Thursday, February 16, 2006

Not so much fun with math

In "Iran's envoy to Portugal questions Holocaust" I found this odd statement:
"To incinerate 6 million people, 15 years would be necessary," he said.
I found that odd. I know that there are still people in the world who deny that one of the best documented horrors the world has knowoccurreded. I didn't realize there were people who actually believe that it COULDN'T have happened.

Curiosity got the best of me. A quick Google search led me to several cremation sites. Consensus is that full cremation takes a 2-3 hours at 1500 degrees. Knowing that European Jews are generally pretty small people and a lot of them were starved to near death before being killed, I will use 2 hours. Further, I will use his assumption, even though we know it isn't the case, that we need to cremate all 6 million (a ton of the them were buried in mass graves).

There are 24 hours in a day so, again using a silly assumption of one body/oven at a time we get 12 bodies/oven/day. 12 x 365 x 15 = 65,700 bodies/oven in 15 years. So this guy is assuming that the Nazis were not capable of having more than 100 bodies in ovens at a time...... odd. The Nazis were many things, unimaginative, unresourceful and uncreative were not among them.

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