but you continue to present that argument as definitive because relying on a narrow interpretation of some speeches,
There is rarely "definitive" evidence in history. Several speeches in which he states that the Jewish question is to be solved by killing children to leave "no avengers" is pretty close to definitive though.
while handwaving large amounts of other speeches and documents as "code" is what you have to work with.
Of course there is other evidence to consider, like the various Nazi documents where 'resettlement' is clearly and explicitly a euphemism for 'murder' or the glaring lack of any documentation for an actual eastern 'resettlement.' But let's stay on topic, since not every piece of evidence can be discussed as once.
You are saying that, on the one hand, Himmler made speeches about this controversy, but during this October 6 speech in Posen he was casually admitting to a policy of genocide in between his use of euphemisms
I am saying Himmler can talk about different, if related, things at different times and the fact that every time but one that he uses the formulation "no avengers" he makes no mentions of partisans (but always to the final solution) makes your argument that if Himmler talks about killing children to prevent the rise of "avengers" he must in every instance be talking about partisans entirely unpersuasive and completely counter to any natural interpretation of the speech.
It's amazing there would be so much secrecy and compliance in their own top-secret internal reporting on the operation, where even the final report on Operation Reinhardt contains no direct or even euphemistic reference to extermination, but then Himmler would just casually admit to it in a speech in between other speeches where he continues to use the euphemism.
It does make sense because Himmler explicitly says in several of these speeches that now he's speaking secretly and the "hard task" never be spoken of in public. Which makes absolutely no sense on the revisionist interpretation, because "resettlement" wasn't a secret at all and was exactly what the Nazis announced to the world at large and to the Jews themselves that they were going to do.
Why does Himmler immediately follow up his statement about killing women and children with the statement that "this people ["Volk"] had to disappear from the face of the earth?" Do you think the "Volk" he refers to is 'partisans'? Why does he say that "in the lands we have occupied...there will be left only...individual Jews who are in hiding"? Is "the East" (nebulous as always--'the East' is not a place on a train schedule to which people can be deported) not included in "the lands we have occupied"?
To_Mandalay
2yr ago
It is perhapse even the central one without which there would be no concept of "Western Civilization", as it is arguably the spread of Christianity from it's birthplace in modern day Isreal to Greece, Rome and beyond, coupled with the debates between Europe and Asia that rocked the early church that ultimately set "The West" apart as "Western".
This seems obviously wrong. The Greeks and the Romans had a conception of themselves as something apart from both rough-edged northern barbarians and decadent easterns.
You're probably right that separation of church and state and egalitarianism have ultimately Christian roots though.
To_Mandalay
2yr ago
"Ich meine die Judenevakuierung," and then he clarifies, "die Ausrottung des jüdischen Volkes."
Among ourselves, it ought to be spoken of quite openly for once; yet we shall never speak of it in public.
Weird thing to say, considering "evacuation" was what the Nazis told the world they were doing with the Jews.
I know you want to claim that there's no way these two passages from two different speeches were intended to convey the same idea, you are saying that these two passages had completely different meanings
No, actually they have very similar meanings, I don't know what you are imagining that I am saying.
Five times Himmler refers to this idea of "not allowing avengers to grow up."
In the speech of 6 October, in the December 1943 speech, in his notes for January of 1944, in the Sonthofen speech of 5 May, and in the Sonthofen speech of 24 May, always in the context of the solution to the Jewish question, and only once does he refer to "partisans and commissars."
"No avengers" is a generic policy applied to Jews in general, as evidenced by the fact that 4/5 times that Himmler employs this formulation he makes no reference of partisans or reprisals. Naturally it also includes the families of Jewish partisans and commissars.
I will say once more, partisans are not a "Volk." Himmler uses the word two-dozen times in the speech and every single time it refers to a race or a nation.
Lastly, the dilemma presented in the passage you are leaning on doesn't make sense if you assume he is admitting to an extermination policy. Himmler justifies killing women and children so the children don't grow up and take revenge... but if the plan was to exterminate them all then this would never have entered into the decision calculus.
What? Killing children to prevent avengers IS the extermination policy.
To_Mandalay
2yr ago
It's pretty clear because Himmler says things like:
Most of you know what it means when 100 bodies lie together, when 500 lie there, or if 1,000 lie there. To have gone through this, and at the same time, apart from exceptions caused by human weaknesses, to have remained decent, that has made us hard.
and
We had the moral right, we had the duty to our own people, to kill this people which wanted to kill us
Luckily we have the 6 October speech to take us from "pretty clear" to "crystal clear." Where Himmler says, one more time:
I did not believe that I had the right to wipe out the men — rather I should say, kill them or have them killed — and let their children grow up to avenge themselves on our sons and grandsons. The hard decision to wipe this people off the face of the earth had to be made.
Please explain how "the hard decision to wipe this people off of the face of the earth" can refer to either the killing of partisans or resettlement.
To_Mandalay
2yr ago
His defense of the decision to conduct reprisals against the families of partisans and commissars would not make any sense in the context of an extermination policy where extermination of all Jews would have been the policy.
Partisans and commissars were not only Jews.
Memo from January 1944:
Largest stabilisation in the G.G. since the solution to the Jewish question. – Race war. Total solution. Not allowing avengers to rise against our children.
"No avengers" refers to the solution to the Jewish question in general. Which includes Jewish partisans and commissars but is obviously not limited to partisans and commissars. There were no 'commissars' in the General Government.
It's pretty clear the 4 October speech refers to physical annihilation as well, but the 6 October speech leaves even less wiggle room.
The Revisionist position is more sensible
In one speech Himmler talked about killing partisans in particular and in another speech he talked about killing Jews in general. This demonstrates only that when Himmler wanted to talk about killing partisans he was fully capable of using the word 'partisan' to indicate that he was talking about partisans. The unjustified assumption that Himmler is talking about partisans on October 6th because he talked about killing partisans in a different speech two months later is not sensible at all.
that his statements about the hard decision to kill Jews in the October 6th
No, he said it was a hard decision to wipe a "people/race" off of the face of the earth. Once again, partisans are not a "Volk."
Women and children killed along with the men. The race wiped off the face of the earth. No Jews to be left in occupied territories except those "in hiding."
Very clear.
Do we have any primary witnesses for the bulk of the killing during the 1941-1943 period before the Posen speeches were made? I was looking into the provenance of the Posen speeches and discovered that at least two Nazis testified to their authenticity and content during the Nuremberg Trials and the post-war period, but were there any other directly present witnesses that attested to the existence and deployment of systematic killing during the 1941-43 period, Nazi or otherwise?
From the very beginning of the opening of the camps on the Bug (Belzec, Sobibor, and Treblinka) reports poured out, mostly through the Polish Underground, so much that the Polish Government in Exile published this white paper in the winter of 1942 while the killing was still at its height.
A number of Jews from the early transports to Treblinka escaped and returned to Warsaw and spoke about what they had seen. The testimonies of many of these witness were recorded and preserved in the Ringelblum Archive which was meant to be a record of life in the Warsaw Ghetto. It was buried in early 1943 and was not recovered until a few years after the war. It can be read here. At least one of these escapees gave a direct description of the gas chambers.
In April of 1942 the Polish Underground published a report on Belzec, which said that large trainloads of Jews arrived daily, and none ever emerged, though the people in the nearby towns did not know how the killing was done. It can be read on page 350 of Yitzhak Arad's book.
In 1943 a Slovakian Jew who had been deported to Sobibor, but then detailed to work on nearby labor projects rather than killed, escaped and gave a report. The labor site was near enough to Sobibor that he could smell the burning flesh from the ongoing cremations. Can be read on page 211 of Jules Schelvis' book on Sobibor.
Kurt Gerstein witnessed gassings at Belzec in 1942, and attempted to get the news out of occupied Europe through several channels (including Sweden and the Vatican). Gerstein's report contains a lot of huge exaggerations and is a favorite punching bag for revisionists, but the report was confirmed in its essentials by Wilhelm Pfannenstiel (who had been with Gerstein at Belzec) in a conversation with, of all people, French Holocaust denier Paul Rassinier in the 60s.
There is more but the above is from strictly 1942 to 43. There also survived a number of documents demonstrating the mass transports of Jews to these camps, but none concerning their transfers out.
If you count the shootings in the USSR as 'systematic killing' that is also pretty clear. The reports of these massacres survive. There are also plenty of pictures.
To_Mandalay
2yr ago
Death toll post-1943 is pretty much just the Hungarian Jews sent to Auschwitz, some 400-500,000 or so, with a few tens of thousands from western European countries. Polish Jewry had already been wiped out at Belzec, Sobibor, and Treblinka (all closed and demolished by late 1943) and likewise for Soviet Jewry in occupied territory. Most memoirs and most famous survivors come from western European deportees who were atypical of the slain in a lot of ways.
To respond to your other comment, yes it used to be a lot more common to lay the blame for the Holocaust and the world wars at the feet of some special defect in German character. But as you note this has fallen out of favor and I believe it was pretty silly to begin with.
To_Mandalay
2yr ago
So he is still using the "code" at Posen.
In other speeches at Posen he uses the word "Judenevakuierung." In this speech he uses the word "umbringen," which unambiguously means "kill."
the killing of Jews being in the context of partisan reprisals
Partisans are in fact mentioned much earlier in the speech and then Himmler says, 'enough about partisans,' and then moves on to talking about other stuff, and finally when he discusses the solution to the Jewish question in the excerpted paragraphs partisans are not mentioned once.
The hard decision to wipe this people ["Volk"] off ["verschwinden"] the face of the earth had to be made.
Partisans are not a "Volk" and "the East" is a place on the face of the earth.
By the end of the year, the Jewish problem in the lands we have occupied will be solved. There will be left only remnants, individual Jews who are in hiding.
Goal is no Jews left in German-occupied territory by the end of 1943. Which included "the East," however you define it.
To_Mandalay
2yr ago
And that's why Germans prior to 1941 and after 1945 are known for aggressively killing innocents in sacrifice to pagan gods.
They were known for this up until their Christianization. And then they were known for their rather aggressive treatment of the Old Prussians and other peoples unfortunate enough to wind up in the path of the Teutonic Knights.
I think trying to answer a question about recent twentieth century history with appeals to national character is bizarre and wrong-headed in the first place, but if you're going to do so "the Germans would never do such a thing," doesn't wash.
were there any Gentile survivors of Auschwitz-Birkenau that have lived to old age and written memoirs?
I'll be honest in that I don't that much about A-B. That said I know Charlotte Delbo, a French resistance activist, was imprisoned at Auschwitz and later wrote a memoir. Google search turned up this list with a couple more written by gentile survivors of Auschwitz. And of course there are plenty of memoirs of gentile survivors of western camps like Dachau and Belsen.
I could infer the revisionist position on the absence of living gentile Holocaust survivors
I don't think any revisionists deny that gentiles were imprisoned and killed by the Nazis. They just weren't targeted for extermination and killed in gas chambers, or (with exceptions) lined up at the edge of pits and shot in. Everybody agrees on that. Revisionists just insist that Jews weren't targeted for extermination either.
To_Mandalay
2yr ago
Even reading Tacitus shows the same continuity of character.
Tacitus also says that the Germans nailed people to trees and burned them alive as sacrifices to Wotan.
The Germans wouldn't have wasted delousing chemicals to kill people or have wasted forced labor that would allow them to feel self-righteous in perpetuity.
Old people and children are not wasted force labor, they're dead weight.
The notion that Germans would use euphemisms in the one extant documented meeting concerning the implementation details is absurd to anyone that has ever met a rank-and-file German.
Here is Himmler talking openly about the extermination of European Jews without use of code-words in the Posen speech of October 6 1943:
In this connection, I may comment before this very tightly knit group on a matter which you, my Party Comrades, all take for granted, and which is the most difficult task I have ever faced in my life, the Jewish problem. All of you gladly take it for granted that there are no longer any Jews in your administrative districts. All Germans — with a few individual exceptions — are aware that we could not have endured the bombings, the hardships of the fourth year of the war, and could not endure fifth and sixth years of war that are perhaps yet to come, if we still had this demoralizing pest in our national body. "The Jews must be eradicated ["ausgerottet"]." This brief sentence is easily said. But for the man who must carry out what it calls for, it is the gravest and hardest thing in existence. Now, look, after all they're Jews, only Jews. That's plain enough. But just think about how many people — including Party comrades — have addressed to me and other officials those famous petitions of theirs in which they say: The Jews are all bastards, of course, but so-and-so is a good Jew and should be left alone. I daresay, judging by the number of such appeals and the number of people who express such opinions, the number of "good Jews" in Germany must have exceeded the total Jewish population! In Germany we have millions and millions of people who each have their "one good Jew." I mention this only because you can see in the vital field of your own administrative districts how many respected and upright National Socialists have their "good Jew."
I ask that you assembled here pay attention to what I have to say, but not repeat it. The question came up: Well, what about the women and children? — I came to a determinedly simple conclusion about that, too. I did not believe that I had the right to wipe out ["auszurotten"] the men — rather I should say, kill ["umzubringen"] them or have them killed — and let their children grow up to avenge themselves on our sons and grandsons. The hard decision to wipe this people ["Volk"] off ["verschwinden"] the face of the earth had to be made. For us, the organization that had to carry out this task, it was the most difficult one we ever had. But it was accomplished, and without — I believe I can say — our men and their leaders suffering any mental or spiritual damage. That was clearly a danger. To become too brutal, too heartless, and lose respect for human life, or to be too soft and bring oneself to the point of a nervous breakdown — the path between these two ever-present possibilities is incredibly narrow, the course between Scylla and Charybdis.
We have turned over to the Reich Ministry of Economics all the wealth we confiscated from the Jews — the sums were staggering — right down to very last penny. I have always maintained: We have a duty to our people, to our race, we have a duty to a leader such as has been given to our people only once in 2,000 years, not to be petty here, but to go the limit, as we must do in all things if we are to win the war. Yet we do not have the right to take even one penny of the wealth confiscated from the Jews. At the outset, I laid down the line: Any SS men who take so much as a mark of it are as good as dead. In the past few days, I've had to sign a number of death sentences — I might as well say it, there were about a dozen. One has to be strict here, or everyone will suffer. I considered it my duty to speak very openly to you — the highest bearers of the will, the highest dignitaries, of the Party, of this political order, of this political instrument of the Führer — about this matter and to give the facts as they are. By the end of the year, the Jewish problem in the lands we have occupied will be solved. There will be left only remnants, individual Jews who are in hiding. The problem of Jews who are partners in mixed marriages and the problem of half-Jews will, in accordance with this policy, be rationally examined, decided upon, and resolved.
Source is this thread on the CODOH revisionist forum, which anyone can read if they want to see whether the revisionist interpretation of such a speech holds up.
To_Mandalay
2yr ago
Funny note about Sanning. He recently released a new edition of his book with a postscript.
I’ll post links when I get home but in the postscript he engages in his usual numerical wizardry to try and get the numbers of Jews in Eastern Europe as low as possible. He quotes an American report on displaced persons in post-war Europe like this:
“Some 500,000 [Jews] were in the American zone by summer 1946”
If you actually check his source, it is specifically noted that the “500,000” number refers to displaced persons in general, and one page later it is clarified that only about 70,000 are Jews, so Sanning is just lying about his source. This sort of thing pops up constantly in revisionist literature.
To_Mandalay
2yr ago
300,000 Jews did not starve to death in Warsaw in the fall of 1942. They were rounded up and deported...somewhere. This is not in question, even by denies.
To_Mandalay
2yr ago
The problem is that whatever happened happened mostly in 1942 - 43, well before any Germans were starving. By the winter of '43 - '44 cities like Warsaw and Lodz were already empty of Jews, where there had been hundreds of thousands and millions before. Most of these people never saw the inside of a concentration camp.
To_Mandalay
2yr ago
it is also necessary to establish that the post-war Jewish population of the USSR plus Poland was substantially lower than 5 million.
It's pretty clear. In 1946 Jewish leaders in the cities and towns of Poland (where the vast majority of Polish Jews lived, they were not very rural people) conducted a census which found something like 250,000 Jews in Poland. However, it is important to remember that about 200,000 Polish Jews spent the war in the USSR, either because they fled of their own free will or because they were deported in 1939-1940 from the pre-war Polish territories annexed by Stalin. In 1946 the USSR repatriated all Polish Jews who wanted to leave, which was the great majority of them, and most of them went back to Poland, though most eventually kept moving to Palestine or the US.
So of those 250,000 odd Jews in Poland in 1946, the vast majority were those who had spent the war in Soviet territory. only about 80,000 remained of the 2,000,000+ Jews which actually spent the war in Nazi custody. It's a big balance to make up, and cannot be done. Jewish immigration to Palestine and the US up to 1946-47 are well accounted for, and so are the Jews in the DP camps in Germany and Austria. Uncertainty exists, but on the order of tens of thousands, not millions or even hundreds of thousands.
This was not a dark ages Völkwanderung. 20th century Europe, even at its most war-torn was not the kind of place where an entire nation could fall into a black-hole.
The best revisionists can do is handwave and insist Stalin deported all the Jews to Siberia so he could claim they had been killed by the Nazis, which is soundly contradicted by Soviet archives, which contain no mention of such a massive operation, which would have been the single largest of all the Soviet mass deportations (all of which are well-documented.)
Deniers have no actual answer for how 2,000,000+ people vanished into thin air and never will.
To_Mandalay
2yr ago
I guess. 'Sacred' seems a bit much, but 'worthy of protection' at least.
To_Mandalay
2yr ago
If there is a group of people that
A) you are "not allowed to criticize," however you choose to define "criticize"
B) clearly do not rule over you
Then the pithy aphorism is falsified.
You could formulate something like "if you are allowed to criticize X, then X does not rule over you," but that's a different claim (and IMO not necessarily true).
To_Mandalay
2yr ago
How is that relevant? Is my 'inability' to criticize Mexicans evidence that the Mexicans 'rule over me' or not?
To_Mandalay
2yr ago
It's not really a criticism to say "I hate black people" or "I hate Jews" either. Probably wouldn't be any different if I wrote "I think disabled children are societal dead-weight" which is an actual 'criticism' I guess.
I would probably also get fired if I wrote "Mexicans should all be deported" does anyone think Mexicans run the country?
To_Mandalay
2yr ago
This has always seemed pretty transparently false. I would probably get fired from my job if I started posting on social media about how I hate disabled children and think it's funny when they die. This doesn't mean we're ruled by disabled children.
To_Mandalay
2yr ago
I don't know to what extent JvN was bottlenecked by just not having enough time to do shit and/or by lack of further JvNs and I don't think anyone does.
To_Mandalay
2yr ago
I'm beginning regret making that first post.
I do think the specific AI doom scenarios are a bit handwavy, but that's because they boil down to "there is a level of intelligence at which an intelligent being could easily kill all humans on earth" which I guess I don't really contest, with caveats. But the AI-doom argument relies on the idea that once we create a "human-level" AGI it will reach that level very shortly and with relative ease, and that (the intelligence explosion idea) is what I really have the biggest problem with and what I think is one of the weakest points in the AI doom case.
To_Mandalay
2yr ago
Hmm? I don't see why you would say that tech and knowledge didn't accumulate,
Very very little. For most of human history, each generation improved only very slightly, if it improved at all, upon the knowledge base of the foregoing generation. Then in the 17th or 18th century or so everything changed. It was once possible for an educated man to be, more or less, an 'expert' in all fields because the pool of general knowledge was not very deep. The explosion in understanding and know-how of the scientific and industrial revolutions has rendered that impossible of course.
But this explosion happened without any similarly sudden explosion in the "raw" cognitive power of human beings (some argue that there was an increase in raw intelligence around this time, but even if so it clearly wasn't a several-hundred fold increase). The slight step up from monke to anatomically modern human wasn't enough on its own to take us to the moon or even create steam power, because we had to wait millennia for the proper conditions (whatever those were) in which such inventions could be realized.
Which is why I don't think "AI becomes a little smarter than us" is immediately followed by "AI becomes 50,000+ times smarter than us and then begins turning the universe into grey goo." Humans becoming a little smarter than monkeys wasn't followed by spaceflight, or even the agricultural revolution, for a long, long time.
To_Mandalay
2yr ago
True. I underspecified. What I meant to say was that there was an anti-nationalist strain on the republican side, even if this was not the only or even the dominant strain, but no such strain existed on the right.
To_Mandalay
2yr ago
I meant in the sense that each generation had access to all the knowledge and technology of the last
Right, but for most of human history technology and knowledge didn't really accumulate much over the generations. We probably learned and built more in the last 200 years than in the 20,000 before that, but the sudden explosion c. 1750 doesn't seem to be down to a similar explosion in "raw" human intelligence.
That's not what I mean, I expect that once a hostile AGI makes a move, it'll eliminate humans with speed and judiciousness in both scenarios, regardless of whether it takes it a day or a century to fulfill its resource demands afterwards.
I'm skeptical that a human-level artificial intelligence will be in a position to wipe out mankind immediately (i.e a few days/weeks/years) after its 'awakening.'
Yes, because if you're killing the wives and children of every Jew, that naturally includes every Jewish partisan and commissar. And, presumably, non-Jewish partisans and commissars, since there were plenty.
Himmler isn't an idiot and when he wants to talk about partisan warfare he is perfectly capable of using the term 'partisan' or otherwise indicating that he is talking about partisan warfare. So no he's not using a euphemism, he's speaking about something specific (Commissar order etc. which ofc did not apply to the GG or Germany anyways), whereas in the other speeches he is speaking more generally.
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