“scuppering” …. the new word of the day …. as in “fresh evidence of mass graves at Treblinka, scuppering the claims of Holocaust deniers”

I read this headline today in the Mail Online, a British newspaper:

British archaeologist destroys Holocaust deniers’ argument with mass grave find at Treblinka

The lead of the story is this quote:  “A British forensic archaeologist has unearthed fresh evidence to prove the existence of mass graves at the Nazi death camp Treblinka – scuppering the claims of Holocaust deniers who say it was merely a transit camp.”

I had a third-grade teacher who taught me to look up every word, that I didn’t know the meaning of, in the dictionary.  So I went directly to an online dictionary and learned that “scuppering” can be used to mean destroy or ruin.  I think a better word might be “demolish.”  But have the arguments of the Holocaust deniers been “scuppered?”  I don’t think so.

The spot where Jews disembarked from the trains to Treblinka

A lot of good comments about this subject have been posted on my previous blog about the “fresh evidence” at Treblinka here.

This article in the Mail Online states that “a lack of physical evidence in the area has been exploited by Holocaust deniers.”  The whole article seems to me to be gloating over the scuppering of Holocaust deniers, instead of just giving the facts, as a newspaper article should. 

What I didn’t know about the Holocaust — until now

I thought I knew a lot about the Holocaust; I’ve been studying it for around 17 years.  It turns out that I was wrong about many of the important details.

Today I read this on a wordpress blog:

Another example Eaton gave was a photograph widely circulated by the Holocaust deniers of General Eisenhower standing next to one of the gas chambers at Dachau. “And they hold this up and say, here is Eisenhower being shown a false gas chamber. And they are correct. At Dachau, which was a camp in Germany used mainly for political prisoners, they started to construct a gas chamber. They used inmates to construct the gas chamber. The inmates sabotaged the chamber and it was never actually used as a gas chamber.”