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He says he is speaking secretly and of a "hard task" in a passage where he explicitly mentions partisans and commissars. This passage is extremely similar to the passage where you are alleging that he was referring to every Jew:
Do you doubt he's referring to partisans and commissars here? Or are you going to deploy the "euphemism" card again?
Yes, because if you're killing the wives and children of every Jew, that naturally includes every Jewish partisan and commissar. And, presumably, non-Jewish partisans and commissars, since there were plenty.
Himmler isn't an idiot and when he wants to talk about partisan warfare he is perfectly capable of using the term 'partisan' or otherwise indicating that he is talking about partisan warfare. So no he's not using a euphemism, he's speaking about something specific (Commissar order etc. which ofc did not apply to the GG or Germany anyways), whereas in the other speeches he is speaking more generally.
Answer this:
There's a difference between being an idiot and considering that your enemies are going to decades later try to interpret every single word you say to assert the pre-concluded existence of a huge conspiracy that didn't exist. If there were no extermination policy, Himmler would not have been concerned with saying a phrase here or there that would be pounced on by people like you decades later to try to give credibility to the allegedly systematic use of code-words and euphemism across extant documentation.
This speech was in the recent aftermath of the Warsaw uprising which was big news (where the fighters were treated harshly as partisans), and partisans were already part of the earlier subject of his speech. You argue that Himmler says "enough about partisans," but the fact is if a speaker says "enough about X" then it's far more likely that X is going to be revisited later in the speech, particularly vaguely and in passing, because it is already established to be an important topic of the speech and will be fresh in the mind of the audience. This is basic logic that is only thrown out the window because your side really needs to selectively call unambiguous statements in documents "euphemism," and ambiguous statements as "direct confirmation" for your theory.
Good, so he's not using a euphemism here and he's talking about partisans and commissars, agreed. But you are saying he is using a euphemism earlier in that very speech when he describes the migration East of the Jews. The more likely solution than "inconsistent usage of euphemisms" is that he was trying to portray a convey similar idea in slightly different words across two speeches that were only two months apart.
This is exactly what I mean, you pounce on words like "these people", I think he is identifying an enemy in a vague and essentialist sense, like partisans or Bolshevists. For example, in that passage, which you acknowledge was not a euphemism, on partisans and commissars he uses "subhumans". So the identification of "subhumans" with "this people" isn't nearly as unlikely as you are trying to let on. Again, if there is any ambiguity then there should be a bias towards interpreting very similar passages across two speeches two months apart to have a continuity in meaning, rather than assigning the nearly identical passages dramatically different meanings based on a few choice words like "this people."
It's not "a phrase here and there" it's several paragraphs of a speech.
No, when someone says "enough about X" that usually means they're done talking about X. That is quite literally what "enough about X" means. Especially when they move on to talk about a bunch of other unrelated stuff and give no indication they've returned to the topic X. In fact Himmler notes at each point in the speech when he changes topic, and here he says he is going to begin talking about the solution to the Jewish question, nothing so specific as partisans. If he wanted to talk about partisan reprisals, he would have talked about them in the section of the speech specifically dedicated to partisan warfare.
Possibly but not necessarily. Some Jews were in fact sent east to work. Others from the Reich sent east and then shot in the Baltics and Belarus. Not very many, but some.
He doesn't say "these people." That would be quite different. That would probably be "diese Leute" or "diese Menschen." He says "this people." "Dieses Volk." The word should of course be interpreted in context, so see that Himmler uses the word 'Volk' about two-dozen times in this speech, and every time to refer to an ethnicity or a nation. It would be quite strange and unnatural if he made an exception in this sentence, despite no contextual indication that this is the case. In fact the opposite is true, and the obvious natural referent of 'Volk' in this sentence is the Jews, since the Jews are mentioned very many times in the immediate preceding and succeeding paragraphs, unlike partisans. There is no ambiguity.
Yes, they are subhumans who are partisans and commissars. They are not subhuman by virtue of being partisans and commissars. Obviously not because their wives and children are also subhumans, and yet their wives and children obviously aren't partisans and commissars.
Not dramatically different. Very similar. October speech talks about the Jews as a whole, December specifically refers to 'commissars and partisans.' Then again, the Nazis viewed 'partisan' and 'Jew' as more or less interchangeable.
Himmler's Posen speech was two months before Globocnik submitted his final report on Operation Reinhardt to Himmler, which was by the end of 1943, two months after that speech. That report contains no mention of extermination, even euphemistically. It contains entirely information pertinent to the orders that Himmler describes in his Posen speech regarding the utilization of confiscated Jewish property.
You are saying that in a semi-public recorded speech, Himmler himself openly acknowledged a policy of extermination of all Jewish people in October 1943, but in the top-secret final report on that operation submitted two months later, there is no mention of extermination whatsoever. The lack of any mention of extermination in that top-secret report has been attributed to the enormous secrecy of the operation by the mainstream...
You would expect it to be backwards: the semi-public speech should be much more discreet than the top-secret, direct report which ought to have the highly sensitive but important details for high command.
But your interpretation has Himmler admitting to matters in a speech that were so secret they weren't even alluded to an in internal top-secret report on the operation only two months later.
The more reasonable interpretation is that in both passages he is referring to reprisals, which was topical due to recent events in Warsaw.
That is just absurd. Including families as acceptable targets for reprisals is tragic and should be criticized in its context, but it's also a common practice in history. The Germans were subject to it, and so were Iraqis. That is a very different matter than publicly announcing a policy to kill every person of a race. It is dramatically different.
Considering the vast bulk of the documentation relating to Reinhard was ordered "destroyed as soon as possible."
I wouldn't call it "semi-public." He's speaking to "this circle" and says multiple times that what he is saying here must "never be spoken of in public." Which makes no sense on the theory that resettlement does, in fact mean 'resettlement' because that was in fact spoken of in public.
Earlier same year Robert Ley got a little carried away in a public speech and shouted that Germany "would not rest until the last Jew in Europe is annihilated and dead" (bis die letzte Jude in Europa vernichtet und gestorben ist).
It's not reasonable to interpret Himmler as speaking about partisan reprisals in Warsaw in a passage where he mentions literally none of these things.
The wives and children of commissars are being killed not simply as reprisals, but because they are "subhumans." i.e Jews and Slavs.
There are hundreds and hundreds of surviving documents pertaining to the Reinhardt operation. They point to the economic objective of the operation, even by the admission of the Majdanek Museum. Most importantly, the top-secret direct report from Globocnik to Himmler was preserved. If Himmler really did put Globocnik in charge of the extermination of the Jews, how could you possibly ask for a better source than a direct, top-secret final report from the man who did it to the man who ordered it?
But as it happens, the report just provides validation for the Revisionist position while the mainstream historians are left pointing to a passage here and there from a speech in Posen, rather than the actual direct report sent to Himmler on the operation a few months later. To me, that speaks volumes that one side is pointing to things like "what do you mean this people" and the other side is pointing to the actual top-secret document reporting exactly what the operation was and what its results were.
There used to be a lot more before it was ordered destroyed, as Globocnik explicitly notes in the final report.
Also:
So Reinhardt involved much more than the exploitation of property.
How about hearing it from the mouth of the man who ordered it himself?
There is also the unexplained demographic collapse of eastern European Jewry, the staffing of the Reinhard camps with former T4 euthanasia men, thousands of eyewitnesses both hostile and otherwise, and massive quantities of human remains in the ground at Belzec. But the German secret police chief admitting on tape that he undertook to "wipe a people off the face of the earth" is pretty good too.
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