschwitz walls to feed the prisoners, whereas food was scarce in the other war-plagued cities.

On gas chambers:
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What do you guys make of David Cole's questions?

http://www.codoh.com/gcgv/gc46-origi.html</p>

On one point made there -- the lack of significant Zyklon B traces -- A debunking site said traces were found on the ventilators, if not the chambers themselves. Anyone know where the independent investigation of that might be found? How about crematoriums IV and V? Any independent forensic studies of that?

"He also claims Germans were receiving 800 calories/day while camp prisoners received 1700 calories."

Why on earth would they keep their prisoners more nourished than their guards?

Thanks Captain Ferseus, unfortunately that 66 Q&A does not seem to address some of this and doesn't link to primary source of census.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polish_census_of_1931</p>

The wiki shows over 2.8 million Jews in Poland in 1931 census, but I can not find that number in the cited material (I only looked over the short Polish document in the references and didn't see any numbers written in Arabic numerical form. Are you able to find the original docs?

Muertos,

Thanks, again. I am trying to be cautious while investigating their 'questions'. These Denier CTs can be very tricky in ignoring the existing facts.

Most of my grandparents' families died in the Holocaust, as did those of many of my friends. It can be sensitive topic around here, so I'm trying to be objective with people that question it.

I'm not sure how many of the camp survivors say what about what they saw of the gas chambers, but the deniers try to paint the picture that in some cases trauma and memory was egged on by propaganda of the winning side and that some material was planted, etc. You know, the usual CT crap.

That is why I wanted to focus on primary forensic and pre war census data.

As for the 'missing' Zykon:, under other circumstances, I think that might raise some eyebrows. Of course there are other explanations and these questions need to be weighed against other evidence like the testimonies, etc.

As for Cole on Dachau, I did the same think you did -- look to see if the places he mentioned are even said to be death camps.
I noticed what you said about Dachau, but then there is also this picture in that article, that says:
The "Brausebad" ("Shower"), the infamous Dachau gas chamber. I am not sure what to make of this contradiction.

The argument was not about calories of guards, but of prisoners vs german population. I think we can ignore that for now because Jeff hasn't cited any sources for that yet. I just told him that if this were true, for any significant length of time, it would have been the German people as a whole that looked like skin on bones and not the people in the camps. He started saying that 800 calories was not that bad for 1000 days (no fundamental different than for 100 days), and I did the weight-loss to calories calculation for him 100 and 1000 days to show him the great difference there.

As for the Wannsee Conference, I will try to show that to Jeff, but you know these CTs and deniers, they'd try to dismiss something like that as a post-war winning-side fabrication of some sort.

You could maybe ask if he knows of anyone, on trial for crimes committed relating to the Holocaust, used the defence 'it never happened'. There are tens of thousands of cases, some acquitted, some imprisoned, some executed. You'd think some of them would have 'blown the whistle' on the 'hoax'. But apparently not. Amusingly, most deniers are more than willing to refer to Jewish survivors as liars but are strangely reticent to apply the same label to the SS/Partei.

Well, what I've found most interesting about holocaust deniers is how they explain away the fact that captured Nazis as well as constructors and executors of the holocaust, never denied the holocaust happened, never denied numbers or anything else. Typically if you point this out it comes down to their claim that the individuals were "tortured by Zionists" or something similar.

Surely if the holocaust didn't happen or only 1 million people were killed, this fact would have been raised by at least one person on trial, but that's never happened.

I know the swimming pools thing was covered on nizkor. I'm not sure why it's so crazy that camp officers would have a swimming pool, but the prisoners wouldn't. I guess even at modern prisons, the offices for guards can be used by prisoners too?

@Geo:

In the link that you posted, it even states at the end:

"When Höss was promoted to Berlin, his replacement, Kommandant Arthur Liebehenschel, was put in charge of just the Auschwitz camp... [...] He had the water trough near Blocks 7 and 8 converted into a swimming pool for Kapos and prisoners who worked well."

Seems to be some varying accounts on how many pools and whether the officers and prisoners shared one or had separate ones, but the important thing to note is that this doesn't disprove that Auschwitz was NOT an extermination camps. Brief internet search says that there were 3 types of camps.

"Aktion Reinhardt" camps, which were pure extermination camps (Treblinka, Sobibor, Belzec). Prisoners were moved in and exterminated. I agree that a swimming pool at one of these camps would be completely out of place, however Auschwitz was a concentration and extermination camp. So people were selected out of the populace and exterminated, but many were kept alive to work and I guess the best-workers were rewarded with some swimming pool use. The last type of camp were just labor camps/prisons with no "extermination policy", until late in the war.

My first post was what I got from Nikzor, second post was from a different source.

Would it be good to have the videos from the Nuremberg trials on university archive websites or the net somewhere? I want to see them but don't know where to find them (in university archives(?)) and am probably not going to look around the library, physically.