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I think that the debate over the historicity of the Holocaust is a good opportunity to discuss the fundamental nature of how we know what we know.
Holocaust deniers are right when they say that most people just accept the mainstream theories without thinking too much about them.
However, in my experience at least, Holocaust deniers are mostly wrong when they depict themselves as open-minded seekers of truth. Again, at least in my experience, most Holocaust deniers believe that it did not happen with just the same sort of religious ardor that they criticize in others.
Holocaust deniers are right that there are various questionable aspects about the mainstream narratives.
However, I am not convinced that they themselves present a more convincing theory. And this is important because, I think, in any major historical event that involved large numbers of people, it will always be possible to pick holes in any given theory.
After any event that involves thousands of people, there will probably be some people afterward who either lie about what happened for personal gain or are genuinely misremembering / hallucinating things because they have mental issues.
However, this does not mean that the event did not happen.
When trying to figure out the truth of something like the Holocaust, I think that we should realize that there is not and probably never will be, barring the invention of time travel, any near-perfect theory that covers all the evidence in a way that makes everyone satisfied.
Given that there is no near-perfect theory, and certainly no perfect theory, the question then is what theory seems to be the most plausible.
For me, what seems more plausible?
The Nazi regime, which openly hated Jews and praised political violence, and which was known for killing even their own former political comrades sometimes (the Night of the Long Knives), actually did wipe out much of the Jewish population of Eastern Europe during the time that they occupied those territories.
The Nazi regime did not. The US and USSR and various European governments cooperated to create a hoax and perpetuate it all through the Cold War, and the various supposed witnesses are largely lying.
To me, #1 seems more plausible.
A similar line of thought can be extended to, for example, the John Kennedy assassination and 9/11. With major modifications, though. For example, it would have taken a much smaller group of people to kill John Kennedy than to kill several million Jews.
I find it much much easier to believe that the "official" story that Lee Harvey Oswald acted alone is wrong than that the Holocaust never happened.
However, the point stands that just because the "official" theory has holes in it does not necessarily mean that any other theory is more plausible. One can pick holes in the other theories too.
Much of the debate over these kinds of historical questions boils down to people picking holes in the other side's theory while ignoring the holes in their own theory.
And unlike at least some people who question the "official" story of John Kennedy's assassination, Holocaust deniers rarely even bother to present a comprehensive alternative theory.
People who think that Oswald did not act alone at least often present some kind of theory to explain what happened. The CIA did it, or the anti-Castro Cubans, or the mafia, or some combination. Most Holocaust deniers, on the other hand, just pick holes in the mainstream theories without actually presenting a comprehensive theory of what they think happened.
As a side note, from what I understand, it did not even really take that many people to kill several million Jews, unless you count all the soldiers whose efforts were necessary to extend Nazis control into Eastern Europe to begin with.
Once the Nazis controlled those territories, the actual effort it would have taken to kill millions of Jews was quite small. A few thousand Einsatzgruppen soldiers, a few thousand camp personnel, and some railroad workers.
Holocaust questioners often argue "why would the Nazis have devoted so much effort to killing all those Jews in the middle of a war". And, even putting aside the fact that wanting to dismantle Jewish power was a major Nazi political aim, that question still makes little sense because the actual effort it would have taken to kill those Jews according to the mainstream theories was quite small.
I have done the math before of looking into necessary use of railroads, material, and soldiers and I figured out that even at the height of the Holocaust, the extermination campaign would have been using maybe about 1-2% of the total German war effort just on the East Front alone.
I do not feel like finding and posting the math right now, but anyone can do it themselves if they want to. For example, look at numbers for how many railroad cars per day it took to supply the German armies on the East Front and then compare them to how many railroad cars per day moving Jews to the camps would have required.
It is not hard for an authoritarian regime to round up and kill huge numbers of mostly unarmed people.
Quite a number (far from the majority, but certainly more than would be expected for an avowed antisemite) Eastern Bloc communists that Stalin put in positions of authority in East Germany, Hungary, Poland Czecheslovakia and Romania immediately after WW2 were Jewish. If Stalin was the kind of person to genocide Jews, he probably wouldn't have done so. Markus Wolf was one of the most important figures in Soviet/East German intelligence for the entire history of the DDR and was Jewish. Again, this doesn't seem like the behavior of someone who would have genocided Jews. Stalin's actions regarding ethnic transfers and his hysteria about the 'doctors' plot' were the product of what one might call an 'HBD mindset', an awareness of group dynamics as a Georgian himself. But he did not display the particular contempt for Jews specifically that Hitler did.
Immigration to Palestine/Israel before and after 1947 was thoroughly recorded. The same is true for immigration to the UK and US. Soviet Jewish communities would have noticed an influx of millions of otherwise unrecorded Jews streaming in during or after WW2; they did not. The Ashkenazi Jewish population of other countries is relatively well documented. There really isn't any good evidence that the Jews who vanished from Poland in WW2 ever reappeared anywhere else.
I don't know that I ever expected to be accused of declaring that my own people have unjust privilege on this board (if anything, it's usually the inverse!) but my point was that Stalin supposedly engaging in a secret genocide of regular Jewish civilians in Eastern Europe - as alleged by some Holocaust revisionists - is pretty ridiculous. The climate in the USSR in the crucial period 1940-1945 (actually well before peak Soviet antisemitism in 1952) wasn't indicative of an environment in which Jews were genocided by the Soviets.
Widespread legal discrimination against poor African Americans didn't occur in the United States in the 1990s, mass incarceration as a result of tough-on-crime policies saw surges in the number of prisoners of all ethnicities in the US). There was absolutely antisemitism in postwar Eastern Europe - I mention elsewhere in this thread Ana Pauker, who was definitely forced out of office (and would have been executed had the big man not died) by Stalin for being Jewish with relatives in Israel, and for allowing Jews to leave Romania as Foreign Minister. There was indeed a well-documented pogrom in Poland in 1946! This was a return to the way things had long been for Jews in the region.
So they vanished, silently assimilating into the gentile population (ironically, as I have argued, this is an excellent argument against ethnic antisemitism), whereupon they were never heard from again. Even as the USSR disintegrated and emigration to Israel provided an escape hatch for the Soviet Jews who had remained aware of their Jewish identity, these people never raised a hand. As religious freedom returned in the postwar Soviet age, they never thought to visit a synagogue or reconnect with the Jewish community their ancestors had been part of for more than 2000 years. In forty years, they forgot they were even Jewish (meanwhile Conversos in the Iberian world took centuries to shed their Jewishness), such that today their children and grandchildren have no idea what they are. It seems unlikely, to say the least.
That, I’m afraid, is precisely my point. Every single one of the examples you cite is extensively documented. An alleged Soviet genocide of Jews is not. And in any case, it’s hard for me to understand what you’re arguing for. Are you suggesting the Soviets killed the Jews or silently (and more effectively than any other state in history) assimilated them? Both are false, but they’re very different accusations.
I don’t claim there was any preferential treatment, only similar treatment to the majority of those other ethnic groups, who were not subject to genocide even if they were subject to persecution.
Alright, but in future, please clearly state your claims when making arguments on The Motte, it helps everyone participate!
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compare Katyń Massacre, where Russians tried to frame Germans (events included Germans supporting war crime investigations and propagating info about actual war crime, for maximum irony)
(though I am really dubious whether they had either motivation, means or ability to do and succeed with Holocaust, I have seen no evidence whatsoever for that)
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It is true that Soviets were to some extent anti-Jewish after Stalin purged many of the Jewish Old Bolsheviks. However, any argument that one can make for how the Soviets were anti-Jewish is true much more for the Nazis. However much anti-Jewish Stalin might have been, as far as I know there is no good evidence that he was anywhere close to having been as anti-Jewish as Hitler.
It is not out of the realm of possibility that the Soviets murdered a bunch of Jews during and right after World War 2, but given that the Nazis were like 10 times more anti-Jewish than the Soviets in their political rhetoric, it seems to me that if either of the two regimes killed millions of Jews, it is much more likely that the Nazis did than that the Soviets did.
I mean, for however anti-Jewish Stalin might have been, the fact is that his regime employed many Jews even after the purges. The same cannot be said, except maybe for a few isolated cases, about Hitler's regime.
1930’s https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polish_Operation_of_the_NKVD
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I don’t think the history of the holocaust is any different than any other event in history. Most of it, for the lay public are believed without looking for evidence. Nobody’s out demanding proof of Lincoln actually being shot in Ford’s theater. Or whether Hamilton was shot by Burr in a duel.
For professionals, there are always journals, pictures, and physical evidence to seek, and tbh I’m not sure how closely the public perception of history matches what the average person thinks they know about history. I’m pretty sure large numbers of Eastern European Jews were killed by the Nazis. I’m not sure where the exact number lies, but I’m not sure an exact number matters. I’m also positive that a lot of the post war publicity around the even wasn’t just aimed at “killing people is bad” (which it obviously is) but in creating a founding myth for the new order of NATO and Atlanticist Allies, basically casting ourselves as heroes for fight genocidal maniacs and making the world safe for democracy and freedom. History, any history is complicated.
I does. If one reduces the number of victims to under million and reframes extermination camps into working camps with terrible conditions in which it was easy to get executed and you know they happened to be in the pale of settlement that was the main battlefield of the war - suddenly it ceases to exist as a moral pillar and turns into - nazis are just communist but without scale and ambition ...
Well, yeah, which is why the most hardcore Holocaust deniers typically reframe casualty numbers to 320,000-600,000, they don't stick with 4 million because 4 million would still unambiguously be a deliberate genocide of Jews in particular.
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If you are trying to assess the prior probability you would want to consider the fact that the "official narrative" claims what were without a doubt the most unusual events in WW-II and perhaps the most unusual series events in all of human history. Sure, there has been "genocide" before, but the claims about millions of people being transported across a continent so they could be tricked into gas chambers on the pretext of taking a shower, then gassed with Zyklon B, then buried, and then later unburied and cremated on open-air pyres within a few months, then reburied... It's hard to believe when you think about it fairly.
Or, this narrative was coarse atrocity propaganda, like the nearly identical "German corpse factory" propaganda in WWI. In contrast with that earlier atrocity propaganda, which the British admitted was a lie and apologized for after the war, Hollywood and the apparatus of Stalinist propaganda joined their efforts in engraining this atrocity propaganda as a quasi-religious, modern-day Exodus narrative exploited by the US for the purposes of denazification, the USSR, and of course above all the Jews.
To me, #2 seems much more plausible, and the lack of contemporary documentary evidence and physical evidence makes it much more so. The reliance on post-war witness testimony as evidence should be highly suspicious to anyone who appreciates how unusual the actual claims made by Holocaust historians are.
Witness testimony is notoriously unreliable, over 50% of the accused confessed in the Salem Witch trials and almost all who confessed were spared execution. The lack of documentary and physical evidence for these extraordinary claims is too glaring to be ignored by any reasonable person.
Edit: One more thing I want to add. An observation made by A. J. P. Taylor in The Origins of the Second World War discusses how in the immediate aftermath of WWI, the prevailing narrative placed singular war guilt on Germany with no room allowed for nuance. But, over time as tensions cooled from the immediate aftermath of the war, there were many historical revisions within the perspective of the causes for WWI that shifted far away from that original post-war narrative to where it stands today, which does not place all the war guilt on Germany. Taylor notes, in contrast, the narrative that congealed in the immediate aftermath of WWII remains completely unchanged decades later.
I find it believable that, in the same way there has been no revision to the completely black-and-white anti-German perspective on the origins of WW-II, there has likewise been no revision to the atrocity propaganda that is foremost used to justify that perspective. They are inexorably tied together. My point is that there were many incentives for the Holocaust narrative to take hold, and many incentives for it to remain, lest the perspective on the origins of WW-II become revised along a similar trajectory as our understanding of the origins of WW-I.
Moldbug said recently, paraphrasing, "everything you have been told about WW-II is a lie, except for the Holocaust." What are the chances of that statement being true? Very slim.
"across a continent" was usually just a few hundred kilometers and it's not like it would have been hard for a state that was supplying three million soldiers with food, ammunition, and replacement parts a thousand kilometers away from Berlin to move the Jews and the tiny amounts of stuff they were allowed to take with them even if it had been across a continent. "tricked into gas chambers" was actually "forced into gas chambers one way or the other, with maybe a fig leaf of plausible deniability to make it easier to control the victims".
Whether they tricked Jews into gas chambers or not, the Nazis had good pragmatic reasons for putting at least some veil of secrecy on top of what they were doing to the Jews. The German public were largely anti Jew as far as I know, but many would have been outraged by the idea of literally killing all of them. Also, Hitler was constantly hoping to reach a peace agreement with the Western powers, which would have been complicated had his solution to the Jewish question become unquestioned international knowledge.
The anti-German propaganda in WWI never accused them of anything even close to the scale of what the Holocaust is supposed to have been. It is harder to believe that the Allies would have bullshitted about something the scale of the Holocaust than that they would have bullshitted about something like supposed German atrocities in Belgium during WWI.
Also, as far as I know, the Holocaust was not even a major element of Allied anti-Nazi propaganda during WW2, that came later. So there is another difference which calls into question the supposed parallels.
A very plausible explanation for why the anti-German post-WW2 narrative has endured longer than the anti-German post-WW1 narrative is that simply put, the average person, whether a random peon or a member of the elite, just genuinely does feel that Hitler's government was more morally outrageous than the Kaiser's government.
If Treblinka "witnesses" were to be believed, they genuinely believed they were taking a shower. One of the few witnesses to Treblinka, a Jew, testified that he gave haircuts to the Jews inside the gas chamber and they didn't know they were going to be killed. Does that make any sense at all? No, but it's what he claims.
We know Soviet investigators bullshitted 1.5 million people murdered at Majdanek in 7 gas chambers, months before they rolled into Auschwitz and made the exact same claims with the exact same body of evidence.
We know the Americans bullshitted about gas chambers at the Western camps they liberated. The Americans brought in Hollywood directors to film concentration camp footage, and in the film they submitted as evidence in Nuremberg they bullshited a homicidal gas chamber at Dachau. To the minimum credit of the Western Allies, they soon after abandoned all claims of gas chamber extermination in the camps that they liberated, and those claims only persisted in those camps liberated by the Soviets, where Western observers were denied access for investigation. Though, for years, the Dachau museum had a sign that bizarrely read "gas chamber disguised as a shower room -- never used as a gas chamber."
We can even see here that Simon Wiesenthal bullshitted about 5 million non-Jews being murdered in the Holocaust, in order to psychologically manipulate Gentiles into caring about Jewish suffering.
All of the things you have said the Allies wouldn't do, they absolutely did, and you grossly underestimate the capacity and motive for mass deception.
These are also both points against a motive for the alleged operation. In Germany the euthanasia program was abandoned because of public unpopularity. The story goes, the Germans carried out their secret gas chamber extermination program purely out of racial hatred, at great risk during a time it was fighting a war for its own survival, and against all logic. Revisionists contend the "Final Solution" was the deportation of the Jews from the European sphere, and there's no real reason why they would have switched from deportation to secret gas chamber extermination. There is certainly no documentation pointing to a change in policy, and there's no strategic reason for it, and many strategic reasons it would have been a very bad idea.
You think the cart is driving the horse? Public opinion is molded by these grand narratives, and the Holocaust and gas chambers disguised as shower rooms is the biggest grand narrative to come out of WWII. That would be consistent with my suggestion that Holocaust Remembrance has been sacralized, in part, to prevent historical Revisions that would give a more balanced perspective of that conflict, and dare I say, attribute a measure of war guilt to the United States and Great Britain. That narrative was an essential part of de-nazification and it continues to be considered an important narrative in preventing re-nazification, at least according to its most zealous proponents.
There is no evidence for deportation because the vast majority of the pre-war Eastern European Jewish population vanished between 1941 and 1945, never to reappear. They didn't go anywhere, not to the Soviet Union (where Jewish communities noticed no great postwar influx), certainly not to Israel (where immigration records were well-kept1 and the majority of early immigration was of Arab Jews), and certainly not to the West (where again, immigration records and records in Jewish communities were well-kept). They never attempted to contact their lost relatives. The younger ones never tried to move back to the West or Israel after 1991 even though many would presumably have survived until then.
1 For example, approximately 120,000 Polish Jews made Aliyah to Israel between 1945 and 1948. The prewar Polish Jewish population was estimated at 3,000,000-3,500,000.
As @Stefferi says, there isn't a coherent revionist explanation for what happened to the extremely well-documented Jewish communities of Eastern Europe after WW2. Survivors undertook surveys of what remained in 1945 and 1946 and found the vast majority had died. This is evidenced by the fact that revisionists cannot really agree on whether the majority of Eastern European Jews either never existed in the first place, did exist but died in other ways that were not intentional genocide (unlikely given vast disparities in civilian casualty rates between Jews and gentiles even when controlling for geography) or did exist but 'left' mysteriously to the Soviet Union or elsewhere at some point between 1939 and 1946. Many believe in all three depending on what is convenient.
And there's an element of ridiculousness to some of the claims, too. The trauma of internment leading to exaggeration or even fabrication is one accusation, and one that has historical precedent. But the idea that all these Eastern European Holocaust survivors invented, out of whole cloth, dozens of extended family members, a half dozen dead siblings, dead uncles and aunts, dead children in some cases, when they were secretly only children or something seems truly absurd.
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