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naraburns  nihil supernum  1yr ago (text post)   31958 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of December 5, 2022

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The high mortality at these camps liberated by the Western allies was caused by a collapsing German infrastructure as it was being destroyed in the final days of the war. It is no longer claimed that Buchenwald or its sub-camp Ohrdruf were extermination camps with gas chambers. The high death toll is what initially caused the gas chamber story to center on Western camps. Images can also be deceiving in several ways. For example, one of your images is captioned:

Here they visit a burial pit containing the charred remains of prisoners who were burned to death at Ohrdruf, Germany.

But it's far more likely that this was a makeshift cremation of people who had died from other causes, like epidemic typhus. There are no credible accusations that I am aware of describing the Germans burning prisoners alive, and it is not maintained by official historiography that this took place (although Elie Wiesel claimed to witness this at Auschwitz in his memoir). On the other hand, the cremation of prisoners that had died was standard operating procedure in order to reduce the spread of disease and epidemic typhus.

Another example of a notoriously deceptive image is found in your link to the Eisenhower presidential library. There is an infamous image of the dead prisoners at the Nordhausen camp, captioned "April 12, 1945 - A portion of the bodies found by U.S. troops when they arrived at Nordhausen concentration camp in Germany." But it is well-known that this camp was bombed by the RAF. You can even see the mass destruction in all the buildings surrounding the bodies which have been used as a prop for propaganda. CODOH has an article on the Nordhausen film and image propaganda:

On April 3 1945, 247 Lancaster bombers and 8 Mosquitos of Group Nos 1 and 8 of British Royal Air Force bombed and strafed the Nordhausen Camp hospital, killing thousands of inmates. The hospital doctors, nurses, and caregivers, (both German and detainee) fled the smashed hospital leaving the sick and wounded in a desperate situation.

The next day, the British attacked again; this time sending 243 Lancasters, 1 Mosquito of No 5 Group, and 8 Pathfinder Mosquitos to bomb the town of Nordhausen and bomb the barracks. Thousands of German civilians and more inmates were killed in the second attack.

Altogether, 490 bombers, each carrying 12,000 lbs. of bombs or almost 6,000,000 pounds of explosives, hit Nordhausen. The hospital was smashed, the doctors and staff scattered, the surrounding area devastated. The already difficult situation in the crowded hospital turned into a disaster. The death toll of hospital inmates and workers was approximately 3,500. The number of dead civilians has been given as approximately 8,000.

On April 11 elements of the US 3rd Armored and 104th Infantry Divisions reached Nordhausen. The bodies of those who died in the bombing and its aftermath were pulled from the rubble and lined up for a "photo opportunity. " No mention was made that the "props" were provided courtesy of the British air force.

Cameramen A. Statt and Rosenmann had a keen eye for filming the horrors, focusing on details of the dead and sick. The filming was supervised by Major Frank Gleason of the JAGD 89th

Their work was packaged into numerous propaganda films and Nordhausen achieved a brief notoriety. An example of the propaganda use Gleason's work was put to can be seen at; Universal Newsreel's Nazi Murder Mills, an Official NewsReel. We are informed that, "The vile inhuman beasts took pride in their concentration camp at Nordhausen;" that the deaths were the result of "Germany's organized carnage", and "For the first time, America can believe what they thought was impossible propaganda. Here is documentary evidence of sheer mass murder. Murder that will blacken the name of Germany for the rest of recorded history."

The true history of the bombing and devastation of Nordhausen was known when the Nuremberg Trial started but the film images were "too good" not to be used by the prosecution. The film footage was shown early in the Trial, on November 29, 1945, as a segment of a longer motion picture described as A Documentary Motion Picture / Document No. 2430-PS / Submitted on behalf of U.S. Chief Counsel as exhibit USA 79. In the film it was stated that, "at least 3,000 political prisoners died here [the Boelcke Kaserne] at the brutal hands of SS troops..." The camp hospital was described only as "a depository for slaves found unfit for work."

No mention was made of the British bombings.

To summarize, the mass death and destruction at Nordhausen concentration camp was caused by RAF bombings of the camp and civilian areas. The United States arrived and produced propaganda films of the aftermath which was submitted as evidence of German brutality at the Nuremberg trial, with no mention that these were victims of Allied bombing. Likewise, the caption of that photograph in the Eisenhower library "A portion of the bodies found by U.S. troops when they arrived at Nordhausen concentration camp in Germany" makes no mention that these people were killed by Allied bombings. In fact, the Nordhausen camp population was minority Jewish. So this is a picture of mostly non-Jewish victims of RAF bombings being posed and passed off as Holocaust victims of a German extermination policy.

The image is real, the context and its use in Holocaust propaganda is highly deceptive.

Speaking of deception, Eisenhower was in command of the Psychological War Division (PWD/SCHAEF) which was the unit which conducted the "investigation" of Buchenwald after its liberation. There's the infamous propaganda film of the forced march of the civilians of Weimar through Buchenwald, which culminates in a table display of human-skin lampshades and shrunken heads allegedly created by the Germans. The shrunken heads were disappeared after they were dramatically presented on the first day of the Nuremberg trial, and the human-skin lampshade was also conveniently disappeared. Historians have also dropped the famous human-skin lampshade story.

Not surprisingly, the famous images of the shrunken heads and human-skin lampshade at Buchenwald did not make it into the album you posted.

The high mortality at these camps liberated by the Western allies was caused by a collapsing German infrastructure as it was being destroyed in the final days of the war.

What you then claim what happened with Polish Jewish pre-war population? Are you also claiming that forcing Jews into ghettos by Germans was fake? Executing people across conquered territories?

I bet that there is plenty of propaganda (add "soap made from human fat" to that) but presenting in a way that claims "Germans have not mass-murdered millions" is even more misleading.

Also, is it intentional that your username in short is SS?

I think the whole demographic question (ie. what happened to the prewar Jewish population) is the crucial question here, much moreso than the concentration camp doors or camp memoirs etc., but this is also a month old subthread so it's probably not a good place to discuss such issues.

It is mostly intended as feedback to SS - in case they are interested why normies like me react to them as they react.

(especially as typical reaction may be based in the end on it, even if ends phrased as "go away")

I think the whole demographic question (ie. what happened to the prewar Jewish population) is the crucial question here, much moreso than the concentration camp doors or camp memoirs etc., but this is also a month old subthread so it's probably not a good place to discuss such issues.

Yes, the revisionists do have answer. Here is the CODOH reply to mainstream historians. You see that they agree that holocaust happened, only Stalin instead of Hitler was the perpetrator.

https://holocausthandbooks.com/index.php?page_id=29

Walter N. Sanning: The Dissolution of Eastern European Jewry

Before the Second World War, Eastern Europe was the demographic center of World Jewry. After the war, however, only a fraction of it was left behind. What happened?

The “Holocaust,” of course, most will say.

The author of this book did not stop there, though, but thoroughly explored European population developments and shifts mainly caused by emigration as well as deportations and evacuations conducted by both Nazis and the Soviets, among other things. The book is based mainly on Jewish, Zionist and mainstream sources. It concludes that a sizeable share of the Jews found missing during local censuses after the Second World War, which have so far been counted as “Holocaust victims,” had either emigrated (mainly to Israel or the U.S.) or had been deported by Stalin to Siberian labor camps.

Anatoly Karlin predicted that this line will become official Western history line in 21st century as Second Cold War heats up. We will see.

edit: links added

I have, actually, read the Sanning book, and found it, to put it mildly, underwhelming. It's essentially a series of it-just-so-happenses - it just so happens that the Polish demographical data on local Jewish population was vastly overcounted without either the Poles or the occupying Germans catching on to this, it just so happens that once this is established the same overcount can be expected to apply on other Eastern European nations as well, it just so happens that out of that population a larger-than-assumed share left for Soviet Union and the Soviets then deported/killed them (even though Soviet sources don't show such deportations and deaths - sure, such sources became available after the Sanning book was written, but that's no excuse for us to ignore them), it just so happens that there was a vast Jewish wave of emigration in the 30s to other countries not shown in official data etc.

And once you add all the it-just-so-happenses together, presto - the numbers advocated by the revisionists! Data massaging would be putting it lightly - and in many cases the data is essentially based on just the sort of testimonials, memoirs and what amounts to guesstimates by individual figures that revisionists don't generally consider to be valid (ie. the idea of Soviet deportations is justified by referring to several testimonies made in front of US House Select Committee on Communist Aggression) in establishing a Jewish genocide by Germans.

Beyond that, though, has there even been an attempt from the revisionist camp to make a similar demographic analysis post-Sanning, taking all the new data (methods of estimating populations in cases where demographic data is considered undertain, post-Soviet archives etc.) into account? If not, it speaks volumes that on this crucial field all that there seems to be is this one book from decades ago, while the general effort of the revisionist sphere seemingly concentrates on individual memoirs and technical camp details, and such.

Also, Karlin's predictive abilitites have not exactly shown their worth in 2022, regarding, well, most aspects of the Russian invasion and its presumed successes.

Also, Karlin's predictive abilitites have not exactly shown their worth in 2022, regarding, well, most aspects of the Russian invasion and its presumed successes.

Karlin was wrong together with the whole world. Everyone from Putin to Biden, from CIA to OSINT twitter expected replay of 2014 Mosul or 2021 Kabul.

Russian maskirovka worked perfectly, everyone saw the manly recruitment videos full of brick smashing and bear wrestling stunts and believed in world's second super power.

Was there anyone notable who predicted that Russians will disastrously fail to defeat Ukraine?

Except our commenter Ilforte/ @DaseindustriesLtd ?

https://old.reddit.com/r/TheMotte/comments/t0cnbx/ukraine_invasion_megathread/hyduv1l/

We're probably not. Kiev is not Baghdad, Ukraininans are not Iraqis (no offense to Iraqis). Last of all, Russians are not Americans.

Assuming that the goal is regime change in Moscow and discrediting of Russians on all possible levels, we have to commit a lot more pointless murder and destruction and then lose. So far, Ukrainian performance demonstates both goals are achievable.

Let's see how my conspiracist analysis fares against your common-sensical one.

https://old.reddit.com/r/TheMotte/comments/sxnftk/culture_war_roundup_for_the_week_of_february_21/hy70oxd/

Не всё. There are some very correct words and allegations thrown in, some correct analysis. Alas, there is no genocide in Donbass, at least nothing that deserves of the name, so it is a cynical pretext, validating everything that Americans were saying about this issue. As is the case of our broader WWII-inspired propaganda, narrow like a T-34 vision slit. It's not even a very good propaganda because it doesn't resonate with the people any more.

I don't have much to say. This is a crime against Russia and against Slavs in general. And if he believes his bullshit about freeing Ukrainians from the Junta or whatever, he's in for a suprise and it'll be even more of a fucking disaster for us than a regular war would have been, and I wonder who supplied him with info all this time.

If he doesn't, I shudder to think of what actually moves him now, near the end of his life, and whom he serves. Not my people, that's for certain. He never cared much about that.

Sure, a lot of people (me included) expected Russia to do much better against Ukraine than it did. Karlin did out of his way, though, to predict that serious Ukrainian resistance would last a week and that of course Ukrainians wouldn't fight back in an insurgency because they're "hipsters in rainbow masks who use their cell phones every hour", which goes rather a bit farther than your usual Russian overestimation prediction.

Oh well, that's all right then; they didn't deliberately murder the people they rounded up and held in camps, it was all down to collapsing infrastructure and typhus.

That is not really any better, SecureSignals, because you still have to explain "why did they round up all these people and hold them in camps?"

No, he actually doesn’t have to explain why they were in concentration camps, because the claim of the holocaust is not that Germans kept Jews in camps like the Americans did the Japanese. The claim of the holocaust is the intentional killing of millions of Jews in these camps.

The reason intentionality was such a big deal for holocaust historiography is because a lot of other nations have this on their records.

The gas chambers and skin lampshades and SS-she-wolves and Looney Tunes electric roller coasters have to be real, because if was all just starvation and cholera and slave camps and mass reprisal executions the holocaust starts looking too familiar. And it has to be seen as a categorically different and historically unique event, not just a quantitatively worse successor.

(Of course, future generations of historians might not care, and will instead prefer to treat the holocaust as just one of many related examples of "naturally evil white devils being evil")

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