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naraburns  nihil supernum  1yr ago (text post)   35348 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of April 3, 2023

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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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