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Notes -
For some reason I was thinking about the OJ Simpson trial today, and it reminded me of your comment.
The most damning evidence in the OJ trial (barring DNA which was little understood by juries at the time) wasn’t the glove, or the record of Simpson’s movements, or the police interview. It was the fact that his defense could not provide any alternate account of what happened to Nicole Simpson and Ron Goldman whatsoever. Two young white (well…) people killed in brutal fashion in a rich part of LA, somewhere that would have had witnesses to on-street commotion, and zero evidence (for any alternate explanation). They hinted or gestured at some kind of gang, or a drug deal, or something related to the restaurant where Goldman worked, but they had nothing, not one shred of evidence for even the most faintly plausible alternate theory of why these two people were murdered by someone other than OJ. This from an extraordinarily skilled legal team with unlimited budget to hire private investigators, research leads and come up with theories.
Holocaust revisionism functions in much the same way. Details about the process of execution, the precise methods, quibbles with testimony, calling the veracity of various accounts in question, all mirror OJ’s defense strategy. The glove don’t fit, the police officer who found the evidence was a virulent racist who had motivation to lie to convict a successful black man with a pretty blonde wife, and the whole trial was surely just another libel against a rich black guy and, especially after Rodney King, who would doubt the hostility of the cops toward black men etc…
But there was and is no alternate theory. The best revisionists can do is, as SecureSignals does, to gesture at possibilities. “Oh, maybe they all went to Russia, changed their names and lived happily ever after”, or “maybe the Austro-Hungarians randomly overcounted the Jewish population by 400% and there were actually far fewer Jews than anyone thought in Eastern Europe”. None of these are evidenced, they’re not supposed to be. They’re mere gestures, hints, seeds of doubt, held together by a narrative in which devious Jews are permanently hostile to white/aryan interests and therefore are probably lying anyway. There is, as @To_Mandalay has said, no real alternate hypothesis; some revisionists apparently argue that Himmler was supposed to kill all the Jews but then didn’t because he was actually a traitor to the cause, which conflicts with other revisionist theories, which conflict with others.
Revisionists avoid believing in strict alternate hypotheses (for example presenting multiple options in the same book or article and feigning ambivalence about which could be true) since doing so would pin them down and make very obvious the extreme dearth of evidence they’re built upon. But it is reasonable for historians to request that they provide and defend comprehensive and evidenced alternate theories for the disappearance of European Jewry.
Why was this a big problem? Because the bodies were discovered at the crime scene. Investigators scientifically studied the scene of the crime, documented evidence found at the scene, performed autopsies of the victims in order to scientifically prove the occurrence of a murder at a precise time and location, along with a cause of death.
The physical evidence found at the scene, and immediately investigated by authorities using standard-operating forensic practices, narrowed down the possibility space of "what happened to Nicole Simpson and Ron Goldman" by 99.99% compared to the counterfactual of no bodies being found, no forensic investigation of the scene of the crime, no murder weapon, no witness reports during the occurrence of any crime.
In contrast, at Treblinka, we have no bodies, we have no murder weapon, we have no contemporary witnesses, we have no documentary evidence. There has not been a single excavation or forensic study of any mass grave at Treblinka- ever. It has not - even remotely - been proven that approximately 900,000 people were murdered at that site. In fact, there is no evidence at all that even 2% of that number of people were ever at that site at any point in time.
If there were no bodies, no murder weapon, no witnesses, no forensic investigation of any crime scene, then there would never have been a trial in the first place.
But it gets even more bizarre.
Let's say that in the Simpson case there were no bodies ever found or autopsied, or forensic evidence ever presented. Then let's say that some witnesses come forward and say, years or even decades after the fact, that they witnessed the murder and know the precise location where the victims were buried. Can you even fathom that there would be no attempt to excavate the remains of the victims in order to procure the evidence that was so crucial to the case in the first place - the evidence you just flatly take for granted in your comparison? It's beyond the pale to imagine that prosecutors would say "we aren't going to excavate the remains or provide autopsies, because that would be disrespectful to the victims."
Your comparison fails, because in contrast with the Simpson case with Treblinka we have:
In contrast with the case of Treblinka, in which the Mainstream claims that they know exactly where the mass graves of 900,000 are located but have never excavated or proven the existence of a single mass grave of any size at any point in time, there is another case of a mass execution in which sound forensic practices were utilized: the Katyn Forest massacre.
When the Germans discovered the mass graves of the Katyn Forest massacre they:
In spite of the lengths the Germans went to in order to scientifically investigate the scene of the crime, they were still accused of the Katyn Forest massacre by the Soviet Prosecution at Nuremberg, which produced witnesses to attest to the fact the Germans committed the crime. The authors of the Soviet investigation of the Katyn massacre, which falsely blamed the Germans for a crime that they had actually committed, submitted their report as evidence in the Nuremberg trial (USSR-54), and they were the same as the authors of the Soviet report on the investigation of Auschwitz (USSR-8), with the addition of Trofim Lysenko as a signatory to the Auschwitz report.
Soviet investigators denied access to Western observers during their own investigations of these alleged "extermination camps." As mentioned before, initially there were claims of "death factories" with gas chambers in both the camps liberated by the Western Allies and camps liberated by the Soviet Union. But Western observers investigated those claims and proved they were false. The Soviets denied any access to Western observers during their own investigations, and those are the only camps where those claims exist today.
I sincerely hope, at this point, you are genuinely wondering why there has never been a single excavation to even prove the mere existence of a single mass grave at Treblinka. The answer to that question is that Jewish authorities forbid any excavation of any mass graves. They use the exact same excuse as cited by the perpetrators of the Kamloops Mass Grave Hoax. Genocide deniers ask: Where are the bodies of the residential schoolchildren?:
This is the -exact- same reasoning used by Jewish authorities to forbid any scientific investigation of the alleged mass graves of Treblinka. If they excavated the site it would immediately disprove the hoax - in both cases, so they cite cultural sensitivity and denounce anyone who expects a bare minimum-standard of scientific investigation as a "genocide denier."
It's unfortunate I was banned and couldn't respond to you in a timely manner. But your example falls completely on its face for the simple fact that the Simpson case had a crime scene and bodies which were forensically investigated, and there has never been any attempt to forensically investigate any mass graves at Treblinka! There isn't even proof that the alleged victims were even at that location at any point in time. There are no bodies. There is no murder weapon. There are no contemporary witness reports. Jewish authorities forbid scientific investigation of the site using the exact same logic as the perpetrators of the Kamloops hoax, a legal maneuver which would be unconscionable if the reported location of Simpson and Goldman was concluded by prosecutors, but the prosecutors blocked any attempt to scientifically prove that the victims are buried where they are claiming.
You have no grounds to compare the two cases here, only to prove the importance of the body of physical evidence in the Simpson that does not even remotely exist in the Treblinka case.
Wow. There are no bodies?
Cremation couldn’t have been involved, perhaps?
How do you feel about the archeological efforts that have been done?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Treblinka_extermination_camp
Like, it’s remarkable you bring up the apparently fake Canadian graves, when the same technique was used at Treblinka and they found stuff.
Is what they found made up? The reinterred remains faked? The confessions of Nazis like Stangl just irrelevant?
You’re not dealing with evidence cited on Wikipedia for Christssake. Your writing here seems to implicate you’re not even aware it exists as a claim—even if you think you can show it’s BS.
Try to at least be aware of evidence you claim doesn’t exist:
https://www.nbcnews.com/news/amp/ncna66241
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/unearthing-the-atrocities-of-nazi-death-camps/
https://www.nbcnews.com/news/amp/ncna66241
It's a common misconception that performing a cremation burns the entire corpse to ash. Even a modern crematory furnace leaves behind thousands of identifiable bone fragments. For example, teeth do not cremate to ash, they calcinate and remain perfectly identifiable after a cremation. As Revisionists have pointed out:
And there would have been orders of magnitude more identifiable bone fragments for each victim than teeth for that matter. If what is claimed actually happened, even if all the victims were cremated, there would be metric tons of physical evidence which could be easily found within a single afternoon of digging.
Even in a murder case, when there is a suspected cremation of the victim involved, it's equally important for investigators to excavate the remains of a murder victim. In no case would investigators say "oh well witnesses say the victim was cremated and buried there, so I guess there's no point in doing a dig to prove that's actually what happened."
No mass graves have ever been excavated at Treblinka. You say "they found stuff", whatever that means, but no mass grave has ever been excavated from the site.
I am well aware of the studies by Caroline Sturdy-Colls, I've read through her papers. You should be aware of the evidence you are citing:
"The techniques respected the religious law" is referring to the "technique" of purely using GPR to identify a mass grave with no subsequent excavation to actually prove what the ground disturbance was. She did not find any mass graves, she did exactly what they did at the Kamloops site.
You can even see the clip on the TV special covering that investigation, where the Jewish Chief Rabbi of Poland (with a New York accent) forbids her from excavating any mass graves.
The methods used by Caroline Colls to identify the "possible mass graves" were the exact same as the Kamloops hoax: GPR results were used to call ground disturbances "mass graves" and then they were forbidden from excavating the ground disturbances based on claims of cultural sensitivity.
She did, though, excavate human remains about 1km from the site of the alleged Treblinka mass graves. She went to a marked Christian graveyard, found a few bones, and then cried on camera. No problem disturbing those graves!
The most dramatic piece of evidence uncovered at the Treblinka extermination camp was not any mass grave, it was a clay tile which Caroline Colls misidentifies as showing a Jewish Star of David whereas in reality it was the brand mark of a porcelain factory in Poland.
Imagine you bring in the TV cameras with an archaeological team to investigate a crime scene where 900,000 were murdered. You don't find any mass graves, but you find a terracotta tile and immediately jump to the conclusion that the tile featured a Star of David to lure Jews inside the gas chamber, whereas in reality it was a manufacturer's branding. But nobody watching the TV show is going to learn the truth about that tile, or wonder why they are making much ado about a terracotta tile instead of investigating the enormous amounts of physical evidence that would be right beneath them, if what is claimed actually happened.
The reality is Caroline Colls did the exact same thing as the Kamloops archaeologists: use GPR to claim to have found mass graves, but don't excavate any of the disturbances you are claiming contain mass graves. It should also be pointed out the GPR results themselves run completely contrary to witness testimony regarding the size, shape, and locations of the mass graves. The GPR results do not prove any mass graves at Treblinka, but they disprove witness testimony about them. If they actually did a scientific investigation of the site and excavated them, it would immediately disprove the story.
Like I said, there has never been a single excavation of a mass grave on this site because Jewish authorities forbid it using the exact same claims as the perpetrators of the Kamloops mass grave hoax.
Edit: Here's an update on the Kamloops situation, if anybody is wondering, from a couple of weeks ago:
It's literally the exact same script as the Treblinka case. Rely on "oral truth-telling" and refuse to excavate, claiming cultural sensitivity, because you know it would disprove the stories which have gained enormous cultural prominence based on extremely thin physical evidence.
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You assume a certain amount of jews and then assert they have to be accounted for.
You have no grounds to assert anything if the amount of estimated jews is lower than you need it to be. So we are basing our entire belief for the holocaust on the assumption that population estimates. We then grandstand on this premise whenever any specific issue is taken with the holocaust narrative.
The problem here is obvious. You can dismiss every single item of critique without engaging with it. Any attempt to bring a hammer and chisel on the ugly rock of lies that is modern belief in the holocaust gets thwarted away.
What's worse, we're pretending that we hold to a different position than the alleged revisionists. As no claims to a specific amount of jews are made. Instead we afford ourselves the luxury of believing that the number of 'missing' jews just so happens to coincide with the reigning holocaust narrative. If the narrative says numbers go down, our belief in a fixed amount of jews in need of accounting for also goes down. It's a completely onesided standard that leaves one in no place to cast any aspersions on the alleged 'seeds of doubt' being sown by 'revisionists'. Since our belief in the holocaust is completely circular. That is, we start of by believing the holocaust narrative, and then use that belief as proof that it happened.
Besides that, uncertainty is a very common thing in history, especially with regards to numbers and populations, and especially around WW2.
The early 20th century was well after the advent of modernity and modern statistics. There is no reason why estimates of the Jewish population of countries like Poland and Czechoslovakia would be off by a factor of three, five or more, which the most common revisionist theories require. It is the duty of revisionists to account for an alternate theory, either by claiming that the dead Jews never existed or, if they claim that they did exist but were not killed, by showing where they went and what happened to them. If they cannot then, on the basis of means, motive and opportunity and in the absence of an alternate explanation the default hypothesis should be that the Germans were responsible for their death.
I imagine this is an extremely fringe view even among Holocaust revisionists, but I know a few people who deny that the Germans ever intended to exterminate the Jews, because the Germans are just too civilized to commit such barbarism. When pressed about the large number of Jews who went missing during the war, they blame the Russians. Everyone knows they’re bloodthirsty and evil, and we know they committed genocides against other groups. Clearly they must be to blame.
I don’t really find it all that convincing, but it is a view I’ve encountered several times before.
But as Mandalay said, and as revisionists often gleefully claim, there were plenty of Jews in the Soviet military and broader leadership. Would they really have stood by and allowed the large scale extermination of millions of Jews on the basis of race without ever discussing it? That seems unlikely, especially if claims about Jewish solidarity and ethnic identity are true. Before Germany and the USSR turned on each other, Soviet Jews pleaded openly with Stalin to lobby Hitler for better treatment of Jews in the German half of Poland, for example.
Oh, I agree. Like I said, I don’t find it convincing, but it is a few I’ve encountered several times in the wild, always from Americans of German descent. I imagine there is a bit of motivated thinking as a result of their ancestors’ ethnic background.
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Alternative theory to what? The idea that there exists some supernatural synchronicity between a population estimate and the amount of jews killed in the holocaust? That's not a theory, that's just you employing circular reasoning to ignore revisionist arguments.
4 million people did not die at Auschwitz. No one needed to prove where they all went to correct that assessment. The fine folks at the holocaust museums did not need to consult a population estimate from the 1920's before they could say that, no, 1.9 million people did not die in Majdanek, contrary to what Soviet prosecutors maintained during the Nuremburg trials. It was more like 68k. No one knows where those guys went...
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Even this analogy is somewhat inapt; it would require for OJ Simpson to have been unrepentantly open about killing them, with the defence team meanwhile trying and failing to construct alternative scenarios regardless.
Like I've said many times everytime SS starts beating this drum, Holocaust deniers never seem to come up with a convincing way to get around the fact that the Nazis were quite happy to admit they had killed millions of Jews. At best they would feign that they had somehow been coerced, or threatened, or were just following orders.
There’s also this weird thing where so many holocaust deniers, particularly in the Middle East, essentially seem to be believe: “obviously the Nazis didn’t kill millions of Jews; wouldn’t it be cool if they had though?”
The vibe around here is more like: “obviously the Nazis didn’t kill millions of Jews; you can understand why someone might want to though.”
There are some issues where over time I’ve had to admit the hard right was more correct than I wanted them to be. On the “Jewish Question” though, well, there are just so many idiots and the tension with prominent right-wing Jewish intellectuals is funny/sad to watch. Antisemitism is Lindy but goddamn is it stupid and it’s incredible how much horseshoe theory applies with it.
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Did you kill him telepathically?
Must have since the news definitely came out after I posted this lol
He can rest in peace knowing his wife's killer is finally dead.
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The alternative theories are as follows:
Jews died of typhus and starvation en masse near the end of the war, in the same way that 200-400k Germans died of starvation in the final months of the war and the months that followed. We should expect very high starvation numbers in isolated concentration camps given that the Germans themselves were starving all over Germany, and they would feed themselves before feeding other nationalities. There’s even the question of, “these people are obviously going to starve to death, should we let them cannibalize themselves to the last man or take them out of their misery?” A lot of the infrastructure to supply concentration camps was bombed. The mainstream historical assertions about Jewish fatalities shows shockingly low typhus death rates which make no sense in light of the typhus death rates we see from the Civil War, WW1, Russians in WWII, and shipping voyage logs. Sometimes this question is answered by the fact that Germans really really cared about cleanliness in their camps, hence the delousing chambers, but this makes little sense in light of genocidal intent and the survivor testimony that confirms frequent typhus bouts.
Jewish population figures were actually accurate prior to WWII (holocaust historians claim that every figure of the Jewish population from before WWII undercounted areas of Russia by millions).
Many Jews after the war assimilated with a non-Jewish identity.
I don’t think holocaust proponents grasp how strong the motive would be to to cement a holocaust narrative. You effectively demoralize Germany, a rival nation that “caused” two wars and which historically created the upperclass of Europe. You effectively seal the moral superiority of America. If the Allied bombing campaign led to millions of starvation deaths among Jewish camp captives, this would be grounds for criticism, but instead the blame is solely laid on Germans. You bulwark against any European nationalism movement because this threatens American hegemony. You justify the creation of Israel and retcon the reputation of Jews as predatory moneylenders to “burnt offering” lambs (literally the word “holocaust”). And lastly you perfect all the neat psy-op techniques that you started in WW1, which also consisted of gas chambers and torturing people etc.
Well that’s the thing, in my opinion even the most virulent 20th century European racist would not gas family after family of downtrodden Jews. This is inexplicable when you consider (1) there were no camp whistleblowers, not even a friend or family member of a camp member who was confided in, which is improbable, (2) the elderly camp guards put on trial in Germany who have entered the “honest old people” phase of dementia more often than not assert that the holocaust didn’t happen. I don’t know, can you imagine hundreds or thousands of Russian soldiers putting family after family of innocent Ukrainians to death by gassing, women and children in all? None of them leaking or whistleblowing? And most of them, even when age has taken away their inhibitions, maintain that it didn’t happen? This is improbable to me.
400k Germans was like 0.5% of the German civilian population, "typhus" would have had to kill upwards of half the Jewish population of the region in a very short period for this explanation to make sense.
Then where are the bodies, if (as revisionists allege) mass cremations were not used? Is the argument that there were widespread crematoria but that they were only used for typus victims? Most damningly, gentile civilians in surrounding areas (subject to the same supply line collapses and bombed infrastructure) did not starve in any substantial numbers (relative). Again, it's merely gesturing at what 'could' have happened, it's not a serious or comprehensive alternative hypothesis.
On the other hand, large numbers of Nazi war criminals who would have been aware of the Holocaust and who were tried throughout the mid and late 20th century never claimed that it didn't happen, before or after trials (eg. even at times it didn't matter to their liberty) and in places where holocaust denial was not, at that time, illegal. One would expect more of them to protest their party's innocence, to claim libel.
Which exact figures, what's the number? As someone else said, Hitler himself discussed Vienna as having 200,000 Jews at 10% of the population in his youth. In 1939 Prague had 90,000 at 20% of the population, 390,000 in Warsaw at 30% of the population. Again, these figures track with the number of synagogues and Jewish schools considering religiosity and congregation size, and once extrapolated downward to smaller cities and towns with synagogues and other Jewish institutions they lead to the prewar estimate of the Eastern European Jewish population as at least 4m.
Perhaps ironically this extreme level of assimilation would be a strong argument against a lot of white nationalist arguments for antisemitism, but in any case it's an absurd hypothesis. It suggests that millions of people were separated from their families and friends, scattered all over the Eastern Bloc and then never attempted to contact eg. surviving family members in the West but also never got in touch with local Jewish communities that survived all across the region and which maintained meticulous pre and post-war records of brises, marriages, funerals and so on. Before the Iron Curtain fully solidifed in the late 40s and early 50s surviving Polish, Ukrainian, Czech, Hungarian, Russian and Romanian rabbis and other figures in the community conducted extensive population surveys of the surviving population.
So this theory involves millions of Jews who were taken to camps or fled into Russia and, despite spending their entire lives in largely Jewish communities before, never got in touch with the local extant Russian-Jewish communities whatsoever, which persisted through the whole Soviet Union. If they had surviving relatives in America or England or France or Israel, they never attempted to get in touch with them (yes, Soviet citizens could send mail to the West). They also never told their kids they were Jewish at all or anything about their family history. Many would even have survived the fall of the USSR and seen the success of Israel, and all this time they never said anything.
Why did the US only suddenly start to do this in the late 1970s, though, long after successfully turning West Germany into a deferential modern Western country under US occupation without discussing it much and while rehabilitating all but a few of the most senior Nazis? It's more accurate to see Holocaust remembrance as something that happened because of pressure from within German society, largely from students, and efforts from some survivors and their children over many decades after the war. It wasn't top down.
That's when the US started getting close with Israel, so all the ADL, holocaust propaganda, and other shit was to help cement the budding alliance through public relations manipulation, perhaps. We've seen how claims of antisemitism were used most recently to try and stifle dissent towards America's support for the ongoing 'police action' in Gaza, and various projects like the opening of new holocaust remembrance museums and movies directed by Spielberg depicting the suffering of Jews keep getting announced ever since 10/6. This strongly suggests that all of the anti-antisemitism buzz is just for propaganda purposes, not for actually contesting antisemitism (which would be bizarre if it was).
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It can be breathtaking sometimes just how much things coming out of the further ends of the right directly match up with the way critical theory works.
There are valuable insights from both postmodernism and the saner parts of the critical theory ecosystem. Particularly for an environment of mutually hostile groups struggling over the gun of state power.
As Kendi says: "knowledge is only power if it is put to the struggle for power." And these "critical ways of knowing" are the ultimate tools in the struggle for power.
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This doesn't work. Most of the Jews who were killed in the Holocaust died in 1942 - '43, well before supply lines began to collapse and starvation set in. The Nazis recorded that by this time, the General Government had been cleared of Jews.
There is absolutely no grounds for assuming the governments of Eastern Europe overcounted Jewish population to the extent that would be necessary to explain the complete disappearance of eastern European Jewry post-1945. Revisionists can say that the numbers are "uncertain" or "unreliable" but it isn't true. These are not population estimates of some ill-recorded migration 2000 years ago, this is Europe in the 20th century. The degree of uncertainty required simply does not exist.
Says who? Do you doubt Bolshevik atrocities also?
This is not true. Rumors of what was going in the east were everywhere in Germany. There is a book called The German War by Nicholas Stargardt which has a long chapter going into depth on what the Germans knew about the Final Solution as it unfolded.
This is also not true. I've never heard of a old Nazi in Germany denying the Holocaust happened. Moreoever, plenty of Nazis admitted to it when they had no actual motive to admit to it. Adolf Eichmann spoke openly about the physical extermination of the Jews while he was a free man in Argentina. Why do you think he did that?
According to the modern scholarship which is in dispute, which has no primary documents or primary evidence of the deaths at this time, and which does no archaeology to determine deaths.
You misread what I wrote. If you find pre-WWII population estimates of Jewry in Europe, published pre-WWII, as for instance in a Jewish encyclopedia, the numbers are lower than today’s estimates of pre-WWII Jewry in Europe. IIRC, by millions.
If you told me Bolsheviks in quiet camp positions had a weekly routine of murdering women and children, then yes I would doubt it. If you told me that some shellshocked war-scarred Soviet soldiers committed an atrocity after experiencing months of trauma, no I would not doubt it. In any case, we did have whistleblowers of Soviet atrocities.
I wish you would quote something from it. From a review,
With hundreds of thousands of participants, we should certainly find letters which speak to the organized and systemic campaign of killing Jewish women and children. Can you find these letters for me?
We don’t generally consider confessions made under torture to be reliable, such as the Nuremberg testimony. Neither should we consider the coerced confessions of the leaders of a defeated country who faced the risk of total destruction (Morgenthau plan) particularly reliable.
Contemporary Nazi documentation records that Poland had been almost entirely cleared of Jews by the end of 1943. The destruction of the Jews in the USSR is also copiously recorded in contemporary documents. These are the Jews in question; Jews that died in Dachau or Buchenwald towards the end of the war are a tiny fraction of the total that must be explained.
This is not true. The Polish government recorded more than 3,000,000 Jews in Poland alone in the mid-1930s. At the end of the war, there were not even 100,000. No other population in Europe suffered in anywhere near a similar proportion. There are numerous revisionist excuses for this collapse (Polish overcounting, emigration to Israel and the United States, deportation into the USSR) but none of them work. We can go into further detail there if you want, but you have to be absurdly charitable to the revisionist case at every turn for the numbers to even begin to come out the way deniers want them to.
Within the actual 'death camps' (Belzec, Sobibor, Treblinka, later Auschwitz) there was only a very small staff assigned to conduct the extermination at each camp, hundreds at the most, including Jewish prisoners forced to work as auxiliaries. It doesn't take that many armed men to murder unarmed civilians in the thousands.
Stuff still leaked though:
Here's one letter from the book (page number is from the epub; here's a link to a free download if you want to read it yourself.
Here's one, cited in Saul Friedländer's Years of Extermination (page 400):
A consul of neutral Sweden in Stettin, Karl Inge Vendel, learned about the exterminations in 1943 from his contacts with dissident figures in the German regime:
(Years of Extermination, page 460)
In 1942, OK Ostrow reported in its war diary that:
The mass shootings of Jewish civilians in the east, since they took place over a broad expanse of territory rather than in a few discrete locations, did directly involve thousands to tens of thousands of people, and thus produced many more letters and personal accounts:
(Years of Extermination, page 426)
The Italians knew what was going on:
Here's another:
I don't know if Franzl ever took any pictures, but
Some
Of
His
Comrades
Did
Then there are the Einsatzgruppen reports themselves, which helpfully catalogue the murdered by "men, women, and children."
This is mostly a meme. Few of the Nuremberg defendants were tortured. None of the defendants in later trials, such as Kurt Franz or Franz Stangl, commandants of Sobibor and Treblinka, were tortured. Nor did they have any incentive to lie, since they received the maximum penalty of life imprisonment under German law. None of this accounts for Nazis who admitted to the exterminations outside a courtroom setting.
I'll ask again:
You have posted a lot of information, so what I decided to do was pick one at random. I looked into your quote from Hosenfeld. This quote would be significant: it is perhaps the earliest admission by a Nazi officer of the conscious mass killing of Jews.
The provenance of the material is... questionable. Hosenfeld’s writings appear to be completely unknown to holocaust scholarship before the year 1999, appearing neither in a book nor in a scholarly article, not even in passing mention. The few book instances I could find on google scholar have the wrong publication date. It may appear, for instance, that page 905 of volume 9 part 1 of the sprawling “Germany and the Second World War” contains the oldest mention of Hosenfeld, but in fact this volume was published in 2012 and seems to be based on the material in the book version of the Pianist. On inspecting the book version of the Pianist, I find the following:
The book gives no account of how the letters and diary were ever obtained by the writer, but implies that they fell into the hands of a “Leon Warm”. He has no biographical details that can be found online. His full name is, allegedly, “Leon Warm-Warczynski”, and despite being integral to this story (and ironically a great amateur archivist) I can find no evidence that he ever lived. The book “the Pianist” was written by the 87 year old Władysław Szpilman, who died a year later. I am not sure if an historian has ever touched the documents, let alone examined and verified their authenticity.
We have been presented with documents that have no "authentic transmission", as the Muslims might say. So now I want to post some of the alleged writing of Hosenfeld. Knowing that the material appeared at first in a book which was an enormous commercial hit, we can consider whether they come off as authentic. Just from the writing itself. You know, does it pass the “smell test”. Here's an excerpt from our dear friend Wilm Hosenfeld:
What a focus on the commandments! We have denied God’s commandments and we will die as a result, “innocent and guilty” alike, and only have ourselves to blame for our punishment. You would think a Jew wrote this! Let me tell you why I giggled reading that excerpt. You see — and this was probably unknown to whoever actually wrote this stuff — Hosenfeld came from a family of devout Roman Catholics. His father was a Catholic schoolmaster and he attended Catholic school. His family held a strong family tradition of Catholicism. He was active in the catholic social movement “Catholic Action”. Hosenfeld was a pedigreed Christian Catholic, born when this was taken seriously (1895). The idea that a pedigreed Catholic like Hosenfeld would explain the evil of the world in terms of forgetting commandments is comically insane — that is a purely Jewish construct that isnt just missing from Christianity but repudiated. A Catholic like Hosenfeld would never see the evil of the world through this prism. If he were irreligious, which he is not given the “Christian teaching” mentioned (by the way, a Catholic would also never use the phrase "God and Christian teaching" lol), his education would have protected him from the error of thinking that following commandments earns salvation and protects against God's wrath.
We are lead to believe from this passage that Hosenfeld, the serious Catholic, saw the evil of the world primarily in terms of commandments. No early 20th century Christian would claim that the denial of commandments led God to inflict punishment on them. This line of thought could only come from a Jew. A Christian would say that a failure to follow Christ has led to sin and so forth. A failure to confess, a failure to repent, a failure to accept God's love, but never a failure to follow commandments. I can’t adequately describe how alien the thought process in this passage would be to anyone from a Catholic background born in the 19th century. “God is allowing evil to happen to show mankind” that we need God? Yet there’s no mention of Christ, of the Son, of salvation, of redemption? This Catholic believes the “innocent along with the guilty have themselves to blame for their punishment”? Nope. Sorry. This is a complete and utter forgery, I would stake my entire (completely irrelevant) reputation on the line here. This isn't the only thing that gives the gag away -- the other exerpts speak on humans "feeling the burden of our own evil and imperfections" with zero mention of Christ or forgiveness... we read phrases like "on a Sunday, when you can indulge in your own thoughts" with no mention of Mass... No.
This is an example of what we can call
gish"yiddish gallop". When there is a discussion on the holocaust, the mainstream narrative supporter can copy and paste some quotes he found within a few minutes on the first page of Google. He can just assume that they are “reliable”. The non-mainstream party has the onus to inspect the material, certainly. But this could take hours if it is even practical. Thankfully there are Russian ebook torrenting sites that permit me to illegally download such lofty and voluminous tomes as Germany and the Second World War Volume IX/I, and such triumphs of creative writing as the Pianist. Alas, I don't know if I can do more research after this one. I relent, believe your holocaust, I lack the strength.Here's Mit Brennender Sorge:
Also a Jewish forgery, no doubt.
I've read all the books I cited here, though naturally I had to go back to excerpt the precise quotes and page numbers since I don't have a photographic memory.
In short, this exchange has been:
"Provide some contemporaneous letters about the extermination of the Jews."
"Here are a few."
"Gish gallop. Also those are fake."
The very passage from which you selectively quoted two sentences begins with —
These word faith is absent from the alleged Hosenfeld writings, and replaced with a Jewish attempt at thinking like a Christian. From the encyclical:
Christ is mentioned something like 50 times, the Son 8 times, the Cross 4 times, yet commandments only 5 times in the encyclical. The encyclical does not address Hosenfeld’s topic:
This is not anything a Catholic hand would write. When Catholics are talking about why evil happens, and what happens to the innocent, they do not claim that the innocent are to blame for their punishment and “must die”. Again, there’s not a mention of redemption or salvation. In the encyclical you cite we read:
So yeah, as we should expect in the encyclical, things are understood through Christ/faith with “obeying commandments” having secondary or tertiary significance. Hosenfeld would not omit all reference to unique Christian thought when processing why countries become evil, and replace that with an exclusively legalistic dimension of obedience to rules.
This is the third time you’ve flat out misunderstood something. The first two times it was your desire to ignore and move the goalpost on pre-WWII population estimates of European Jewry. This time you are cherry picking two sentences from the encyclical which on the whole proves my point.
If you are intent on believing in this source, please show me an instance of an historian authenticating it. It appeared out of thin air in 1990 for a snappy new edition to the holocaust novel industry.
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You would be wrong to doubt it. Over 1.5 million died in the gulags, and over a twenty year period citizens were regularly snatched out of their beds, taken to the basement of the Lubyanka, and shot in the back of the head. At least 700,000 Russians were executed between 1936-1938 during Stalin's Great Purge.
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We have literally an orgy of evidence. We found the damn camps and even recorded it on video. Do you think that is fake? The Nazis also documented the shit out of their death camps.
Here yah go https://encyclopedia.ushmm.org/content/en/article/nazi-camps
The facts are indisputable, even if you think it is jewish propaganda, it is all correct.
We also have photographic evidence of bigfoot along with eye witness testimony, for what that's worth. Point being, the conversation pertains to looking at the actual evidence.
A great example of this would be the alleged death camp in Dachau. It has every single element used to prove everything the article you cite uses to prove the holocaust. Except for the fact that an SS document detailed there was no 'gas chamber' ever built at the site. So hundreds of jews who testified to American detectives about the killings lied. All the images from the camp alleging it was a death camp were not from a death camp at all. History rewritten at the stroke of a pen. Reality altered forever. Or, well, for us at least. The people executed for their participation in guarding a death camp that never was could not benefit from the correction.
You cite as evidence an SS document saying no gas chamber was ever built, I cite as evidence a US Army investigative report from 1945 that not only says "yup, there's gas chambers here, we saw them ourselves" but includes photographic evidence. Not based on the testimony of "hundred of Jews" but based on the testimony of American soldiers of the Counter Intelligence Corps Detachment, Seventh Army, who were sent to the camp to investigate and report back. They have photos of the crematoria, the gas chamber buildings, and a detailed physical description of the gas chambers themselves.
I don't see how a single SS documents saying that no gas chamber was built at Dachau beats a comprehensive US report, with photographs, saying that there was a gas chamber there.
My mistake, when I said 'gas chamber' I meant 'homicidal gas chamber'. The camp had a 'gas chamber' but it was never used to kill anyone, as was later reported, it was for decontamination. Funny how that term 'gas chamber' just gets thrown around heh...
The Counter Intelligence Corps Detachment of the Seventh Army disagrees. Page 33 of the report:
"The internees who were brought to Camp Dachau for the sole purpose of being executed were in the most cases Jews and Russians. They were brought into the compound, lined up near the gas chambers, and were screened in a similar manner as internees who came to Dachau for imprisonment. Then they were marched to a room and told to undress...There were 15 shower faucets suspended from the ceiling from which gas was then released. There was one large chamber, capacity of which was 200, and five smaller gas chambers, capacity of each being 50. It took approximately 10 minutes for the execution. From the gas chamber, the door led to the Krematory to which the bodies were removed by internees who were selected for the job. The dead bodies were then placed in 5 furnaces, two to three bodies at a time."
So we have, on the one side, an SS document (which you haven't produced, though I have been so kind as to produce my source for your to examine) that says that the camp had a gas chamber but that it was never used to kill anyone. On the other hand you have a US report claiming that it was used to kill people, with photographic evidence, and the fact that the gas chamber is still there and can be seen today, and was clearly designed to administer poison gas for the purpose of killing people. Do you have any evidence that the execution device was never used to execute people? Something that would cause me to doubt the fine men in uniform of the 7th Army?
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No SS guard was ever accused, tried for, convicted, or executed for gassing people at Dachau. No SS guard ever admitted to having gassed anyone at Dachau, under duress or otherwise. Dachau was not presented as an extermination camp equipped with gas chambers at Nuremberg, revisionist mythology to the contrary aside. The only Dachau inmate to claim there had been a functioning gas chamber at Dachau at the time (there were two or three many decades later, and to my knowledge all were gentiles, like the Polish priest Father Alexis Lechanski or the Turkish journalist Nerin Gun) was Franz Blaha, a gentile Czech doctor who claimed at the trial of Commandant Martin Weiss not systematic gassing, but that a dozen prisoners had once been gassed 'experimentally,' under his supervision.
It's entirely incomparable to camps like Treblinka, Sobibor, or Auschwitz-Birkenau where all testimony, without exception, regardless of whether it came from guard or prisoner, or whether it was delivered in or outside of a courtroom, confirmed their function as extermination facilities.
From the 'Blue Series', the official record of the trial of the major civilian and military leaders of Nazi Germany who were accused of war crimes.
Sir Hartley Shawcross, Britain's chief prosecutor at the Nuremburg Trials. Pay no heed to the other camps that are also not death camps anymore.
DOCUMENT 159-L ATROCITIES AND OTHER CONDITIONS IN CONCENTRATION CAMPS IN GERMANY
When I said "Dachau was not presented as an extermination camp with gas chambers," I did not mean "no one or any document claimed gassings at Dachau," since I mentioned that at least one (Blaha) did. I meant that murder by gassings at Dachau were not part of any official charges against anyone, and no Dachau guard was ever accused of or executed for gassing prisoners, nor did any ever admit to it. Likewise, there were no "hundreds of jews who testified to American detectives about the killings," assuming that by 'killings' you mean 'gassings.' There was a single eyewitness who claimed one small-scale gassing at Dachau. It is not comparable to a place like Treblinka, where every single eyewitness, wither victim or perpetrator, was in accord that it was an extermination facility, and where every guard who ever spoke on the matter admitted to the fact.
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So do you think the holocaust is a conspiracy? Faked?
I think there are a few elements of what we call the holocaust that are not up to scratch. But they are maintained through bad incentives.
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If this did happen this way - millions of Jews were killed by disease and starvation, the Germans would absolutely be culpable for all of these deaths beyond what might be calculated an expected amount of disease deaths in a non-locked-up population, since they had spefically closed the Jews (and others) in these camps and were thus liable for their general welfare. This would end up being simply another Holocaust narrative. Gulag camp deaths caused by starvation and typhus are generally counted as Gulag camp deaths just as much as the shooting deaths, indeed many of the most notorious cases involve starvation.
So basically we should expect camp guards with dementia to be truthful (despite having probably spent decades justifying and minimizing their crimes, at least in their own heads), but all these Jews would stridently hold on to their assimilated identities despite at least many of them being at some point eligible for Holocaust victim compensation and basically having a free pass to get the hell out of the collapsing post-Communist Eastern Europe by moving to Israel?
Some of the most popular "alternative theories" offered by denialists in past discussions have involved the Soviets conducting a genocide of deported Jews exactly like this - killing (perhaps not by gas but otherwise) hundreds of thousands of Jews in Central Asian camps with zero historical record, zero or close to zero camp guard memories of precisely this sort of an event happening (particularly risible since these guards would not be the most virulent 20th century European racists and indeed, as anti-Semites remind us, a number would have been Jews themselves) etc etc. Just vague gesturing that this must have happened since there has to be some, no matter how threadbare, explanation to the everpresent "Where did the Jews go" question, and we know it can't have been that they were killed in the Holocaust, and the Holocaust didn't happen.
The moral complaint against the Germans in such a scenario is nowhere near the moral complaint in the official holocaust scenario, even though they may still be ultimately culpable (full culpability and level of evilness are distinct things). Germans reasonably attempted to relocate Jews; any reasonable Germany would have to do something about the foreign nation living on their soil who have a history of revolution including in Germany, and who have compatriots in the rival Soviet Union, and who have never ever assimilated fully and unshackled themselves from ethnic solidarity. A Germany that didn’t place them in camps is a Germany that would likely have their munitions depots bombed. So they were placed in camps, like Japanese in America and like the Palestinians tomorrow. If you believe that Germany should have “evened out” their starvation so that if affected Germans and Jews equally, okay, maybe from the standard of moral perfection, but there is obviously less evilness here than purposefully taking lives which would not already be lost in a trolly problem sense.
Now if you mean, “America has no culpability because they are allowed to bomb a country to infinity”, okay, but this would have needed to be argued, and Jews might wonder why there was no attempt to negotiate their release in exchange for better terms of German surrender, or whether America even calculated their loss of life when they bombed railways.
Yes. You don’t just forget putting women and children to death in your 20s for years. Just like how the demented will at times confess infidelity (many such cases)
If they started families and have a new life, the isn’t an easy decision, and once old age hits that becomes harder. And do you expect the demented to fill out a complicated holocaust victim compensation plan? This isn’t a reasonable comparison. However, from my hypothesis we would see them remembering their Jewish adolescence and heritage, 100%. But I don’t know how we could measure or catalog such cases which occur in the armchair of an Eastern European home.
Right but you understand that both sides have this problem, because there has been no serious archaeological attempt at quantifying human remains or cremation remains around concentration camps. Which IMO strongly reinforces the revisionist side, because why on earth wouldn’t historians be interested in finding remains and quantifying numbers and so on?
According to Wikipedia, out of the 100,000+ Japanese interned during the Japanese internment, about 1 % died, which presumably is not that far off from the amount that would have died anyway. Even this is generally considered to be a black mark on American history and particularly on FDR's record; I can only imagine how it would be treated if it had been more like 80 % dead, even if the deaths weren't done directly. And it has been a popular argument that Gaza is a concentration camp/on the verge of megadeaths already before the current operation, if it turned out that 80 % of Gazans were dead (again, for any reason) after the operation is finished... well, it would at the very least create considerable troubles for Israel in the court of global opinion.
The whole idea that "well, the Germans just had to put the Jews in the camps" seems to be based on an assumption that Jews are some sort of a self-evident, ontological evil. The largely assimilated German Jews had not hindered the German WW1 effort in a material way, as far as I know (the revolutions that you refer to, which had both Jewish and gentile participants, happened after the Germans had already lost in the field of battle). Rather more importantly, the vast majority of Jews put to camps weren't German, they were Polish and Soviet Jews that Germans wouldn't have needed to bother one bit with if they hadn't decided to invade half of Europe. Hell, the Germans were specifically procuding Jews from other countries to put in the camps - they were actually temporarily importing Jews to their temporarily occupied territories!
When it comes specifically to immigration to Israel, they could bring their families along, and their children - who presumably would be privy to such memories from old-age people - would be the ones hearing such stories and being able to use them to justify immigration. Also, people who would have been, say, 12-18 years old around 1942-1944 would have been 58-66 in 1990, when the fall of the Soviet regime would have presumably allowed freer movement and claims application (was it possible for Soviet block citizens to apply for Holocaust compensation from West Germany anyway?) - hardly the age where most of them would have been demented.
American civilians faced no threat from Axis bombers, only a dozen or so died due to enemy action. Had any Japanese-American starved, it was either a hunger strike or a deliberate withholding of food. Meanwhile Japanese in Japan and Germans in Germany had their food supply distrupted by unrestricted bomber and submarine warfare. Even if Germans treated Jews as kindly as Americans did Japanese-Americans, a greater fraction would have died.
This argument reminds me of some who point out that diring the Pacific war a greater fraction of American soldiers captured by the Japanese died in captivity, than Japanese POWs in American custody. Sure, but while the American captors got delivered ice cream, Japanese captors were forced to eat belts and each other. To condemn Japanese for not giving more to Americans than even themselves got seems to be an isolated demand of charity.
As you point out, even the most righteous among the nations involved in WW2, the US, saw it fit to intern ethnic minority civilians. Minorities were everywhere looked at with suspicion.
This was after Japan had declared war on the US. Germany, by contrast, was not going to fight Israel, given that the latter didn't exist at the time. What threat did the various targeted minorities pose to the German people that the Germans did not invite unto themselves by invading the nations where those people lived?
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Wait, so if the Jews put all the Palestinians in camps, and then food became scarce, and almost all Palestinians civilians died but, say, only 10% of Jewish civilians died in the ensuing famine, you would say that didn’t count as probable genocide?
Letting prisoners of war starve to death is literally a war crime, a prison warden who cannot feed his prisoners has a duty to release them, and indeed Polish civilians who lived around the sites of many of the deaths had mortality rates of less than 10%, so we can ascribe the material difference to captivity.
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The Russian top-down propaganda, as well as most of the grassroots, fortunately, doesn't claim that all Ukrainians as a subspecies is a plague upon the face of earth - merely that the leadership is Nazis & American proxies.
Yet I can’t think of any case in European history where teams of thousands organized for the mass murder of women and children over a span of years. Men who were not made psychopaths from years of starving in war, but men who sat comfortably in camps. That didn’t happen when colonists invaded America. It didn’t happen in ancient history like after the siege of Melos. It is an enormous assertion to make that this occurred.
There are countless examples of women and children being massacred throughout history. The sack of Magdeburg, the sack of Baghdad, Nader Shah's sack of Delhi, the Sand Creek Massacre, or this massacre of Globular Amphora Culture women and children(they might have even been killed by proto-Germans). History is littered with stuff like this, human brutality isn't rare and it isn't exceptional.
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Ukrainians qua Ukranians maybe not, but what about Ukrainians as kulaks, counter-revolutionaries and fascist collaborators?
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