To_Mandalay
2yr ago
an operation that is completely void of documentary evidence or witness account
There's next to no documentation for anything regarding the day to day operations of Belzec, Sobibor, or Treblinka, since Himmler and Globocnik had most of it destroyed. And as usual, for some reason Mattogno insists that wood was the only possible fuel that could have been used.
Are you familiar with any contemporary reports of the raging infernos that would have been burning hundreds of cords of wood on a daily basis to cremate thousands of people per day, every day?
I presume you specify "contemporary" reports to exclude any reports made after the end of the German occupation, which to me raises the question of to who locals should have made these reports to in 1942 and '43. The Nazis?
We can compare the result to the testimony of Rudolf Reder, the principal witness to the alleged extermination at Belzec
The function of archaeology is to corroborate or correct eyewitness and documentary evidence. This is like saying that when they found the Titanic and confirmed the ship split in two before sinking this should have been a blow against the "official story" which up until then had the ship sinking intact.
Your estimate of 3,000 people in Pit 5 is based on nothing and pulled from thin air.
Pit is 32 long, 10 wide, and 4.5 meters deep. Kola measured a crematory layer 1 meter deep. Chop the 1.0 meter in half and that's a 0.5 meter thick crematory layer. If a human body leaves 0.0421667 cubic meters of ash (Mattogno's number), then it's roughly 0.5 x 10 x 32 / 0.0421667 = 3,794 people. Assuming Kola overestimated the size of the crematory layer by half. And there were more crematory layers in grave 5 alone, this was just the thickest one.
Even if there were "only" tens of thousands of cremated people in the ground at Belzec that is enough to refute the transit camp idea.
500,000 short of what is claimed by mainstream historiography.
Höfle telegram has 430,000 Jews shipped to Belzec by the end of 1942, after which Belzec pretty much ceased operations, so 600,000 is much too high.
However, none of the numerous local witnesses interrogated by the investigative judge of Zamość between the end of 1945 and the beginning of 1946 ever saw such an enormous flow of trucks and/or trains full of firewood
Neither is there a single witness to trains leaving Belzec full of deportees bound eastwards (though there are plenty of witnesses to the opposite; trains coming in and leaving empty), but for Mattogno's thesis to stand several such trains must have left daily in full view of all the locals.
To_Mandalay
2yr ago
I didn't think there was much rhetoric.
This is a discrepancy between different sources.
Not all sources are created equal. I presented several sources to counter Sanning's single source (which is a huge outlier numerically, while the rest of the sources are in the same ballpark, which casts some doubt on it from the start). If 100,000 Jews left Poland each year, this would be reflected in the growth of the Jewish populations of Palestine and the US, but it isn't. Emigration from Poland also dropped sharply after the onset of the Great Depression.
But actually that's all besides the point: since I wrote that piece, someone let me know where Sanning's source got the "100,000 per year" figure. It apparently comes from the Universal Jewish Encyclopedia of 1942, which refers to 100,000 emigrants per year from the Jewish "zone of suffering" which consisted of central and eastern Europe in general, not Poland specifically. So actually Sanning is just lying about his sources again.
Another example of this sort of thing being that the Polish government can matter of factly undercount the numbers of jewish births by up to 60-some percent and that's completely normal.
It is much easier to be born in a Jewish shtetl unnoticed than to get on a ship to Palestine or the US unnoticed.
If your standard for history is "well this source says one thing but this source says another," without any attempt to discriminate between the quality of various sources, you can't do history at all.
To_Mandalay
2yr ago
His opinion has no bearing on the actual policy, his complaints suggests he was not aware of any top-secret plan to kill all the Jews.
If he was protesting a plan to deport several million Jews into his domain he would complain about that, not one transport of skilled workers.
at no point in any of this correspondence does either party hint at the extermination policy you are alleging
The entire first half of the letter is Kube talking about the tens of thousands of Jews he has killed over the past few weeks to make Belarus Jew free.
There was no attempt at all to quantify the amount of human remains. Mass graves are known to have burial density of as low as 1-2 bodies per square meter, but the claimed burial density of the Holocaust mass graves are unrealistically higher than that.
One of the graves at Belzec, Grave 5, had the dimensions of 32 x 10 x 4.5 meters. The crematory layer was 1.00 meter thick (a quantification). Even assuming that the extent of the crematory layer is overestimated by half, that would still be the remains of some 3,000 people in this one grave out of dozens. There is no reason for a transit camp to have several tens of thousands of cubic meters' worth of burial pits.
To_Mandalay
2yr ago
Kube says that he wants to completely eliminate Jewry in White Russia once the Wehrmacht no longer has a need for skilled Jewish workers. He also says that the danger the Jew poses outweighs even his worth as a skilled laborer. This is completely incompatible with the supposition that Kube was in fact anticipating hundreds more transports of economically worthless Jews.
The 60% of non-laboring Polish Jews were not sent to work camps in the east, nor were they sent to the ghettoes which ceased to exist in 1943.
He verified no such thing, as was shown by Mattogno.
Mattogno didn't show that. If you sink a drill into the ground at regular intervals within a circumscribed plot of ground and come up with ashes every time, it's because the pit underneath is full of ashes. Insisting otherwise is like saying if you stick your hand into a sack of marbles five times and come out with a handful of red marbles every time you can't conclude the bag is full of red marbles, you have to spill the bag and count every single marble. There's nothing wrong with Kola's results or his method, and they are the same methods used to investigate Soviet mass graves at Katyn and Kommunarka. This idea that "you have to dig up the mass grave and count every skull or else there's no mass grave there" is totally wrongheaded as demonstrated by the hundreds of mass graves of Stalin's terror and the Cambodian genocide and other mass killings that are universally recognized as mass graves despite having never been excavated.
To_Mandalay
2yr ago
Himmler ordered the liquidation of the eastern ghettoes in summer 1943 while Sobibor and Treblinka were still in operation. You don't liquidate deportation destinations while you're deporting people there.
Wilhelm Kube complains about a single transport of 1,000 Warsaw Jews sent to work at a Luftwaffe plant, because he says he just cleared his district of Jews, so why are they sending him new ones? He would not say this if he knew the plan was to dump millions of Polish and western Jews on his doorstep. Obviously this was not the case.
The point is that it is demonstrable that Jews were separated piecemeal across tens of thousands of camps and used as a mobile labor
Obviously the 60% of Polish Jews that were non-laboring were not sent to random work camps all over the eastern front.
On the other hand, you claim to know the precise GPS coordinates of where every single one of 1.5 million+ Jews were murdered and are buried, but 0% of those remains have ever been identified in scientific excavation.
Andrzej Kola verified the presence of huge quantities of human ash in the ground at Belzec, Mattogno's cope arguments to the contrary aside.
To_Mandalay
2yr ago
If you look at the maps you linked, you will see that the camps are mostly concentrated in the territory of the former Polish Republic and thin out rapidly the further east you go. Anyways, Himmler ordered the ghettoes in the occupied east liquidated in 1943 so obviously Polish and western European Jews weren't deported to ghettoes that didn't exist anymore. That same year he ordered that no Jews were to remain in the GG except absolutely essential workers, so they weren't there either.
To_Mandalay
2yr ago
When people were kept in concentration camps, they were recorded as such. The Nazis kept records of inmate population at places like Auschwitz and Dachau which makes sense because you want to have a good idea of the size of your labour pool.
What happened in 1942 - 43 is that the Polish General Government was cleared of Jews. As surviving documents attest, 2,000,000 were deported to three camps: Belzec, Sobibor, and Treblinka. These camps were not like Auschwitz or Dachau, they were tiny little outposts in the Polish countryside, not big enough to accommodate ten thousand prisoners, let alone the hundreds of thousands they received. After this point these Jews disappear from Nazi documentation and from history. Revisionists want to claim that these camps were 'transit' centers by which the deportees were resettled in the "Russian east" but the problem is that there is no evidence, testimonial, physical, or documentary for the massive logistical effort that such a resettlement would have entailed. The paper trail ends at Treblinka, so to speak. That's what I mean by "disappear." It's well-documented that these people wound up in these places, but after that there's only a gaping hole in the historical record. Unless you account for the hundreds of testimonies from guards and prisoners at these places identifying them as extermination camps, and the huge quantities of human ash found by more recent archaeological investigations.
I have talked about this before on this board but Sanning's analysis is total nonsense and by extension so is Faulk's. I actually did a long-form write-up of the question a few months ago, but the short version is Sanning dishonestly juggles numbers to force pre-war Jewish demographic numbers down by several millions, grossly overestimates the numbers of evacuees moved eastwards by the USSR, and just generally lies a lot. This isn't like talking about the pre-Columbian Americas where population estimates can differ several times over; and demographic uncertainty in this case is not nearly great enough to rescue the revisionist thesis.
Here's a particularly egregious example. In the latest edition of Sanning's book he says the following:
By the end of January [1946] the flow of [Jewish] refugees into the American zone reached such proportions that it was estimated more than 600,000 persons would be interned in displaced persons camps by March.
His source is here on page 308, and he has inserted "1946" and "Jewish," which makes sense because if you read to the very next page you see that this 600,000 number applies to DPs in general, Jewish or otherwise, and that the number of Jews specifically in the American zone by March of 1946 was not even 50,000.
Revisionism basically just consists of lying like this writ large in more or less obvious ways.
I remember AltHype's videos being huge on YT back when I was in HS and thinking that he certainly seemed like a smart guy since I sure didn't understand the first thing about genetics or psychometrics, but now that he's trying to engage the history of WWII I'm updating substantially towards him being a dumbass.
To_Mandalay
2yr ago
The problem with this is that the majority of Jews in question "disappeared" in 1942 - 43 which was well before German infrastructure began falling apart.
To_Mandalay
2yr ago
Weber, along with David Cole and David Irving, who were all pretty heavy-hitters in the revisionist scene back in the 90s, have all accepted the reality of the extermination program for some time. I'm not sure about Weber, but Cole and Irving, also accept 'limited' gassings at Auschwitz. For this reason among others the IHR has kind of fallen out of favor with most deniers. CODOH has more or less taken its place. 'Scholarly' Holocaust denial these days is basically just Carlo Mattogno who puts out a book like every two months (though to be fair large chunks of his books tend to be copy-pasted from his older books), with a little help from Jürgen Graf and Thomas Dalton. As you say, there's also Jim Rizoli I guess but he's a total clown. Ryan Faulk (the Alternative Hypothesis) is also dipping his toe into denial lately but he's not doing a very good job of it.
Interestingly there's actually something of a laundry list of 'former deniers.' Eric Hunt (a schizophrenic who once tried to kidnap Elie Wiesel) was probably the biggest name in denial in the early 2010s because of a number of revisionist documentaries he produced which got a lot of exposure on youtube back before they banned all that stuff. In 2016 he caused kind of a stir when he decided that the Holocaust happened after all and revisionism was bankrupt. There's also Jean-Claude Pressac who was sent to Auschwitz archives by French denier Robert Faurisson in hopes of disconfirming the extermination once and for all and instead ended up convinced that it actually happened. There was a pretty prolific/well-known blogger and poster on the various denial and anti-denial forums back in the day who went by "the Black Rabbit of Inlé" and who also ultimately decided that the evidence supported an extermination program.
To_Mandalay
2yr ago
Well, SS is correct on this point. The question is not whether the Jews were threats to Germany but whether the Germans perceived them as such, which they did. The existential threat that Jewry supposedly posed to Germany was the justification for all of the anti-Jewish measures up to and including the Holocaust (as Himmler put it, "we had the right to kill this people that wanted to kill us"). That said, because the Jews were viewed as such a menace, the Nazis concentrated them in ghettoes where they could keep an eye on them. This concentration was explicit Nazi policy, and as soon as the German Army conquered Poland, Heydrich issued orders for Jews to be cleared from the countryside and concentrated in a few large cities.. Sprinkling them piece-meal out over the eastern front, directly in the rear of the embattled German Army, makes absolutely no sense and is in direct contradiction to established Nazi policy. There is also no evidence for it.
To_Mandalay
2yr ago
What's a next suggestion, that Stalin somehow accepted ~ 2 million assorted European Jews who didn't speak Russian in some sort of very sneaky prisoner transfer ?
To_Mandalay
2yr ago
Liberalism didn't exist in feudal Europe. But someone like Thomas Jefferson, a slaveholder, was certainly a liberal by the standards of his time (and a pretty radical one), though he'd be barred from any liberal political party today (and most right-wing ones). Even if you wanted to measure Bush or Reagan against other contemporary world governments, it isn't as though there were a surfeit of openly fascist regimes on the world stage, since the end of WWII the vast majority of world governments at least pay lip service to democracy and liberal constitutionalism. Though I wouldn't disagree that there are and were politicians who were more right-wing than Bush and Reagan, sure.
We can actually compare governments between countries and time periods.
To an extent, yes. But at a certain point certain political perspectives become so marginalized and irrelevant that to insist they be used as anchor-points for the definition of the political spectrum is to treat "left" and "right" as platonic ideals rather than convenient labels. If someone is going to argue that say Eric Zemmour isn't really right-wing because he doesn't advocate for the restoration of the Bourbon monarchy and the reinstitution of manorial dues that would just be ridiculous.
To_Mandalay
2yr ago
Okay, replace "immediate full communism" with "Soviet socialism," then. The point is Bush really was right-wing and Obama really was left-wing in the context of the 21st century United States, because those terms are relative, despite the fact that things could always be right-er (or left-er).
If twentieth-century European fascism is your ideal, I don't think that much recommends full right-wing governance, but I suppose that's a matter of taste.
To_Mandalay
2yr ago
This is the mirror image of a marxist who insists nothing short of immediate full communism is real leftism, and therefore there has never been any real leftist government.
Right and left are relative. Even Mussolini was not especially right-wing by the standards of pre-French Revolution Europe.
To_Mandalay
2yr ago
That doesn't mean Cajuns in the 40s knew that. I had an immigrant teacher from Latin America in HS who told me how his parents spoke only English at home to Americanize the children better, so that by the time he was an adult he couldn't speak Spanish.
To_Mandalay
2yr ago
I'm pretty sure he's saying that the Global Yudkowskian Air Regime will forcibly retard and then roll back AI development until we reach early 2000s levels and continue there indefinitely.
To_Mandalay
2yr ago
I've seen some writings indicate that Korean War was one of the most widely popular and unopposed wars in American history, with even most leftists supporting it (apart from CPUSA, of course, but it was at a very low point in public support or indluence), but what little opposition existed was mostly among the Right.
This may be true, I admit I have read next to nothing about domestic opposition to the Korean War. But I would be interested in reading any recommendations that you have.
You're certainly right about the south having traditionally been the most martial region of the country. Even today the south contributes a disproportionate share of recruits to the US military. While as I said, opposition to intervention in WWII was largely conservative-shaded, a snarl is that the south was the most vociferously pro-Allied and anti-Axis region of the country.
To_Mandalay
2yr ago
As I recall, opposition to NATO intervention against the white, Christian serbs was also largely leftist, to the extent that it existed (certainly it was much smaller than the anti-Iraq movement and did not draw in mainstream Democrats. But then again mainstream Dems were all for Iraq too until later).
For example, here's an article from 1999 by leftist journalist Alexander Cockburn for Counterpunch denouncing Clinton for 'blowing little children to pieces'. Though he does note at the end the opposition that also existed from paleocons like Pat Buchanan.
To_Mandalay
2yr ago
Not coincidentally, many American pro-war/ant-fascist leftists immediately became anti-war upon the signing of the Hitler-Stalin Pact, and then became pro-war again when that pact was broken.
In fairness, this phenomenon was mostly limited to actual card-carrying capital-C Communists.
Molotov-Ribbentrop nuked the Popular Front. The CPUSA had done a pretty good job burnishing its credentials with left-liberal Americans of more moderate bent through the 30s through its tactical support of the New Deal and anti-fascist activism, especially lobbying on behalf of the Spanish Republic during the civil war. The CPUSA had become 'respectable' by the end of the 30s. But after M-R most of the unaffiliated liberals and leftists that had been part of the Popular Front kept on being pro-Roosevelt, pro-Allies, and anti-fascist while the CPUSA spent an awkward two years denouncing the war and the Allies which quickly burned most of the goodwill it had accumulated over the past decade. In Maurice Isserman's Which Side Were You On he talks about how a lot of communists were actually perversely relieved when Hitler attacked Soviet Russia because it meant Moscow was going to let them be anti-fascist again.
Right-Wing and Left-Wing Wars
For the greater part of the twentieth century, being "anti-war" was strongly associated with the left, to the point where even identifying as "anti-war" was enough in the eyes of most people to brand you as a left winger. Though every war fought by the US since the foundation of the country has seen an anti-war movement spring up in opposition (of varying size and significance), the anti-Vietnam movement has a special place in American national memory, and opposition to Vietnam was massively left-coded. A few years earlier, Korea did not similarly divide the nation, seeing as it was a much quicker war and one waged in a much less turbulent time, but even so what opposition there was to intervention in Korea was decidedly left-wing. The initiation of the GWoT seemed to confirm this partisan divide, with those who opposed the invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq being, again, overwhelmingly left-liberal. I would venture to say nothing defined an early 2000s leftist so much as, and nothing was more non-negotiable for one's participation in the American left of that time, than opposition to Iraq.
Lately, with Ukraine, there is a change. Ukraine is of course not a 1:1 analogue to Vietnam or Iraq, not in the least because no actual US troops are engaged on the ground and don't look likely to be. But while the great majority of Americans are at least sympathetic to Ukraine and want them to win, the emerging trend is that gung-ho support of Ukraine and support for military aid to Ukraine are increasingly left-Democratic coded, and opposition to such aid is increasingly right-Republican coded. While actual pro-Russia sentiment is extremely fringe in the US, to the extent that it does exist it is mostly right-wing.
This baffles some who the 20th century conditioned into a belief that the left is always "anti-war" and the right is always "pro-war" but a broader look should disabuse one of the notion. In fact the pattern does not hold before the 50s.
Opposition to intervention in European affairs in the 1930s and then to entry into WWII was distinctly conservative. This was not entirely the case, and it's certainly not true that most (not even close) isolations were fascists or fascist-sympathizers, and there were also noteworthy left-wing isolationists like socialist Norman Thomas and progressive Robert La Follette. But for the most part, the people who opposed American participation in WWII were the same people who opposed Roosevelt and the New Deal at home. America Firsters were constantly guarding their right flank against accusations of Nazi sympathies (which were sometimes merited), just like anti-Vietnam activists had to constantly fend off accusations of communist sympathies (which were sometimes merited).
Going back into the 19th century, both the left and the right again have a record of "anti-war" and "pro-war" sentiment. The Mexican-American War was a very popular war in the more conservative southern and western regions of the US. States like Mississippi, Tennessee, and Texas filled their volunteer quotas several times over. The war was much less popular in the north. In New England, at the time the most 'left-wing' (not that the phrase was used too much in the US at the time, but it's probably a fair descriptor--in New England abolitionism, Unitarianism, transcendentalism, etc. were more popular than anywhere else in the nation) region of the country, it was downright unpopular, and the whole region managed to raise only a single (understrength) regiment. Thoreau was famously arrested for refusing to pay his taxes in protest of the war. Northerners sometimes saw the war (not wholly inaccurate) as a slaveholder conspiracy to carve new slave states out of Mexican territory, and one New England senator (I can't remember which one) even declared in front of congress that he was rooting for the Mexicans.
A few years later, the Civil War broke out, which was essentially a war between the half of the country that had supported war in Mexico and the half that had opposed it. While there was not much of an anti-war movement in the south, at least until late in the war, there was a significant anti-war movement in the Union states. That was the 'copperheads' who favored a peace with the Confederacy. This movement was distinctly conservative in character, being strongly skeptical of abolitionism and the supposed racial integrationism of the Lincoln administration. New England of course was the region of the Union most enthusiastic in the prosecution of the war, with Maine out of all the loyal states contributing the highest proportion of its male population as soldiers for the federal army.
What are the common factors here? At first blush it may appear simple, that the left opposes war when the enemy is leftist (Red China, USSR, North Vietnam) and the right opposes war when the enemy is rightist (Confederacy, Axis powers, Russia). But Ba'athist Iraq and certainly the Taliban were not leftist powers, and yet the opposition to those interventions was primarily left-wing. Neither was the Mexico of 1846. Another potential explanation is that left-wingers oppose wars where the enemy is viewed as an underdog, which Iraq, Afghanistan, and Mexico certainly were. Technically the Confederacy, the Axis, and modern Russia were/are all also weaker than the US, but it's less obvious and they gave/give at least the illusion of being formidable foes. So I'm actually not sure what the common thread is, or even if there is one. Maybe I'm trying to flatten too much nuance over a 200 year period. Either way, I find the question interesting.
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To_Mandalay
2yr ago
In not on the far right or even the right but while it’s certainly true that insane people and morons make up a significant portion of the e-right (possibly a majority) I don’t think it’s necessarily a larger portion than on the e-left.
I also am not sure that the fraction of the far right that is openly Hitlerist is that much bigger than the fraction of the far left that is openly Stalinist or Maoist. It’s east to overestimate how common such people are if you spend too much time on Twitter or 4chan.
AOC is not going to come out as pro-Stalin but neither is Tucker Carlson going to start openly praising Hitler.
To_Mandalay
2yr ago
Your point about authoritarian is well-taken but left-wing dictators tend to at least pay lip-service to democracy (not that I think this makes it better, just to be clear). Even Stalin’s USSR was officially a democratic state (most democratic in the world in fact).
Outright, “democracy is bad, actually” authoritarianism tends to be a right-wing thing.
As far as Spain is concerned, there was a political spectrum in the Republic. The center-right was occupied by the misleadingly named Radical Party (which had in fact been a revolutionary leftist party under the monarchy but moved right under the Republic). Further right was the CEDA which was willing to work within the confines of Republican democracy so long as it was convenient. At the farthest end were groups that wanted to do away with the Republic immediately. It was these sectors of the right that primarily influenced the military uprising in 1936 so I think it’s fair to call it ‘far-right.’
I accuse Sanning of lying because he lies, as the example I gave in my first response to you pretty clearly shows.
Just saying "it was chaotic" is hand-waving. Where, specifically, was the chaos? What chaos would have caused the British authorities of Mandate Palestine or the US immigration authorities, both quite severe in the restriction of immigration, to underestimate the number of Jews entering their borders by the hundreds of thousands?
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