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naraburns  nihil supernum  1yr ago (text post)   35347 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of April 3, 2023

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As I understand, you believe Operation Reinhardt was about resettling 2 million Jews

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:

The purpose of the action [Reinhardt] was to gather into the Reich all the Jewish manpower and wealth which could be reached.

This can be compared with Wikipedia's description:

Operation Reinhard or Operation Reinhardt ... was the codename of the secretive World War II German plan to exterminate Poland's Jews in the General Government district of German-occupied Poland.

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 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.

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:

"On 25 September 1937, there was a special Sovnarkom decision proclaiming the census invalid and setting a new one for January 1939. A Pravda editorial stated that the "enemies of the people gave the census counters invalid instructions that led to the gross under-counting of the population, but the brave NKVD under the leadership of Nikolai Yezhov destroyed the snake's nest in the statistical bodies".

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.

This is pretty unambiguous: the number of Jews in Europe has decreased by 4 million.

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.

Where are the testimonies of the more than one million Jews who were resettled?

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.

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.

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.

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:

"On 25 September 1937, there was a special Sovnarkom decision proclaiming the census invalid and setting a new one for January 1939. A Pravda editorial stated that the "enemies of the people gave the census counters invalid instructions that led to the gross under-counting of the population, but the brave NKVD under the leadership of Nikolai Yezhov destroyed the snake's nest in the statistical bodies".

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.

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 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.

It says the number of Jews in Europe has decreased by 4 million:

From 1937 to the beginning of 1943 the number of Jews, partially due to the excess mortality of the Jews in Central and Western Europe, partially due to the evacuations especially in the more strongly populated Eastern Territories which are here counted as off-going, should have diminished by an estimated 4 million. (...) European Jewry should since 1933, i.e. in the first decade of National Socialist German power, have lost almost half of its population.

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.

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.

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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