Einsatzgruppen Mass Graves Part Four

Part 1, Part 2, Part 3

Today I will address the remainder of the Holocaust Denial on Trial (HDoT) entry for Einsatzgruppen mass graves. In the previous articles in this series we have determined that so far none of the mass graves presented by HDoT can be considered evidence of a genocide.

HDoT gives the excuse that mass graves are difficult to find 65 or so years after the fact. HDoT is working with the premise that the graves exist and it’s just a matter of finding them. This is wrong. As I’ve said before, the burden of proof is on the person making the accusation. The default isn’t that the Holocaust happened. Therefore you don’t get to say the graves exist before you have found them. In actuality HDoT has all the institutional backing behind them to say this and gets away with publishing such unscholarly work on a site that is a project of Emory University.

Back to the point. HDoT mentions Father Patrick Desbois who I have previously written about. I will repeat what Robert Faurisson has said about the work of Desbois:

“These days, in the Ukraine, there’s a Roman Catholic priest who’s been getting a lot of attention, father Patrick Desbois, a Frenchman and great friend of the Jews. His speciality consists in travelling the length and breadth of the land in search of “mass Jewish graves”. He has the good Ukrainian peasants of a given area informed that he’ll soon be calling at such or such locale and that he intends to garner testimonies about the slaughters of Jews by the Germans during the war. It’s wholly in the inhabitants’ interest to be able to boast that the environs actually possess such mass graves over which, afterwards, may be erected monuments that may in turn attract the odd foreign tourist. The “witnesses” get together and prepare a story. The priest then pays his visit and has his photograph taken with the country-folk as they point towards some spot or other. One may, to begin with, be astonished at the age of certain witnesses photographed thus far: they are quite plainly below the necessary age, which would normally be about 80. But there’s something more astonishing still: these supposed mass graves will not be dug open; no disinterment or any material verification will be carried out, all under the admirable pretence that the Jewish religion prohibits the touching of Jewish corpses; however, it’s enough to look in the Encyclopedia Judaica (1978) at the entry “Autopsies [plural] and Dissection [singular]” to see that there is no such prohibition at all. Only at a single location, Busk outside Lvov, have fifteen common graves been dug open, but none of the skeletons found there were examined and the sites were all covered over with a thick layer of concrete, meaning no authentication will be very possible in future! A curious way of respecting a body in accordance with Jewish law! The historian will thus have to be satisfied with what father Desbois, a clever man, tells us the witnesses told him. Hence, unverified numbers of unfound and unshown victims will be added up and, at the end, we shall be told that the Ukraine contains so many mass graves with so many Jewish victims.”

Next HDoT says that the Nazis did not do a good job of documenting the sites of their crimes. Because of this they had a difficult time trying to relocate them later to dig them back up and cremate the bodies while they were retreating from the Soviet army. Makes total sense that the Nazis, that did a poor job of mapping the alleged graves, would go looking for them while fleeing from the enemy. HDoT also says that disturbing a grave site somehow can make it harder to find. I would love to know the logic behind that.

In his book, The Einsatzgruppen in the Occupied Eastern Territories—Genesis, Missions and Actions, Carlo Mattogno has 300 and some odd pages dedicated to addressing the claim that the Nazis dug up bodies and cremated them. After all his analysis he concludes that there is insufficient evidence of this claim. Besides the lack of proof it is unfeasible and just doesn’t make sense. We’re talking about an area about the size of the continental United States and the Einsatzgruppen was four groups of men consisting of 300-500 men. And not all of those men were working in the field. Plus the fact that there was the Soviet army to worry about. Do you think the Germans would have made themselves a target by building huge fires to burn bodies?

In the final paragraph of this section HDoT again brings up Desbois and how he uses a metal detector to find the grave sites. Of course a metal detector won’t help you find buried bodies. Instead Desbois looked for shell casings and assumed there was a grave nearby. He never actually looked for any bodies.

This statement, ““A bullet, a Jew. A Jew, a cartridge.” is so ridiculous that I don’t need to get into it. But I will anyway. In the the Great Emu war of 1932 there was roughly one Emu killed for every 10 bullets spent. Of course the Australians waging this war weren’t also fighting the Soviet army.

I once again turn to Carlo Mattogno and agree with his sentiment below. Father Desbois should go to the Gaza Strip with his metal detector and locate the spent shell casings from Israeli guns. “A bullet, a Palestinian. A Palestinian, a cartridge.”

I feel like I could respond to every sentence in HDoT’s conclusion. So I will.

“Physical evidence, eyewitness testimony, and Nazi German documents prove that there are thousands of mass graves in the East.” Eyewitness testimony does not prove that a mass grave exists.

“Overall, the East is the final resting place of 1,150,000 Jews.” There is absolutely no proof of this.

“A single newspaper article about the difficulty of finding one mass grave does not constitute historical evidence.” Duh.

“The use of inaccurately analyzed, anecdotal evidence is a common Holocaust denier strategy. This is not good history, nor does it hold logically.” Project much?

“Meanwhile, Holocaust deniers demand that responsible, trained historians produce reams of documentation and physical evidence down to the tiniest detail.” We demand evidence that holds up to scrutiny and you are unable to provide it.

“They then demand that witnesses to events in the 1940s have absolutely no slip in memory or differing perspectives. According to deniers, if there is one iota of difference between eyewitness accounts, then someone must be ill-informed or lying. It is highly unlikely that they would hold friends or family to the same standards of absolute perfection for events that they witnessed 25 years ago, let alone 70+ years ago.” This is one reason why witness testimony is the least reliable form of evidence.

“Instead, Holocaust deniers accept one single newspaper article about one small Lithuanian town as proof of their assumption that the Einsatzgruppen did not murder 1,150,000 Jews.” See image below.

“The mass grave in this Lithuanian town has since been found (300 ft. away!), but Holocaust deniers do not rush to correct their mistake.[15]“ I addressed this in part one. What’s actually funny is that note 15 is a post from some random person on the CoDoH forum. HDot, if you’re going to attack arguments from random people on the internet please have at my website. I double dog dare you.