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Dear "revisionists", where are all the Jews?
A couple of months ago, I had a discussion with the self-proclaimed "revisionist" @SecureSignals concerning the veracity of the Holocaust, always a fun topic.
There was a bit of back-and-forth on the archaeological evidence and witness testimony, which I eventually gave up on because SS (very subtle username, by the way) clearly knew much more about the subject than me, and could thus, as the saying goes, drag me down to his level and beat me with experience. Calculating the number of corpses that can fit in a given volume definitely felt like I was being dragged down a few levels.
A more fruitful line of questioning is that of where millions of Jews disappeared to. In response to SS's accusation that:
I said:
SS replied with arguments as to why the "official narrative" on Treblinka is implausible, which I was unable to argue against because, as I said, I'm not familiar with all the details of every Nazi camp. It is possible that the consensus figures for a single camp are wrong. As in the Jasenovac example, this has already happened (though it should be noted that most of the victims at Jasenovac were not Jewish). Even if true, this is at most evidence that the consensus on Treblinka is incorrect. It says nothing about the other camps, where the vast majority of the murders happened. In my reply, I said:
As far as I can tell, SS never addressed any of this. It seems some of the comments in the thread have since been deleted, which apparently hides all child comments when viewing the thread directly, though they are still visible on the profile page. This makes it hard to reconstruct the exchange, but looking at SS's profile, I can't find anything where he addressed my argument. From his post below on Holocaust education, we can infer that he does indeed believe that not just Treblinka but the entire Holocaust is fake, a position for which he has not provided any evidence.
So, to SS and any other "revisionists" who may be lurking: Where are all the Jews?
Tacitus also says that the Germans nailed people to trees and burned them alive as sacrifices to Wotan.
Old people and children are not wasted force labor, they're dead weight.
Here is Himmler talking openly about the extermination of European Jews without use of code-words in the Posen speech of October 6 1943:
Source is this thread on the CODOH revisionist forum, which anyone can read if they want to see whether the revisionist interpretation of such a speech holds up.
They were known for this up until their Christianization. And then they were known for their rather aggressive treatment of the Old Prussians and other peoples unfortunate enough to wind up in the path of the Teutonic Knights.
I think trying to answer a question about recent twentieth century history with appeals to national character is bizarre and wrong-headed in the first place, but if you're going to do so "the Germans would never do such a thing," doesn't wash.
I'll be honest in that I don't that much about A-B. That said I know Charlotte Delbo, a French resistance activist, was imprisoned at Auschwitz and later wrote a memoir. Google search turned up this list with a couple more written by gentile survivors of Auschwitz. And of course there are plenty of memoirs of gentile survivors of western camps like Dachau and Belsen.
I don't think any revisionists deny that gentiles were imprisoned and killed by the Nazis. They just weren't targeted for extermination and killed in gas chambers, or (with exceptions) lined up at the edge of pits and shot in. Everybody agrees on that. Revisionists just insist that Jews weren't targeted for extermination either.
Re: Germans as authoritarian automatons, I've seen it said, either here or on the old Reddit, that when the Soviets occupied East Germany, they saw the Nazi problem as specifically a Prussian problem and set about correcting that. Dunno if there's any truth to that, though.
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In the Posen speeches Himmler describes the policy as "Judenevakuierung", which is alleged to have been a code-word. So he is still using the "code" at Posen. And months later he continues describing a policy of evacuation/resettlement/emigration to the East with the killing of Jews being in the context of partisan reprisals (which revisionists do not deny happened).
In other speeches at Posen he uses the word "Judenevakuierung." In this speech he uses the word "umbringen," which unambiguously means "kill."
Partisans are in fact mentioned much earlier in the speech and then Himmler says, 'enough about partisans,' and then moves on to talking about other stuff, and finally when he discusses the solution to the Jewish question in the excerpted paragraphs partisans are not mentioned once.
Partisans are not a "Volk" and "the East" is a place on the face of the earth.
Goal is no Jews left in German-occupied territory by the end of 1943. Which included "the East," however you define it.
Yes, in speeches at Posen he describes the policy as evacuation. Two months after that October 1943 speech, in December, he also describes the policy as evacuation:
Although he mentions the killing of Jews in this December speech as well, in the context of partisans:
His defense of the decision to conduct reprisals against the families of partisans and commissars "If I was forced to take action" would not make any sense in the context of an extermination policy where extermination of all Jews would have been the policy. You are saying his statement here is just theater right? To provide cover for the fact he actually ordered the extermination of all Jews?
You are basically saying:
Posen October 4th <- evacuation euphemisms + partisans
Posen October 6th <- partisans + admitted the policy was to exterminate all Jews
Weimar December 15th <- evacuation euphemisms + partisans
Why did Himmler go "mask off" only in the October 6th speech but maintain the euphemisms in the other speeches? The Revisionist position is more sensible, that his statements about the hard decision to kill Jews in the October 6th speech resembles the same statements in the December speech which is unambiguously about partisans.
Hermann Goering- the one who actually gave the "Final Solution" order to Heydrich and would have been as aware as Himmler of its actual nature, maintained that it was a policy of evacuation for emigration and not a euphemism for extermination in the Nuremberg Trial. That stands as more significant than a narrow interpretation of a single passage which stands in contrast with other speeches before and after that single passage.
Partisans and commissars were not only Jews.
Memo from January 1944:
"No avengers" refers to the solution to the Jewish question in general. Which includes Jewish partisans and commissars but is obviously not limited to partisans and commissars. There were no 'commissars' in the General Government.
It's pretty clear the 4 October speech refers to physical annihilation as well, but the 6 October speech leaves even less wiggle room.
In one speech Himmler talked about killing partisans in particular and in another speech he talked about killing Jews in general. This demonstrates only that when Himmler wanted to talk about killing partisans he was fully capable of using the word 'partisan' to indicate that he was talking about partisans. The unjustified assumption that Himmler is talking about partisans on October 6th because he talked about killing partisans in a different speech two months later is not sensible at all.
No, he said it was a hard decision to wipe a "people/race" off of the face of the earth. Once again, partisans are not a "Volk."
Women and children killed along with the men. The race wiped off the face of the earth. No Jews to be left in occupied territories except those "in hiding."
Very clear.
So much of your case rests on an extremely narrow interpretation of a few selected passages, while dismissing the much more extant documentation as "euphemism" and "coded language."
You say that the 4 October speech refers to physical annihilation because Himmler describes:
Your entire assumption is based on the assertion of what "Ausrottung" is supposed to denote. The meaning of this term was something of a mild controversy at the Nuremberg Trial and in the David Irving trial as well. It's misleading to call it "pretty clear" when it has been a controversy in court.
This question was brought to Alfred Rosenberg at Nuremberg:
Hitler warned of the "Ausrottung" of all European peoples (including the Allies) if Germany lost the war. Obviously this did not mean that every single European person would be killed, but something more like "an allied victory will lead to the Bolshevization of Europe," which he considered to be an Ausrottung.
So to say that it's pretty clear Himmler is referring here to physical annihilation rather than the sense used by Hitler and Rosenberg, which completely fits the evacuation policy, is grasping at straws.
It's pretty clear because Himmler says things like:
and
Luckily we have the 6 October speech to take us from "pretty clear" to "crystal clear." Where Himmler says, one more time:
Please explain how "the hard decision to wipe this people off of the face of the earth" can refer to either the killing of partisans or resettlement.
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Death toll post-1943 is pretty much just the Hungarian Jews sent to Auschwitz, some 400-500,000 or so, with a few tens of thousands from western European countries. Polish Jewry had already been wiped out at Belzec, Sobibor, and Treblinka (all closed and demolished by late 1943) and likewise for Soviet Jewry in occupied territory. Most memoirs and most famous survivors come from western European deportees who were atypical of the slain in a lot of ways.
To respond to your other comment, yes it used to be a lot more common to lay the blame for the Holocaust and the world wars at the feet of some special defect in German character. But as you note this has fallen out of favor and I believe it was pretty silly to begin with.
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By October 1943 the Holocaust was in many ways complete; somewhere around 5 million Jews were already dead at this point. By far the largest remaining Jewish population in Europe was in Hungary, who was still an ally (and wouldn't start deporting its Jews to Auschwitz until after March 1944 when Germany seized control). The remaining Jews still on the chopping block were smaller populations in western countries: Italy, France, the Netherlands, and Germany itself.
The distinction is there were various kind of camps:
Arbeitslager (work camps), which were slave labour camps. Inmates were treated very poorly, but there was an active effort to keep them alive because they provided either useful manual labour or some element of skilled labour.
Konzentrationslager (concentration camps), where the inmates were more or less expected to work at menial tasks until they died.
Vernichtungslager (extermination camps) where almost all individuals were murdered immediately, usually within an hour or two of arrival. Only the strongest individuals would be selected as sonderkommandos, and these groups would be liquidated from time-to-time. If you had made it to November 1943 (the end of Operation Reinhard), the only extermination camp operational past that point was at Auschwitz (with the exception of a brief resumption of gassing operations at Chelmno in June 1944). The others were all farther east and by mid-1943 the Nazis realized they were at risk from a sudden Soviet advance.
The two main reasons why Auschwitz gets so much attention in memoirs/popular histories is that Auschwitz had a work camp, a concentration camp, and an extermination camp; so while more people were murdered there than anywhere else, there were also tens of thousands of survivors. Additionally, it was the principle destination for the western (and Hungarian) Jews who were the last to be targeted, so they were both those who entered the concentration and labour camp systems last (making them most likely to survive), and those able to freely write about their experiences post-war.
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But... we have quite a lot of information about Soviet crimes, including the various genocides ("ethnic campaigns") that they did. Perhaps not the exact details, but the general gist of it, at least. Often much of this data comes directly from various Soviet archives that were opened up after the fall of the Soviet Union for researchers, as - from what I've understood - Boris Yeltsin wanted to showcase the new Russia's openness and find reasons to ban the Communist Party/Parties (reformed as CPRF and a bunch of other smaller instances) entirely.
This doesn't mean we have all the data or that all the research that could be done has been done; for instance, when it comes to the Soviet ethnic purge of Finns in East Karelia (tens of thousands of Finnish communists and immigrants died), we don't know everything about it, but we know that it did happen, we have a fair idea of the scale, the locations, the historical process, and some in Finland knew as early as the 30s, when it actually happened.
NKVD often documented their "transfers" and camp system ins/outs in detail: there might have been some polishing of the details (ie. people not counted as camp deaths as they were released at the edge of perishing and then died and so on). However, this theory proposes that there was an entire genocide of a group that was left completely undocumented, including the transfers, the camps, the deaths and everything. Heck, when you mention Kolyma, you talk about an entire well-documented camp, suggesting that there was some class of deaths entirely missed by statisticians during the period of research.
There's no paper trail. There's no witnesses - you might imagine that some of the NKVD camp guards and functionnaires who were themselves Jewish (and we know there were such guards and administrators, Holocaust revisionists themselves remind us of that when discussing Soviet crimes as a counterweight to Holocaust) might have noted a crapload of Jews arriving to their camp to be slaughtered and, I don't know, at least told someone about it.
There's basically nothing, expect an argument something like that must have happened, because it's needed to serve as a (partial) explanation to "Where did the Jews go?" question. If I remember my reading of Sanning correctly, the most concrete argument that it happened was based on some HUAC witness statements by people who didn't claim to be eyewitnesses themselves.
This is really one of the most bewildering things that revisionists do, in these debates in the forums and elsewhere. The "mainstream view" holders are challenged on quite specific details of Holocaust camps and their correctness; yet revisionists see it proper to propose an entire hidden genocide of Jews by Soviets with extremely vague allusions to who did what to whom where and when and basically no concrete evidence at all to show for it. Everything can be handwaved away quite simply: "Well, the commies would lie about it, wouldn't they?". The revisionists would themselves laugh and scorn at any attempt to talk about the Holocaust this way, and indeed do so, frequently.
Funny note about Sanning. He recently released a new edition of his book with a postscript.
I’ll post links when I get home but in the postscript he engages in his usual numerical wizardry to try and get the numbers of Jews in Eastern Europe as low as possible. He quotes an American report on displaced persons in post-war Europe like this:
“Some 500,000 [Jews] were in the American zone by summer 1946”
If you actually check his source, it is specifically noted that the “500,000” number refers to displaced persons in general, and one page later it is clarified that only about 70,000 are Jews, so Sanning is just lying about his source. This sort of thing pops up constantly in revisionist literature.
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Revisionists have written many published works on the so-called "Operation Reinhardt" death camps, the most recent of which was published in 2021 and covers all three camps. But these technical studies aren't very approachable without a high level of background knowledge. My first exposure to the Revisionist position on those camps, which includes Treblinka, was in the well-known Revisionist documentary One Third of the Holocaust.
I wasn't a Revisionist when I first saw that and knew virtually nothing about these camps, so I took everything presented with a huge grain of salt. But there were some relatively straightforward claims presented in the documentary that seemed easy to verify, and if true, raised questions. For example, in the video the creator describes that the official historical narrative is that the Nazis buried about 1.5 million - 2 million Jews and then later dug them all back up and cremated them on grills to hide the evidence. I assumed that had to be some sort of straw man or misrepresentation but it turned out not to be- it's what historians actually claim. Or when he presents silly statements made by witnesses you are going to assume he is just cherry-picking, but it turns out those witnesses are as important to the whole story as he presents in the video.
Having learned that the story itself is simply pretty hard to believe, stranger than fiction even, I learned a lot more about these camps and the Holocaust in general, and the more I learned the more I realized that Revisionists have the stronger case. The evidence for these claims should be considered holistically. I would separate the categories of evidence in four parts:
Census data: Inconclusive, it's the most important evidence cited by anti-Deniers here due to the deficiencies in the other categories of evidence. But there are so many uncertainties and contradictions in the numbers. How many Jews are in the Princeton class of 2026? We couldn't figure that out, we could only conclude that the Jewish organizations presenting the estimates were fudging them based on political and economic incentives. But so many here stake the truth of this tall tale on some Jews that should exist on paper, by doing some simple additions and subtractions from many different demographic studies conducted before, during, and after the war in the Russian empire, Poland, and Soviet Union. It heavily relies on a level of precision (how many Polish Jews became "Soviet Citizens" on paper after the war?), accuracy and honesty that simply does not exist.
Physical evidence: Strongly favors the Revisionist side. Historians claim ~2 million were murdered in these camps, but the remains of approximately 0% of those two million victims have been identified in scientific excavations. This also includes technical arguments around things like burial density or cremation capacity, fuel requirements, etc. Although these arguments are usually not influential to non-Revisionists because they just assume that Revisionists are using math deceptively or not representing the mainstream position accurately (they are).
Documentary evidence: Strongly favors the Revisionist side, as the Revisionist case mostly takes the documents at face value whereas the mainstream narrative claims that there was systematic euphemism and coded language. For example, there are documents where both Himmler and Pohl, head of the concentration camp system, identify Sobibor as a transit camp (Durchgangslager). The Revisionist theory is this camp was what the document says it was, the mainstream theory is that in their own internal secret documents they used coded language to camouflage the extermination camp. There are some documents that Revisionists struggle to explain, which is to be expected given that there are millions and millions of them. There are documents that the mainstream struggles to explain. But most important of all are the documents that should be there but which are not.
Witness testimonies: The most strong aspect of the Revisionist case in my opinion. Witnesses are by far the most important part of the body of evidence for the mainstream narrative, so the Revisionist critique of that body of evidence is devastating.
The "Where did they Go?" trump card is the most popular retort against Revisionists as it's an attempt to reverse the burden of proof. The mainstream narrative makes these claims which are honestly pretty hard to believe, Revisionists build an extremely strong case against that narrative, so the ultimate strategy is to try to demand Revisionists track the population movements of Jews in the final years of the war, right before the Soviet Union conquered that half of the continent and the most important German officials involved had died or been killed.
The fact is, there are no surviving documents at all pertaining to transports to or from the alleged Treblinka extermination camp. The Korherr report does not mention Treblinka at all, and the author of that report wrote a letter to Der Spiegel in the 1970s stating that he interpreted those numbers in his report to mean what Revisionists say those numbers meant. The story is the same at Belzec, where the mainstream admits that unfortunately:
So it's highly convenient to demand Revisionists answer questions that rely on evidence which has been destroyed in unlucky circumstances or otherwise fallen into Soviet Custody. But neither is there documentary evidence remaining for transports into those camps either.
In recent years it has been revealed, to the surprise of historians, that there were tens of thousands of labor and concentration camps which were previously unknown:
So historians missed tens of thousands of camps that existed in these areas which happened to exist in a network around rail lines that were subject to the gas chamber extermination rumors. This revelation certainly gives more context to Korherr's interpretation of settlers "sifted through the camps of General Government", of which there were many more than historians had previously understood.
The retort "Where did the Jews go?" would not be necessary if there was strong evidence that they were murdered in the precise location where it is said they were murdered. When the Germans (NSFL) discovered the mass graves in the Katyn Forest, they invited international observers from all sides and released American POWs to observe the investigation. They exhumed the mass graves to conduct autopsies, investigate time and cause of death, and to identify victims. They were still accused of this crime by the Soviet prosecution at Nuremberg, and the Soviet authors of that Katyn report submitted into evidence (USSR-54) were the same as the authors of the Auschwitz report (USSR-8), with the addition of Trofim Lysenko as a signatory to the Auschwitz report.
No similar investigation was conducted for the alleged murder of about 2 million people at these three camps. While the Western Allies had conducted investigations disproving the allegations of gas chamber extermination in the camps liberated by the Western Allies, the Soviet Union denied access to outside observers and freely modified structures in Soviet-Occupied Poland, including most importantly the gas chamber at Auschwitz which has been shown to millions and millions of tourists.
The difference between the data on the number of Jews at Princeton and the number of Jews recorded in a census is that at Princeton no one goes around asking everyone if they are Jewish, yet this is exactly what happens during a census. And the census data was certainly not collected by Jewish organizations.
Censuses record the population at the local level, too, not just the country level. We can look at the number of Jews within Poland's current borders, for example: a table on Wikipedia records over 3 million Jews in 1939 and less than 300,000 in 1946.
I don't know what your point is with "Soviet Citizens". Census takers don't look at a list of citizens, they go around from place to place recording how many people there are and various data on those people. It's hard to over- or under-count people in a census.
As I understand, you believe Operation Reinhardt was about resettling 2 million Jews, and the few deaths that happened were unintentional. If this is the case, if Sobibor and the other Operation Reinhardt camps were just transit camps, where did all these Jews who passed through them end up? Where are the testimonies of Jews who passed through the camps and were peacefully resettled?
It's a perfectly reasonable question. Millions of people don't just disappear. It should be possible to track the movements of millions of people.
Compare the Armenian genocide. (You believe this one happened, right?) Even though most of the deported Armenians died, some managed to escape and today there are significant Armenian communities in places like Lebanon and Syria. Armenians were already present there, but most of the modern population descends from victims of the deportations. There are hundreds of thousands of them today. Where are the comparable Jewish populations in the "Lublin district" or wherever it was they were being resettled to?
(Edit: see also this comment by @To_Mandalay.)
What is the "revisionist" interpretation of the more than one million Jews the Korherr Report says were "processed" in various camps? The letter to Der Spiegel is presumably the same one quoted on the report's Wikipedia article:
So, more than a million Jews entered those camps. This is uncontroversial, right? Either they didn't leave or they left and were resettled. In the latter case, where were they resettled? Where are the testimonies of the more than one million Jews who were resettled?
The Korherr report says:
This is pretty unambiguous: the number of Jews in Europe has decreased by 4 million. What is the "revisionist" interpretation here? There certainly weren't millions of Jewish refugees outside Europe at this point.
This number includes labour camps, "detention facilities", "a variety of penal camps, prisons, and other sites for mostly non-Jewish prisoners" and POW camps. The total number of people who were imprisoned in these camps is much higher than 6 million and many of them, probably a majority, were not Jewish.
Of course such an investigation wasn't done because the bodies were destroyed. Indeed, the Germans' discovery of the Katyn massacre is said to be the reason why they decided to destroy the bodies, as they didn't want their own murders similarly discovered.
Edit: As a counterfactual, suppose the Nazis did murder millions of Jews and destroy the evidence by cremating the bodies and then destroying the crematoria and all the documents relating to the genocide. What sort of evidence would prove that this happened?
What Operation Reinhardt was about is an important issue.
It was one of my first topics of interest, because if Wikipedia had it right and this was the code-name for the secret plan to exterminate the Jews, then that would have settled the matter and satisfied my curiosity. But the mainstream consensus is clearly wrong.
Operation Reinhardt was an economic initiative for the utilization of Jewish labor and confiscated property in the General Government. One of the primary motivations for liquidating the Jewish ghettos was to confiscate and exploit Jewish movable and immovable property for the German economy and war effort. This required a significant amount of administration and labor, and all of this was organized under that operation. The Nuremberg Military Tribunal WVHA trial (1950), for what it's worth, also identified this as the purpose of the operation. From the court's finding of facts:
This can be compared with Wikipedia's description:
The NMT got it right. Mainstream historians have appropriated the "Reinhardt" code-name to claim it was code for extermination for the simple reason that they don't have other options for suggesting how the secret extermination plan was supposed to have been denoted in documents.
The point was that counting people is not a politically-neutral act, neither is it for a census. The Alternative Hypothesis in his recent Revisionist work identified controversy surrounding the 1937 Soviet census:
The assumption is that thereafter Soviet population figures were inflated in the 1939 census, with the help of the "brave NKVD" destroying the "snake's nest in the statistical bodies." The assumption of political neutrality in the census is highly dubious. Keep in mind that historians accuse the Germans of manipulating their concentration camp inmate and death statistics by excluding the gas chamber victims in order to hide evidence of the crime. So they are accusing the Germans of manipulating internal statistics while taking Soviet statistics at face value.
It is actually pretty ambiguous, the estimated decrease is meant to take into consideration excess mortality and emigration since 1937, so asserting that this figure is some "unambiguous" admission to the murder of 4 million people is quite silly and not even the mainstream interprets this figure in that way. The most controversial figure is "Total Evacuations" which is 1.8 million. Historians say that was code for the number of Jews murdered in gas chambers on the pretext of taking a shower. Revisionists that this was the number of Jews deported into one of the many camps in General Government or deported further east. Korherr said he was told it referred to Jews deported into camps in Lublin, which fits the Revisionist claim.
Revisionists have proven beyond a doubt that the Soviet Union systematically inflated death tolls by orders of magnitude in their investigations, and modified structures to give them an apparent criminal intent, and accused the Germans of war crimes that the Soviets were responsible for... and you're asking why the Soviet Union didn't gather exculpatory testimonies and submit them as evidence? The Soviet Union did not allow Western investigators access to this entire body of evidence. Among the body of evidence that Western investigators had access to, the gas chamber extermination story was disproven.
At Nuremberg, Belzec, Sobibor and Treblinka were discussed in the trial for no more than 20 minutes. Electrocution floors were the alleged method of murder at Belzec at the time, and at Treblinka it was steam chambers. The alleged murder of millions at these camps was represented by a single witness who was examined for not more than 15 minutes and was not cross-examined by the defense. These camps were almost entirely ignored at Nuremberg, the Western camps were at the time more central to the gas chamber extermination claims, particularly Dachau.
The problem with all the evidence these eastern camps being behind the Iron Curtain is that you have to contend with the fact that this body of evidence was in Soviet Custody. So when you ask, for example "why weren't resettled Jews interviewed?" you don't seem to grasp the purpose of a show trial.
The Katyn Forest massacre is an example of the counterfactual. The German's didn't have access to documents proving the Soviets did it, they had to scientifically investigate the crime scene to try and prove it. They didn't do it out of the goodness of their hearts, it was a very important propaganda opportunity. Your mistake is thinking that "cremating the bodies" is the same thing as "destroying the evidence", when they are not the same thing. A cremated body leaves behind a lot of evidence, 800,000 cremated bodies would leave an amount of evidence that is hard to fathom. But the Soviet Union would have had every motive to excavate those tens of millions of cremated bone fragments with international observers for all the same reasons as the Germans in their investigation of the Katyn massacre.
Imagine if the Germans interviewed a witness to the Katyn massacre, and the witness said the bodies were cremated and buried. And then the Germans covered the area of the mass graves in concrete and forbade anybody from excavating in order to protect the religious beliefs of the victims. Would that course of action at all make any sense if they were motivated to reveal Soviet crimes to the world? It would make sense in the case of a mass grave that wasn't actually there, and the world bought the story without the scientific investigation.
Only this one census is generally considered unreliable. And mainstream historians agree that it is unreliable. The censuses conducted before Stalin went completely insane and after he died are generally considered reliable, as are the Polish censuses.
It says the number of Jews in Europe has decreased by 4 million:
This means that it doesn't include Jews who were just deported to a different part of Europe.
Assuming Korherr's claim that he was told those Jews were just resettled is even true, that just means they didn't want him to know what was going on. Need to know and all that.
That explains why no testimony was submitted to the trials. What about independent research since then? Where are all the interviews historians conducted with survivors? Published memoirs? There are plenty of available accounts of the Japanese internment camps in the US, for example, where only a tenth of the number of people were imprisoned.
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This reads a tad bit uncharitable. If he knows more than you it could hardly be fair to say that he is dragging you down. As for calculating the number of bodies that can fit in a room, the nature of the revisionist talking points can only be fairly compared to the nature of the evidence presented by mainstream theorists.
Aside from that:
The Alternative Hypothesis made a video on this topic. With a text version available, linked below. I've heard that the arguments presented come from Walter N. Sanning.
The general gist is probably best summarized on page 35 onwards of the text version. Long story short, the amount of jews Germany had access to in the Poland/USSR regions is lower than the amount of jews that are missing from the census. Attributing the deaths of 4.4 million jews to Germans who only occupied Polish/USSR regions with a total of 1.9 million jews is problematic.
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IMO, a stronger argument is 'how hard is it to conduct a genocide'?
The Ottoman Empire was capable of killing 600K-1.5M Armenians in 2 years during WW1. Islamist militias managed to kill between 300K and 3M in Bangladesh back in 1971, in 9 months! Nazi Germany was a far more capable state and they had six years in WW2 to do their killings.
I cannot believe that Nazi Germany, a country that could conquer Western Europe with apparent ease, a country that killed about 10M Soviet soldiers, would struggle killing 6 million unarmed and disorganized Jews. The whole logic of 'oh the gas chambers weren't big enough or it was too hard' is ridiculous when you consider all the other things the Germans were doing at the same time.
Cambodia and Rwanda suggest an upper limit on how fast you can do a genocide before the act of doing genocide causes the state to cease to meaningfully function or lose the capacity to resist invasion. For Cambodia, it was 3 years 8 months to kill 25% of the population, so maybe 6.7% of the population a year, but they were able to put up meaningful resistance to Vietnamese invasion. For Rwanda, it was 8% of the population in 4 months, so 24% of the population a year, at the cost of getting their ass handed to them by Paul Kagame.
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The theoretical possibility of something happening is not proof of it actually happening. The specific claims made as to what happened and how matter far more in determining that.
There is nothing ridiculous about the logic relating to the size of an alleged gas chamber and the amount of people you could possibly fit into it when the claim made is that people were fitted into it and killed at a necessitated rate. If it turns out that you can't fit as many people into the chamber as you would need to maintain the rate then what can you make of the claim? You would have to revise it.
Do you revise back to a different estimate of killings? One false claim doesn't disprove a narrative based on a thousand claims, afer all. Well, what if we do this for most of the claims of the holocaust and come away from them with the conclusion that the vast majority of them don't hold up to scrutiny all that well. Does it then matter that it sounded plausible to us that the Germans could have done it?
This is rather pertinent since it calls into question on just what we are grounding our belief in the holocaust. I mean, yeah, of course, it sounds plausible to me that the Germans could have done it. After all I've been told all my life that they were evil back in the day, on top of being industrious and efficient. If that is our basis for belief is it even possible for us to question the holocaust at all? Won't it always sound plausible to us that the evil regime would do whatever evil thing?
Does it matter whether Germany killed 3 million or 6 million Jews + another 6 million Slavs, gypsies, homosexuals and so on? Nobody particularly cares whether Soviet casualties in Stalingrad were 1M or 1.2M. For nearly all purposes, it is enough to say that they were very high.
So what if there was some kind of accounting error (or deliberate overestimates) and they revised figures at Auschwitz down? You can prove or disprove anything with statistics if you try hard enough, especially if it's 70 years ago and the fog of war is involved. I don't buy the 'because of the Holocaust Jews deserve unique privileges to never be called out for their disproportionate role in promoting harmful social trends with their outsized political, economic and media influence' line. You can see this in the Holocaust wikipedia page, which relegates the non-Jewish victims to 'other victims' when they make up about half the total. Poles, homosexuals and gypsies clearly do not have as much clout as Jews. And Bangladeshis have no clout at all, nobody's heard of their genocide in 1971. The notion that megadeaths buy you moral superiority points is ridiculous. Otherwise we'd never be able to say a bad word about Russia or China, yet we're clearly happy to do so.
But the Holocaust surely happened. There's definitely some reason that Jews hate Nazism so much! Even if they exaggerated it, a large-scale killing effort is a natural conclusion of Nazi ideology and is within their considerable capabilities.
Absolutely. If people think you aren't being honest, they're going to ask what else they can trust you about. Trust is like a mirror and all that, you can't forget the cracks.
The reason is that we're talking about status via megadeaths conditional on being part of Western civlization. Bangladeshis aren't, the Kashmiri Pandits aren't, along with a host of other groups.
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Yeah, I think so.
Maybe it's just me but when I first learned that I had been heavily mislead by a supposed arbiter of truth I started questioning things that came from that arbiter. I mean, if they'd lie about the holocaust why wouldn't they lie about "Nazy ideology"? How could you trust them? Have you ever heard "Nazi ideology" expressed by an actual historical national socialist? Has anyone aside from select soundbites and quotes? Who selected those?
And don't get me started on the idea that this is just an error. If historians can collectively make errors like this there is no reason to take the field seriously.
I don't hold to that notion nor do I know anyone who does. The holocaust is pushed because jews have a lot of power in western society. There's nothing objective about the standard of placing it front and center in victimary discourse.
Hitler said something like 'If the Jews start another war in Europe, it will be the end for them in Europe' which is a relatively vague euphemism. But then there's Goebbel's slipup in the Sportspalast speech where he almost says 'exterminated' as opposed to 'excluded'. Then there's more of that speech:
Goebbels quite clearly lays out that the Jews are behind Bolshevism (and run the Anglosphere from behind the shadows) and are waging an existential war against Western civilization. Jews are the demonic incarnation of evil, decay and chaos. It is a plague, it enslaves, it terrorizes. The most radical measures will be adopted, at the appropriate point.
Or take 'The Jew as World Parasite' from Rosenberg: https://research.calvin.edu/german-propaganda-archive/weltparasit.htm
We certainly know Kristallnacht happened. There was some significant violent trend against Jews even before the war, so during the war when emotions are running high (the fate of Western civilization was at stake, millions had died and the existence of whole nations was in question), why not take the most radical measures, as Goebbels explains and Rosenberg encourages?
I'm not persuaded that there even was an accounting error and total Jewish Holocaust deaths were significantly below 6 million. The fog of war and whatever covering-up operations hastily conducted by Germany at the end of the war are enough to cloud our vision to some level. Why would we expect indisputable proof?
This methodological standard for historical evidence is, to put it lightly, unsustainable. By the same logic you can look at any war propaganda and use it as proof of genocide. Not genocidal intent, but actual genocidal events.
Who killed 22 thousand Polish military officers in Katyn forest? How could you know? You don't look at physical evidence. But going by the war propaganda that you happen to know, which just so happens to be the propaganda the victors of history want you to know about, everyone knows just how much Hitler hated the Slavs and wanted to kill every single one of them. Everyone also knows, because it is so true of course, that Hitler thought Poles were Slavs, not Aryan. So going by our methodology it just makes sense that the Germans committed the Katyn forest massacre.
I want you to be self aware of your position here. Your claims of not being persuaded that there were even 'accounting errors' is completely meaningless. You have already represented yourself as someone who acquires belief in historical events not through evidence but inference from broader historical narratives. You have no basis to question these narratives. You have no knowledge of what even constitutes historical evidence or proof in the context of these events. All you have are inferences based on what sounds plausible to yourself as a person who doesn't question historical events or the broader historical narrative you were raised with.
This position is unassailable. I can't do anything. Because no matter the fraught nature of specific evidence for any specific event, you always have the broader narrative to fall back on. And because you fall back on the broader narrative to protect individual claims, no individual claim can be refuted and the narrative can never be called into question.
Do you think I lack material evidence? There's a tonne of websites which will provide anti-Holocaust revisionist arguments! People can produce mountains of evidence. Tens of thousands of eyewitnesses, plenty of documents. I could list a bunch of them but you surely know of them.
The Sportspalast Speech is not Allied war propaganda, it's German war propaganda. Almost nobody reads through these Web 1.0 text files from Calvin University.
These assumptions of knowledge aren't based on thin air - we know the Soviets and Germans disliked the Poles, they partitioned the country earlier. If I were in 1942 or whatever, I'd be uncertain whether Germany or Russia killed those Poles.
Well what choice do I have? Am I supposed to go to Auschwitz and use my expert-tier knowledge of gas chambers to determine whether they made up a fake chimney or whatever? Scrutinize thousands of photographs to see whether the execution squads were using Mausers or some other kind of rifle, geolocate battlegrounds from seventy years ago, work out whether they're fake or not? Read through all the Holocaust memoirs and find the logical absurdities like people being frozen into ice or whatever? Dig up all these mass graves? Go find Goebbels's diary to see if he really wrote:
The whole point of arguing from capability and motives is that we can bypass the masses of facts that clog everything up. We can adjust our base rates such that the absolute mountain of pro-Holocaust evidence and fairly considerable amount of anti-Holocaust or minimal-Holocaust evidence is balanced. We can then conclude that, notwithstanding the fact that there's some confusion, some exaggeration and some concealed information, the Holocaust really happened.
Did Hitler like Slavs? Not really. Was Hitler planning to exterminate them all? No, there were various plans to subjugate or relocate them if possible. He would've settled for working with them. A fair few Slavs were fighting for Germany as Hiwis. Hitler was allied with the Soviet Union for some time. Hitler at one point wanted to ally with Poland where they'd return German territory in exchange for getting bits of Soviet territory. There's nuance there. The primary school version I got that Hitler wanted to get rid of non-blondes and non-blue eyed people is childishly silly.
But when it comes to Jews, there was never any desire to work with them, they were implacable enemies of Nazism. And they still are today!
I think you are going in circles just like I described above. You keep circling back to the narrative being true. When I proposed an evidence based approach to specific claims you wanted to rely on a heuristic that's partly based on the narrative being true. When I call that heuristic into question you are now circling towards an evidence based approach that's based on the narrative being true. Like I said before, I can't do anything here. If you just presuppose that the holocaust happened then it always did regardless of anything else.
I didn't say it was allied war propaganda. And you're not the first person to quote Goebbels to prove how evil the nazis were in pursuit of proving claims made against them without having to propose any specific evidence for any specific events. The point being made is that you can quote war propaganda to produce sentiment of genocidal intent because war propaganda is generally about killing the enemy.
In 2003 the USA along with its NATO allies invaded Iraq because they hated Iraqis and wanted to genocide them all. Every single civilian death was part of a genocidal judeo-christian neo-conservative plot to exterminate Iraq. We know this because the USA invaded Iraq and toppled its government. In fact, public sentiment at the time included rhetoric about 'glassing' the region. Directly invoking and promoting a nuclear holocaust. This is proof of murderous intent for every single Iraqi casualty during the war and subsequent occupation.
I am not asking you to do primary research. You can simply stop believing in the holocaust or be compelled to defend it. Stop maintaining differential standards for historical methodology based on social factors. You don't believe in other historical events in the same way. If someone calls the mainstream narrative of the war in Burma into question you don't care. You don't feel the need to weave together some methodology that can sustain the narrative. Belief in the holocaust, for 99,99% of people is just ridiculous.
See the genocidal invasion of Iraq above. You are not bypassing anything except your own critical faculties. Why do you need to believe in the holocaust?
Not true. See the Haavara Agreement and the Madagascar plan.
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No it doesn't.
In a sort of man bites dog analogy: holocaust education, like you describe it, is like listening to a CNN pundit explain why people voted for Trump with a CGI rendering of Capitol Hill on fire in the background.
Very similar to how people will frame National Socialism as an elaborate Rube Goldberg style mechanism to hate jews. With a hatred that practically sprung out of thin air via philosophies and theories, Hitler was just a sort of 'whacky idea man' and the German people voted for him because they were insane.
To be clear, you're right to be tired of this kind of argument, often used by midwits, but most serious historians do concede that Hitler had a point about Germany's crushing Versailles debt and that he did well in reconstructing Germany after taking power. Conceding these facts doesn't exonerate his behaviour during the war.
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Did Germany "struggle" killing 6 million Jews? I think people may not be aware of how condensed the timeline of the Holocaust actually was. Part of this I think is reflective of "survivor's history", which I talked about before here: the people who survived the Holocaust and disproportionately shaped western perceptions of it were by necessity aberrations from the norm. They were mostly western Jews whose march to the death camps began after the large majority of Jews were already dead.
The vast majority of victims of the Holocaust were eastern European Jews, whose mass extermination was conducted in a fairly narrow timeframe (with the notable exception of Hungarian Jews). The Holocaust as can be coherently defined started on June 22, 1941 with the invasion of the Soviet Union. Within six months of that mark, somewhere around a million Jews were dead - the victims of bullets, nationalist militias, POW camps, forced starvation, and experimental mobile gassing vans. In January 1942 Nazi bureaucrats assembled to plan the Final Solution, and by the end of that year roughly another 3 million Jews had died, mostly asphyxiated by carbon monoxide. This brings us to roughly two-thirds of the final total within a span of 18 months. The purpose-built extermination camps built for Operation Reinhard operated for another half a year or so until they were sabotaged or dismantled, and by that time most of the remainder had been killed. The remaining Jews still to die at this point were mostly westerners or Hungarians who would mostly be poisoned by hydrogen cyanide at Auschwitz.
Why? Schnellbrief was issues on 1939-09-21, shortly after joint Nazi Germany and USSR invasion of Poland.
By 1940 expulsions/ghetto formation by Germans was going full strength. See say https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Warsaw_Ghetto#Establishment_of_the_ghetto
Up until September 1939 German policies were focused on forcing Jewish emigration from Germany. From the beginning of the war movement of Jews was curtailed for security reasons, and there were a series of massacres by invading forces in Poland; but this violence was not deliberate policy, merely tolerated. The deliberate, purposeful, mass killing of Jews (although this was still absent some larger unifying plan) did not start until Operation Barbarossa.
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Quite right, Holocaust deniers and everyone else is too fixated on gas chambers. The Shoah by bullets or starvation is just as important. Bullets are the traditional method of mass extermination, not these great big centralized, industrial operations.
I think the response to that would be that gas chambers are a big part of the narrative. I recall seeing some images from Maus (that book people got upset over last year) and it reminded me just how much the Holocaust is considered industrialized i.e people being killed by the most efficient mass process, and that this uniqueness, to me at least, seems to be an important point that is reinforced in the conventional narrative.
Maus itself doesn't particularly fixate on the industrial killing process. Indeed, the part where Vladek Spiegelman's (ie. Art Spiegelman's dad and the main character of the book, alongside Art Spiegelman) is in camp is actually not all that long, and much of it concentrates on how he got through the camp by being a crafty little shit (the entire comic's thesis is basically "Even if you're a Holocaust victim you can still be a huge shithead, like my dad, and it actually helps you survive").
Vladek is probably portrayed as going through more "danger moments" (ie. parts where Spiegelman portrays his life as if it's actually on line) outside of the camps than inside, though it's clear that inside there's a constant background danger of being selected for death if he doesn't find new ways to be useful.
Interesting to know, I haven't read it myself. That was just what it reminded me of from some history lessons almost a decade old now.
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Yeah, a common revisionist argument is "why would Nazi Germany spend effort on killing Jews in the middle of an existential war?"
But this ignores the following:
Some of the camps were combined labor / death camps. The Nazis benefited from the Jewish slave labor.
To your point, the mainstream theory of the Holocaust is that Nazi Germany only spent a tiny fraction of its total resources on the Holocaust. The Einsatzgruppen were only a few thousand strong. The Nazi personnel in all of the camps put together were probably also only a few thousand strong. Rounding up and killing unarmed people is easy for a modern state, especially a state that has few forests or mountains for people to hide in, especially when the unarmed people are concentrated in cities and are ethnically distinct so have limited ability to blend in with others. To move six million Jews to camps* over the course of about three years would have taken about 1.5 train sets per day if we just divide six million by how many people the Nazis would pack into each train set. In practice of course Jews had to be gathered from multiple source points, so let us say an estimate of 5-10 train sets per day. By comparison, for Germany to supply its East Front alone required something like (200-300) train sets per day. Given the centrality of Jews in Nazi thought, this level of investment does not seem particularly large. Furthermore, from a resources perspective the Holocaust could largely be serviced using coal and coke, materials that Germany had in abundance. It did not require any resources that the Nazis had a shortage of.
The Nazis were not very efficient. Their political system was a bunch of overlapping fiefdoms that fought with each other and at no point during the war did they manage to standardize their weapons systems to simplify production.
*Edit: And not all Jews were moved to camps, many were killed on the spot.
I think the largest point you're missing is that in the eye of the Nazis, time spent killing Jews was not a distraction from existential war, but a fundamental part of it.
The Prussian officer corps had inherited a pathological fear of franc-tireurs from their experiences in 1870-71 and 1914. Nazi and reactionary political thought emphasized the duplicity of Jews, their creation and fundamental enmeshing with Bolshevism. The planned invasion of the Soviet Union was meant from its conception to be a Rassenkrieg. The Bolshevik system was to be torn out root and stem, and all its mouthpieces and enablers with it. To this extent Jews were a fundamental security risk to rear areas and a existential threat to the Heer's design for a rapid victory: they would be the inevitable saboteurs, partisans, Bolshevik agitators. That was the threat the Einsatzgruppen formations were meant to combat. Only the liquidation of the adult male Jewish population would secure the rear areas and ensure German victory. (Later this objective would be expanded incrementally to include all Jewish individuals in the Soviet Union).
After the failure of Operation Barbarossa the nature of the killing of Jews shifted more to that of retribution than immediate security concerns, but again this was in concordance with a future vision of a Europe that was Judenfrei.
edit: you get a sense of the Nazi perspective on this in Himmler's October 4 (1943) Posen speech. An excerpt:
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There are revisionists who believe that Jews died due to diseases like typhus as well as from starvation, but that this does not meet the criterion of purposeful holocaust / genocide. Or, you could even say it fits the criterion of “negligent genocide”, if you wanted to use such a term, but that this again does not reach the same peak of evil required for conscious and systematic genocide. According to historian Richard Bessel’s 2009 work on Germany in the year 1945, praised by the NYT for its sober and objective analysis, give or take 500,000 Germans starved to death or died from malnutrition in the final months of the war. If Germany in all its ethnocentric might was not able to feed half a million of its own people in 1945, then clearly they lacked the power and the will to feed those in concentration camps in 1945. As for why Jews were placed in camps to begin with, it must be noted that (according to those like Winston Churchill, no fan of Nazism) many of the original Soviets were Jewish, to a degree that the system was labeled Judeo-Bolshevism. The leaders of the failed November revolution in Germany were Jewish. Additionally, the international Jewish community had figuratively declared war on Germany (cue those old newspapers clippings “Judea Declares War in Germany”; remember Kristalnacht was a response to Jewish boycotts among the Allies). It makes sense in war that you quarter your ideological enemies. As Judaism conceived itself as a nation and not simply a religion, and has historically conceived itself as such, and actually still does today, it makes sense to not have a large group of foreign nationals roam free in your country. Hell, if we go to war with China, I would not exactly be opposed to first gen Chinese placed in a guarded quarter of a city (hopefully replete with all necessary accommodations and more, even swimming pools and a concert hall). If I lived in China, I would expect no less for myself down to the second generation. Hence why America had concentration camps for Japanese. I am not justifying Germany creating camps for those they see as a national threat. I’m explaining why they did this. As the reasoning makes sense from a position other than “we want to genocide them”, the mere existence of camps does not prove the holocaust.
Anton Joachimsthaler, another giant of historical studies, notes that Germany was aware of impending shortages and acted accordingly. As such you can imagine that they chose to redistribute goods that went to camps, to Germans in cities. He estimates up to one million Germans died from food insufficiency in the last year of the war. And this is sufficient in my mind to prove that, had Germans not dramatically gassed Jews, a huge majority would have starved to death anyway. In fact, it’s crazy to think there could be any holocaust survivors at all, given the level of food insufficiency. Indeed, the mere existence of holocaust survivors makes one puzzled as to why a genocidal regime would direct any food to concentration camp residents as opposed to Germans in cities. Why did they not all die, as you would expect from their genocidal sociopathy? Lastly, for another source, Ian Kershaw‘s 2011 work specifically mentions the destructiom of supply railways as a reason for the starvations. He pins the number at 500,000 dead from food insufficiency.
I am definitely not against revisionism discussions, because the holocaust is one of the most important events of the 20th century that still affects us today. The more important an event, the more it deserves people to attempt to nitpick and over-analyze. There is, of course, enormous reason for why the Allies would want it to be true that Germany gassed Jews rather than allowed them to starve. It weakens Germany’s morale, making them pliant to influence we still exert today; it allows for a geopolitical justification for the state of Israel that makes sense to the Western palette; it repudiates anti-semitism once and for all; and it staves off any criticism of the Allies for how it targeted supply chains and railways (not that this criticism would ever be legitimate).
Remember that in WW1, we used a ton of propaganda against Germany which was then proven demonstrably false. This was called atrocity propaganda and professors wrote books about it after the war. Atrocity propaganda is not unusual. It wouldn’t be some “new thing” the Allies tried after WWII, it would be the Anglophere strategy used from the Belgian Congo Propaganda War through WW1.
This is not true at all... the points of disagreement are:
There was no plan for the physical extermination of Jewry, i.e. the "Final Solution" was not the plan to secretly exterminate Jews in gas chambers.
There were no gas chambers disguised as shower rooms used to carry out such a plan.
The 6 million number is a symbolic propaganda number that doesn't have a strong basis in reality.
There are no Revisionists who deny the existence of camps, or deaths by typhus and starvation especially near the end of the war. There is far more variation on the mainstream side of the camp, where they cannot even agree on where the "Final Solution" actually came from- who, when, or why...
In contrast, there are no Revisionists I am aware of who make claims that are stronger than the three above, and they all agree on these three claims. I disagree with Revisionists on some matters of interpretation, but the points of disagreement are summarized above and held by all Revisionists.
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Because all holocaust revisionists are part of the same cabal, employing a 'strategy'. But they are so stupid that they can't get their story straight.
This is unlike holocaust believers who all believe exactly the same thing with regards to the holocaust, how it happened and why. Which we can see being the case in this thread...
Honestly, this rhetoric is so ridiculous and 'boo outgroup' it's self defeating. It's so far below the general standards of discourse here that I can hardly believe you wrote it.
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Even if I would accept claims that gas chambers and death camps were fake, then genocide by starvation is genocide anyway - so it does not change much.
And forcing Jews into ghettos created by Germans and trying to starve them is, I think, not disputed even by resident SS man?
Of course it would change much. Starvations are not unusual among the losing powers of war, and the starvation would be out of Germany’s control. There is also less planning, foresight, and direct involvement, which obviously reduces culpability. As an example, if a losing Ukraine has civilians starve to death, our media would blame Russia. If POWs starved to death during this same time, our media would blame… Russia.
Germans were deliberately starving Jews, imprisoning in newly created ghettos, forbidding them to work and so on - long before Germans were starving in cities.
Tragic situation ghettos was not out of Germany’s control, it was not even accidental or unintended mismanagement, it was entirely deliberate. And that is before we even start considering death camps.
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Let them out… to where? If Germans were starving in cities, where they had the most support, you would let out the camp inmates to… pillage other communities and starve in the wild? This doesn’t make much sense.
It’s important that we have clarity on hypotheticals before we begin to specify things within a given hypothetical. If prisoners starving is as morally significant as conscious, planned genocide, then there’s not even a reason to question whether the primary mode of death was starvation. If the hypothetical instead shows reduced culpability, then it’s not a meaningless question.
Germans were deliberately starving Jews, imprisoning in newly created ghettos, forbidding them to work and so on - long before Germans were starving in cities.
To say nothing about fact that starving was caused in both cases (of conquered people and of Germans) by war that Germans started.
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How would this be compatible with the "where are the bodies?" line of revisionists?
Also, as noted below, the timing doesn't match up.
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The problem is that whatever happened happened mostly in 1942 - 43, well before any Germans were starving. By the winter of '43 - '44 cities like Warsaw and Lodz were already empty of Jews, where there had been hundreds of thousands and millions before. Most of these people never saw the inside of a concentration camp.
See for example https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Warsaw_Ghetto_Hunger_Study and
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Warsaw_Ghetto#Establishment_of_the_ghetto
300,000 Jews did not starve to death in Warsaw in the fall of 1942. They were rounded up and deported...somewhere. This is not in question, even by denies.
around 92 000 starved to death, with around 210 000 murdered in other way
basically noone was deported
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A good summary of the Revisionist position is "the things that have always happened in human history and war: concentration and forced labor, conscription, property confiscation, forced resettlement, death by shooting, starvation, death by disease- actually happened. But the things that have never before happened in human history: herding millions of men, women, and children into bedroom-sized gas chambers on the pretense of taking a shower and being gassed by engine exhaust, after which they were buried, and then later unburied, cremated, and the ashes were scattered to hide evidence that this happened, did not actually happen."
Some people want to say that concentration and forced labor, conscription, shooting, starvation, and disease still constitutes a Holocaust. That's a fine perspective, but the ones with the delegated authority on that matter do not allow compromise on the gas chamber narrative or the extermination camps or the elusive extermination plan.
David Cole for example has long tried to distance himself from Holocaust Denial, but the establishment still does not allow his "Auschwitz was not an extermination camp, but Treblinka, Sobibor, Belzec, and Chelmno were" conclusion to acquit him from the crime Holocaust denial. His YouTube channel was very recently banned.
Cole has retreated to Substack to host his content, but alas, Substack has attracted the Eye of Sauron for its relatively lenient moderation policy and is now on the chopping block.
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For reference:
The 1926 Soviet Census counts about 2.6 million Jewish-ethnicity people.
The 1931 Polish Census counts about 3.1 million Jewish-faith people.
Granted, these figures might not be trustworthy. However, they roughly track with the 1897 Russian Empire census, which counts about 5 million Jewish native speakers, which I think lends credence to the figures. (Keep in mind that in 1897, the Russian Empire controlled much of 1931 Poland.) Also, I imagine that generally governments have a good incentive to keep accurate census information for the purposes of taxation, conscription, and other kinds of social control.
So we have good reason to believe that in the territories of Poland and the USSR alone, there were probably over 5 million Jews in 1939.
However, I suppose that for this to be part of a good argument in favor of the theory that the Nazis really did kill millions of Jews, it is also necessary to establish that the post-war Jewish population of the USSR plus Poland was substantially lower than 5 million. And to determine that would require some research that I have not done so far.
I am not sure that I really need much more convincing, though. The Nazi regime openly hated Jews, openly praised violence as a legitimate political method, demonstrably murdered members of many different opposition groups and even sometimes its own former allies, and between 1941 and 1944 controlled the part of Europe where most of Europe's Jews lived. Common sense tells me that it is much more likely that this regime actually killed millions of Jews than that the idea that it did is the result of a giant hoax that for some reason the US and USSR governments collaborated on during the Cold War, a hoax that also would have required the participation of many other governments, plus various eyewitnesses, family members, and so on.
It's pretty clear. In 1946 Jewish leaders in the cities and towns of Poland (where the vast majority of Polish Jews lived, they were not very rural people) conducted a census which found something like 250,000 Jews in Poland. However, it is important to remember that about 200,000 Polish Jews spent the war in the USSR, either because they fled of their own free will or because they were deported in 1939-1940 from the pre-war Polish territories annexed by Stalin. In 1946 the USSR repatriated all Polish Jews who wanted to leave, which was the great majority of them, and most of them went back to Poland, though most eventually kept moving to Palestine or the US.
So of those 250,000 odd Jews in Poland in 1946, the vast majority were those who had spent the war in Soviet territory. only about 80,000 remained of the 2,000,000+ Jews which actually spent the war in Nazi custody. It's a big balance to make up, and cannot be done. Jewish immigration to Palestine and the US up to 1946-47 are well accounted for, and so are the Jews in the DP camps in Germany and Austria. Uncertainty exists, but on the order of tens of thousands, not millions or even hundreds of thousands.
This was not a dark ages Völkwanderung. 20th century Europe, even at its most war-torn was not the kind of place where an entire nation could fall into a black-hole.
The best revisionists can do is handwave and insist Stalin deported all the Jews to Siberia so he could claim they had been killed by the Nazis, which is soundly contradicted by Soviet archives, which contain no mention of such a massive operation, which would have been the single largest of all the Soviet mass deportations (all of which are well-documented.)
Deniers have no actual answer for how 2,000,000+ people vanished into thin air and never will.
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Can we have a moratorium on making top level posts to answer to specific threads? What the hell is the point of retelling a conversation that is a couple posts downthread and everyone can read? And it's like the third time this thread people are trying to reset this particular conversation or something. This is getting ridiculous.
You're not even answering multiple people, this could literally be a reply.
I personally love the tradition of continuing threads and arguments in top level posts. One of the strengths of the Motte is having long form arguments about serious topics. Where else can you find this style of argumentation online?
If you want to only have arguments on the controversial topic of the week, there are plenty of other places besides the Motte.
Some time ago a bunch of people were complaining about how the revisionism threads are crowding out other conversation. My sympathy for them has just dropped below zero.
Fair point, I’m not the biggest fan either. I’d like to see other topics continued on throughout the weeks though.
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Yeah but this feels very much like a 'I am losing the argument or getting insufficient support down in a reply thread rabbithole but I would like to take it back up to the top in search of reinforcements.' kind of a vibe, which IMO isn't what's really desired.
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I prefer effortposts being top level whether they're responses or not. Otherwise they get buried.
That said I'd support a rate limit on top level posts for certain topics. Do we need three Holocaust revisionism subthreads in a single week? I get the impression this conversation is driven by 1.5 cranks who care about the topic and lots of other people who can't bring themselves to shrug and leave their arguments unaddressed.
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I would support a mega-thread for this topic while it runs its course this time.
What’s wrong with a normal thread? Say, the one downstream?
I don't want the spread out posts across several CW threads. Better to let those who want to duke it out have a space to do so.
I would honestly prefer that. I absolutely stand by my original thread and think it's extremely CW-relevant even from a Revisionist-neutral perspective. But people want to discuss Revisionism itself in response, which I understand. I'm also hesitant to effortpost in response to OP with long back-and-forth threads that annoy the community, and I know that people who want to argue against Revisionism have to contend against that as well and it isn't fair for people who want to honestly discuss the issue.
I would be fine with a containment thread more suited for long-term discussion. If I responded to OP it would re-hash a lot of things I've already said, but like he mentioned, large parts of those discussions have been truncated by comment deletions and they are hard to follow.
So there's just not a great way for people who want to talk about it to do so without annoying the community, and frankly it's annoying that whenever people want to talk about it a bunch of others feel compelled to make comments about how much they don't care about the topic. Not sure what the solution is if not a containment thread.
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