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naraburns  nihil supernum  1yr ago (text post)   6209 thread views

Quality Contributions Report for December 2022

This is the Quality Contributions Roundup. It showcases interesting and well-written comments and posts from the period covered. If you want to get an idea of what this community is about or how we want you to participate, look no further (except the rules maybe--those might be important too).

As a reminder, you can nominate Quality Contributions by hitting the report button and selecting the "Actually A Quality Contribution!" option. Additionally, links to all of the roundups can be found in the wiki of /r/theThread which can be found here. For a list of other great community content, see here.

A few comments from the editor: first, sorry this is a little late, but you know--holidays and all. Furthermore, the number of quality contribution nominations seems to have grown a fair bit since moving to the new site. In fact, as I write this on January 5, there are already 37 distinct nominations in the hopper for January 2023. While we do occasionally get obviously insincere or "super upvote" nominations, the clear majority of these are all plausible AAQCs, and often quite a lot of text to sift through.

Second, this month we have special AAQC recognition for @drmanhattan16. This readthrough of Paul Gottfried’s Fascism: Career of a Concept began in the Old Country, and has continued to garner AAQC nominations here. It is a great example of the kind of effort and thoughtfulness we like to see. Also judging by reports and upvotes, a great many of us are junkies for good book reviews. The final analysis was actually posted in January, but it contains links to all the previous entries as well, so that's what I'll put here:

Now: on with the show!

Quality Contributions Outside the CW Thread

@Tollund_Man4:

@naraburns:

@Bernd:

@FiveHourMarathon:

@RandomRanger:

@Iconochasm:

Contributions for the week of December 5, 2022

@zeke5123:

@ymeskhout:

@FiveHourMarathon:

@gattsuru:

@Southkraut:

@Bernd:

@problem_redditor:

@FCfromSSC:

@urquan:

@gemmaem:

Sexulation

@RococoBasilica:

@problem_redditor:

Holocaustianity

@johnfabian:

@DaseindustriesLtd:

@SecureSignals:

Coloniazism

@gaygroyper100pct:

@screye:

@urquan:

@georgioz:

Contributions for the week of December 12, 2022

@SecureSignals:

@Titus_1_16:

@Dean:

@cjet79:

@JarJarJedi:

@gattsuru:

@YE_GUILTY:

@aqouta:

@HlynkaCG:

Contributions for the week of December 19, 2022

@MathiasTRex:

@To_Mandalay:

Robophobia

@gattsuru:

@IGI-111:

@NexusGlow:

Contributions for the week of December 26, 2022

@FCfromSSC:

@gattsuru:

@LacklustreFriend:

@DaseindustriesLtd:

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The majority of the documents pertaining to Jewish transports are said to have been destroyed by the SS to hide their crimes, and only a few remain. So you accuse the SS of a coverup of deportation documentation right before you say the NKVD would never do such a thing.

But there's a clear situational difference, isn't there? SS officers were facing a situation where the regime their served was imminently facing destruction, with the prospect being that the entire country would be occupied and they themselves, unless they died, would be captured by enemy troops and would face some sort of a reckoning. If you were a NKVD officer working outside the German-occupied zone then in all probability you wouldn't have faced this after 1942, and it's arguable whether you would have faced this before this, either, as there probably never was a prospect of the Germans literally and physically occupying the entire territory of the Soviet Union.

If Germany won the war, and the SS archives were eventually opened up, would you take all the surviving documents at face value? Would you assume the SS would faithfully retain the documentation of their crimes? Particularly if they were involved in crimes they had successfully pinned on the Soviets? Historians refuse to take SS documents at face-value as-is, saying that they used "coded language" in their own top-secret communication to each other.

They could certainly be used for historical research without any requirement at taking them at face value. After all, we do that already (the Korherr report). We don't need to take NKVD records at a face value, either, they could contain errors (with potentials for both over- and undercounting the afflicted persons), as records are wont to do - but "not taking them at face value" is different from just declaring them altogether invalid as a source because "it's NKVD and of course they lie" and then declaring that the more valid source is, essentially, a secondary source based on guesswork and anecdotes.

To_Mandalay claims that "Operation Reinhardt" was the code-name for the German plan to exterminate the Jews in gas chambers. He claims Globocnik was put in charge of this operation by Himmler.

But Globocnik's top-secret report to Himmler on this initiative makes no reference or allusion to the extermination of the Jews. The report describes resettlement as claimed by Revisionists. So To_Mandalay is accusing the SS of deception in internal, top-secret documentation during a period when they were not expecting to lose the war.

Globocnik also suggested destroying the receipts of confiscated property, showing the obvious conclusion that the participants in secret operations will destroy the paper trail of their crimes after-the-fact. Historians claim this happened in spades within the SS, but the FSB releases from the NKVD must be taken at face value according to him - even though they have a track record and motive to lie about these very questions.

They could certainly be used for historical research without any requirement at taking them at face value. After all, we do that already (the Korherr report).

The Korherr report also describes an evacuation and resettlement and not an extermination. This is yet another case where the mainstream is alleging deception and camouflage in top-secret, internal reporting. The author of that report even wrote a letter to Der Spiegel in the 1970s saying that he sought clarification and understood the reporting to refer to evacuation/resettlement and not extermination, so To_Mandalay would have you believe that even the statistician who created the report was deceived! So much for the "no deception in internal communications" assumption he relies on so heavily to bolster his trust in NKVD sources.

Besides the fact that there is explicit evidence of 'resettlement' being used as code for 'murdered', use of 'code words' is significantly less problematic than the massive falsification of population statistics (by a factor of like six) in an internal report on the population of the Siberian GULag system.

At the very least you are no longer in any position to ding Holocaust historians for not taking Nazi claims of resettlement at face value.

There are many, many, many documents describing resettlement in the General Government, but you base so much assumption on the impossible-to-verify authenticity of handwritten modifications to a few documents that aren't even contextually related to the resettlement actions in the General Government.

In these trials (the IMT) the prosecution also claimed:

An attempt was even made to manufacture soap from the fatty parts of the bodies, while the ashes remaining after cremation were used for fertilizer. This was indeed a gruesomely commercial exploitation of death on a mass basis.

It is not reasonable to base your assertion - that resettlement mentioned in dozens and dozens of documents was code for extermination- on a few handwritten modifications to documents that were submitted to these trials, especially in which the context was not related to these resettlement actions in General Government.

But you have to reach, because the direct reading of those documents affirms the Revisionist claims.

There are many, many, many documents describing resettlement in the General Government

There aren't. There are plenty of documents that use the words "resettlement" or "evacuation," there aren't any documents actually describing to the process of resettlement of several million Polish Jews (i.e, transportation, provisioning, housing) in northern Russia (like Bühler said) or Lublin (like Korherr said--evidently they couldn't even agree on where the Jews were supposed to be 'resettled'), which would have left behind plenty of documentation had it actually happened. When you add this to the fact that there is hard evidence, which I have presented, that "resettlement" was sometimes used as a code for "murder" by the Nazis, and that many Nazis discussed this openly after the war in non-coercive settings (Adolf Eichmann, for example, talked about the extermination of Jews in the GG to journalist and former SS man Wilhelm Sassen in Argentina in the 50s), things begin to look suspicious.

In these trials (the IMT) the prosecution also claimed:

Is your contention that these documents are forged?

Is your contention that these documents are forged?

My contention is that the weakness of your case is demonstrated by your enormous reliance on handwritten modifications to a few documents that aren't even related in context to the resettlement actions in General Government under discussion. You are claiming that an enormous number of SS men in an enormous volume of documents across time and space were all in on the conspiracy to talk about "resettlement" instead of "gas chamber extermination" in secret internal communications, and that the highest-level officials with direct involvement in these initiatives all continued to insist on the "coded language" after the war. And you base that on very weak evidence. Someone in the comment section also objects to the reliability of your evidence that you place so much weight on:

I find it fascinating that the document the Judge Ad read before the "camo" document, orders on how to treat the Jews on the Eastern Front is based upon...hearsay and "doesn't help the court at all". Wow. Page 17. Hearsay admitted as evidence. Now, I wonder why the prosecution would do that?

Dr. Laternser asks to see the "camo" document? Why? Was he not allowed to see the "camo" document prior to the trial? Was the defense present during the forensic analysis? Nope.

  1. So no change of evidence for the document.
  1. Defense apparently didn't view the document prior to the trial as he asks to see it.
  1. Defense did not have representation during the forensic analysis.

There are according to the transcript, multiple copies, but only one presented as evidence. Can anyone obtain the original document for research or just the photostat? You realize it would be easily claimed the Prosecution manufactured the edit (replacement words in the margin instead of above the word???) , performed the forensic science, and then claim some official made the "rather clumsy precaution" with speculation as to the motivation...

You are basing so much on so little, but it's honestly par for the course in mainstream historiography.

The fact is, the direct reading of these documents, without your claim of remarkably consistent "coded language" supports the Revisionist case.

You are basing so much on so little

All I am basing on these documents, is that the Nazis sometimes used 'resettlement' as code for 'murder,' and this is a matter of documentary fact.

All Soviet deportations of nations are well documented in archives.

Modern organized bureaucratic state runs on paper, you simply cannot move millions of people without generating lots of paperwork.

edit: link

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