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Culture War Roundup for the week of August 28, 2023

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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 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.