The Holocaust Thread - The Great Debate Between Affirmers, Revisionists and Deniers

[Solid Snek]

Instead there are reports like this,

Report to Hitler: "Jews executed: 363,211"

Exploring Holocaust history. Debunking Holocaust denial.

holocaustcontroversies.blogspot.com

of 300,000 Jews being murdered in Russia during this exact time period Q3-4 1942 - corroborated by local reports of Jews being taken out of specific ghettos and shot

On 9 November 1942, the leader of 10th company of SS-Polizeiregiment 15, Helmut Saur, reported that the men were employed for "guarding at the assembly point, securing the individual transports to the execution site, which was about 4 km outside Pinsk". He goes on that "10,000 people were executed. On 30 October, the ghetto was searched through for second time, on 31 October for the third time and on 1 November for the fourth time. A total of about 15,000 Jews were brought to the assembly point. Sick Jews and some children left in the houses were immediately executed in the ghetto in the courtyard. In the ghetto, about 1,200 Jews were executed." (VEJ 8, document 219).​

Holocaust Denial & Himmler's Report to Hitler on "Jews executed: 363,211" (Part II)

Exploring Holocaust history. Debunking Holocaust denial.

holocaustcontroversies.blogspot.com

That's a little disingenuous though, don't you think?

Again, as an Affirmer, I do not doubt that the Nazis deliberately targeted Jews for murder. And as an advocate for civil liberties, I think the details about the Holocaust are ultimately moot, as even if the Nazis killed absolutely no-one, the Nazis would still be guilty of using coercive force in order to deprive millions of Europeans of their liberty, dignity, and property. Authoritarianism doesn't become bad when someone dies, and become good if everyone survives (albeit in slavery and poverty). Authoritarianism is evil, full stop.

However, your link provides scans of the actual document, which you can read for yourself: Prutzmann does not say "we executed 363,211 Jews". He says that they executed 363,211 Jewish "Bandenhelfer und Bandenverdächtige" - i.e. partisans, partisan collaborators, and suspected collaborators. While this may certainly be a sneaky and cynical attempt to conceal their "true motivations" (why would the SS feel the need to do that, if this was a top secret report for Hitler's eyes only?), it might also mean that they shot 300,000+ Jewish people suspected to be partisan collaborators.

The more serious problem is that per even the worst possible interpretation, these Jews were shot, in Russian territory, at or near the front lines. These Jews were not put into trains, sent to internment camps, and gassed to death - which is the aspect of the Holocaust narrative that most Revisionists (and all Deniers) dispute. The fate of Soviet resistance fighters, while certainly horrible, and worthy of remembrance, has no actual bearing on the fate of Western and Central European Jews sent to internment camps. One might as well attempt to bolster Affirmer arguments by producing documents that "prove Japanese nationals died in American internment camps", for all the relevance Putzmann's report has on the actual debate.

 

[Rapechu]

You are not scrutinizing eg the logistics of how an organization could "destroy likely hundreds of thousands documents pertaining to resettlement of millions of Jews in Russia + get millions of Jewish witnesses to be completely quiet about it (you'd think they'd say something accidentally just like they did with the auschwitz vacation) + get tens of thousands of Russian and German witnesses to stay completely quiet about it, and keep this up for decades , through dozens of different administrations and the fall of the USSR, and do this all without leaving a shred of concrete evidence of their actions . . ."

https://kiwifarms.st/threads/the-holocaust-thread.68380/page-48

Hitler's original plan was to relocate jews to permanently settle in the east, somewhere in modern-day Belarus, but eventually abandoned this plan though he continued to relocate them east to temporarily detain them because the jewish nation was heavily involved with communism and Hitler felt that the only way to maintain state security was to treat them as suspected communists. Hitler's final solution was to relocate the jews in French Madagascar after ww2 since he had already spoken to the arab leaders prior to ww2 and they refused to let the jews into Palestine. (It's funny that after a supposed genocide that the jews had enough numbers to colonize an entire country. Most victims of genocide have never fully replenished their numbers even centuries later).

When the USSR had occupied the camps containing jewish prisoners, they simply resettled them wherever they wished and lied to the outside world about what happened to them, usually claiming they died. At least one case (the one I had posted) had been sent to a gulag completely arbitrarily to be used for slave labor. The USSR was a police state and they regularly fudged statistics (even internal statistics), and did not allow neutral third party human rights investigations into their country.

David Cole, who you had quoted, in fact, ironically, worked at a holocaust museum after changing his name to Stein. After coming back out of hiding, he admitted that he had conversations with the museum director about ridiculous and indefensible propaganda, and the director said, outright, that they know it is a lie but they have to defend it for political reasons. ("We don't want to embolden the Nahtsees"). So both sides, USSR and the west, have deliberately obfuscated events and even separated families, for purely political reasons.

Pray tell, how did you win? How do the logistics not make sense? Were there not enough trees in Europe and Russia to provide fuel for the burning of 4 million bodies? Did Germany not have not enough gasoline to do it?

I love this magical thinking where Germany can just materialize millions of tons of lumber and teleport it to Auschwitz.

This is such a convoluted cope you have going on here.

>"Where are the bodies"
"There are none because they were all cremated to fine ash and flushed down the waterway. Nevermind that the literal tons of ash would completely change the landscape, no, it just flushed away without a trace."
>"So how much fuel shipments were made to the crematories? What was the crematory capacity?"
>"Nevermind that, the Germans burnt most of the bodies in open air wood burning pits"
>"So where are the miles of defoliated forest? Where are the massive Auschwitz lumber yards? Where are the thousands of train shipment to supply logs to Auschwitz? Why were the Germans supplying far less efficient logs instead of extremely efficient coal when rail capacity was severely limited (and often bombed)?"
>"Just trust me they had the logs"

If the log does not fit, you must acquit!

Does this mean I have to simply accept the existence of a vast conspiracy for which there is no evidence?

I could ask you the same thing, hahaha.

Copypaste:

“Either we abandon the primacy of archives in favor of testimonies, and in that event we have to disqualify history as science and requalify it immediately as art. Or we maintain the primacy of archives, and in that event we have to concede that the lack of [criminal] traces leads to the inability to ascertain directly the reality of the existence of the [Nazi] homicidal gas chambers.” – Anti-revisionist French historian Jacques Baynac, September 1996 (3 years after the release of Pressac’s book).

“Sources for the study of the gas chambers are at once rare and unreliable.” – Professor Arno J. Mayer, Why Did the Heavens Not Darken, 1988.
“Most of what is known is based on the depositions of Nazi officials and executioners at postwar trials and on the memory of survivors and bystanders. This testimony must be screened carefully, since it can be influenced by subjective factors of great complexity.” – Professor Arno J. Mayer, Why Did the Heavens Not Darken, 1988.

“The consequence of the absence of any overt documentary evidence of gas chambers at these camps, coupled with the lack of archaeological evidence, means that reliance has to be placed on eye witness and circumstantial evidence.” Judge Gray, Irving-Lipstadt trial, 2000.

"Ninety-nine per cent of what we know [about the Holocaust in Auschwitz-Birkenau] we do not actually have the physical evidence to prove. . . it has become part of our inherited knowledge." (A Case for Letting Nature Take Back Auschwitz , The Toronto Star, December 27, 2009).

However, your link provides scans of the actual document, which you can read for yourself: Prutzmann does not say "we executed 363,211 Jews". He says that they executed 363,211 Jewish "Bandenhelfer und Bandenverdächtige" - i.e. partisans, partisan collaborators, and suspected collaborators. While this may certainly be a sneaky and cynical attempt to conceal their "true motivations" (why would the SS feel the need to do that, if this was a top secret report for Hitler's eyes only?), it might also mean that they shot 300,000+ Jewish people suspected to be partisan collaborators.

Yes this, thank you, you beat me to it as I was about to address this very thing. Holocaust advocates like to play linguistics games where wording is deliberately mistranslated.

The argument from holocaust advocates is that "the Germans only ever spoke in euphemisms". This is a little ridiculous because of the circular logic involved. We know the Germans spoke in codephrases because we know the holocaust happened. How do we know the holocaust happened? Because we have the documents where they speak in code!

Enough of this nonsense already.

 

[Madre Muerte]

The Holocaust is a ruse used by the Jews to gather pity.

 

[Rapechu]

Also, to give context to what "bandit" means. According to the Geneva convention (which the USSR were not even a signatory of), a country has an obligation to give certain human rights to captured POWs (though nobody really fully observed this in ww2). A partisan is expected to wear, at least, an armband or some sort of insignia for the country they are fighting for. They are NOT supposed to dress as civilians and blend in with civilian populations. Why? Because this forces an occupying army to target suspicious civilians for security. The uniform requirement in the geneva convention explicitly states that uniforms are required for the protection of civilians. The Poles are an excellent example of a people who regularly did (and didn't, just as often) adhere to this law, and when Germans captured uniformed Polish rebels, they treated them as POWs. The Red army was not so scrupulous, they frequently infiltrated soldiers dressed as civilians, or even as German soldiers, into German territory, or when an army was encircled, soldiers and officers would often dress as civilians to try to sneak back to friendly territory (more than a handful of soviet generals escaped encirclements this way). Because they were not uniformed soldiers, the German army did not label them as combatants at all, but simply as bandits because they had no obligation by international law to treat them as anything other than criminal gunmen. So if a village is knowingly harboring criminal fugitives it is their moral responsibility to hand them over to the authorities. Failure to do so indicates complicity, and necessity justifies the execution of suspects. However, rather than just wipe out entire villages because they refused to hand over partisans, the Germans had set a hard limit on the number of suspects they could execute, from memory it was 10 suspects for every German soldier killed. So the Germans were more than fair in their treatment, but some places were simply determined to hold out to the last man because they were ideologically motivated. For that matter, Poles treated Germans the same, at the start of ww2, where German women and children living in Poland were executed on suspicions of hiding machineguns in their houses (even when no evidence was found) using such spurious evidence as "we found their hands covered in oil". Strict measures taken by military are an unfortunate reality when one side decides to fight dirty.

 

[Chugger]

That's a little disingenuous though, don't you think?

Again, as an Affirmer, I do not doubt that the Nazis deliberately targeted Jews for murder. And as an advocate for civil liberties, I think the details about the Holocaust are ultimately moot, as even if the Nazis killed absolutely no-one, the Nazis would still be guilty of using coercive force in order to deprive millions of Europeans of their liberty, dignity, and property. Authoritarianism doesn't become bad when someone dies, and become good if everyone survives (albeit in slavery and poverty). Authoritarianism is evil, full stop.

However, your link provides scans of the actual document, which you can read for yourself: Prutzmann does not say "we executed 363,211 Jews". He says that they executed 363,211 Jewish "Bandenhelfer und Bandenverdächtige" - i.e. partisans, partisan collaborators, and suspected collaborators. While this may certainly be a sneaky and cynical attempt to conceal their "true motivations" (why would the SS feel the need to do that, if this was a top secret report for Hitler's eyes only?), it might also mean that they shot 300,000+ Jewish people suspected to be partisan collaborators.

The more serious problem is that per even the worst possible interpretation, these Jews were shot, in Russian territory, at or near the front lines. These Jews were not put into trains, sent to internment camps, and gassed to death - which is the aspect of the Holocaust narrative that most Revisionists (and all Deniers) dispute. The fate of Soviet resistance fighters, while certainly horrible, and worthy of remembrance, has no actual bearing on the fate of Western and Central European Jews sent to internment camps. One might as well attempt to bolster Affirmer arguments by producing documents that "prove Japanese nationals died in American internment camps", for all the relevance Putzmann's report has on the actual debate.

The location where they were killed is given, that is around Western Ukraine, nowhere near the frontlines

Yes this is a report on anti-partisan operations, and they provide figures for non-Jews and Jews killed as part of these bandit clearing activities.

14,000 non Jews killed compared to 360,000 Jews for this roughly 3 month period in mid to late 1942, more than a year after initial invasion. So 25x more Jews were executed than non-Jews.

So one could assume, that if the Jews were half the population and Nazis were treating them fairly and executing only those who were actually "bandit helpers", Jews were 25x more likely to be engaged in this activity than non-Jews.

But Jews made up less than 5% of the population (and some revisionists would say there were almost no Jews in occupied territory at this time--they had all fled), so there was roughly 20x more Non-Jews in 'Russia' at this time. Therefore, this document would suggest Jews were hundreds of times more likely to be "bandit helpers" than non-Jews.

Perhaps an argument could be made here that this was truly the case, the Jews hated the Germans so much they were willing to do anything to harm them, even Jewish children and the elderly were a threat, but any acute observer of the period knows that the Jews had largely been ghettoized and isolated from the general population since the beginning of 1941--and that the ghettos were finally being closed down at around this period, and according to revisionists they were being transferred to internment camps. How much assistance to "bandits", mostly living in the woods ,could these people really provide?

---

The use of Nazi coded language and euphemism to describe their crimes is a subject I am particularly interested in. This dates back to the top-secret T-4 program where the euphemism 'disinfected' was used to notate murder

Another famous document mentions 70,000 people 'disinfected' by 1941

So coded language is not something controversial at all and even admitted by the most 'prestigious' of deniers. Here's Carlo Mattogno in his Einsatzgruppen book, by far the longest and most exhaustive discussion of this subject by a revisionist

and again from the now withdrawn Holocaust Controversies response,

Just like use of the term 'disinfection', Holocaust related coded language was employed in top secret documents and even when the 'code' part was obvious, see Strauch's 'resettlement' pits http://holocaustcontroversies.blogspot.com/2011/10/pits-at-resettlement-site.html

I believe there was a euphemistic, perhaps even ironic aspect to the use of this language, but this is a part of the holocaust that will likely forever be shrouded in mystery.

Hope I clarified some things for you, thanks for the questions.

@Rapechu

I love this magical thinking where Germany can just materialize millions of tons of lumber and teleport it to Auschwitz.

I don't think lumber was extensively used at Auchwitz, but I'm sure they did get lumber deliveries by train. If you're wondering where the records of these deliveries are, can I ask about the deliveries of lumber or plans to build the resettlement camps for the Jews in the east, or does this only go one way?

The Reinhardt camps are an interesting case because they clearly existed, yet there is almost no documentation concerning their construction or deliveries to them (one of the exceptions is large mechanical diggers were sent there), though there is evidence they employed hundreds of people, and judging by air photos were fairly large facilities.

The mystery of this particular lack of evidence is revealed in Globocnik's letter to Himmler summing up the Reinhardt "evacuation" and "property seizure"

Title: "Document 4024-PS: [Economic Development of Action Reinhardt], Part 01-09 [partial translation]", in Nazi Conspiracy an

In addition to the camps being razed and "surveillance" farms built over them: " The equipment which was provided for this action from seized goods, which however are to be considered as Reich property, have been removed completely. For reasons of surveillance in each camp a small farm was created which is occupied by an expert.

An income must regularly be paid to him so that he can maintain the small farm."

Globocnik's letter also makes clear documentation regarding these camps was going to be destroyed: "In accordance with an agreement with the Reich Ministry of Finance, this preliminary examination is final and the vouchers and data will be destroyed in accordance with Security regulations, cutting out the Reich Accounting Office."

and: "There is one additional factor to be added to the total accounting of "Reinhardt" which is that the vouchers dealing with it must be destroyed as soon as possible after the data have already been destroyed by all other works concerned in this matter. "

--

So to Rapechu, it is clear (and evidenced) why Germans would cover up a top secret extermination program, but far less clear why they would do the same with the resettlement of millions of Jews in Russia, that in 1942 the entire world started hearing was a group supposedly being mass murdered

What happened to the hundreds of thousands of documents pertaining to resettlement that one would expect to exist?

Or are you guys the only ones who get to ask questions? This doesn't seem too fair.

Well first of all, there is a complete lack of any sort of German documentation ordering an industrialized genocide of slavs. That should be the first clue. We do know from events like the Polish Action of the NKVD (where Polish civilians were massacred) and Katyn Massacre that the SOVIETS were intentionally genociding Poles, and blaming it on the Germans. This forms the foundation for any ideas of an intentional German genocide of Slavs. The Germans uncovered the massacres during Operation Barbarossa and informed neutral investigators from the red cross (which is the appropriate thing to do when you uncover a genocide). The soviets, predictably, responded with "no... it was you!" and the Brits backed them up well until the collapse of the USSR when the whole scam was leaked.

As for the intentions of Germans, it is not a secret, Hitler publicly outlined it in Mein Kampf and public speeches, with no genocidal tones at all. Imperialistic tones? Yes, but that was the norm for the day. Look at any map of the world in the 30s and see how many imperial acquisitions France and Britain had. Hitler had always intended to liberate Russia from the communists. His moral views were that Germany had millions of people and they were not food-independent. This led to mass starvations whenever a certain island went to war with them and blockaded food exports. If he could make eastern territories protectorates of Germany then Germany would no longer be at the mercy of global superpowers (and these territories would be better off than they were under communism). So ironically, Hitler was trying to prevent a repeat of the situation of mass starvation during war time which he is accused of causing.

alert @Lemmingwise

You're right there is no order of mass murder, but there is ample documentation showing the German planned on creating an ethnically pure German state beyond Moscow.

They state quite clearly that tens of millions would have to be relocated (to Siberia? was that an area capable of sustaining such populations?) and Poland, Ukraine, Russia, would no longer exist. Many millions would necessarily die here, and certainly there would be much resistance which would lead to brutal countermeasures on the part of the Germans.

see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Warsaw_Uprising#Destruction_of_the_city


A general population reduction was seen as something favorable to creation of an ethnically pure German Empire.

So we may have some insight, for example, into why Himmler thought the death of millions of Soviet POWs in the first years of the war was "not regrettable"

At the time, we did not value the mass of humanity as we value it today: as raw material, as labor. The fact that prisoners died of exhaustion and hunger in tens and hundreds of thousands is by no means regrettable from the standpoint of lost generations but is deplorable now for reasons of lost labor.​

I detailed a few documents here that Nazi apologists don't like very much

Generalplan Ost documentation - The Skeptics Society Forum

 

[Rapechu]

It makes sense that some jewish settlements would resist especially hard if a certain soviet union had been spreading propaganda that Germans were killing them with gas chambers, and especially so if the men were engaged in partisan activities and organizing together and moving as a military unit, and if non-combatants had been evacuated. This could easily skew the statistics for a region. It is also difficult to verify the authenticity of documents produced by the soviet union.

But that's not what I'm talking about here. I am talking about Auschwitz and the gas chambers and crematories. You seem uncomfortable with this and keep trying to distract with some strawman that literally nobody is paying attention to because it's irrelevant. Auschwitz was the largest camp. If there were or weren't other camps that were comparable in size was never something I had even mentioned, nor do I believe it is true.

Nothing you are saying here produces physical evidence of mass executions of over 1 million confirmed non-combatants. I suppose you are hoping that by producing large volumes of low quality evidence and mistranslations that you can just overwhelm the listener, and I am getting tired of this. If you can't respond to my central points: the letter from the British government discussing intent to create atrocity propaganda, the insane infeasibility of covering up 1 million bodies at Auschwitz, the well-known Katyn massacre which Germany was falsely blamed for; etc. then I can only assume you have nothing left to offer but random idea thrown out as attempted deflections.

 

[Chugger]

It makes sense that some jewish settlements would resist especially hard if a certain soviet union had been spreading propaganda that Germans were killing them with gas chambers, and especially so if the men were engaged in partisan activities and organizing together and moving as a military unit, and if non-combatants had been evacuated. This could easily skew the statistics for a region. It is also difficult to verify the authenticity of documents produced by the soviet union.

But that's not what I'm talking about here. I am talking about Auschwitz and the gas chambers and crematories. You seem uncomfortable with this and keep trying to distract with some strawman that literally nobody is paying attention to because it's irrelevant. Auschwitz was the largest camp. If there were or weren't other camps that were comparable in size was never something I had even mentioned, nor do I believe it is true.

Nothing you are saying here produces physical evidence of mass executions of over 1 million confirmed non-combatants. I suppose you are hoping that by producing large volumes of low quality evidence and mistranslations that you can just overwhelm the listener, and I am getting tired of this. If you can't respond to my central points: the letter from the British government discussing intent to create atrocity propaganda, the insane infeasibility of covering up 1 million bodies at Auschwitz, the well-known Katyn massacre which Germany was falsely blamed for; etc. then I can only assume you have nothing left to offer but random idea thrown out as attempted deflections.

Yes, it appears we are at an impasse. Perhaps we should try once more, setting parameters for this conversation.

To keep such a conversation manageable, I will address a single argument of your choosing against my claim of what happened to the Jews--that is systematic murder of millions (to break this down, around 3 mil gassed, 1.5 mil shot, and around 750k from privation- I personally think death toll is a little over 5 mil) , and you will address my single best argument against what you claim happened to the Jews--that is resettlement of millions in the "Russian East".

This seems fair, no? Identical standards for both of us.

 

[Rapechu]

Yes, it appears we are at an impasse. Perhaps we should try once more, setting parameters for this conversation.

To keep such a conversation manageable, I will address a single argument of your choosing against my claim of what happened to the Jews--that is systematic murder of millions (to break this down, around 3 mil gassed, 1.5 mil shot, and around 750k from privation- I personally think death toll is a little over 5 mil) ,

Okay, go ahead and prove this then. Show me the bodies of those killed by gassing. Show me the massive Auschwitz lumber yards used for the 600,000 tons of lumber needed to cremate 1.2 million bodies if your claim is that the bodies were all or mostly destroyed by open air bonfires. In short, show me that Auschwitz actually had the physical capacity to kill and dispose of so many people. It does not. It never had. Instead it had theatres and dental offices. Nobody has ever produced physical evidence of the massive amounts of fuel or fields of thousands of burning pyres and mountains of wood. How do you so effectively hide multiple cities worth of corpses and towers of ash from burnt trees? It is absurd.

The British letter, the ideas about secret German codes and euphemisms, anti-partisan documents and testimonies are all secondary to the basic principle of "Where is the body?"

and you will address my single best argument against what you claim happened to the Jews--that is resettlement of millions in the "Russian East".

Okay I will address this claim.

Pew Research states:
In 1939, there were 16.6 million Jews worldwide, and a majority of them - 9.5 million, or 57% - lived in Europe, according to DellaPergola's estimates. By the end of World War II, in 1945, the Jewish population of Europe had shrunk to 3.8 million, or 35% of the world's 11 million Jews.

This number, for that matter, is in conflict with other sources, which are based on census data, and show a much smaller population drop, but this is a number advanced by holocaust proponents, so you shouldn't have any issues with accepting it. Claiming that all 5.7 million of these, were killed by deliberate action as civilian targets, is quite daft, when it has already been established that the majority of camps were not death camps, that many jews had been used for labor to support the war effort, that Germany had a involuntary food deficit, that jews had been leaving Germany before ww2 (EG Haavara agreement) and had been resettled to the far east in Russia after ww2 (EG Jewish Autonomous Oblast). Or that there was a highly destructive total war between 3 great powers going on.

Some jews died due to the war, either from fighting in it as combatants of the red army or other national militaries (including the Germans, who also had jewish soldiers in the wehrmacht), or as partisans fighting ununiformed, or executed for aiding and abetting these partisans, or as German laborers building trenchworks and roads on the front line, or as unintentional civilian casualties (British firebombing of residential districts, artillery shells, sieges, battles, destruction of property leading to starvation or homelessness, and other collateral damage), unintentional deaths due to population transfer (during or after the war), or as victims of the Allied blockades and aerial bombings which made food and medicine unavailable. Some jews fell east of the iron curtain where they were simply now denizens of the communist regime and may have not been treated hospitably or accounted for honestly. Many were either refugees, or emigrees before, during or after the war. We definitely see jewish populations dispersed from their original settlements, due to the mass movement of population imposed on them by the Germans, but we have not seen any loss in overall population consistent with the "6 million massacred" idea or even the 4.5 million number you are advancing, considering the fact that this leaves almost no room for actual war casualties in a conflict that killed 80 million people, including 7 million Germans alone and 26.6 million in USSR. No doubt that being concentrated and resettled didn't make things easy on the jews, and that ultimately the situation became a disaster, but this was not through German intention, and they intended to treat their jewish and POW prisoners as humanely as possible in the midst of the crisis of the collapsing war effort. The idea that their deaths were intentional or so great in number was meant to obfuscate the German civilian deaths caused by deliberate soviet actions.

 

[Chugger]

Okay, go ahead and prove this then. Show me the bodies of those killed by gassing. Show me the massive Auschwitz lumber yards used for the 600,000 tons of lumber needed to cremate 1.2 million bodies if your claim is that the bodies were all or mostly destroyed by open air bonfires. In short, show me that Auschwitz actually had the physical capacity to kill and dispose of so many people. It does not. It never had. Instead it had theatres and dental offices. Nobody has ever produced physical evidence of the massive amounts of fuel or fields of thousands of burning pyres and mountains of wood. How do you so effectively hide multiple cities worth of corpses and towers of ash from burnt trees? It is absurd.

The British letter, the ideas about secret German codes and euphemisms, anti-partisan documents and testimonies are all secondary to the basic principle of "Where is the body?"



Okay I will address this claim.

Pew Research states:
In 1939, there were 16.6 million Jews worldwide, and a majority of them - 9.5 million, or 57% - lived in Europe, according to DellaPergola's estimates. By the end of World War II, in 1945, the Jewish population of Europe had shrunk to 3.8 million, or 35% of the world's 11 million Jews.

This number, for that matter, is in conflict with other sources, which are based on census data, and show a much smaller population drop, but this is a number advanced by holocaust proponents, so you shouldn't have any issues with accepting it. Claiming that all 5.7 million of these, were killed by deliberate action as civilian targets, is quite daft, when it has already been established that the majority of camps were not death camps, that many jews had been used for labor to support the war effort, that Germany had a involuntary food deficit, that jews had been leaving Germany before ww2 (EG Haavara agreement) and had been resettled to the far east in Russia after ww2 (EG Jewish Autonomous Oblast). Or that there was a highly destructive total war between 3 great powers going on.

Some jews died due to the war, either from fighting in it as combatants of the red army or other national militaries (including the Germans, who also had jewish soldiers in the wehrmacht), or as partisans fighting ununiformed, or executed for aiding and abetting these partisans, or as German laborers building trenchworks and roads on the front line, or as unintentional civilian casualties (British firebombing of residential districts, artillery shells, sieges, battles, destruction of property leading to starvation or homelessness, and other collateral damage), unintentional deaths due to population transfer (during or after the war), or as victims of the Allied blockades and aerial bombings which made food and medicine unavailable. Some jews fell east of the iron curtain where they were simply now denizens of the communist regime and may have not been treated hospitably or accounted for honestly. Many were either refugees, or emigrees before, during or after the war. We definitely see jewish populations dispersed from their original settlements, due to the mass movement of population imposed on them by the Germans, but we have not seen any loss in overall population consistent with the "6 million massacred" idea or even the 4.5 million number you are advancing, considering the fact that this leaves almost no room for actual war casualties in a conflict that killed 80 million people, including 7 million Germans alone and 26.6 million in USSR. No doubt that being concentrated and resettled didn't make things easy on the jews, and that ultimately the situation became a disaster, but this was not through German intention, and they intended to treat their jewish and POW prisoners as humanely as possible in the midst of the crisis of the collapsing war effort. The idea that their deaths were intentional or so great in number was meant to obfuscate the German civilian deaths caused by deliberate soviet actions.

Thank you for agreeing to the parameters I proposed, let's see if this works.

Would it be ok if I phrased your argument like this, just so I can understand the essence of it?

"Holocaust didn't happen because there is no physical evidence of it and it would have been impossible to completely cover up"

 

[Rapechu]

Not necessarily that there are no bodies at all. There was certainly a crisis that occurred at the camp and many others like it that caused it to deteriorate rapidly. Most likely this is because camps were prioritized beneath military needs and German citizens for supplies. It is also very likely that there were some wood burning pits for corpses during this crisis as the number of bodies exceeded what the crematoria could handle, though this was an act of desperation, in order to maintain sanitation, rather than part of "the final solution" which had been planned in advance. After all, why would they design the system in advance to rely on such inefficient methods?

However, what I am intending is that there is no evidence of this industrialized pipeline of train -> gas on arrival -> cremate -> hide ashes. Because the available facilities do not suggest that such a scale of operations were ever intended nor does what we can see show such a magnitude of remains.

 

[Chugger]

Not necessarily that there are no bodies at all. There was certainly a crisis that occurred at the camp and many others like it that caused it to deteriorate rapidly. Most likely this is because camps were prioritized beneath military needs and German citizens for supplies. It is also very likely that there were some wood burning pits for corpses during this crisis as the number of bodies exceeded what the crematoria could handle, though this was an act of desperation, in order to maintain sanitation, rather than part of "the final solution" which had been planned in advance. After all, why would they design the system in advance to rely on such inefficient methods?

However, what I am intending is that there is no evidence of this industrialized pipeline of train -> gas on arrival -> cremate -> hide ashes. Because the available facilities do not suggest that such a scale of operations were ever intended nor does what we can see show such a magnitude of remains.

Yes helpful clarification, is this ok?

"Holocaust didn't happen because there is no physical evidence of industrialized murder in death camps [and this would have been impossible to completely cover up]

I'm just trying to get to the essence of your argument, because it is broad (which is ok), so should be simplified as much as possible, otherwise I don't know what to respond to. Should I remove the last part?

 

[Rapechu]

I would phrase it as:

"The scale and nature of available facilities and burial sites at Auschwitz do not support the official >1 million figure for deaths caused by premeditated design."

 

[Chugger]

I would phrase it as:

"The scale and nature of available facilities and burial sites at Auschwitz do not support the official >1 million figure for deaths caused by premeditated design."

Ah ha, that is a very tight argument which I hope you will not deviate from. Again this is to prevent the conversation from becoming too unruly and also to ensure I don't dodge any points you are trying to make.


My argument is a bit more broad: 'Resettlement* did not happen because the evidence for it is virtually non-existent, and such a vast event would be near impossible for any known entity to conceal so fully'

*[of millions of Jews in Russia during 42/43]

That's me. If you are ok with it, we can both flesh out our arguments. Of course, if you want to switch yours up I'll let you do that.

BTW, "official" death toll at Auschwitz by gassing is under 1 million, so I can defend any number around there.

 

[Linako 2.0]

I don't trust this chugger guy, not only through his odd condescending writing style, trying to add more arguments to overwhelm you with data (something a lot of holocaust narrative enforcers do) but also because all his posts have only been in this thread.
must be a JIDF trying hard to keep the status quo

Meanwhile Rapechu is also postmerge but he has also posted in other threads and has obvious interests beyond debunking the holocaust.

 

[Rapechu]

Yes, my main academic interest on this site is retarded mother-raping pants-shitters, which shows you what kind of person I really am.

@Chugger I'm glad that you're just getting into the debate and I wish you all the best, but I'm really just kind of looking to get out at this point, I feel like I've said my peace. I've always been interested in holocaust revisionism, but going over links and organizing information is tedious and I'm here on this site for fun, talking about this doesn't make me happy, it makes me annoyed, it feels as if an injustice has been done. You and I believe in different things, and I respect that, but I don't want this to drag on. If you want to respond to my thesis, go ahead. Yes, I am aware that I made it very difficult to disprove, qualifiers like "scale" and "premeditation" will be almost impossible to conclusively address, and that is the point. The government-backed narrative is so harshly defended, that you cannot question that the numbers are wrong, and you cannot question that the intent is wrong, often with extremely severe punishments depending on where you live. They say that it is because "the evidence is so obvious that you would have to be a nazi to deny it" but the truth is that it isn't so obvious at all, and this doesn't sit right with me.

Cheers.

 

[Chugger]

Yes, my main academic interest on this site is retarded mother-raping pants-shitters, which shows you what kind of person I really am.

@Chugger I'm glad that you're just getting into the debate and I wish you all the best, but I'm really just kind of looking to get out at this point, I feel like I've said my peace. I've always been interested in holocaust revisionism, but going over links and organizing information is tedious and I'm here on this site for fun, talking about this doesn't make me happy, it makes me annoyed, it feels as if an injustice has been done. You and I believe in different things, and I respect that, but I don't want this to drag on. If you want to respond to my thesis, go ahead. Yes, I am aware that I made it very difficult to disprove, qualifiers like "scale" and "premeditation" will be almost impossible to conclusively address, and that is the point. The government-backed narrative is so harshly defended, that you cannot question that the numbers are wrong, and you cannot question that the intent is wrong, often with extremely severe punishments depending on where you live. They say that it is because "the evidence is so obvious that you would have to be a nazi to deny it" but the truth is that it isn't so obvious at all, and this doesn't sit right with me.

Cheers.

fair enough, and thanks for appreciating my presence

I should also make it clear I think the free speech restrictions placed on revisionists are definitely wrong--and this actually is a sentiment shared by most Holocaust historians and 'anti-revisionists'. From Roberto Muhlenkamp, who is one of the main voices of the HC blog

But do these restrictions have anything to do with the veracity of the holocaust story? In my mind absolutely not--they are more the product of Jewish organizations that have to justify their own existence in fighting "Anti-semitism", which as far as problems go is not a big one at all, despite all the efforts of organizations like the NJP. It is true that the perpetrator of the PIttsburgh synagogue shooting was a holocaust denier, and this may have contributed to his decision. In this sense fighting Holocaust misinformation online might in some way (though probably not a lot) reduce likelihood of these attacks. Nevertheless my thinking is that these policies make unnecessary martyrs out of people.

The more important point I think (for those of us interested in what actually happened during ww2) is that there is no evidence that revisionists have been greatly impaired by government or private entities in their ability to do holocaust research. That is why revisionists like Mattogno brag about the archives they've been to.

And revisionists have actually found many interesting and even important documents, which is good of course. Just yesterday an article on HC blog I was reading in preparation for my convo with Rapechu, cited a document produced by Mattogno http://holocaustcontroversies.blogspot.com/2012/09/auschwitz-labour-force-reports-as.html

On the internet, you can pretty much find whatever Holocaust information you want without restriction. All of the Holocaust Handbook series are available on their site, forums like Codoh are allowed to freely operate. Private entities like twitter and facebook restrict discussion here (I myself was a victim of this), but there are other, better places you can go to. On this forum, anyone can say whatever they want.

And anyone can be questioned about anything, and theoretically they should be able to respond.

As someone who's spent a good deal time researching the subject over the past year or so, I feel comfortable addressing any question or argument thrown my way. If push comes to shove, I will even get down CSI doggy style and do some corpse math. But it's pretty clear so far (and this is how it goes with most revisionists) that they aren't willing to defend their own historical narrative.

This was the challenge I posed to Rapechu, and which I now pose to anyone else here:

Yes, it appears we are at an impasse. Perhaps we should try once more, setting parameters for this conversation.

To keep such a conversation manageable, I will address a single argument of your choosing against my claim of what happened to the Jews--that is systematic murder of millions (to break this down, around 3 mil gassed, 1.5 mil shot, and around 750k from privation- I personally think death toll is a little over 5 mil) , and you will address my single best argument against what you claim happened to the Jews--that is resettlement of millions in the "Russian East".

To me this seems a fair proposal. Is anyone willing to defend their version of history, or do some things just have to be accepted without question? It's easy to beat up on someone, even someone much stronger than you, if they don't get to fight back.

As for the JIDF accusation, it's pretty obvious that most anti-revisionists on the internet are not big fans of Israeli policy. https://www.skepticforum.com/viewtopic.php?f=39&t=28699 Since I like to stay on topic, I will let everyone in on who I think the real holocaust deniers are. How's this for a cover story

Zizek Israel and the Holocaust

www.youtube.com

 

[Lemmingwise]

You are not scrutinizing eg the logistics of how an organization could "destroy likely hundreds of thousands documents pertaining to resettlement of millions of Jews in Russia + get millions of Jewish witnesses to be completely quiet about it (you'd think they'd say something accidentally just like they did with the auschwitz vacation) + get tens of thousands of Russian and German witnesses to stay completely quiet about it, and keep this up for decades , through dozens of different administrations and the fall of the USSR, and do this all without leaving a shred of concrete evidence of their actions . . ."

https://kiwifarms.st/threads/the-holocaust-thread.68380/page-48

Considering the illegality and persecution of people that "downplayed the holocaust" in Germany the fact that people didnt speak up about it is really inconsequential. They recently jailed that 72 year old women again over facebook comments.

So the fact that people don't speak up for decades is not surprising at all. Especially if they lived with all the secret police and pogroms of soviet union or ddr.

Take another controversial subject, male circumcision. There is. No shortage of studies that show all sorts of health benefits to male circumcision. They may not be particularly robust, most of them done in africa with poor standards (like giving the circumcised condoms and teaching how to use them. Oh my god! Circumcision reduces stds!).

There was another study in canada that wanted to study the harm of male circumcision but it was shutdown midway by an ethics committee and a statement about this by the researchers made clear their disapproval and the evidence they already had showing severe brain damage being done to infants (which is further corroborated by various psych studies that compare circumcised to intact groups).

Now it's hard to give a full comprehensive position of the harm by male circumcision. Academics aren't paid around the clock to pad the legitimacy of dangers of circumcision but do a study about the merits and you have a good chance of being funded.

The environment is more hostile for the holocaust. You may give some example of academics hemming and hawing about the lack of freedom of the subject, but they don't have the courage to taint their name by talking with Leichter, or Cole, or Irving and seeing how far a study would go.

As for your earlier accusation that I don't hold equal scrutiny against resettlement, I haven't made any specific claim about resettlement, nor have I seen any unreasonable ones.

My grandfather was stuck in Japan after the war. Released from the concentration camp, but not brought back to his own island. No possessions. He ended up befriending a captain and being a stowaway on his ship. His travel wasn't recorded.

You acknowledged earlier that you had little trust for truthfulness of soviet documentation, so why is it suddenly ironclad?

 

[MelloYello]

Imagine a truth so evidently true that there need to be laws to prevent people from ever questioning it.
Questioning this dogma is a rather pointless effort.
If people are willing believe that mutilated freaks of nature are real women because authority told them as much, they'll believe any kind of nonsense.

I find it more useful to point out and mock the sheer amount and absurdity of the lies. "Lampshades and soap" being a primary example.
A narrative so baseless, even the jews no longer bother to pretend it actually happened.

 

[byuu]

I find it more useful to point out and mock the sheer amount and absurdity of the lies. "Lampshades and soap" being a primary example.
A narrative so baseless, even the jews no longer bother to pretend it actually happened.

The soap rumors are interesting because they existed years before the end of the war.
Even Himmler commented on it and gave the order to make sure no one does anything weird like that with the corpses.

A fun theory is that German officers used it as an intimidation tactic.
"Do you know what happened to the last prisoner who didn't cooperate?". Pulls out a bar of soap. "That's all that's left of him."

 

[MelloYello]

The soap rumors are interesting because they existed years before the end of the war.

That particular propaganda myth was already around during World War One.
Same old tricks.