creedal minimalism vs. Skeptic magazine

Lyle Burkhead (LYBRHED@delphi.com)
Tue, 24 Dec 1996 17:38:31 -0500 (EST)


Michael Lorrey writes,

> Such photos are in existence, and can be accessed in the US Army
> archives, probably at your local National Archives.

Ok, I'll check that out. Have you been to the archives yourself?
If not, what is the basis for this statement?

I am assuming that Michael Shermer gave us his best shot. If such
photos are in existence, why didn't he publish them in his article?
I have read numerous books on this subject and never seen any
photographs of the gassing operation itself. There are photos of
everything else, but not that. If they do in fact exist, then, as I said,
revisionism becomes impossible. That would settle the matter
once and for all.

>: Revisionism is possible only because there is a total lack of physical,
>: photographic, or documentary evidence for gas chambers.
>
> This is a total lie Lyle.

Of course I expected to get this sort of thing... but I didn't expect
to get it from you, Mike.

> The camps are still in existence,

Of course they are.

> though they are beginning to fall apart from age. Just because you
> personally have never been there is no reason to doubt their existence,

I don't doubt their existence. My dad was in the US Army in WW2.
He was in the unit that liberated Dachau.

> and anyone who has told you they do not exist is either misled
> or a liar.

No one has told me any such thing.

> I would suggest that anyone who doubts to go,

I intend to go. In the meantime I have to rely on photographs.
But please try to understand: it's not the existence of the camps
that I doubt. I only doubt that the camps had gas chambers.

In the photographs I have seen, the rooms which are supposed to
have been gas chambers don't look like gas chambers. The alleged
gas chamber at Auschwitz is a concrete room with a doorway (not a
door that could be closed, locked, or sealed) opening into the
adjacent room with the ovens. It looks like a morgue. I don't see
how it could possibly have been used as a gas chamber.

If an archeologist examined the camps, not knowing what they were,
it would never cross his mind that the rooms in question were
gas chambers. To repeat what I said last night: if there were rooms
in the ruins of Auschwitz that looked like the gas chambers in
American prisons, revisionism would be impossible.

> as your own eyes will not lie.

Sometimes people see what they want to see. Some people can
look at the same photographs I look at, and see gas chambers. Being a
creedal minimalist helps to keep this phenomenon under control.

> In our social studies class in junior high our teacher showed us films
> produced by the US Army at the end of the war of the camps.
> THey definitely showed gas chambers, and showed the gas apparatus.
> They also interviewed people who were prisoners at the camps who
> had been put on details to clean out the gas chambers after use.

I'll check that out too. There is of course a remote possibility
that the US Army had its own agenda, and was more concerned with
propaganda than with veracity. Likewise for your social studies
teacher. Nevertheless, I will check out all leads.

I started working on this subject in the summer of 1995. By December,
I had written a 50 page critique of "Proving the Holocaust," in which I
went over every facet of Shermer's article in the same vein as my post
last night. At the end of my article, I proposed a project, called the
Gas Chamber Project, in which I would recruit 50 college students,
and they would each write a thesis; the thesis topics would be chosen
in such a way that, taken together, they would cover the whole subject.
My intention was to check out all leads, get all the evidence on the
table, and settle the matter once and for all. By that time, however
(end of 95), I was sick and tired of the whole thing, and I put it aside.
But I still intend to pursue the project. The idea is not to prove that
gas chambers existed, nor to prove that they didn't exist, but to find out
what happened.

Lyle