I hope you won't forget to name the first eyewitness you really trust.

Meanwhile, allow me to make a little inquiry about your belief in genocide through gas chambering. I have some difficulty understanding your notion of "convergence of evidence". Can you please make a few points clear to me?

1) In what sense is the "convergent evidence" for the gas chambers different from the same for witchcraft, alien abductions and chupacabras epidemics if you accept that "confirming proof" is absent from all of those?

How can we speak of "convergent evidence" for a round-the-clock extermination process involving millions of victims, taking place for consecutive months or years, in the same locations, under the eyes of scores of people, without a single amateur photo of the truly sensational events surviving? One can find a good deal of photos of people being shot and dumped into pits, just like eyewitnesses claim, but people being shoved into the sensational gas slaughterhouses or the proverbial resulting piles of corpses? No chance.

And yet, taking photos of naked people (including children) being shot and dumped into pits was not exactly an officially encouraged policy either. Given the incredibly lax standards of the location choices for the supposed Auschwitz-Birkenau gas chambers (the whole process supposedly taking place directly under the windows of the SS hospital at first, and then in the immediate vicinity of the railroad terminal, on both sides of the same, and along the way to the "sauna" disinfection facilities, and involving thousands of people at any given time), how do we account for this strange absence of actual images of the massive proceedings? The continuous exterminations by gas should have been the focus of some degree of local attention.

Instead, everyone acted as if the exterminations of hundreds of thousands taking place next door were being conducted in outer Mongolia. A few SS guards testified in the Auschwitz trial that they saw the exterminations from hiding places etc, but no one remembered to take a single valuable photo to sell in the atrocity black market, in spite of the very large numbers of inmate auxiliaries shepherding the victims alongside the guardians, working in the maintenance of the crematories, passing information to the outside resistance networks etc. Were they all conspiring to maintain the "Holocaust" whale under the delicate cloak of invisibility?

Auschwitz memoirs often mention clandestine radio sets being brought in, in spite of their size at the time and the danger of incurring the death penalty, by the numerous parties (many thousands of inmates) that worked outside camp compounds I and II. But a single active clandestine camera during the on-going round-the-clock massive extermination? No chance.

People being divided on arrival, right next to the gas chambers? Sure, lots of photos captioned "the selection process", generally showing simply adult males on one side, females and male children on the other, certainly taken with some sort of actual cameras on the arrival ramp in the immediate vicinity of the supposed slaughterhouses themselves. But people being marched into the mouths of the actual Behemoths? Nope. Not a single one.

If this is "convergent evidence", no orders or detailed central plans for the extermination existed, no giant deposits of human remains can be found at any of the various "extermination camps" and a masquerade devised to confuse things for future historians in search of the mysteriously vanished Jewish race always referred to the secret gas chambers as "crematory morgues", how should we define "lack of evidence" for any supposed gas chambers?

2) I assume your "convergent evidence" for homicidal gas chambers means the uniform fog of post-War trial proceedings where the accusing parties had an overwhelming interest in establishing *proof* of the unprecedented "extermination by gas", as well as to justify their own behaviour during a War that culminated with the dropping of nuclear weapons on populated cities.

But no effort at all was made towards any serious investigation of the crime weapons (or even their exact locations!), much as should be expected for vague propaganda expedients whose exposition would present serious dangers for the prosecution's allegations. Indeed, the legal people acting on behalf of the accusing powers took the trouble of parading shrunken heads, lampshades and soap bars at the IMT -- a truly amazing image of their integrity for the future generations, if you ask me -- but no attempt was even made to have a quick look at the prodigious gas slaughterhouses themselves.

Doesn't this systematic lack of focus present a problem to your skeptical mind? Why was the fog of human testimony & hearsay thought preferable to in loco forensic investigation of the criminal matter, given the unique historical interest of the trials, as well as their relevance for the immediate political purposes of the winners? Do you have any explanation for this astonishing lack of interest in the nuts and bolts of the gas chambers, not to speak of such an elementary thing as the establishment of their precise locations, to begin with?

3) People who presented "divergent evidence" (like, for instance, their own ignorance of any purported gas chambers for the extermination of the Jews) were either executed (like the German leadership and many of the camps rank and file) or persecuted for their non-conformist "denial" views (like camp inmate Paul Rassinier himself). Indeed the presentation of "divergent evidence" is punished by the law in most European countries today. Do you see any obvious explanation for this? Wouldn't you agree that the persecution of any attempted "divergence" makes a mockery of your meaningless "convergence"?

4) Shouldn't we assume that a "convergence of purpose" in the homicidal gas chambers claim on the part of the several Allied powers, the Jewish organizations and assorted individual "survivor" spinners of tales might account for the "convergence of evidence" you mention? If not, how do you account for this surprising lack of malevolence, given the opportunity for human nastiness to emerge in the uniquely favorable climate of the immediate post-War trials?

5) Would you agree, in your quality of Witchcraft denier, that different trials conducted in environments that share a commonly enforced conformity of belief that concedes no defense guarantees for the accused other than pleading repentant guilt to qualify for possible mercy, tend to produce similar results? Wouldn't it be correct for us to refer to this very understandable phenomenon as a "convergence of lies", mutually profitable to the intervening conformist parties?

Why does this sort of "convergence" seem so mysterious to you?

ASMarques