SecureSignals
Civilization is simply a geno-memetic-techno-capital machine
1yr ago·Edited 1yr ago
You are thus technically correct that there were not "12 million victims of the Holocaust" according to modern definitions of who is considered a "victim of the Holocaust". Consider me corrected.
Your "12 million" estimate was not errant based on any changes to "who is considered a victim of the Holocaust." The implication of your about-face would be that you were also counting 3 million non-POW-non-Jews as Holocaust victims, a number which has no basis no matter how you arbitrarily define a "Holocaust victim". Neither the 11 nor 12 million number are even approximately consistent with any of those definitions at any point in time. It was a pure propaganda figure.
You were not uninformed, you were misinformed- the problem was not that you failed to keep up with modern definitions of Holocaust victims, the problem was you were deceived by liars who, according to the Times of Israel, created the lie of 11 million Holocaust victims in order to manipulate the opinion of people like you towards Jewish suffering.
Your "expectation that the conventional narrative was broadly correct" was wrong- you were intentionally deceived by those with high institutional status.
If "the gas chamber bit was the important bit, not the genocide bit" is not in fact your core claim, then I find it suspicious that you keep coming back to that topic after people have repeatedly told you that we do not find it an interesting or important topic of discussion, and that you keep evading topics where more substantial documentation exists.
The gas chamber claim is the mainstream explanation for how the Germans murdered approximately 3 million Jews. You are also claiming that those 3 million Jews were murdered, you are just refusing to take any position on when they were murdered, where they were murdered, or how they were murdered. Because people are so inoculated against Holocaust denial you can probably get away with flagrantly making a sensational claim like that and then refusing to elaborate on any specifics for how this sensational crime actually happened.
At least some people should find it odd that you are claiming the Germans killed 6 million people, a serious accusation, and then absolving yourself of any responsibility to specifically explain when, where, and how they committed such a crime. The reason the gas chamber question is important is because it is the method by which mainstream historians claim the Germans murdered about 3 million people. You want to sidestep the issue entirely and make no specific claims at all for how these murders happened.
Explicit question - do you explicitly think that the "10,000 survivors" claim is factually incorrect? If so, approximately how many survivors do you expect that there actually were?
My claim was that the 10,000 figure lacks any apparent basis and has no reference, it is simply stated as true by the author with no elaboration or references. This is a great microcosm for the mainstream historiographical approach because instead of pointing to any solid basis for the figure you have claimed, you immediately reverse the burden of proof. It doesn't help that the author simply states this figure, with no explanation or reference or apparent basis, right next to a similar outlandish claim of a special account in the ghetto administration that existed to pay bounties for snatching Jews for the gas chambers- whereas a sober reading of the document shows this bonus pay was nothing of the sort, it was hazard pay for the risk of exposure to deadly disease like epidemic typhus.
The authoritative source of the new, by-over-half reduced death toll at Chelmno (1995 Julian Baranowski) is reproduced in a table by Mattogno here. It places 167,540 Jews in Lodz in December 1941, and records about 78,000 "Number of Murder victims" in that city. Of course Revisionists do not accept that figure, but I cite it to point out that even the official revision by Polish historiography claims that "only" 78,000 Jews in that city were murdered. So the figure you have cited of 10,000 survivors, and the rest murdered, has no apparent logic or basis. This is a good example of why reversing the burden of proof, making a claim with no support and then demanding Revisionists debunk your claims is an alluring strategy but massively fallacious.
we didn't kill 300,000 people, we only killed 150,000 at most
Did you even read the source I provided for the 300,000 estimate? It was based on absolutely nothing except napkin math by a judge. No documentary or physical proof. It would be more like if I accused you of murdering 100 people on the basis of no physical or documentary evidence, and then when pressed for evidence say "fine, you murdered 50 people." A reasonable person would not assume that the accusation of 50 murders is more likely just because the initial estimate was reduced. The proper conclusion is that the entire accusation was baseless, so a reduction of an estimate with no basis has no more credibility than the original estimate.
Of the people who were in the Lodz Ghetto, how many do you think survived the war?
This is a question that cannot be answered conclusively. Certainly there would have been high mortality during the war due to many causes. Ryan Faulk estimated that, assuming Jewish civilians had the same rate of death as other civilians in the areas which they lived, then something like 1.1 million Jews would have been expected to die during the conflict. Furthermore, the evidence that at one point could have been conclusive was purely in the custody of the Soviet Union, who had a motive and an opportunity to present false information.
Do you think that large numbers of prisoners were shipped to Chelmno? If so, what do you think happened to them?
The number of prisoners who arrived at Chelmno is not known. Mattogno shows that the large majority of Jews evacuated from the Lodz ghetto where Jews of working age (starting page 113), while many young children and elderly remained in the ghetto. This would be consistent with the documents Mattogno provides explicitly describing the motive for the evacuation. Mattogno has a section on the deportations in Chapter 12.
faul_sname
Fuck around once, find out once. Do it again, now it's science.
SecureSignals 1yr ago
Looking at wikipedia, it does appear to me now that the modern convention is indeed to classify the murders of non-jewish people by Nazis as "not holocaust victims". So, for example, the over 3 million Soviet POWs who died during the time period of the Holocaust, while in Nazi custody, to things like starvation, murder, and death marches, are not considered "Holocaust victims".
You are thus technically correct that there were not "12 million victims of the Holocaust" according to modern definitions of who is considered a "victim of the Holocaust". Consider me corrected.
Your "12 million" estimate was not errant based on any changes to "who is considered a victim of the Holocaust." The implication of your about-face would be that you were also counting 3 million non-POW-non-Jews as Holocaust victims, a number which has no basis no matter how you arbitrarily define a "Holocaust victim". Neither the 11 nor 12 million number are even approximately consistent with any of those definitions at any point in time. It was a pure propaganda figure.
The phrase "for example" was included in the GP comment, but I have bolded it this time because apparently you missed it last time. There were additional victims of the Nazi regime besides 6 million Jews and 3 million Soviet POWs - some more examples are
13 million Soviet civilians, which is in turn estimated to be 7 million deaths directly due to violence (bombings, etc), 4 million deaths due to famine and disease in occupied regions, and 2 million who died as forced laborers (though the "forced laborer" number does not seem to me to be backed by anything in particular)
Hundreds of thousands of disabled people (estimates here vary less, wikipedia says 275,000 to 300,000)
I do agree, though, that the specific "12 million" number does not seem to correspond to a specific subset of the people who died outside of combat as a result of Nazi actions during WWII - the total number seems to be much higher than 12 million, and the number specifically killed by ethnic cleansing related activities as opposed to more generic "stuff that would retroactively be classified as a war crime" seems to be quite a bit lower (though note that the treatment of Soviet POWs was already considered a war crime). It makes sense to me now why modern-day historians limit "the Holocaust" to refer specifically to the attempted extermination of European Jews.
As I said before, consider me corrected on my earlier vague impression that "about 12 million people were murdered in the Holocaust" -- upon reflection both the "murdered", and "in the Holocaust" parts were underspecified to the point that they did not correspond to falsifiable beliefs about the world as it is.
For the "in the Holocaust" part, I was just plainly wrong about how the term is used. For the "murder" part, I had never actually considered the following questions:
Does it count as "murder" if you invade someone's country and then steal their food such that they starve to death? Does the answer change if the "and then they starve to death" was explicitly called out in your plans before you actually went and did it?
How about if you abduct them and use them for forced labor, with poor safety practices, on starvation rations, and then they die on the job? If a factory full of forced laborers is bombed, and you don't let the laborers use the bomb shelters, is that murder? Maybe it counts as murder for the other side?
Or maybe you relocate them from one slave labor camp to another, in the dead of winter, again on starvation rations, on foot, and then they die during the march?
If you say "We are invading your country now. For every German killed in the invasion, we will round up 50-100 of your citizens and execute them," and there is resistance, and you follow through on your threats and do the mass executions, is that murder?
Depending on your answers to the above questions, two people can look at the exact same set of people killed in exactly the same circumstances, not disagree about any of the material facts, and come to quite a wide range of estimates of how many of those people were "murdered".
But I don't get the impression that's what your argument is. In fact, I'm starting to get the impression that you don't have any specific affirmative beliefs about what happened during WWII, and instead you're operating by looking at what claims other people make about WWII, and saying "that one does not seem particularly well-supported, I will request clarification on that point, and if it turns out that point is correct I will not change my mind but instead just move on to the next point and never mention it again".
And on the topic of specific claims
The authoritative source of the new, by-over-half reduced death toll at Chelmno (1995 Julian Baranowski) is reproduced in a table by Mattogno here. It places 167,540 Jews in Lodz in December 1941, and records about 78,000 "Number of Murder victims" in that city.
No, it records 78,000 as "number of murder victims of the Chelmno camp in that city". Which makes sense, as the ~70,000 inmates of the Lodz ghetto at the time the ghetto was liquidated in August 1944 were instead sent to Auschwitz.
This is a good example of why reversing the burden of proof, making a claim with no support and then demanding Revisionists debunk your claims is an alluring strategy but massively fallacious.
I would be a lot more sympathetic to this point of view if the Nazi regime had not specifically made significant efforts to destroy evidence. The man in charge of that initiative was Paul Blobel. Here is his affidavit on the topic of the burning of bodies and the destruction of evidence:
I, Paul Blobel, swear, declare and state in evidence:
I was born in Potsdam on August 13, 1894. From June 1941 to January 1942 I was the commander of Sonderkommando 4A.
After I had been released from this command, I was to report to Berlin to SS Obergruppenfuhrer Heydrich and Gruppenfuhrer Muller, and in June 1942 I was entrusted by Gruppenfuhrer Muller with the task of obliterating traces of executions carried out by the Einsatzgruppen in the East. My orders were that I should report in person to the commanders of the Security Police and SD, pass on Muller's orders verbally and supervise their implementation. This order was top secret and Gruppenfuhrer Muller had given orders that owing to the need for strictest secrecy there was to be no correspondence in connection with this task. In September 1942 I reported to Dr. Thomas in Kiev and passed the order to him. The order could not be carried out immediately partly because Dr. Thomas was disinclined to carry it out, and also because the materials required for the burning of the bodies was not available. [...snip due to character limit, full text available here ...]
According to my orders I should have extended my duties over the entire area occupied by the Einsatzgruppen, but owing to the retreat from Russia I could not carry out my orders completely....
Blobel's last words were
Whatever I have done, I did as a soldier who obeyed orders. I have committed no crime. I will be vindicated by God and history. God have mercy on those who murder me.
That does not sound like "there is no evidence of bodies because there were no bodies", that sounds like "there is no evidence of bodies because the evidence was deliberately destroyed". Claims about how there's no physical evidence ring a bit hollow when there were specific, documented efforts to destroy the physical evidence.
Yad Vashem has a database of 4.8 million known holocaust victims. You can search that database by name, or by place of birth. Each entry says where and when that person was born, and what their name was, and how they died (or, in rare cases, that they survived). In that database, there are 139,692 people who were born in Lodz. I will ask, one last time before I give up and conclude that you're either a troll or just not someone who agrees that there is a physical underlying reality, and it is important to have accurate beliefs about what that physical reality looks like:
Do you think those 139,692 people are just fictitious people? Do you think they survived somewhere else? Do you have any beliefs at all about the physical world beyond "historians are lying about the Holocaust?
Edit 2023-01-24T08:08:03Z: character limit bug showed I was under 10k chars, but I was actually just barely over
SecureSignals
Civilization is simply a geno-memetic-techno-capital machine
faul_sname 1yr ago·Edited 1yr ago
It makes sense to me now why modern-day historians limit "the Holocaust" to refer specifically to the attempted extermination of European Jews.
You are continuing to pretend that this is just some shift in the sensibility of modern historians. Stop, it's not true. The figure of non-Jews allegedly killed in the Holocaust was fabricated in order to deceive you- and it worked. It had absolutely nothing to do with limitations set by "modern-day historians." You keep saying that you've conceded the argument, but you have not conceded until you acknowledge that this was a propaganda figure fabricated in order to manipulate the masses. It was not a change by "modern-day historians."
For the "in the Holocaust" part, I was just plainly wrong about how the term is used.
No you weren't- you were lied to, and you believed the lie.
For the "murder" part
You are free to categorize the 70 million civilian deaths during WW-II as "murder" vs "not murder" however you want, that doesn't interest me and it's not what Revisionists are claiming. We are discussing the claim that the Germans murdered 6 million Jews. If you want to count most or all civilians who died in the war as murdered by the Germans, that's up to you.
Or maybe you relocate them from one slave labor camp to another, in the dead of winter, again on starvation rations, on foot, and then they die during the march?
The Eastern Front collapsed and hundreds of thousands of desperate people fled West. Elie Wiesel, due to being in the camp hospital (!), was given the option of going on the "'Death March" with the Germans or waiting for the Russians, and he and his father chose the "Death March."
If you say "We are invading your country now. For every German killed in the invasion, we will round up 50-100 of your citizens and execute them," and there is resistance, and you follow through on your threats and do the mass executions, is that murder?
Why do you continue to be so lazy with your claims? The executions mentioned in your link refer to reprisals as punitive measures for partisan warfare. Your comment says "killed in the invasion" implying that they would tabulate all the German soldiers KIA and then murder 50-100 citizens for each one. But what this is actually referring to are punitive measures for German soldiers killed by partisan warfare. Partisans were what you or I would call terrorists today, and they had no protection under international law. Reprisals were even legal according to international law.
Partisan warfare was a major reason Germany lost the war, IIRC they lost about a million troops to partisan warfare. Reprisals should be understood and criticized in that context. But it bears no relation to your claim that all the Germans killed in the invasion were avenged with 50-100 civilian deaths. That is a lie.
70,000 inmates of the Lodz ghetto at the time the ghetto was liquidated in August 1944 were instead sent to Auschwitz.
Oh, 70,000 were killed in Auschwitz I wonder what evidence you are going to provide... turns out it's just a picture of a train with the claim stated by Yad Vashem. Par for the hole I guess.
In fact, of the 65,000 Jews (maximum figure) deported in August 1944 from the Łódź ghetto, no more than 22,500 were sent to Auschwitz, of whom about 11,500 were then transferred from Auschwitz to Stutthof. Included in the transport of 3 September 1944 were also some forty children from 6 months to 14 years, who should have ended up in the “gas chambers” at Auschwitz, if orthodox “logic” had its way, but who were instead transferred with their mothers to Stutthof and properly registered there (see Documents 15, 15a, and Table 3, p. 149).
So Mattogno found documentation for over 11,000 prisoners from Lodz, including women and children, which were transferred from the "extermination camp" Auschwitz to the concentration camp Stutthof:
The two brothers Michael Salomonowicz... and Josef traveled with their mother Dora Salomonowicz, born 28 August 1904, number 1652 on the transport list, registered under number 83619 at Stutthof. All three came from the Łódź ghetto, whither they had been deported on 3 November 1941, and all three survived the war.. Michael and Josef therefore were 8 and 3 years old, respectively, when they were deported to Łódź, yet in spite of this they survived both the selection for alleged extermination at Chełmno and the selection for the claimed extermination at Auschwitz!
There is no doubt that the remaining children also came from Łódź. The transfer of these children shows that among the Jews of the Łódź ghetto there was no selection for the alleged gas chambers, otherwise how would they have remained alive?
‘This is a race against time – search the site today, submit unrecorded names and pictures, and help ensure that every Holocaust victim has a place in our collective memory. […] Gather information – talk to your family: As you may not know about relatives who might have perished in the Holocaust, we recommend that you first contact your family: parents, grandparents, aunts or uncles to collect as much information as possible about all of those persons that might [sic] have been murdered. […] If you have family members who were murdered in the Holocaust, […] you may either submit names and details online via the site, or use the attached Page of Testimony’
Such a database has all the problems you could imagine- duplicate entries, survivors entered into the database (as the Lodz Jews deported from the "extermination camp Auschwitz" to Stutthof), entire transport lists all assumed murdered and entered multiple times.
The way historians estimate the number of those killed at Chelmno is to simply tabulate all of the Jews who were deported from Lodz and assume they were killed there or at Auschwitz. The documents describe deportation or resettlement for labor, and that is what Revisionists claim happened.
For example, 1944 documents described the deportations as "zur Arbeit aus Litzmannstadt-Getto ausgereist", which translates to "left the Litzmannstadt ghetto for work". This is what Revisionists claim was the purpose of the transport. But historians say that this was code for "transferred to Chelmno and murdered in gas chambers." This same general pattern applies to thousands of documents, where the document states what Revisionists claim but mainstream historiography says "no, that is camofloauge and what actually happened was completely different from what the document says".
Mattogno cites another document that refutes the claim of ~60,000 deportees from Lodz being exterminated in August in 1944:
On 15 August 1944 the head of Amtsgruppe DIV (KL-Verwaltung129) of the WVHA, SS Sturmbannführer Burger, sent to the head of Amtsgruppe B, SS Gruppenführer Lörner, a letter relating to a “Häftlingsmeldung” (communication concerning prisoners) and “Häftlingsbekleidung (clothing for prisoners). This says that on 1 August 1944 the population of the concentration camps was 379,167 male and 145,119 female prisoners, to whom were added “angekündigte Neuzugänge” (announced new arrivals). Among them are 60,000 prisoners “aus Litzmannstadt (Polizeigefängnis und Getto)” – from Łódź (police and ghetto prisoners)...
“A major part of the inmates is already en route and will arrive in the concentration camps during the next days."
..the WVHA genuinely expected these prisoners to arrive in the concentration camps and to be in need of proper clothes – a need which executees do not have. Therefore, also the 60,000 Jews from Łódź were expected to stay alive and be in need of clothing, whose evacuation to the concentration camps had already been under way for several days.
This document shows the claim to be historically unfounded that the Jews from the Łódź ghetto were sent to Auschwitz in order to be gassed
To estimate deaths in the Lodz ghetto, historians just sum the deportations and say they were all murdered in gas chambers. There's no proof that these numbers of people were ever sent to Chelmno, it's an assumption based on witness testimony.
Edit:
I would be a lot more sympathetic to this point of view if the Nazi regime had not specifically made significant efforts to destroy evidence.
Let's take Treblinka for example, which is a common example for demonstrating the Revisionist case for the forensic evidence:
And finally, we must note that the teeth of the supposed victims could not have been destroyed by the primitive methods attested to. Even if each of the alleged victims had only 20 of the usual 32 teeth left at the time he or she died, there would have been at least 17.5 million teeth to be disposed of at Treblinka. This means that we should still be able to find some 5 teeth per cubic foot of the 3.53 million cu.ft. of material excavated at the alleged site of the crime.
This isn't even counting the much-greater quantity of larger bone pieces which would be in the ground there. But how many mass graves have been excavated there? Zero. Caroline-Sturdy Colls did excavations which received a lot of press, but she didn't find any mass graves. She did find a tooth- a fossilized shark tooth from when Poland was covered by an ocean. It is impossible that the evidence for this crime would have been destroyed.
faul_sname
Fuck around once, find out once. Do it again, now it's science.
SecureSignals 1yr ago
We are discussing the claim that the Germans murdered 6 million Jews.
I agree. Let's discuss that claim.
So Mattogno found documentation for over 11,000 prisoners from Lodz, including women and children, which were transferred from the "extermination camp" Auschwitz to the concentration camp Stutthof:
The two brothers Michael Salomonowicz... and Josef traveled with their mother Dora Salomonowicz, born 28 August 1904, number 1652 on the transport list, registered under number 83619 at Stutthof
All three of those Jews survived the war, so it's interesting to note that all three names appear in the Yad Vashem “Central Database of Shoah Victims’ Names"!
Yes. The Yad Vashem “Central Database of Shoah Victims’ Names" includes both people who survived and people who died. It also includes whether those people survived or died. According to said database
Dora Salomonowicz is listed by Yad Vashem as having survived.
Michael Salomonowicz is listed by Yad Vashem as having survived
Josef Salomonowicz is listed by Yad Vashem as having survived
"Three people who were listed in the database (as survivors) actually survived" is not the slam dunk you seem to think it is.
Here is a list of all of the people who were on the same transport (Transport E, Train Da 20 from Praha) - there are 1020 identified names on that list. You can further filter that list by whether they survived (47 people, including your 3 examples) or were murdered (973 people).
Do you think those 973 people who were listed as murdered were fabricated? Or maybe they survived, but were listed as deceased? I personally think that most of the 973 people who are listed as murdered were actually real people, and really did die. Still, there is virtue in actually looking at the world as it is, in making your beliefs pay rent in anticipated experiences, so I chose 5 random numbers between 1 and 973. Those numbers are 258, 817, 811, 273, and 153, and correspond to the 258th, 817th, etc person in that list of 973 people in alphabetical order.
258: Elisabeta Fischlova, born January 17, 1915. I think this passport application is pretty strong evidence that she was in fact a real person. Beyond that, I can't say a lot -- Yad Vashem lists 142 shoah victims with that last name, all murdered, and as far as I can tell, there are only 24 people alive in the entire world now with the last name Fischlova, so it strikes me as likely that she has no surviving closely related descendants.
We do not live in the fucking dark ages. Genealogical records exist. Those people who survived went on to live their lives, to marry and have children and eventually die of something else at a later time, and their lives left echoes on the modern world. Since we're talking about something that happened less than a hundred years ago, those echoes are not exactly faint. There are Facebook groups for people whose parents died in the Holocaust, because the end of the Holocaust and the creation of Facebook were separated by less than 60 years.
The exact fate of the 973 people on Transport E, Train Da 20 from Praha to Lodz may be lost to time and the destruction of evidence, but we do know that there was an explicit plan to rid Europe of Jews, we know that a large number of people who survived the ghettoes and camps described the details within, we know that there was a specific effort led by Paul Blobel to destroy evidence of mass murders, and we know that Blobel's defense at the Nuremberg trials in regards to that effort to destroy evidence was "I was following orders and thus did nothing wrong", not "that did not happen".
If you take a group of people into custody, prevent them from leaving for a period of years, use them as forced labor in documented terrible conditions, and then at the end of those few years only a few people from that original group are anywhere to be found, and those few people say you murdered the remaining people, and the remaining people are never heard from again, and you say "yeah, I did it and destroyed the evidence after" - then yes, I think it's fair to conclude that you murdered the remaining people. I think it remains fair to conclude that the missing people were murdered, even if there is doubt about how specifically those murders were performed, or what specifically happened to the bodies.
I believe that
If the 4.8 million names from Yad Vashem were largely fabricated, the effort to compile passport and other documents would have been immense, and an immense effort like that would have left marks on the world.
If the 4.8 million names from Yad Vashem had been largely duplicates, I would expect to see a lot more duplicate names and birth dates in the search for people on that particular transport.
If the 4.8 million names from Yad Vashem had mostly referred to people who survived, I would expect to see genealogical records from those survivors.
You will note that I am making specific, concrete predictions of things I will not see. Thus, if you want to convince me, you could try to show
There has been a massive effort to create millions of falsified documents from before the war. Note that this effort would have either been recent or made mistakes that are easily detectable by modern techniques.
If you select 10 people at random from the Yad Vashem list, there are a substantial number of records that Yad Vashem claims are different people but in fact share the same names / birth dates / origins (if your claim is that the actual Jewish death toll was 1.4 million, you would need over 20 duplicate people from your sample of 10).
If you select 10 people documented as "murdered" at random from the Yad Vashem list, a significant fraction of those actually survived, and documents showing their survival (genealogical records, obituaries, etc) will exist, because we don't live in the dark ages.
Note that the "at random" is doing quite a bit of work in the latter two examples - random samples are vital when operating in an environment where people want you to conclude false things.
Do you have any specific, falsifiable beliefs about the provenance of those 4.8 million names and the fate of the people those names referred to?
SecureSignals
Civilization is simply a geno-memetic-techno-capital machine
faul_sname 1yr ago
You don't see the circular logic that's being used here? Yad Vashem and mainstream historiography starts with the assumption that nearly all Jews listed in transport documents were murdered in gas chambers. So, if someone is on a transport list, they get listed in the database as a murder victim. Then, in a debate over whether the purpose of these transports was extermination or resettlement, you cite the names from this database that have presupposed the murder of almost all the evacuees.
Irma Bunzlova, born April 30, 1888. Again no picture, though this time there is some sort of police document with her name on it.
The Holocaust is the only controversy where you can just list a name, Date of Birth, "some sort of police document" and then claim that she was murdered without any factual basis.
Typically when you claim someone was murdered, you would require some sort of evidence, such as: death certificate, excavation and identification of remains, autopsies, time of death, cause of death, location of death. You require absolutely none of these things to cite this person as a murder victim. Can you explain any sort of investigation or verification that was used to determine this person was murdered during the war? Or do you not even require the most minimum amount of evidence to believe?
None of your citations include any evidence that the people listed were murdered, except that the Yad Vashem database gives them all the label of "murdered." Where? When? How?
There has been a massive effort to create millions of falsified documents from before the war.
What documents need to have been falsified? You have the name, date of birth, and a single document from a person who was 57 years old in 1945. You are telling me she was murdered without any evidence or elaboration on how this crime was done.
You immediately retreated from multiple salacious claims in your previous posts: your first false claim that the Germans executed 50-100 citizens for each soldier killed in the invasion, and your second claim that 70,000 Jews from the Lodz Ghetto were murdered in Auschwitz.
The latter falsity is especially revealing because it shows when you try to claim with any specificity as to when, where, or how Jews were murdered in gas chambers you can't defend evidence for your claim. You immediately retreat to "look at this 57 year old woman and her passport application in the Yad Vashem database" when pressed with evidence against your claim. Documents show that your claim was false, and it furthermore shows how "mainstream historiography" works: just declare huge swaths of people as murder victims with 0 standard of evidence.
faul_sname
Fuck around once, find out once. Do it again, now it's science.
SecureSignals 1yr ago·Edited 1yr ago
I will ask again, because you keep evading the main question when I include literally anything besides the main question in my responses
Do you have any specific, falsifiable beliefs about the provenance of those 4.8 million names and the fate of the people those names referred to?
A specific, falsifiable belief might be something like "those names mostly did not belong to real people" or "most of the people who were listed as murdered were actually resettled in Siberia, where they lived long and happy lives" or "they mostly died in the ghettoes and in transit due to disease and starvation, but I don't count that as murder".
After you have answered that question, feel free to ask your above questions again.
SecureSignals
Civilization is simply a geno-memetic-techno-capital machine
faul_sname 1yr ago·Edited 1yr ago
My falsifiable claim is that there is no evidence those 4.8 million people were murdered by the Germans during the war. The database is a collection of names and documents with no evidence, investigation, or verification of murder. This is not a legitimate database of murder victims, as any database of murder victims would require some sort of investigation and verification that the entries are people who were actually murdered.
If you are claiming they were murdered, you should demonstrate evidence that they were murdered. An example would be your claim that 70,000 Jews were sent from Lodz to Auschwitz in 1944 to be exterminated. That's an example of an actual accusation of murder we can investigate. Revisionists have investigated that claim and, using contemporaneous documents, shown that claim you be false. You haven't even tried to defend that claim since you initially cited it, so you've fallen back to "look here's a name, DOB, and passport application- this person was murdered!"
People should be extremely suspicious upon learning that there are known locations where the remains of up to a million Jews are said to be buried, but nobody has had the motive to actually excavate those alleged mass graves- despite the obvious propaganda motive that ought to exist but seems to be outweighed by other concerns. So people like you are reduced to pointing at a bunch of names in a database with no commensurate evidence that they were murdered.
Revisionists are the ones who actually want to investigate the scene of the crime. Yad Vashem wants to scan a passport application and add it to their database so the faithful have something they can point to when they claim 6 million were murdered.
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Why are you called The Motte?
A motte is a stone keep on a raised earthwork common in early medieval fortifications. More pertinently,
it's an element in a rhetorical move called a "Motte-and-Bailey",
originally identified by
philosopher Nicholas Shackel. It describes the tendency in discourse for people to move from a controversial
but high value claim to a defensible but less exciting one upon any resistance to the former. He likens
this to the medieval fortification, where a desirable land (the bailey) is abandoned when in danger for
the more easily defended motte. In Shackel's words, "The Motte represents the defensible but undesired
propositions to which one retreats when hard pressed."
On The Motte, always attempt to remain inside your defensible territory, even if you are not being pressed.
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Notes -
Your "12 million" estimate was not errant based on any changes to "who is considered a victim of the Holocaust." The implication of your about-face would be that you were also counting 3 million non-POW-non-Jews as Holocaust victims, a number which has no basis no matter how you arbitrarily define a "Holocaust victim". Neither the 11 nor 12 million number are even approximately consistent with any of those definitions at any point in time. It was a pure propaganda figure.
You were not uninformed, you were misinformed- the problem was not that you failed to keep up with modern definitions of Holocaust victims, the problem was you were deceived by liars who, according to the Times of Israel, created the lie of 11 million Holocaust victims in order to manipulate the opinion of people like you towards Jewish suffering.
Your "expectation that the conventional narrative was broadly correct" was wrong- you were intentionally deceived by those with high institutional status.
The gas chamber claim is the mainstream explanation for how the Germans murdered approximately 3 million Jews. You are also claiming that those 3 million Jews were murdered, you are just refusing to take any position on when they were murdered, where they were murdered, or how they were murdered. Because people are so inoculated against Holocaust denial you can probably get away with flagrantly making a sensational claim like that and then refusing to elaborate on any specifics for how this sensational crime actually happened.
At least some people should find it odd that you are claiming the Germans killed 6 million people, a serious accusation, and then absolving yourself of any responsibility to specifically explain when, where, and how they committed such a crime. The reason the gas chamber question is important is because it is the method by which mainstream historians claim the Germans murdered about 3 million people. You want to sidestep the issue entirely and make no specific claims at all for how these murders happened.
My claim was that the 10,000 figure lacks any apparent basis and has no reference, it is simply stated as true by the author with no elaboration or references. This is a great microcosm for the mainstream historiographical approach because instead of pointing to any solid basis for the figure you have claimed, you immediately reverse the burden of proof. It doesn't help that the author simply states this figure, with no explanation or reference or apparent basis, right next to a similar outlandish claim of a special account in the ghetto administration that existed to pay bounties for snatching Jews for the gas chambers- whereas a sober reading of the document shows this bonus pay was nothing of the sort, it was hazard pay for the risk of exposure to deadly disease like epidemic typhus.
The authoritative source of the new, by-over-half reduced death toll at Chelmno (1995 Julian Baranowski) is reproduced in a table by Mattogno here. It places 167,540 Jews in Lodz in December 1941, and records about 78,000 "Number of Murder victims" in that city. Of course Revisionists do not accept that figure, but I cite it to point out that even the official revision by Polish historiography claims that "only" 78,000 Jews in that city were murdered. So the figure you have cited of 10,000 survivors, and the rest murdered, has no apparent logic or basis. This is a good example of why reversing the burden of proof, making a claim with no support and then demanding Revisionists debunk your claims is an alluring strategy but massively fallacious.
Did you even read the source I provided for the 300,000 estimate? It was based on absolutely nothing except napkin math by a judge. No documentary or physical proof. It would be more like if I accused you of murdering 100 people on the basis of no physical or documentary evidence, and then when pressed for evidence say "fine, you murdered 50 people." A reasonable person would not assume that the accusation of 50 murders is more likely just because the initial estimate was reduced. The proper conclusion is that the entire accusation was baseless, so a reduction of an estimate with no basis has no more credibility than the original estimate.
This is a question that cannot be answered conclusively. Certainly there would have been high mortality during the war due to many causes. Ryan Faulk estimated that, assuming Jewish civilians had the same rate of death as other civilians in the areas which they lived, then something like 1.1 million Jews would have been expected to die during the conflict. Furthermore, the evidence that at one point could have been conclusive was purely in the custody of the Soviet Union, who had a motive and an opportunity to present false information.
The number of prisoners who arrived at Chelmno is not known. Mattogno shows that the large majority of Jews evacuated from the Lodz ghetto where Jews of working age (starting page 113), while many young children and elderly remained in the ghetto. This would be consistent with the documents Mattogno provides explicitly describing the motive for the evacuation. Mattogno has a section on the deportations in Chapter 12.
The phrase "for example" was included in the GP comment, but I have bolded it this time because apparently you missed it last time. There were additional victims of the Nazi regime besides
6 million Jews and3 million Soviet POWs - some more examples are13 millionSoviet civilians, which is in turn estimated to be 7 million deaths directly due to violence (bombings, etc),4 million deaths due to famine and disease in occupied regions, and2 million who died as forced laborers (though the "forced laborer" number does not seem to me to be backed by anything in particular)1 - 2 million non-Jewish Polish civilians
Hundreds of thousands of Romani people (credible estimates vary widely but at least 130,000 total)
Hundreds of thousands of disabled people (estimates here vary less, wikipedia says 275,000 to 300,000)
I do agree, though, that the specific "12 million" number does not seem to correspond to a specific subset of the people who died outside of combat as a result of Nazi actions during WWII - the total number seems to be much higher than 12 million, and the number specifically killed by ethnic cleansing related activities as opposed to more generic "stuff that would retroactively be classified as a war crime" seems to be quite a bit lower (though note that the treatment of Soviet POWs was already considered a war crime). It makes sense to me now why modern-day historians limit "the Holocaust" to refer specifically to the attempted extermination of European Jews.
As I said before, consider me corrected on my earlier vague impression that "about 12 million people were murdered in the Holocaust" -- upon reflection both the "murdered", and "in the Holocaust" parts were underspecified to the point that they did not correspond to falsifiable beliefs about the world as it is.
For the "in the Holocaust" part, I was just plainly wrong about how the term is used. For the "murder" part, I had never actually considered the following questions:
Does it count as "murder" if you invade someone's country and then steal their food such that they starve to death? Does the answer change if the "and then they starve to death" was explicitly called out in your plans before you actually went and did it?
How about if you abduct them and use them for forced labor, with poor safety practices, on starvation rations, and then they die on the job? If a factory full of forced laborers is bombed, and you don't let the laborers use the bomb shelters, is that murder? Maybe it counts as murder for the other side?
Or maybe you relocate them from one slave labor camp to another, in the dead of winter, again on starvation rations, on foot, and then they die during the march?
Okay, how about if the people you murder are people who might hypothetically be able to organize resistance to your invasion?
If you say "We are invading your country now. For every German killed in the invasion, we will round up 50-100 of your citizens and execute them," and there is resistance, and you follow through on your threats and do the mass executions, is that murder?
Depending on your answers to the above questions, two people can look at the exact same set of people killed in exactly the same circumstances, not disagree about any of the material facts, and come to quite a wide range of estimates of how many of those people were "murdered".
But I don't get the impression that's what your argument is. In fact, I'm starting to get the impression that you don't have any specific affirmative beliefs about what happened during WWII, and instead you're operating by looking at what claims other people make about WWII, and saying "that one does not seem particularly well-supported, I will request clarification on that point, and if it turns out that point is correct I will not change my mind but instead just move on to the next point and never mention it again".
And on the topic of specific claims
No, it records 78,000 as "number of murder victims of the Chelmno camp in that city". Which makes sense, as the ~70,000 inmates of the Lodz ghetto at the time the ghetto was liquidated in August 1944 were instead sent to Auschwitz.
I would be a lot more sympathetic to this point of view if the Nazi regime had not specifically made significant efforts to destroy evidence. The man in charge of that initiative was Paul Blobel. Here is his affidavit on the topic of the burning of bodies and the destruction of evidence:
Blobel's last words were
That does not sound like "there is no evidence of bodies because there were no bodies", that sounds like "there is no evidence of bodies because the evidence was deliberately destroyed". Claims about how there's no physical evidence ring a bit hollow when there were specific, documented efforts to destroy the physical evidence.
Yad Vashem has a database of 4.8 million known holocaust victims. You can search that database by name, or by place of birth. Each entry says where and when that person was born, and what their name was, and how they died (or, in rare cases, that they survived). In that database, there are 139,692 people who were born in Lodz. I will ask, one last time before I give up and conclude that you're either a troll or just not someone who agrees that there is a physical underlying reality, and it is important to have accurate beliefs about what that physical reality looks like:
Do you think those 139,692 people are just fictitious people? Do you think they survived somewhere else? Do you have any beliefs at all about the physical world beyond "historians are lying about the Holocaust?
Edit 2023-01-24T08:08:03Z: character limit bug showed I was under 10k chars, but I was actually just barely over
You are continuing to pretend that this is just some shift in the sensibility of modern historians. Stop, it's not true. The figure of non-Jews allegedly killed in the Holocaust was fabricated in order to deceive you- and it worked. It had absolutely nothing to do with limitations set by "modern-day historians." You keep saying that you've conceded the argument, but you have not conceded until you acknowledge that this was a propaganda figure fabricated in order to manipulate the masses. It was not a change by "modern-day historians."
No you weren't- you were lied to, and you believed the lie.
You are free to categorize the 70 million civilian deaths during WW-II as "murder" vs "not murder" however you want, that doesn't interest me and it's not what Revisionists are claiming. We are discussing the claim that the Germans murdered 6 million Jews. If you want to count most or all civilians who died in the war as murdered by the Germans, that's up to you.
The Eastern Front collapsed and hundreds of thousands of desperate people fled West. Elie Wiesel, due to being in the camp hospital (!), was given the option of going on the "'Death March" with the Germans or waiting for the Russians, and he and his father chose the "Death March."
Why do you continue to be so lazy with your claims? The executions mentioned in your link refer to reprisals as punitive measures for partisan warfare. Your comment says "killed in the invasion" implying that they would tabulate all the German soldiers KIA and then murder 50-100 citizens for each one. But what this is actually referring to are punitive measures for German soldiers killed by partisan warfare. Partisans were what you or I would call terrorists today, and they had no protection under international law. Reprisals were even legal according to international law.
Partisan warfare was a major reason Germany lost the war, IIRC they lost about a million troops to partisan warfare. Reprisals should be understood and criticized in that context. But it bears no relation to your claim that all the Germans killed in the invasion were avenged with 50-100 civilian deaths. That is a lie.
Oh, 70,000 were killed in Auschwitz I wonder what evidence you are going to provide... turns out it's just a picture of a train with the claim stated by Yad Vashem. Par for the hole I guess.
Fortunately Revisionists are more thorough:
So Mattogno found documentation for over 11,000 prisoners from Lodz, including women and children, which were transferred from the "extermination camp" Auschwitz to the concentration camp Stutthof:
All three of those Jews survived the war, so it's interesting to note that all three names appear in the Yad Vashem “Central Database of Shoah Victims’ Names"! What was the historiographical criteria used to add names to that database? Historical investigations or historical records? No. Yad Vashem just takes forms where you can write the name of someone you lost contact with and then they can become a Holocaust victim.
Such a database has all the problems you could imagine- duplicate entries, survivors entered into the database (as the Lodz Jews deported from the "extermination camp Auschwitz" to Stutthof), entire transport lists all assumed murdered and entered multiple times.
The way historians estimate the number of those killed at Chelmno is to simply tabulate all of the Jews who were deported from Lodz and assume they were killed there or at Auschwitz. The documents describe deportation or resettlement for labor, and that is what Revisionists claim happened.
For example, 1944 documents described the deportations as "zur Arbeit aus Litzmannstadt-Getto ausgereist", which translates to "left the Litzmannstadt ghetto for work". This is what Revisionists claim was the purpose of the transport. But historians say that this was code for "transferred to Chelmno and murdered in gas chambers." This same general pattern applies to thousands of documents, where the document states what Revisionists claim but mainstream historiography says "no, that is camofloauge and what actually happened was completely different from what the document says".
Mattogno cites another document that refutes the claim of ~60,000 deportees from Lodz being exterminated in August in 1944:
To estimate deaths in the Lodz ghetto, historians just sum the deportations and say they were all murdered in gas chambers. There's no proof that these numbers of people were ever sent to Chelmno, it's an assumption based on witness testimony.
Edit:
Let's take Treblinka for example, which is a common example for demonstrating the Revisionist case for the forensic evidence:
This isn't even counting the much-greater quantity of larger bone pieces which would be in the ground there. But how many mass graves have been excavated there? Zero. Caroline-Sturdy Colls did excavations which received a lot of press, but she didn't find any mass graves. She did find a tooth- a fossilized shark tooth from when Poland was covered by an ocean. It is impossible that the evidence for this crime would have been destroyed.
I agree. Let's discuss that claim.
Yes. The Yad Vashem “Central Database of Shoah Victims’ Names" includes both people who survived and people who died. It also includes whether those people survived or died. According to said database
Dora Salomonowicz is listed by Yad Vashem as having survived.
Michael Salomonowicz is listed by Yad Vashem as having survived
Josef Salomonowicz is listed by Yad Vashem as having survived
"Three people who were listed in the database (as survivors) actually survived" is not the slam dunk you seem to think it is.
Here is a list of all of the people who were on the same transport (Transport E, Train Da 20 from Praha) - there are 1020 identified names on that list. You can further filter that list by whether they survived (47 people, including your 3 examples) or were murdered (973 people).
Do you think those 973 people who were listed as murdered were fabricated? Or maybe they survived, but were listed as deceased? I personally think that most of the 973 people who are listed as murdered were actually real people, and really did die. Still, there is virtue in actually looking at the world as it is, in making your beliefs pay rent in anticipated experiences, so I chose 5 random numbers between 1 and 973. Those numbers are 258, 817, 811, 273, and 153, and correspond to the 258th, 817th, etc person in that list of 973 people in alphabetical order.
258: Elisabeta Fischlova, born January 17, 1915. I think this passport application is pretty strong evidence that she was in fact a real person. Beyond that, I can't say a lot -- Yad Vashem lists 142 shoah victims with that last name, all murdered, and as far as I can tell, there are only 24 people alive in the entire world now with the last name Fischlova, so it strikes me as likely that she has no surviving closely related descendants.
817: Vladimir Langer, born February 20, 1921 - Was the son of Fritz Langer and Blanka Langer. None of his immediate family seems to have survived, but he has some more distant surviving relatives - for example his cousin survived the Holocaust and moved to Australia, where he still has surviving relatives.
811: Hedwiga Landova was born on March 28, 1894. Again some official documents exist, but I didn't find any living close relatives.
273: Edita Kristina Flaschnerov, born June 22, 1920. Not a whole lot I can find about her - no picture, just a name and an entry.
153: Irma Bunzlova, born April 30, 1888. Again no picture, though this time there is some sort of police document with her name on it.
By contrast if you look at one of the survivors from the same transport, you can see that he shows up in several genealogical databases, and has a number of living descendants.
We do not live in the fucking dark ages. Genealogical records exist. Those people who survived went on to live their lives, to marry and have children and eventually die of something else at a later time, and their lives left echoes on the modern world. Since we're talking about something that happened less than a hundred years ago, those echoes are not exactly faint. There are Facebook groups for people whose parents died in the Holocaust, because the end of the Holocaust and the creation of Facebook were separated by less than 60 years.
The exact fate of the 973 people on Transport E, Train Da 20 from Praha to Lodz may be lost to time and the destruction of evidence, but we do know that there was an explicit plan to rid Europe of Jews, we know that a large number of people who survived the ghettoes and camps described the details within, we know that there was a specific effort led by Paul Blobel to destroy evidence of mass murders, and we know that Blobel's defense at the Nuremberg trials in regards to that effort to destroy evidence was "I was following orders and thus did nothing wrong", not "that did not happen".
If you take a group of people into custody, prevent them from leaving for a period of years, use them as forced labor in documented terrible conditions, and then at the end of those few years only a few people from that original group are anywhere to be found, and those few people say you murdered the remaining people, and the remaining people are never heard from again, and you say "yeah, I did it and destroyed the evidence after" - then yes, I think it's fair to conclude that you murdered the remaining people. I think it remains fair to conclude that the missing people were murdered, even if there is doubt about how specifically those murders were performed, or what specifically happened to the bodies.
I believe that
If the 4.8 million names from Yad Vashem were largely fabricated, the effort to compile passport and other documents would have been immense, and an immense effort like that would have left marks on the world.
If the 4.8 million names from Yad Vashem had been largely duplicates, I would expect to see a lot more duplicate names and birth dates in the search for people on that particular transport.
If the 4.8 million names from Yad Vashem had mostly referred to people who survived, I would expect to see genealogical records from those survivors.
You will note that I am making specific, concrete predictions of things I will not see. Thus, if you want to convince me, you could try to show
There has been a massive effort to create millions of falsified documents from before the war. Note that this effort would have either been recent or made mistakes that are easily detectable by modern techniques.
If you select 10 people at random from the Yad Vashem list, there are a substantial number of records that Yad Vashem claims are different people but in fact share the same names / birth dates / origins (if your claim is that the actual Jewish death toll was 1.4 million, you would need over 20 duplicate people from your sample of 10).
If you select 10 people documented as "murdered" at random from the Yad Vashem list, a significant fraction of those actually survived, and documents showing their survival (genealogical records, obituaries, etc) will exist, because we don't live in the dark ages.
Note that the "at random" is doing quite a bit of work in the latter two examples - random samples are vital when operating in an environment where people want you to conclude false things.
Do you have any specific, falsifiable beliefs about the provenance of those 4.8 million names and the fate of the people those names referred to?
You don't see the circular logic that's being used here? Yad Vashem and mainstream historiography starts with the assumption that nearly all Jews listed in transport documents were murdered in gas chambers. So, if someone is on a transport list, they get listed in the database as a murder victim. Then, in a debate over whether the purpose of these transports was extermination or resettlement, you cite the names from this database that have presupposed the murder of almost all the evacuees.
The Holocaust is the only controversy where you can just list a name, Date of Birth, "some sort of police document" and then claim that she was murdered without any factual basis.
Typically when you claim someone was murdered, you would require some sort of evidence, such as: death certificate, excavation and identification of remains, autopsies, time of death, cause of death, location of death. You require absolutely none of these things to cite this person as a murder victim. Can you explain any sort of investigation or verification that was used to determine this person was murdered during the war? Or do you not even require the most minimum amount of evidence to believe?
None of your citations include any evidence that the people listed were murdered, except that the Yad Vashem database gives them all the label of "murdered." Where? When? How?
What documents need to have been falsified? You have the name, date of birth, and a single document from a person who was 57 years old in 1945. You are telling me she was murdered without any evidence or elaboration on how this crime was done.
You immediately retreated from multiple salacious claims in your previous posts: your first false claim that the Germans executed 50-100 citizens for each soldier killed in the invasion, and your second claim that 70,000 Jews from the Lodz Ghetto were murdered in Auschwitz.
The latter falsity is especially revealing because it shows when you try to claim with any specificity as to when, where, or how Jews were murdered in gas chambers you can't defend evidence for your claim. You immediately retreat to "look at this 57 year old woman and her passport application in the Yad Vashem database" when pressed with evidence against your claim. Documents show that your claim was false, and it furthermore shows how "mainstream historiography" works: just declare huge swaths of people as murder victims with 0 standard of evidence.
I will ask again, because you keep evading the main question when I include literally anything besides the main question in my responses
Do you have any specific, falsifiable beliefs about the provenance of those 4.8 million names and the fate of the people those names referred to?
A specific, falsifiable belief might be something like "those names mostly did not belong to real people" or "most of the people who were listed as murdered were actually resettled in Siberia, where they lived long and happy lives" or "they mostly died in the ghettoes and in transit due to disease and starvation, but I don't count that as murder".
After you have answered that question, feel free to ask your above questions again.
My falsifiable claim is that there is no evidence those 4.8 million people were murdered by the Germans during the war. The database is a collection of names and documents with no evidence, investigation, or verification of murder. This is not a legitimate database of murder victims, as any database of murder victims would require some sort of investigation and verification that the entries are people who were actually murdered.
If you are claiming they were murdered, you should demonstrate evidence that they were murdered. An example would be your claim that 70,000 Jews were sent from Lodz to Auschwitz in 1944 to be exterminated. That's an example of an actual accusation of murder we can investigate. Revisionists have investigated that claim and, using contemporaneous documents, shown that claim you be false. You haven't even tried to defend that claim since you initially cited it, so you've fallen back to "look here's a name, DOB, and passport application- this person was murdered!"
People should be extremely suspicious upon learning that there are known locations where the remains of up to a million Jews are said to be buried, but nobody has had the motive to actually excavate those alleged mass graves- despite the obvious propaganda motive that ought to exist but seems to be outweighed by other concerns. So people like you are reduced to pointing at a bunch of names in a database with no commensurate evidence that they were murdered.
Revisionists are the ones who actually want to investigate the scene of the crime. Yad Vashem wants to scan a passport application and add it to their database so the faithful have something they can point to when they claim 6 million were murdered.
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