… before his obsessive grudge against Muehlenkamp got the better of him.
In what he announced might be his last "performance" in our debates, Friedrich Jansson commendably cut a bit on the rhetoric in the introduction, merely referring to "some more messes" of mine (read: some more arguments uncomfortable to his articles of faith), regarding which he would undertake one more "clean up job" (read: one more attempt to restore his peace of mind by restating what he is eager to believe and/or eagerly expects his readers to believe). Someone among his fellow "Revisionists" must have told him that he was putting on the rhetorical bullshit way too thick.
However, Jansson wouldn’t be Jansson if he had managed to stick with this line instead of again disgracing himself with at least one further "lie" accusation and his customary abusive bluster, as he tried to address those of my arguments he thought he could address (ignoring the rest, as usual). His attempts will be commented in this blog.
1. On topics other than the "main topics"
Jansson starts out on the wrong foot by repeating a claim he should have kept to himself, so as not to dig himself in further.
Obviously bothered by my having repeatedly pointed out his dishonesty exposed here and here, he repeats the already discussed non-argument, regarding the first of these blogs, that he had referred to "improved food supply, at least among the pregnant population" in connection with the 79 births at the Leningrad State Pediatric Institute (LSPI) in the second half of 1942.
This non-argument contains two deliberate falsehoods.
One consists in obfuscating that, while Jansson had "conceded" that the fall of the prematurity rate among children born at the LSPI in the second half of 1942, if compared to the high prematurity rate in the first half that year, "may be partially the result of improved food supply, at least among the pregnant population", his argument had been that said fall of the prematurity rate was not so much due to the "improved food supply", but suggested that "prematurity rates for a population under sustained food pressure are likely to return to somewhat normal levels" (emphasis added).
The other, more serious falsehood is the obfuscation of Jansson’s having omitted the fact that Dr. Antonov chiefly attributed the comparatively normal prematurity rate in the second half of 1942 to the apparent fact that the women who gave birth in that period, or at least a large part of them, belonged to privileged population segments that were much better fed than the majority of the city’s female population.
As readers of my reply to Jansson’s Leningrad blog will recall, Jansson omitted this information in order to unduly (as the women giving birth in the second half of 1942 were not representative of the city’s female population at the time) raise newborn weights by not considering the weights of babies born prematurely.
Jansson did himself no favor by repeating a falsehood whereby he had tried to cover up another falsehood.
As concerns the second of the aforementioned blogs, Jansson at least had the good sense of keeping silent about his shameful paper-dragon-slaying exercise, instead of further disgracing himself by trying to justify it.
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Jansson’s reply to what I last wrote regarding Ettling’s experiments (see section 2 of the blog The more you scratch Friedrich Jansson …) is not much better than his repeated Leningrad falsehoods.
After trying to make the 150-pound-ewe’s mass loss of just 20 % look "significant" (which it hardly was in comparison to the 170-pound-ewe’s mass loss of 70.6 %), and producing some arithmetic whereby a mass loss of 20 % due to external flammables would be 28.3 % of the 170-pound ewe’s total proportional weight loss, Jansson repeats his argument that the contribution of external flammables to the 170-pound ewe’s being consumed by fire must have been much higher than with the 150-pound ewe, due to a higher amount of gasoline being used on the 170-pound ewe and the different arrangement and longer duration of the fire.
Needless to say, what Jansson thinks must have been and what Ettling observed and concluded are two different pairs of boots, and while the latter is what matters here, the former is irrelevant.
If the external flammables had contributed more than the carcass’s own fat to the 170-pound-ewe’s combustion, Ettling would not have written that the "findings" (of observing the carcass’s combustion and the factors that contributed thereto, what else?) "showed that for a ewe, and presumably for a human also, the body can be rather thoroughly consumed by fire from its own fat" (emphasis added), provided that the body is "suspended in such a way that it is over the fire which is fed from the body fat" (emphasis added) – the very way the 170-pound ewe’s carcass had been found "suspended on the seat springs with a lot of char and ash underneath", due to which the fat rendered from the carcass had "dripped onto the char which acted like a candle wick and kept the fat burning".
If I understood Jansson correctly, he is arguing that Ettling’s above-quoted statements are about "something ... which was not directly supported by his experiments".
This is a rather absurd proposition, for while it may be that the author of a scientific paper about the results of experiments also mentions something other than these results in the "Discussion" section, Ettling wouldn’t be discussing his experimental results at all if Jansson were not just writing plain nonsense.
Moreover Jansson’s argument calls for deliberately and insistently ignoring a clear and unequivocal statement of Ettling’s, whereby the possibility of a carcass being largely consumed by (essentially) a fire fed by its own fat is a finding derived from, guess what, the experiments described in the article.
Unless Jansson can identify a source of Ettling’s findings and the conclusions derived from these other than Ettling’s carcass-burning experiments (good luck, Mr. Jansson), his claim to have read the paper "with a clear head" is but a laughable case of what Jansson, in characteristic "Revisionist" self-projection, lamely accuses me of – empty rhetoric.
As I presume that at least some readers following this discussion have become curious about the full contents of Ettling’s article, I have transcribed the entire article here. Feedback from our readers on what they think of Mr. "clear head" Jansson’s reading of this article will be much appreciated.
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Next, Jansson tries to cover up the embarrassment of having made a fuss about oh-so-outrageous errors in tables included in the HC critique and in the blog Mattogno, Graf & Kues on Aktion Reinhard(t) Cremation (4), only to be confronted with the fact that these errors
a) were nothing more than Excel formulae errors (the denominator of a formula in a cell was not "frozen" before copying that formula onto cells below), and
b) led to wood to body mass ratios less favorable to my argument than those resulting from a correct calculation (especially embarrassing as Jansson had hollered about my presumable "dishonesty").
He does so by, first of all, misrepresenting my argument:
Jansson claims having assumed that I had used different energy density values for wooden railway sleepers than for other wood, as if the tables in question did not clearly show that I used exactly the same BTU/kg values for "Sleepers" as I did for "Pallets" or "Wood". But then, Jansson’s falsehoods are usually transparent.
Then Jansson complains that I should have used different energy density values for sleepers and for (other) wood, acting as if it were a matter of intelligence to know that "railway sleepers are generally soaked with creosote (coal tar, amounting to perhaps an additional 15% of their weight) which has a higher energy density than wood".
Jansson doesn’t tell just how much this creosote soaking, assuming it was present in the sleepers in question (the "generally" suggests that this is not always the case) would make the energy density of sleepers increase in relation to that of wood not treated with creosote. But he can do that when responding to this blog, if he should decide to do so (which I expect him to). However, as concerns tables 8.41 (5.5) to 8.43 (5.7), he need not even try unless he should be able to demonstrate an energy density for sleepers above 18,300 BTU/kg, for otherwise he will only return to the original wood to body mass ratio of 1.982/1, this time correctly calculated.
So much for the already considerable amount of garbage accumulated by Jansson before he even turns to what he calls the "main topics". That's where the fun really starts.
2. On burial density (see the blog As Jansson continues producing junk … and its first update, section 5., as well as the blog The more you scratch Friedrich Jansson …, section 3.)
Following the inevitable blather about my having "finally managed" to read the article available for download here (to which Jansson failed to provide the link), Jansson commits the unbelievable stupidity of repeating one of his deliberate falsehoods, which reads as follows (emphasis added):
The second set of these data, except for the packing factor, he mentions only marginally, even though I referred to it prominently in my previous blog. It is characteristic of Jansson’s dishonesty that he makes a big fuss about my having noted the "bulk density" (wrong term in this context, according to Jansson) of 0.9 g/cm³, berating me for not having realized, as genius Jansson did "in less than ten seconds", that this value did not refer to the bulk density but to the "average density of carcass", because the bulk density, as Jansson informs, includes empty spaces between the carcasses.
What Jansson doesn’t tell his gullible readers is that I mentioned the 0.9 g/cm³ before focusing on what he considers the actual bulk density, as follows:
Hence it’s understandable (taking into consideration Jansson’s amply demonstrated mendacity) that in his reply he doesn’t spend a word on my above-quoted text.
Fortunately for Jansson, in that it gave him the opportunity to fuss around a little bit more, I had misunderstood the "typical burial volumes of about 0.6 m³ for cattle and between 0.04 and 0.05 m³ per sheep or pig" as referring to what Jansson calls the "average density of carcass" (not including spaces between carcasses), as opposed to what, according to Jansson, is the actual bulk density. Accordingly I had assumed that the lower densities stated in Table 4.2 were because the carcasses, projected by the authors to be placed in the pit with "a packing factor of 1.4 (equivalent to 30% porosity)", had not been packed together tightly enough with that packing factor when placed "randomly" inside the pit, and that the projected densities in terms of mass per cubic meter or fraction of cubic meter per mass (which, as mentioned before, are close to or even above the density I calculated) could (only) be achieved by a team inside the pit packing the carcasses more tightly than "a packing factor of 1.4 (equivalent to 30% porosity)", so that the carcasses would occupy more than 70 % of the available space.
Thanks to Jansson’s clarification (which, by the way, renders completely superfluous his lengthy illustrated sermon about cords of wood and a packing factor of 1.4 being pretty tight), I’m now aware that densities of ca. 622 kg per m³ (cattle), ca. 636 to 795 kg per m³ (sheep) or ca. 552 to 690 kg per m³ can be achieved with a packing factor of 1.4 – which suggests that the same applies to my calculated density of 663.40 kg per m³ for human beings.
In what is arguably the least intelligent of his ubiquitous "lie" accusations, Jansson accuses me of lying on account of my having wrongly understood that the packing factor mentioned by the article’s authors was based on experience and not just projected.
So I’m supposed to have deliberately misrepresented the contents of a text that I had (quite unlike Jansson, who for obvious reasons kept it to himself) quoted verbatim before. And as if this proposition were not inane enough, Jansson also failed to take into account that it made no difference to my argument whether the packing I assumed to be insufficient had been projected or actually practiced. Last but not least, my assumption of insufficient packing was unfavorable to my argument, requiring me to speculate that a packing team inside the pit would be required to achieve densities corresponding to my calculations.
Jansson often forgets to think before writing (especially before spouting one of his "lie" accusations), but this occasion is particularly amusing even by Janssonian standards.
Now, why did the article’s authors, based on practical experience, eventually consider burial densities somewhat lower than their projections? Was the projected packing factor of 1.4 not achieved in practice (i.e. was the empty space between carcasses higher than 30 %)? Or did the average density of carcass turn out to be higher than the projected 0.9 g/cm³? Or was it both?
The last paragraph from the article, quoted in my previous blog about this subject (and also conveniently omitted by Jansson) suggests the second of these possibilities (emphasis added):
Second and more important, the reason for lower bulk density that is expressly pointed out is "carcass bloat", which presumably means that the carcass mass was increased by gasses building up inside the carcass during the decomposition process.
Unless the Jews at the AR camps were mostly placed inside the burial pits when in a state of bloating due to decomposition (which is not what becomes apparent from the evidence), Jansson was thus comparing apples with oranges when he claimed, based on the article’s Table 4.2, that the burial densities resulting from that table could be projected to the AR camps.
Jansson knew what he was doing when he showed only the table and omitted the related text. (It is in the above-quoted paragraph, incidentally, that no specific data are provided – and not regarding the projected higher densities, as Jansson mendaciously claimed. If I know my Jansson well, he will now start babbling about the unfortunate wording of his claim.)
Jansson shows this photograph of a partially filled burial carcass disposal pit in Birkshaw Forest, UK:
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and asks what evidence I have that a stacking team inside the pit could increase the density of the carcass mass "by over 50% in comparison with this".
It seems that Jansson has a problem with his eyesight, for the answer to his question is partially provided by the picture itself, which shows a rather loose packing of carcasses especially on the left edge, and a large space close to that edge which doesn’t seem to contain any carcass at all. There is hardly a packing factor of 1.4 here – rather a packing factor that could already be improved by a bulldozer shoving the carcasses closer together, not to mention a hypothetical packing team inside the pit having arranged the carcasses in a space-saving manner in the first place.
While Jansson’s aforementioned clarification and the above picture suggest that a packing team is not necessary to achieve burial densities in the order of the 663.40 kg per cubic meter I calculated (actually I need only 604.55 kg per cubic meter as pointed out here, and when factoring in decomposition after the corpses were placed inside the pit, top-down burning for sanitary purposes and the fact – mentioned by Sara Berger and to be addressed in a future blog – that the last contingents of deportees were burned right after being killed and never buried, I will need even less), Jansson’s rambling against evidence to the existence of a packing team at Bełżec extermination camp is worth addressing for the sheer stupidity of Jansson’s arguments.
Against this paragraph of the aforementioned blog:
Second, Jansson obviously didn’t bother to listen to Claude Lanzmann’s interview with Franz Suchomel, otherwise he might have realized that Suchomel’s statements between minute 17:39 and minute 19:03 of the video, including the part about Wirth having ordered Franz, Oberhauser and Hackenholt to place corpses inside the pits "so that Wirth could see how much space he needed", minute 18:35 (which shows that there was a concern about saving space at an early stage), refer to Bełżec (where Suchomel had not served, so he must have obtained this information from colleagues who had been there) and not to Treblinka.
As to the "relatively low burial density" at Sobibór, this results from dividing the number of 80,000 corpses through the combined volume of mass graves 3, 4, 5 and 6 identified by Prof. Kola in 2001 (9,525 cubic meters), as stated i.a. in this blog. Given that Sobibór handled much less "traffic" than its sister camps and the body disposal procedure was changed from burial to burning at a relatively early stage, it is entirely possible that some of these graves were filled below their capacity. The much lower number of deportees to be "processed" also implies that less thoroughness had to be applied to saving mass grave space.
As concerns Jansson’s imbecilic claim that "Sara Berger lies outrageously on p. 113 about the dimensions of the Belzec graves", apparently our "lies" howler hasn’t considered the possibility – which is not unlikely considering how the related footnote 103 on p. 499 is worded – that the historian (who refers to Kola only as concerns her statement about what she calls the Ausgrabungen (excavations) in the late 1990s) assumed that Kola had not identified the full extent of the mass graves and relied in this respect on Tregenza and/or on one or more of the four witnesses mentioned in that footnote.
3. On the Dresden Altmarkt pyres (see the blog Jansson finally answered my Dresden Altmarkt question …)
In this section a desperate Jansson largely tries to make up for the weakness of his arguments with dodging, empty claims, deliberate misunderstanding and abusive patronizing ("Looks like we need another hand-holding session. I can only wonder at Muehlenkamp’s inability to do a word problem that one might assign to a nine year old.", etc.). That makes it more fun to deconstruct Jansson's garbage point by point, as I will do in the following.
Jansson
So Jansson considers his "puddle" arithmetic, and his lame squealing about the source base being "inadequate", to be proof that gasoline was not the main combustion agent on the Dresden Altmarkt pyres. His standards of evidence seem to be unreachably high or abysmally low, depending on what suits his argument.
Jansson
First of all, I was not referring to Hahn’s photographs alone, but to photographs plus eyewitness testimonies (presumed to be the source of Irving’s and Taylor’s writing about the fuel and procedures, quoted i.a. here) and documents (confirming that, as is suggested by one of the photographs, the end result of the cremation was something that could be called "ash" or "ashes". Unlike "Revisionists", I don’t expect a single source of evidence to tell all the story, but look for a convergence of various sources.
Second, I wasn’t asking Jansson to determine the amounts and types of fuels used, let alone to do that on the basis of photographs alone. I was asking him for an estimate on the amount of gasoline that would in his opinion have been required to burn 6,865 corpses on the Dresden Altmarkt between 21 February and 5 March 1945, assuming that (as all related evidence suggests) the main combustion agent was gasoline.
Last but not least, while I can understand Jansson’s seeing the corpses of sub-human Jews as "carcasses", I must take the strongest possible exception to his applying that term to the corpses of worthy Volksgenossen murdered by those Jew-dominated Allied airborne gangsters. I hope for Jansson that Jürgen Graf is not reading this.
Jansson
The ashes of what exactly – if not of cremated human beings – does Jansson think he is seeing in the foreground of the picture below?
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Why would such non-human ashes be covering an open square like the Altmarkt?
What evidence is there that they did?
Why would such non-human ashes not have been completely removed from the square before setting up the pyres by 21 February 1945, a full week after the end of the attacks?
And why would such ashes be shoved towards the pyres instead of away from them, when there was much other space to pile them up, as would under Jansson’s assumption be suggested by the picture below (the link of which suggests that it is featured by a source close to Jansson’s intellectual circles)?
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Jansson
And as concerns one of these two documents, Jansson either has a short memory or is arguing against better knowledge, for the document in question goes into some detail in referring to the cremation results and the procedure to be adopted in disposing of these results. I’m talking about the document StAD, Marstall- und Bestattungsamt, Nachtrag I - Schreiben, 4.3.1945 (Matthias Neutzner, Martha Heinrich Acht, pp. 91, 93 and 221), partially quoted in the excerpt from Martha Heinrich Acht transcribed and translated here:
Jansson
Muehlenkamp doesn’t "believe" (believing I leave to ideologically motivated specimens like Jansson) that "there are wartime forgeries among the documents mentioning these cremations". He sees no room for reasonable doubt that, as was finally established on hand of a copy of the unaltered document, exactly one document related to the Dresden bombings and their aftermath was subsequently manipulated, the subject of the manipulation (inflating the figures stated in the document by a factor of ten for propagandistic purposes) being wholly unrelated to the cremation process or results.
The manipulators were in all probability the recipients of the original document at the "Reich Ministry for Public Enlightenment and Propaganda", who had every reason to manipulate figures stated in the document but no reason whatsoever to manipulate the information that body disposal had partially been carried out by cremating the bodies.
The fact that the Schlußmeldung contains figures obviously not manipulated is strong evidence against any manipulation having taken place in regard to that document, besides the fact that cremation of a part of the corpses was a propagandistically irrelevant detail.
As to the document StAD, Marstall- und Bestattungsamt, Nachtrag I - Schreiben, 4.3.1945, this was obviously an internal document of the city administration, known prior to Neutzner’s book only to a few insider researchers, and there was no reason for anyone to manipulate information as innocuous and unspectacular as an instruction to reuse recipients containing cremation remains instead of burying them with such remains.
This means that, while I would have reasons to protest against Jansson’s attempt to saddle me with the burden of proof, I don’t have to do so because it can be considered proven beyond a reasonable doubt that neither the Schlußmeldung nor the document StAD, Marstall- und Bestattungsamt, Nachtrag I - Schreiben, 4.3.1945 were in any way manipulated.
By the way, it seems that Jansson accepts as fact the aforementioned manipulation of the figures in TB 47. I wonder what Jürgen Graf would say to that.
Jansson
Jansson
And again, I didn’t ask for Jansson’s "technical analysis". I asked for an estimate on the amount of gasoline that would in his opinion have been required to burn 6,865 corpses on the Dresden Altmarkt between 21 February and 5 March 1945, assuming that (as all related evidence suggests) the main combustion agent was gasoline.
Jansson
Now that the question has been sufficiently clarified to keep Jansson from trying to weasel out of it, let’s what he’s got.
Unless, of course, he means to tell me that the straw between each layer of bodies did the trick, together with what flammable material was under the pyres, without any other fuel being added. That would also be fine.
Jansson
Anyway, it’s not like British historian Charles Taylor, quoted i.a. in this blog, had invented what he wrote about those "huge grill racks" and the use of gasoline for incineration. Taylor’s source is an excellent study with the title Dresden im Luftkrieg, of which I own the 2006 edition by Flechsig Buchvertrieb. The author of this study is the late Götz Bergander, who was himself a survivor of the Dresden bombing on 13/14 February 1945. Bergander’s source is a man who must have known what he was talking about – Mr. Theodor Ellgering, in his capacity as Geschäftsführer Interministerieller Luftkriegsausschuβ (Manager of the Inter-ministerial Air War Committee).
Ellgering reported having been put in charge of directing aid measures by Goebbels, and of having received extensive powers for this purpose (Bergander, p. 179). Regarding the pyres on the Altmarkt, Ellgering wrote the following (Bergander, p. 180, after Rodenberger, Axel, Der Tod von Dresden, Dortmund 1951, pp. 158-160):
My translation:
So, what is Mr. "primary sources" Jansson going to argue now? That Ellgering was lying about the corpses being drenched with gasoline, just for the fun of it?
[Skip Jansson’s patronizing abuse, which is of no interest except for what it reveals about Jansson.]
Jansson
Just the kind of calculations and considerations I was expecting from Jansson, no surprise here. Ten liters per corpse and 5,000 liters per pyre is in line with my calculations and sources, but Jansson seems to be assuming that all of it would run off the pyre, as opposed to at least a considerable part of it being soaked up by the victims’ clothing and hair, the straw between the corpses and the wood and straw below the grate. Why does he expect this to be so, especially in a scenario in which the gasoline was not poured over the bodies all at once but each layer of bodies was drenched in gasoline before adding the next layer?
Anyway, I understand from Jansson’s "puddle" fussing that he’s considering an amount of gasoline (or whatever other fuel he should have in mind, if he should decide on squealing that Ellgering lied about the gasoline) way below the 68,000 liters I calculated. What amount would that be, Mr. Jansson?
Not that it matters, but my "stupid question" was about pre-ignition pictures because I would expect whatever gasoline made a puddle around the pyre (or "spread all over the square", as Jansson is now arguing) to have ignited pretty quickly once the pyre was lit. And how did Jansson determine that there’s no gasoline around the burning pyre on the color photo? For someone who can’t tell whether the cremation remains in the foreground are remains of human beings or of whatever else Jansson has in mind, even though they look like bone fragments, that’s quite an achievement.
4. On the term Ausrottung and its verbal forms (see the blog Friedrich Jansson proudly presents … including updates, as well as the blog The more you scratch Friedrich Jansson …, section 1.)
Guess what, Jansson again dodged my questions regarding the statements from illustrious contemporaries quoted here.
These questions, or his inability to provide a faith-conforming yet not absurd reply to them, must be hard on poor Jansson’s nerves. At least that what is suggested by his initial furious outburst in this section, which inaugurates the opportunity for some more refutation fun.
Jansson
Who does Jansson think he’s fooling? The argument he now claims to have made was not the argument to which my comment referred. Regarding that argument (which was that Ausrottung could not have been used at a later stage with a more radical (literal) meaning than corresponded to its (figurative) use in the 1930s), my comment was entirely appropriate.
Look who’s talking about "boring everyone with imbecile blogs", by the way.
Jansson
Jansson
Jansson
By this amazing piece of Janssonian reasoning, terms like "murdering", "killing", "slaughtering", "butchering", "assassinating" also do not imply killing, because all of them can be and are often used in a figurative sense (e.g. "a murderous routine", "making people work so-and-so-many hours a day is sheer murder", "killing with laughter", "football team A was slaughtered by football team B in the match at C", "character assassination", etc.)
If this was Jansson’s argument, he was making no argument at all.
But I strongly doubt it was, unless Jansson can convince me that he thought Mr. Harrison was referring to "Ausrottung" in a figurative, non-literal sense.
Jansson
Highly irrelevant babbling, unless Jansson can demonstrate that ausrotten was ever used in its literal sense, when describing something done to a group or population of human beings, as meaning anything other than killing all or a significant part of that group’s members.
As to the classic "postwar reeducation" claim, the contemporary quotes provided suggest that Otto von Bismarck, Bernhard Fürst von Bülow, Navy Higher War Tribunal Counsel Dr. Schattenberg, SS-Gruppenführer Hermann Fegelein, General Governor Hans Frank, and Reichsführer Heinrich Himmler, among many others, would laugh their heads of it they read such blatant nonsense. So might Joseph Goebbels, unless he was too fond of the German language to consider it a laughing matter.
Jansson
Jansson
Jansson
Jews may or not have made opportunistic usage of a Christian language "with themselves in the place of Jesus", but what would reveal where Jansson comes from (if that were not obvious already on account of, among other things, the sole and exclusive theme of his blog site) is his obvious preoccupation with the actual or supposed wrongdoings of "Jews".
As to the "dare" remark (which, like with the "truth is antisemitic" classic, is also a cherry on the cake), Jansson should cut out the infantile use of terms suggesting that his opponent is afraid of something. As I remember having told him already, it enhances the impression that Jansson is scared of a great many things beside historical facts inconvenient to his articles of faith.
Talk about "truth" ("Wahrheit", in German), here’s something that I’m sure Jansson will like.
In what he announced might be his last "performance" in our debates, Friedrich Jansson commendably cut a bit on the rhetoric in the introduction, merely referring to "some more messes" of mine (read: some more arguments uncomfortable to his articles of faith), regarding which he would undertake one more "clean up job" (read: one more attempt to restore his peace of mind by restating what he is eager to believe and/or eagerly expects his readers to believe). Someone among his fellow "Revisionists" must have told him that he was putting on the rhetorical bullshit way too thick.
However, Jansson wouldn’t be Jansson if he had managed to stick with this line instead of again disgracing himself with at least one further "lie" accusation and his customary abusive bluster, as he tried to address those of my arguments he thought he could address (ignoring the rest, as usual). His attempts will be commented in this blog.
1. On topics other than the "main topics"
Jansson starts out on the wrong foot by repeating a claim he should have kept to himself, so as not to dig himself in further.
Obviously bothered by my having repeatedly pointed out his dishonesty exposed here and here, he repeats the already discussed non-argument, regarding the first of these blogs, that he had referred to "improved food supply, at least among the pregnant population" in connection with the 79 births at the Leningrad State Pediatric Institute (LSPI) in the second half of 1942.
This non-argument contains two deliberate falsehoods.
One consists in obfuscating that, while Jansson had "conceded" that the fall of the prematurity rate among children born at the LSPI in the second half of 1942, if compared to the high prematurity rate in the first half that year, "may be partially the result of improved food supply, at least among the pregnant population", his argument had been that said fall of the prematurity rate was not so much due to the "improved food supply", but suggested that "prematurity rates for a population under sustained food pressure are likely to return to somewhat normal levels" (emphasis added).
The other, more serious falsehood is the obfuscation of Jansson’s having omitted the fact that Dr. Antonov chiefly attributed the comparatively normal prematurity rate in the second half of 1942 to the apparent fact that the women who gave birth in that period, or at least a large part of them, belonged to privileged population segments that were much better fed than the majority of the city’s female population.
As readers of my reply to Jansson’s Leningrad blog will recall, Jansson omitted this information in order to unduly (as the women giving birth in the second half of 1942 were not representative of the city’s female population at the time) raise newborn weights by not considering the weights of babies born prematurely.
Jansson did himself no favor by repeating a falsehood whereby he had tried to cover up another falsehood.
As concerns the second of the aforementioned blogs, Jansson at least had the good sense of keeping silent about his shameful paper-dragon-slaying exercise, instead of further disgracing himself by trying to justify it.
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Jansson’s reply to what I last wrote regarding Ettling’s experiments (see section 2 of the blog The more you scratch Friedrich Jansson …) is not much better than his repeated Leningrad falsehoods.
After trying to make the 150-pound-ewe’s mass loss of just 20 % look "significant" (which it hardly was in comparison to the 170-pound-ewe’s mass loss of 70.6 %), and producing some arithmetic whereby a mass loss of 20 % due to external flammables would be 28.3 % of the 170-pound ewe’s total proportional weight loss, Jansson repeats his argument that the contribution of external flammables to the 170-pound ewe’s being consumed by fire must have been much higher than with the 150-pound ewe, due to a higher amount of gasoline being used on the 170-pound ewe and the different arrangement and longer duration of the fire.
Needless to say, what Jansson thinks must have been and what Ettling observed and concluded are two different pairs of boots, and while the latter is what matters here, the former is irrelevant.
If the external flammables had contributed more than the carcass’s own fat to the 170-pound-ewe’s combustion, Ettling would not have written that the "findings" (of observing the carcass’s combustion and the factors that contributed thereto, what else?) "showed that for a ewe, and presumably for a human also, the body can be rather thoroughly consumed by fire from its own fat" (emphasis added), provided that the body is "suspended in such a way that it is over the fire which is fed from the body fat" (emphasis added) – the very way the 170-pound ewe’s carcass had been found "suspended on the seat springs with a lot of char and ash underneath", due to which the fat rendered from the carcass had "dripped onto the char which acted like a candle wick and kept the fat burning".
If I understood Jansson correctly, he is arguing that Ettling’s above-quoted statements are about "something ... which was not directly supported by his experiments".
This is a rather absurd proposition, for while it may be that the author of a scientific paper about the results of experiments also mentions something other than these results in the "Discussion" section, Ettling wouldn’t be discussing his experimental results at all if Jansson were not just writing plain nonsense.
Moreover Jansson’s argument calls for deliberately and insistently ignoring a clear and unequivocal statement of Ettling’s, whereby the possibility of a carcass being largely consumed by (essentially) a fire fed by its own fat is a finding derived from, guess what, the experiments described in the article.
Unless Jansson can identify a source of Ettling’s findings and the conclusions derived from these other than Ettling’s carcass-burning experiments (good luck, Mr. Jansson), his claim to have read the paper "with a clear head" is but a laughable case of what Jansson, in characteristic "Revisionist" self-projection, lamely accuses me of – empty rhetoric.
As I presume that at least some readers following this discussion have become curious about the full contents of Ettling’s article, I have transcribed the entire article here. Feedback from our readers on what they think of Mr. "clear head" Jansson’s reading of this article will be much appreciated.
____
Next, Jansson tries to cover up the embarrassment of having made a fuss about oh-so-outrageous errors in tables included in the HC critique and in the blog Mattogno, Graf & Kues on Aktion Reinhard(t) Cremation (4), only to be confronted with the fact that these errors
a) were nothing more than Excel formulae errors (the denominator of a formula in a cell was not "frozen" before copying that formula onto cells below), and
b) led to wood to body mass ratios less favorable to my argument than those resulting from a correct calculation (especially embarrassing as Jansson had hollered about my presumable "dishonesty").
He does so by, first of all, misrepresenting my argument:
Muehlenkamp also claims that my observation of his error regarding quantities of wood neglects another of his errors which works in his favor, namely one involving the wood equivalent of railroad ties.As readers of the blog last mentioned will have noticed, that was not my claim at all. I simply pointed out that an Excel formulae error had led to higher wood to body mass ratios than a calculation without that error would have.
Jansson claims having assumed that I had used different energy density values for wooden railway sleepers than for other wood, as if the tables in question did not clearly show that I used exactly the same BTU/kg values for "Sleepers" as I did for "Pallets" or "Wood". But then, Jansson’s falsehoods are usually transparent.
Then Jansson complains that I should have used different energy density values for sleepers and for (other) wood, acting as if it were a matter of intelligence to know that "railway sleepers are generally soaked with creosote (coal tar, amounting to perhaps an additional 15% of their weight) which has a higher energy density than wood".
Jansson doesn’t tell just how much this creosote soaking, assuming it was present in the sleepers in question (the "generally" suggests that this is not always the case) would make the energy density of sleepers increase in relation to that of wood not treated with creosote. But he can do that when responding to this blog, if he should decide to do so (which I expect him to). However, as concerns tables 8.41 (5.5) to 8.43 (5.7), he need not even try unless he should be able to demonstrate an energy density for sleepers above 18,300 BTU/kg, for otherwise he will only return to the original wood to body mass ratio of 1.982/1, this time correctly calculated.
So much for the already considerable amount of garbage accumulated by Jansson before he even turns to what he calls the "main topics". That's where the fun really starts.
2. On burial density (see the blog As Jansson continues producing junk … and its first update, section 5., as well as the blog The more you scratch Friedrich Jansson …, section 3.)
Following the inevitable blather about my having "finally managed" to read the article available for download here (to which Jansson failed to provide the link), Jansson commits the unbelievable stupidity of repeating one of his deliberate falsehoods, which reads as follows (emphasis added):
(Interestingly enough, the authors of this study had also supposed – without specific data– that higher densities of burial were possible, but found that supposition refuted by real-life experience.)The "without specific data" claim is what can be safely called a lie, as the supposedly non-existing specific data are clearly stated in the article in question, from which I quoted them in my previous blog about this subject (emphasis added):
The area and volume of burial pits for slaughtered animals were initially estimated from the data on animal weights and age distributions contained in Table 4.1, using the following assumptions:
• The bulk density of the animals is 0.9 g/cm³;
• The carcasses are placed randomly in the pit, with a packing factor of 1.4 (equivalent to 30% porosity), to arrive at typical burial volumes of about 0.6 m³ for cattle and between 0.04 and 0.05 m³ per sheep or pig.No specific data my ass. Jansson even discusses the first set of these specific data (the 0.9 g/cm³ "bulk density") as he goes on.
The second set of these data, except for the packing factor, he mentions only marginally, even though I referred to it prominently in my previous blog. It is characteristic of Jansson’s dishonesty that he makes a big fuss about my having noted the "bulk density" (wrong term in this context, according to Jansson) of 0.9 g/cm³, berating me for not having realized, as genius Jansson did "in less than ten seconds", that this value did not refer to the bulk density but to the "average density of carcass", because the bulk density, as Jansson informs, includes empty spaces between the carcasses.
What Jansson doesn’t tell his gullible readers is that I mentioned the 0.9 g/cm³ before focusing on what he considers the actual bulk density, as follows:
Also of interest are the typical burial volumes:It must have been a bitter pill for Jansson that I could (moreover based on information from his own source, which he had conveniently omitted) demonstrate that the bulk densities (as per Jansson’s understanding of the term, i.e. including empty spaces) projected by the article’s authors are close to or above my calculation whereby 663.40 kg of human mass can fit into one cubic meter, which he had decried as a "a truly enormous error".
- According to Table 4.2, whereby 100 cattle weigh 37.3 tons or 37,300 kg, one head of cattle weighs 373 kg. If one head of cattle typically occupies 0.6 m³, then the typical burial density for cattle is 373÷0.6 = ca. 622 kg per m³.
- According to Table 4.2, whereby 1,000 sheep weigh 31.8 tons or 31,800 kg, one head of sheep weighs 31.8 kg. If one head of sheep typically occupies 0.04 to 0.05 m³, then the typical burial density for sheep is 31.8÷0.05 = ca. 636 kg per m³ to 31.8÷0.04 = ca. 795 kg per m³.
- According to Table 4.2, whereby 1,000 pigs weigh 27.6 tons or 27,600 kg, one pig weighs 27.6 kg. If one pig typically occupies 0.04 to 0.05 m³, then the typical burial density for pigs is 27.6÷0.05 = ca. 552 kg per m³ to 27.6÷0.04 = ca. 690 kg per m³.
So much for Jansson’s claim that my calculation whereby 663.40 kg of human mass can fit into one cubic meter is "a truly enormous error".
Hence it’s understandable (taking into consideration Jansson’s amply demonstrated mendacity) that in his reply he doesn’t spend a word on my above-quoted text.
Fortunately for Jansson, in that it gave him the opportunity to fuss around a little bit more, I had misunderstood the "typical burial volumes of about 0.6 m³ for cattle and between 0.04 and 0.05 m³ per sheep or pig" as referring to what Jansson calls the "average density of carcass" (not including spaces between carcasses), as opposed to what, according to Jansson, is the actual bulk density. Accordingly I had assumed that the lower densities stated in Table 4.2 were because the carcasses, projected by the authors to be placed in the pit with "a packing factor of 1.4 (equivalent to 30% porosity)", had not been packed together tightly enough with that packing factor when placed "randomly" inside the pit, and that the projected densities in terms of mass per cubic meter or fraction of cubic meter per mass (which, as mentioned before, are close to or even above the density I calculated) could (only) be achieved by a team inside the pit packing the carcasses more tightly than "a packing factor of 1.4 (equivalent to 30% porosity)", so that the carcasses would occupy more than 70 % of the available space.
Thanks to Jansson’s clarification (which, by the way, renders completely superfluous his lengthy illustrated sermon about cords of wood and a packing factor of 1.4 being pretty tight), I’m now aware that densities of ca. 622 kg per m³ (cattle), ca. 636 to 795 kg per m³ (sheep) or ca. 552 to 690 kg per m³ can be achieved with a packing factor of 1.4 – which suggests that the same applies to my calculated density of 663.40 kg per m³ for human beings.
In what is arguably the least intelligent of his ubiquitous "lie" accusations, Jansson accuses me of lying on account of my having wrongly understood that the packing factor mentioned by the article’s authors was based on experience and not just projected.
So I’m supposed to have deliberately misrepresented the contents of a text that I had (quite unlike Jansson, who for obvious reasons kept it to himself) quoted verbatim before. And as if this proposition were not inane enough, Jansson also failed to take into account that it made no difference to my argument whether the packing I assumed to be insufficient had been projected or actually practiced. Last but not least, my assumption of insufficient packing was unfavorable to my argument, requiring me to speculate that a packing team inside the pit would be required to achieve densities corresponding to my calculations.
Jansson often forgets to think before writing (especially before spouting one of his "lie" accusations), but this occasion is particularly amusing even by Janssonian standards.
Now, why did the article’s authors, based on practical experience, eventually consider burial densities somewhat lower than their projections? Was the projected packing factor of 1.4 not achieved in practice (i.e. was the empty space between carcasses higher than 30 %)? Or did the average density of carcass turn out to be higher than the projected 0.9 g/cm³? Or was it both?
The last paragraph from the article, quoted in my previous blog about this subject (and also conveniently omitted by Jansson) suggests the second of these possibilities (emphasis added):
However, practical experience at some of the mass burial sites suggests that in practice the volumes for sheep and cattle are greater than above and appropriately adjusted values are incorporated in Table 4.2, for herds of 100 cattle or 1000 sheep or pigs. The increase is attributed in part to carcass bloat, which effectively reduces the bulk density.First of all, note the highlighted "some", which means that the mentioned practical experience did not occur at all of the mass burial sites and suggests that the authors, preferring to err on the side of caution, stated in their table densities corresponding to worst case scenarios, despite densities corresponding to their projections having been achieved on some occasions.
Second and more important, the reason for lower bulk density that is expressly pointed out is "carcass bloat", which presumably means that the carcass mass was increased by gasses building up inside the carcass during the decomposition process.
Unless the Jews at the AR camps were mostly placed inside the burial pits when in a state of bloating due to decomposition (which is not what becomes apparent from the evidence), Jansson was thus comparing apples with oranges when he claimed, based on the article’s Table 4.2, that the burial densities resulting from that table could be projected to the AR camps.
Jansson knew what he was doing when he showed only the table and omitted the related text. (It is in the above-quoted paragraph, incidentally, that no specific data are provided – and not regarding the projected higher densities, as Jansson mendaciously claimed. If I know my Jansson well, he will now start babbling about the unfortunate wording of his claim.)
Jansson shows this photograph of a partially filled burial carcass disposal pit in Birkshaw Forest, UK:
and asks what evidence I have that a stacking team inside the pit could increase the density of the carcass mass "by over 50% in comparison with this".
It seems that Jansson has a problem with his eyesight, for the answer to his question is partially provided by the picture itself, which shows a rather loose packing of carcasses especially on the left edge, and a large space close to that edge which doesn’t seem to contain any carcass at all. There is hardly a packing factor of 1.4 here – rather a packing factor that could already be improved by a bulldozer shoving the carcasses closer together, not to mention a hypothetical packing team inside the pit having arranged the carcasses in a space-saving manner in the first place.
While Jansson’s aforementioned clarification and the above picture suggest that a packing team is not necessary to achieve burial densities in the order of the 663.40 kg per cubic meter I calculated (actually I need only 604.55 kg per cubic meter as pointed out here, and when factoring in decomposition after the corpses were placed inside the pit, top-down burning for sanitary purposes and the fact – mentioned by Sara Berger and to be addressed in a future blog – that the last contingents of deportees were burned right after being killed and never buried, I will need even less), Jansson’s rambling against evidence to the existence of a packing team at Bełżec extermination camp is worth addressing for the sheer stupidity of Jansson’s arguments.
Against this paragraph of the aforementioned blog:
Reder’s observation that the corpses were thrown "without order" into the graves does not contradict the evidence whereby, once inside the graves (and obviously outside the range of Reder’s observation), the corpses were ordered systematically by a team created for that purpose in order to save space (see Berger, EdV, pp. 66, 113, 148 and 372; judgment LG Düsseldorf vom 3.9.1965, 8 I Ks 2/64 (1st Düsseldorf Treblinka Trial), transcribed online here; Claude Lanzmann’s interview with Franz Suchomel).Jansson blusters away as follows:
A Treblinka trial verdict is not about Belzec, and Suchomel was not at Belzec either. As for Muehlenkamp’s citations from Sara Berger’s Experten der Vernichtung, p. 66 refers to Sobibor and p. 148 to Treblinka, while p. 113 refers to Belzec but does not say that a stacking team arranged the bodies for the sake of highly efficient use of space, and p. 372 has nothing to do with the subject. None of the references support Muehlenkamp’s idea of a Belzec “stacking team”, and he is lying in implying that they do. (Incidentally, Berger lies outrageously on p. 113 about the dimensions of the Belzec graves, claiming that there was a 70×33 meter grave. More charitably, she could have been misled by Michael Tregenza’s numbers, which are close to hers, but as she cites Kola as well there’s little excuse for this.) As for the fact that careful use was supposedly made of burial space at Sobibor, this actually works against Muehlenkamp, as if one accepts Muehlenkamp’s claims about burial space at that camp, only a relatively low burial density was achieved there, indicating that contrary to his claims these measures did not lead to any extraordinary burial density.First, the objection that a Treblinka trial verdict is not about Bełżec and references to Treblinka are not references to Bełżec: certainly so, but Treblinka and Bełżec were akin camps with akin methods and procedures, essentially organized and implemented by one and the same person (Christian Wirth), so it stands to reason that procedures applied at one of these places were also applied at the other, all the more so as space constraints (especially if one assumes that there were only the 33 mass graves at Bełżec identified by Prof. Andrzej Kola, and not also the further mass graves that Alex Bay considers to be visible on an air photograph) were probably more pressing at Bełżec than at Treblinka. The same goes for the parallel between Sobibór and Bełżec, except that in the former camp the burial density was somewhat lower for reasons that will be addressed below. Jansson either hasn’t read enough about these camps or forgot to think before hitting the keyboard.
Second, Jansson obviously didn’t bother to listen to Claude Lanzmann’s interview with Franz Suchomel, otherwise he might have realized that Suchomel’s statements between minute 17:39 and minute 19:03 of the video, including the part about Wirth having ordered Franz, Oberhauser and Hackenholt to place corpses inside the pits "so that Wirth could see how much space he needed", minute 18:35 (which shows that there was a concern about saving space at an early stage), refer to Bełżec (where Suchomel had not served, so he must have obtained this information from colleagues who had been there) and not to Treblinka.
As to the "relatively low burial density" at Sobibór, this results from dividing the number of 80,000 corpses through the combined volume of mass graves 3, 4, 5 and 6 identified by Prof. Kola in 2001 (9,525 cubic meters), as stated i.a. in this blog. Given that Sobibór handled much less "traffic" than its sister camps and the body disposal procedure was changed from burial to burning at a relatively early stage, it is entirely possible that some of these graves were filled below their capacity. The much lower number of deportees to be "processed" also implies that less thoroughness had to be applied to saving mass grave space.
As concerns Jansson’s imbecilic claim that "Sara Berger lies outrageously on p. 113 about the dimensions of the Belzec graves", apparently our "lies" howler hasn’t considered the possibility – which is not unlikely considering how the related footnote 103 on p. 499 is worded – that the historian (who refers to Kola only as concerns her statement about what she calls the Ausgrabungen (excavations) in the late 1990s) assumed that Kola had not identified the full extent of the mass graves and relied in this respect on Tregenza and/or on one or more of the four witnesses mentioned in that footnote.
3. On the Dresden Altmarkt pyres (see the blog Jansson finally answered my Dresden Altmarkt question …)
In this section a desperate Jansson largely tries to make up for the weakness of his arguments with dodging, empty claims, deliberate misunderstanding and abusive patronizing ("Looks like we need another hand-holding session. I can only wonder at Muehlenkamp’s inability to do a word problem that one might assign to a nine year old.", etc.). That makes it more fun to deconstruct Jansson's garbage point by point, as I will do in the following.
Jansson
Regarding my proof that his assumptions on pyre fueling are false, Muehlenkamp first contests the fact that there are serious doubts concerning the procedures involved in the execution of the pyres, their fueling, and their results.
So Jansson considers his "puddle" arithmetic, and his lame squealing about the source base being "inadequate", to be proof that gasoline was not the main combustion agent on the Dresden Altmarkt pyres. His standards of evidence seem to be unreachably high or abysmally low, depending on what suits his argument.
Jansson
He notes that “there are photographs of pyres while and before burning” – but this is just the problem. The photographs only show pyres with largely intact bodies, and not a pyre that has burned down and largely cremated the carcasses. As the pictures do not show a complete cremation – not even close – they cannot be used to determine the amounts and types of fuels used, even supposing that complete cremation did eventually take place.
First of all, I was not referring to Hahn’s photographs alone, but to photographs plus eyewitness testimonies (presumed to be the source of Irving’s and Taylor’s writing about the fuel and procedures, quoted i.a. here) and documents (confirming that, as is suggested by one of the photographs, the end result of the cremation was something that could be called "ash" or "ashes". Unlike "Revisionists", I don’t expect a single source of evidence to tell all the story, but look for a convergence of various sources.
Second, I wasn’t asking Jansson to determine the amounts and types of fuels used, let alone to do that on the basis of photographs alone. I was asking him for an estimate on the amount of gasoline that would in his opinion have been required to burn 6,865 corpses on the Dresden Altmarkt between 21 February and 5 March 1945, assuming that (as all related evidence suggests) the main combustion agent was gasoline.
Last but not least, while I can understand Jansson’s seeing the corpses of sub-human Jews as "carcasses", I must take the strongest possible exception to his applying that term to the corpses of worthy Volksgenossen murdered by those Jew-dominated Allied airborne gangsters. I hope for Jansson that Jürgen Graf is not reading this.
Jansson
As for Muehlenkamp’s claims that the ashes seen in the photos are from the pyres, this is his interpretation, nothing more. The city was full of ashes; even clearing a spot for the cremation would have left piles of ash pushed to the side.
The ashes of what exactly – if not of cremated human beings – does Jansson think he is seeing in the foreground of the picture below?
Why would such non-human ashes be covering an open square like the Altmarkt?
What evidence is there that they did?
Why would such non-human ashes not have been completely removed from the square before setting up the pyres by 21 February 1945, a full week after the end of the attacks?
And why would such ashes be shoved towards the pyres instead of away from them, when there was much other space to pile them up, as would under Jansson’s assumption be suggested by the picture below (the link of which suggests that it is featured by a source close to Jansson’s intellectual circles)?
Jansson
Even if the photographed piles of ashes were from previous pyres, their presence would not show that they were the only remains: the larger remains could have been removed first.A rather difficult undertaking to say the least, if one considers that, according to the Schlußmeldung über die vier Luftangriffe auf den LS-Ort Dresden am 13., 14. und 15. Februar 1945 (link provided by Jansson himself), one of the reasons for deciding to burn the corpses was a lack of suitable vehicles for transporting corpses to the cemeteries. Especially if a substantial portion of the cremated body parts looked like Leleko’s description of such parts at Treblinka (emphasis added):
The parts of the body that had burned but had preserved their natural shape were put into a special mortar and pounded into flour. This was done in order to hide the traces of the crimes committed. Later on the ashes were buried in deep pits.Jansson
As for documents mentioning cremation, they only give an offhand mention without details on the full course of events, or on fueling, and do not come from anyone closely involved with carrying out cremations.If Jansson’s characterization of the documents mentioning cremation were accurate, first of all, then so what? Would this mean that the description of the cremation’s results as "ash" or "ashes" in these documents (which is what we’re talking about here) was inaccurate, that the authors of these documents had no first-hand experience or reliable sources on which to base these descriptions? Hardly so.
And as concerns one of these two documents, Jansson either has a short memory or is arguing against better knowledge, for the document in question goes into some detail in referring to the cremation results and the procedure to be adopted in disposing of these results. I’m talking about the document StAD, Marstall- und Bestattungsamt, Nachtrag I - Schreiben, 4.3.1945 (Matthias Neutzner, Martha Heinrich Acht, pp. 91, 93 and 221), partially quoted in the excerpt from Martha Heinrich Acht transcribed and translated here:
Thousands of corpses still had to be retrieved and buried. A task that the available forces were not up to: thus, after Gauleiter and city administration had agreed, corpses were collected on the sealed-off Altmarkt, registered and finally burned. This happened »in consideration of the quickly progressing decomposition and the existing extraordinary difficulties in retrieving [the corpses] as well as the lack of suitable vehicles for transportation to cemeteries«, was stated in the Order Police's final report. For two weeks the old market place in the city center became a crematorium. On 5 March the corpses collected in the streets had been retrieved, the pyres gone out. »By my estimate, 8 - 10 cubic meters of ash lay on the Altmarkt«, was reported to the city administration the day before. »The Brigadeführer wished that this ash be loaded into recipients (boxes or sacks) and transported to the Heidefriedhof, where it is to be sunk into the earth at the place marked in lead on the map. It is not necessary to leave the boxes or sacks in the soil. You shall thus pour the ash from the transport recipients into the soil, so that the recipients can be reused several times. Transport should start on Tuesday.«So someone was being instructed on how to handle the boxes or sacks containing what was referred to as "ash", in such a manner that these recipients would not be buried with their contents but could be used for several loads of similar contents. Offhand mention, Mr. Jansson? Not from someone closely involved in carrying out cremations (and/or disposing of their results)? Bullshit.
Jansson
Moreover, even Muehlenkamp believes that there are wartime forgeries among the documents mentioning these cremations, which implies that the pool of documents has been subject to propagandistic manipulation. Muehlenkamp may imagine that only one version of a document was subject to this, but this is only an assumption, not a proven fact. This renders the evidence still more uncertain, …
Muehlenkamp doesn’t "believe" (believing I leave to ideologically motivated specimens like Jansson) that "there are wartime forgeries among the documents mentioning these cremations". He sees no room for reasonable doubt that, as was finally established on hand of a copy of the unaltered document, exactly one document related to the Dresden bombings and their aftermath was subsequently manipulated, the subject of the manipulation (inflating the figures stated in the document by a factor of ten for propagandistic purposes) being wholly unrelated to the cremation process or results.
The manipulators were in all probability the recipients of the original document at the "Reich Ministry for Public Enlightenment and Propaganda", who had every reason to manipulate figures stated in the document but no reason whatsoever to manipulate the information that body disposal had partially been carried out by cremating the bodies.
The fact that the Schlußmeldung contains figures obviously not manipulated is strong evidence against any manipulation having taken place in regard to that document, besides the fact that cremation of a part of the corpses was a propagandistically irrelevant detail.
As to the document StAD, Marstall- und Bestattungsamt, Nachtrag I - Schreiben, 4.3.1945, this was obviously an internal document of the city administration, known prior to Neutzner’s book only to a few insider researchers, and there was no reason for anyone to manipulate information as innocuous and unspectacular as an instruction to reuse recipients containing cremation remains instead of burying them with such remains.
This means that, while I would have reasons to protest against Jansson’s attempt to saddle me with the burden of proof, I don’t have to do so because it can be considered proven beyond a reasonable doubt that neither the Schlußmeldung nor the document StAD, Marstall- und Bestattungsamt, Nachtrag I - Schreiben, 4.3.1945 were in any way manipulated.
By the way, it seems that Jansson accepts as fact the aforementioned manipulation of the figures in TB 47. I wonder what Jürgen Graf would say to that.
Jansson
… and totally unsuitable for proving that something is possible which all other experience says is not possible. A piece of paper claiming something is very poor evidence for such an occurrence (if a document mentioned that someone drove a large truck from Lisbon to Moscow using only one gallon of fuel, would you believe it?) even under the best of circumstances, and the circumstances here are far from the best.The circumstances are actually pretty good when there is a convergence of eyewitness, photographic and (other) documentary evidence, as in regard to the Dresden Altmarkt cremations and their results. And while it is true that the best of documents cannot prove something that is obviously preposterous (or something "which all other experience says is not possible"), that’s not the case we have here. All there is to support the notion that burning air raid victims to something deserving the designation "ash" or "ashes" was not possible with the means at hand, unless I missed or forgot something, is Jansson’s say-so.
Jansson
In short, as I stated, the evidence concerning the Dresden pyres is inadequate to allow for a technical analysis of the cremation (if complete cremation did indeed take place).The evidence is perfectly adequate for concluding that the Dresden pyres burned 6,865 corpses, with gasoline as the main combustion agent, to remains small enough to fit into the boxes and sacks that the city administration instructed to reuse, and thus allow for transportation to the cemetery despite the lack of suitable vehicles that had been a reason for ordering cremation in the first place.
And again, I didn’t ask for Jansson’s "technical analysis". I asked for an estimate on the amount of gasoline that would in his opinion have been required to burn 6,865 corpses on the Dresden Altmarkt between 21 February and 5 March 1945, assuming that (as all related evidence suggests) the main combustion agent was gasoline.
Jansson
Muehlenkamp asks whether I can “point out any source mentioning a different type of flammables used in addition to the wood below the pyre?” As usual, he does not know his own sources. David Irving’s book on Dresden, which Muehlenkamp cites in this connection, refers to the inclusion of “more straw between each layer” of corpses.Witness Jansson playing dumb as he deliberately misunderstands my question, which obviously was about what, besides the other flammables mentioned by my sources and/or visible on Hahn’s photographs, is supposed to have been used as a combustion agent instead of gasoline.
Now that the question has been sufficiently clarified to keep Jansson from trying to weasel out of it, let’s what he’s got.
Unless, of course, he means to tell me that the straw between each layer of bodies did the trick, together with what flammable material was under the pyres, without any other fuel being added. That would also be fine.
Jansson
Ultimately, however, one needs to examine the primary sources, which Muehlenkamp fails to do entirely.Does Jansson examine the primary sources before accepting as fact a historical event that does not run contrary to his preconceived notions, or does he only yell for primary sources when it comes to events inconvenient to his articles of faith? I submit that it’s the latter, but I’m open to Jansson trying to convince me that he’s just as rigorous when it comes to historical events other than the crimes of his Nazi heroes, especially against Jews.
Anyway, it’s not like British historian Charles Taylor, quoted i.a. in this blog, had invented what he wrote about those "huge grill racks" and the use of gasoline for incineration. Taylor’s source is an excellent study with the title Dresden im Luftkrieg, of which I own the 2006 edition by Flechsig Buchvertrieb. The author of this study is the late Götz Bergander, who was himself a survivor of the Dresden bombing on 13/14 February 1945. Bergander’s source is a man who must have known what he was talking about – Mr. Theodor Ellgering, in his capacity as Geschäftsführer Interministerieller Luftkriegsausschuβ (Manager of the Inter-ministerial Air War Committee).
Ellgering reported having been put in charge of directing aid measures by Goebbels, and of having received extensive powers for this purpose (Bergander, p. 179). Regarding the pyres on the Altmarkt, Ellgering wrote the following (Bergander, p. 180, after Rodenberger, Axel, Der Tod von Dresden, Dortmund 1951, pp. 158-160):
Wir standen trotz dieser doch gewiβ primitiven Bestattungsart vor der Notwendigkeit, das Tempo weiter zu beschleunigen, denn infolge des milden Wetters begannen die Leichen in Verwesung überzugehen. Dadurch verbreitete sich über der völlig zerstörten Innenstadt ein pestilenzartiger Gestank. Es war deshalb aus gesundheitspolizeilichen Gründen dringend notwendig, die Leichenbergung zu beschleunigen. Der von vielen Seiten gemachte Vorschlag, die Toten in den städtischen Grünanlagen – also an Ort und Stelle – zu beerdigen, war aber nach Ansicht der Hygieniker wegen Gefährdung der Trinkwasserversorgung nicht durchführbar. Um den Ausbruch von Seuchen zu vermeiden, wurde die Altstadt zum Sperrgebiet erklärt. Es blieb keine Wahl mehr, als die … Genehmigung zur Verbrennung der Leichen zu geben, die auf dem Altmarkt stattfand, wo aus Eisenträgern riesige Roste gebaut wurden, auf denen jeweils 500 Leichen zu Scheiterhaufen aufgeschichtet, mit Benzin getränkt und verbrannt wurden.
My translation:
Despite this certainly primitive kind of burial we stood before the necessity to further accelerate the pace, for due to the mild weather the corpses began to decompose. Due to this a pestilential stench spread over the completely destroyed inner city. It was urgently necessary, for public health reasons, to accelerate the recovery of the corpses. However, the suggestion made from many sides to bury the dead in the municipal green areas – i.e. on the spot – was not executable according to the hygienists’ opinion as it would imperil the drinking water supply. In order to prevent the outbreak of epidemics, the old town was declared a restricted area. There was no choice but to … grant permission for the burning of the corpses, which took place on the Altmarkt, where they made giant grates with iron girders, on each of which 500 corpses were piled up in pyres, drenched with gasoline and burned.
So, what is Mr. "primary sources" Jansson going to argue now? That Ellgering was lying about the corpses being drenched with gasoline, just for the fun of it?
[Skip Jansson’s patronizing abuse, which is of no interest except for what it reveals about Jansson.]
Jansson
Following Muehlenkamp’s assumptions on fuel demands and the number of bodies per pyre, one is looking at some 5,000 litres of fuel per pyre, or 5 cubic meters. Muehlenkamp has estimated the pyre dimensions at some 6×2.5 meters, or 15 square meters. Dividing, we see that the puddle should have been one third of a meter deep, or a little over a foot.
Muehlenkamp also asks a stupid question about what makes me think that the gasoline had been poured on the pictures that don’t show burning. Who said it was? There’s no deep puddle of gasoline in the pictures showing combustion either, even though they show largely intact corpses. In fact, the point it that it isn’t possible to pour that amount of gasoline on a pyre of those dimensions, unless you have some kind of sealed tub underneath it to keep it contained (which the pictures show there was not). If that amount of gasoline were poured on such a pyre, it would simply spread out all over the square. That’s what liquids do.
Just the kind of calculations and considerations I was expecting from Jansson, no surprise here. Ten liters per corpse and 5,000 liters per pyre is in line with my calculations and sources, but Jansson seems to be assuming that all of it would run off the pyre, as opposed to at least a considerable part of it being soaked up by the victims’ clothing and hair, the straw between the corpses and the wood and straw below the grate. Why does he expect this to be so, especially in a scenario in which the gasoline was not poured over the bodies all at once but each layer of bodies was drenched in gasoline before adding the next layer?
Anyway, I understand from Jansson’s "puddle" fussing that he’s considering an amount of gasoline (or whatever other fuel he should have in mind, if he should decide on squealing that Ellgering lied about the gasoline) way below the 68,000 liters I calculated. What amount would that be, Mr. Jansson?
Not that it matters, but my "stupid question" was about pre-ignition pictures because I would expect whatever gasoline made a puddle around the pyre (or "spread all over the square", as Jansson is now arguing) to have ignited pretty quickly once the pyre was lit. And how did Jansson determine that there’s no gasoline around the burning pyre on the color photo? For someone who can’t tell whether the cremation remains in the foreground are remains of human beings or of whatever else Jansson has in mind, even though they look like bone fragments, that’s quite an achievement.
4. On the term Ausrottung and its verbal forms (see the blog Friedrich Jansson proudly presents … including updates, as well as the blog The more you scratch Friedrich Jansson …, section 1.)
Guess what, Jansson again dodged my questions regarding the statements from illustrious contemporaries quoted here.
These questions, or his inability to provide a faith-conforming yet not absurd reply to them, must be hard on poor Jansson’s nerves. At least that what is suggested by his initial furious outburst in this section, which inaugurates the opportunity for some more refutation fun.
Jansson
Regarding my statement that as Ausrottung was held to be an appropriate term to describe Nazi Jewish policy in the 1930s, it cannot imply any further radicalization from that point, such as to a policy of killing the Jews, Muehlenkamp states thatthat argument is a non-sequitur, for the use of “Ausrottung” as meaning something other than physical extermination at a certain time would not preclude its use in the sense of physical extermination at a later time.
As usual, he has misread. If he is unable to understand the meaning of the verb “to imply” in this context, he should take some English lessons rather than boring everyone with imbecile blogs. As was clear to everyone except Muehlenkamp, the argument was not that Ausrottung applied to people cannot be used to refer to killing, but rather that it does not imply killing, i.e a conclusion of “killing” does not follow from the use of “Ausrottung” with respect to the Jews.
Who does Jansson think he’s fooling? The argument he now claims to have made was not the argument to which my comment referred. Regarding that argument (which was that Ausrottung could not have been used at a later stage with a more radical (literal) meaning than corresponded to its (figurative) use in the 1930s), my comment was entirely appropriate.
Look who’s talking about "boring everyone with imbecile blogs", by the way.
Jansson
Muehlenkamp proves unable to respond to my explanation of the actual meaning of the “assassination” passage from Der Gelbe Fleck of which he is so fond, so he spams the text again, and then tries to change the subject.Mendacious rhetorical blather instead of arguments – typical Jansson.
Jansson
He then tries to draw a sharp distinction between literal and figurative meanings, maintaining that at least ausrotten’s literal meaning involves killing.No, I do draw a sharp and appropriate distinction between a certain term as used in its literal sense (which is what our conversation is all about, after all) and that term as used in a figurative sense (which is irrelevant).
Jansson
By conceding that it also has a figurative meaning, he effectively concedes the argument: it follows from the existence of a “figurative” meaning that Ausrottung does not imply killing, as I said.
By this amazing piece of Janssonian reasoning, terms like "murdering", "killing", "slaughtering", "butchering", "assassinating" also do not imply killing, because all of them can be and are often used in a figurative sense (e.g. "a murderous routine", "making people work so-and-so-many hours a day is sheer murder", "killing with laughter", "football team A was slaughtered by football team B in the match at C", "character assassination", etc.)
If this was Jansson’s argument, he was making no argument at all.
But I strongly doubt it was, unless Jansson can convince me that he thought Mr. Harrison was referring to "Ausrottung" in a figurative, non-literal sense.
Jansson
To conceal this fact, Muehlenkamp tries a rhetoric aimed at minimizing the problem by giving the example of the verb “to kill” and the expression “you’re killing me”, where the former meaning is clearly dominant; one might also give examples of the figurative use of “to drown” (“we will shut the Jews in the ghettos and they will drown in their own filth”) or cases of the figurative use of “totschlagen” (strike dead). Here there is a sense that the verb has a very strong literal and lethal meaning, and the others meanings are of somewhat restricted and subordinate use. This is not the case for ausrotten (particularly not at the time; postwar reeducation has emphasized the lethal meaning of this word and its derivatives, which has led this sense to dominate in contemporary German, but this is irrelevant and anachronistic for the period we are studying). It is just not that explicit a verb. The literal meaning is “to root out” – no death implied, although death is certainly one possibility. In short, it is a polyseme, and the non-homicidal uses are not subordinate to the homicidal one in the way that they are with “to kill” or “totschlagen”.
Highly irrelevant babbling, unless Jansson can demonstrate that ausrotten was ever used in its literal sense, when describing something done to a group or population of human beings, as meaning anything other than killing all or a significant part of that group’s members.
As to the classic "postwar reeducation" claim, the contemporary quotes provided suggest that Otto von Bismarck, Bernhard Fürst von Bülow, Navy Higher War Tribunal Counsel Dr. Schattenberg, SS-Gruppenführer Hermann Fegelein, General Governor Hans Frank, and Reichsführer Heinrich Himmler, among many others, would laugh their heads of it they read such blatant nonsense. So might Joseph Goebbels, unless he was too fond of the German language to consider it a laughing matter.
Jansson
I have no particular objection to referring to the homicidal sense as “literal” and the non-homicidal sense as “figurative”, but one cannot pretend that the homicidal sense is the “true” meaning of “ausrotten.” Both are true meanings.So now a term's figurative meaning is also its true meaning? This is getting better and better. Does Jansson feel physical pain when someone is figuratively kicking his butt?
Jansson
Therefore the use of ausrotten or its derivatives with respect to the Jews is perfectly consistent with revisionism – which is what I said in the first place.With revisionism maybe, but not with the "Revisionism" of Jansson et al, which is the exact opposite of revisionism in that it challenges solid evidence on the basis of bullshit, as opposed of challenging bullshit on the basis of solid evidence. As to what Jansson claims to have "said in the first place", see above.
Jansson
Muehlenkamp also tries to whine about the supposed anti-semitism in my explanation of Der Gelbe Fleck – but doesn’t dare try to prove me wrong. Evidently Muehlankamp is one of those who believes that the truth is antisemitic.I’ll give Jansson the benefit of assuming that he was drunk or had smoked something weird when regurgitating what must be one of the oldest catchphrases in his manual.
Jews may or not have made opportunistic usage of a Christian language "with themselves in the place of Jesus", but what would reveal where Jansson comes from (if that were not obvious already on account of, among other things, the sole and exclusive theme of his blog site) is his obvious preoccupation with the actual or supposed wrongdoings of "Jews".
As to the "dare" remark (which, like with the "truth is antisemitic" classic, is also a cherry on the cake), Jansson should cut out the infantile use of terms suggesting that his opponent is afraid of something. As I remember having told him already, it enhances the impression that Jansson is scared of a great many things beside historical facts inconvenient to his articles of faith.
Talk about "truth" ("Wahrheit", in German), here’s something that I’m sure Jansson will like.