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Culture War Roundup for the week of December 5, 2022

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I've learned to be distrustful of mainstream conservative commentators, but I still had hope that Dennis Prager was one of the intellectually honest ones. Having read his latest column, my disappointment is immeasurable, and my day is ruined.

I understand that accusing someone of intellectual dishonesty without clear evidence that they are lying is frowned upon here and likely anywhere else that meaningful discussion happens. If anyone has a defensible reading of this column, I would greatly appreciate hearing it, because I can only see two possible readings.

  1. The subject of the holocaust hits so close to home for Prager that he suspends all rational thought when discussing it, leaving him incapable of recognizing his own hypocrisy or recusing himself to avoid embarassment.

  2. He is consciously trying to enforce a norm that you can't question anything about the holocaust; he is aware that this contradicts his encouragement of vaccine hesitancy and other forms of wrongthink, but he doesn't care, because those are forms of wrongthink he likes, and this is one he doesn't like.

The first possibility fills me with pity. The second one fills me with outrage, not only because I consider that attitude to be morally wrong, but because I consider it to be counter-productive. The best way to encourage holocaust denial, and the anti-Semitism that it so often leads to, is to tell people not to question any details about it. And I'm not exaggerating when I say that Prager does not want people to question any details about it whatsoever. He says so himself.

Yet, some people, including an American named Nick Fuentes, aggressively deny the Holocaust, asserting that a few hundred thousand Jews, not millions, were killed.

Prager does not define the holocaust as "the German government's mass-murder of Jewish citizens," or even "the deliberate attempt by the German government to kill all of the Jews in Europe." He defines the holocaust specifically as the murder of millions of Jews, meaning that if you put the death toll at anything under 7 figures, you are denying the totality of the event in his mind. If Prager was giving a live lecture, I would excuse this implication as an accidental result of speaking off-the-cuff, but this is a written column, which means he had the opportunity to proof-read his words and think about what they mean, and he still thought that this was acceptable.

Based on my conversations with others about holocaust denial and revisionism, I suspect there's an unspoken implication in this column that people who are neurotypical (or just not autistic in the same way I am) are capable of picking up on: that anyone who questions any detail about the holocaust is a bad faith actor trying to Ship of Theseus it out of the historical record. I've had many people, even in ratspace, tell me that this is so obvious a reason to ostracize holocaust revisionists that it doesn't even have to be stated explicitly when condemning them. Well, not only is it not obvious to me, but I think it takes an astonishingly poor imagination to think that there might not be anyone out there who, in good faith and without denying Hitler's genocidal ambitions, questions how many people were killed in the holocaust or what methods were used.

This is not a defense of Nick Fuentes. While I can't read Fuentes's mind, I have inferred based on his tone when speaking about the holocaust that he likely either doesn't believe it happened or wants other people to not believe it happened. The column, however, is not about Nick Fuentes. It's a column about the general subject of holocaust "denial," and it merely uses Fuentes as an example. And while I'm at it..

Second, Holocaust denial is not only a Big Lie; it is pure Jew-hatred, i.e., antisemitism. The proof that it emanates from antisemitism is that no other 20th-century genocide is denied (with the exception of the Turkish government’s denial of the Turks’ mass murder of Armenians during World War I). No one denies Stalin’s mass murder of tens of millions of Soviet citizens in the Gulag Archipelago or his deliberate starvation of about five million Ukrainians (the Holodomor); or the Cambodian communists’ murder of about one in every four Cambodians; or Mao’s killing of about 60 million Chinese. The only genocide-denial is the genocide of the Jews.

Prager, buddy, do you have any idea how many people on my university campus alone denied "Stalin’s mass murder of tens of millions of Soviet citizens in the Gulag Archipelago?" I don't, because once you're counting in the dozens, it's impossible to keep track without administering a structured survey. I know that Bob Avakian's group canvassed there every day for years without incident, while right-wing events were met with hostile protests. I was one of the first people to know that Quentin Tarantino spoke at one of their events, but it took Breitbart a month to report on my tip, and not a single other outlet picked up on it because they didn't care.

What world does Prager live in where Stalin apologists are marginalized, but holocaust denial runs free? It's not the world he lived in five years ago, because 3 minutes into this video, he approvingly quotes a professor's statement that denial Stalin's genocide is common. Did Prager's assessment of the culture change over the past five years, or is he just contradicting himself to effectively enforce his preferred censorial norms? I'm inclined to think the latter, and it's a darn shame. I used to be a Ben Shapiro fan until I caught him doing stuff like this, and my search for people who recognized the problems with wokeness without enforcing their own intellectual taboos drove me further right to places like VDare and Unz, because they were less obviously dishonest. Several years later, I don't think those places are particularly honest, but I'm sure they're more honest than Daily Wire, and I expect many people to get stuck at that level of the radicalization rabbit hole without graduating to the general agnosticism and confusion I'm at. Shit, now I'm getting emotional.

Also, whoever chose that headline did a bad job. Prager is Jewish, and his reference to hell in the column was clearly meant to be a figure of speech. Making it the headline makes it sound literal. I wonder if Prager approved it.

The Holocaust killing millions is very well documented. I'm more of a mistake theorist than a conflict theorist, so I wouldn't call people who say the Holocaust killed 5% of what it actually did are necessarily evil, but I would say they're likely mentally ill(like Kanye) and/or have made some very poor decisions in which sources they want to trust.

The question of when information should be censored is not an easy one in my opinion. Especially because we can never really be sure when information is true or not; even in mathematics "proofs" that are widely accepted can be much later shown to be false. So all information, from the planet being round to evolution to covid policy to the holocaust would be kept open to debate in an ideal society. But in an ideal society then also on the easily answerable questions like the planet being round everyone would quickly come to the right answer, and for even trickier questions like covid policy everyone would quickly dismiss the stupid information like that vaccines are being used to implant microchips.

But we do not live in an ideal society, and if you let debate spread unhindered, you'll get a lot of people believing flat out wrong stuff. And that flat out wrong stuff can have harmful effects. For example, in the 14th century, the belief that Jews were related to the spread of the bubonic plague led to massacres of Jewish communities. I think with the benefit of hindsight, most modern people would agree that if they had the magic power to censor the belief that Jews spread the black plague(and there wouldn't be any butterfly effects through the timeline), they would, since that information was very harmful.

It is actually not well-documented at all. There are no written orders for extermination of millions, likely none ever existed. The "well-documented killings" amounts to historians tallying transports with the assumption that every single person on them was murdered in a gas chamber disguised as a shower room, which is not documented (and in fact documents explicitly refer to these alleged extermination camps with non-homicidal functions, like "transit camp" or "labor camp." Historians say this was all "coded language" to get around the fact that documents paint a different picture for the purposes of these camp than their own assertions). But there's never been a single excavation of a single mass grave at any of the alleged killing sites, despite the fact they exist in precisely known locations. There was never a single autopsy of a single person killed by one of these homicidal gas chambers. Excavations are in fact forbidden by Jewish authorities using the same reasoning as is being used to refuse excavations of the alleged Kamloops Indian Reservation mass graves. They say that excavations at Kamloops would "disturb the spirits of the children" which is practically the exact same reasoning given by rabbinical authorities. More likely, they know that excavations would disprove the prevailing narrative in both cases.

In essence, "If Holocaust Deniers Don’t Go to Hell, There Is No God" is simply the conservative manifestation of the Holocaust dialectic, with the leftist manifestation being Adorno's infamous quote "To write poetry after Auschwitz is barbaric."

Holocaust deniers tend to all focus on Auschwitz, and with good reason: it was a massive operation with three prominent subcamps, it had the most victims and most survivors, it received mostly western and Balkan Jews as well as POWs and political prisoners. In short, it had a wide range of experiences; which is ideal for someone who wants to chip away at a subject that an individual has a very general and non-specific understanding of.

A classic tactic of deniers (and conspiracy theorists in general) is to insert a wedge into the mind of a layman, and then try to lever it. They have a vast array of knowledge of all kinds of minutiae about the subject, and the layman does not. They have an endless arsenal of anecdotes or factoids or even legitimately true things that they known and the layman does not. A classic example would go like this: did you know Auschwitz had a swimming pool? It's true! The Germans even let prisoners use it! Boy, that doesn't sound like the sort of thing a death camp would have, now would it? Huh, I wonder why we never learned about that in history class... wonder what else we're not told about.

And then maybe the layman goes and googles it and boy, sure enough it's true. Of course some of the details are fudged: yes, there was a reservoir for firefighting that the German guards would swim in sometimes, and even let certain privileged political prisoners use from time to time. It was a massive operation, with thousands of guards and support staff that along with lodgings and mess halls needed some form of entertainment. And in the bigger picture it doesn't really change anything: somewhere close to a million people were murdered at Auschwitz, swimming pool or no. Someone posted the link to epistemic learned helplessness: this is the exact kind of thing that heuristic is meant to guard against.

So when @SecureSignals says something like "There are no written orders for extermination of millions", he's hoping you might go google it and think "well jeez, it turns out we don't have a Führerbefehl relating to the Holocaust. Why did I never know that?", and from that be incrementally swayed to his side. Of course, if you were to actually read a history of the Holocaust you would know; but most people don't read history books about any subject, and let pop culture shape their impressions for them.

Holocaust deniers tend to all focus on Auschwitz

Holocaust deniers have in previous decades focused on Auschwitz because the historical narrative, and particularly the cultural depiction of the Holocaust in popular culture, was focused on Auschwitz. After all, until the fall of the Soviet Union in the 1990s it was claimed that four million people were murdered at Auschwitz, only to be revised downwards to the still-wildly inflated 1.5 million. Auschwitz is also the only "extermination camp" which claimed to have an intact gas chamber, the "gas chamber" which you will see frequently posted to the front-page of Reddit and has been visited by millions of unwitting tourists.

It was the Revisionists who visited the archives and procured the blueprints which label this room a morgue (Leichenkeller) during the period it was allegedly a gas chamber. It was Revisionists who exposed in an undercover interview the head of the Auschwitz Museum admitting that the "Zyklon introductory chimneys" in that room were in fact "reconstructions" built post-war in Soviet-occupied Poland, whereas previously all were told that they were original structures attesting to the homicidal function of the room.

If you talk to a smart anti-denier, he will downplay the importance of Auschwitz and in particular the importance of that famous gas chamber on the Auschwitz tour (the only one left standing at any of the extermination camps!). But that's only because Revisionists have forced a retreat.

So when @SecureSignals says something like "There are no written orders for extermination of millions", he's hoping you might go google it and think "well jeez, it turns out we don't have a Führerbefehl relating to the Holocaust. Why did I never know that?", and from that be incrementally swayed to his side. Of course, if you were to actually read a history of the Holocaust you would know; but most people don't read history books about any subject, and let pop culture shape their impressions for them.

Well then help bring back the people who would potentially be swayed upon learning that there are no such documents ordering the extermination of the Jews. You say "if you would read a history book, you would know", but can you just explain it to everyone real quick and save them the trouble? Why are there no documents, @johnfabian?

Well then help bring back the people who would potentially be swayed upon learning that there are no such documents ordering the extermination of the Jews.

Gee, I guess these American photographers who took pictures like this were all lying and faking too, then, SecureSignals?

April 14, 1945 - Pile of ashes and bones found by U.S. soldiers at Buchenwald concentration camp in Germany.

Or this one:

April 12, 1945 - Bodies of prisoners of Ohrdruf concentration camp stacked like cord-wood

Who are the actors playing Patton, Bradley and Eisenhower in this one?

April 12, 1945 - Dwight D. Eisenhower, Omar Bradley, and George Patton are given a tour of Ohrdruf concentration camp. Here they visit a burial pit containing the charred remains of prisoners who were burned to death at Ohrdruf, Germany.

Plainly the Eisenhower presidential library is just unreliable source!

The high mortality at these camps liberated by the Western allies was caused by a collapsing German infrastructure as it was being destroyed in the final days of the war. It is no longer claimed that Buchenwald or its sub-camp Ohrdruf were extermination camps with gas chambers. The high death toll is what initially caused the gas chamber story to center on Western camps. Images can also be deceiving in several ways. For example, one of your images is captioned:

Here they visit a burial pit containing the charred remains of prisoners who were burned to death at Ohrdruf, Germany.

But it's far more likely that this was a makeshift cremation of people who had died from other causes, like epidemic typhus. There are no credible accusations that I am aware of describing the Germans burning prisoners alive, and it is not maintained by official historiography that this took place (although Elie Wiesel claimed to witness this at Auschwitz in his memoir). On the other hand, the cremation of prisoners that had died was standard operating procedure in order to reduce the spread of disease and epidemic typhus.

Another example of a notoriously deceptive image is found in your link to the Eisenhower presidential library. There is an infamous image of the dead prisoners at the Nordhausen camp, captioned "April 12, 1945 - A portion of the bodies found by U.S. troops when they arrived at Nordhausen concentration camp in Germany." But it is well-known that this camp was bombed by the RAF. You can even see the mass destruction in all the buildings surrounding the bodies which have been used as a prop for propaganda. CODOH has an article on the Nordhausen film and image propaganda:

On April 3 1945, 247 Lancaster bombers and 8 Mosquitos of Group Nos 1 and 8 of British Royal Air Force bombed and strafed the Nordhausen Camp hospital, killing thousands of inmates. The hospital doctors, nurses, and caregivers, (both German and detainee) fled the smashed hospital leaving the sick and wounded in a desperate situation.

The next day, the British attacked again; this time sending 243 Lancasters, 1 Mosquito of No 5 Group, and 8 Pathfinder Mosquitos to bomb the town of Nordhausen and bomb the barracks. Thousands of German civilians and more inmates were killed in the second attack.

Altogether, 490 bombers, each carrying 12,000 lbs. of bombs or almost 6,000,000 pounds of explosives, hit Nordhausen. The hospital was smashed, the doctors and staff scattered, the surrounding area devastated. The already difficult situation in the crowded hospital turned into a disaster. The death toll of hospital inmates and workers was approximately 3,500. The number of dead civilians has been given as approximately 8,000.

On April 11 elements of the US 3rd Armored and 104th Infantry Divisions reached Nordhausen. The bodies of those who died in the bombing and its aftermath were pulled from the rubble and lined up for a "photo opportunity. " No mention was made that the "props" were provided courtesy of the British air force.

Cameramen A. Statt and Rosenmann had a keen eye for filming the horrors, focusing on details of the dead and sick. The filming was supervised by Major Frank Gleason of the JAGD 89th

Their work was packaged into numerous propaganda films and Nordhausen achieved a brief notoriety. An example of the propaganda use Gleason's work was put to can be seen at; Universal Newsreel's Nazi Murder Mills, an Official NewsReel. We are informed that, "The vile inhuman beasts took pride in their concentration camp at Nordhausen;" that the deaths were the result of "Germany's organized carnage", and "For the first time, America can believe what they thought was impossible propaganda. Here is documentary evidence of sheer mass murder. Murder that will blacken the name of Germany for the rest of recorded history."

The true history of the bombing and devastation of Nordhausen was known when the Nuremberg Trial started but the film images were "too good" not to be used by the prosecution. The film footage was shown early in the Trial, on November 29, 1945, as a segment of a longer motion picture described as A Documentary Motion Picture / Document No. 2430-PS / Submitted on behalf of U.S. Chief Counsel as exhibit USA 79. In the film it was stated that, "at least 3,000 political prisoners died here [the Boelcke Kaserne] at the brutal hands of SS troops..." The camp hospital was described only as "a depository for slaves found unfit for work."

No mention was made of the British bombings.

To summarize, the mass death and destruction at Nordhausen concentration camp was caused by RAF bombings of the camp and civilian areas. The United States arrived and produced propaganda films of the aftermath which was submitted as evidence of German brutality at the Nuremberg trial, with no mention that these were victims of Allied bombing. Likewise, the caption of that photograph in the Eisenhower library "A portion of the bodies found by U.S. troops when they arrived at Nordhausen concentration camp in Germany" makes no mention that these people were killed by Allied bombings. In fact, the Nordhausen camp population was minority Jewish. So this is a picture of mostly non-Jewish victims of RAF bombings being posed and passed off as Holocaust victims of a German extermination policy.

The image is real, the context and its use in Holocaust propaganda is highly deceptive.

Speaking of deception, Eisenhower was in command of the Psychological War Division (PWD/SCHAEF) which was the unit which conducted the "investigation" of Buchenwald after its liberation. There's the infamous propaganda film of the forced march of the civilians of Weimar through Buchenwald, which culminates in a table display of human-skin lampshades and shrunken heads allegedly created by the Germans. The shrunken heads were disappeared after they were dramatically presented on the first day of the Nuremberg trial, and the human-skin lampshade was also conveniently disappeared. Historians have also dropped the famous human-skin lampshade story.

Not surprisingly, the famous images of the shrunken heads and human-skin lampshade at Buchenwald did not make it into the album you posted.

The high mortality at these camps liberated by the Western allies was caused by a collapsing German infrastructure as it was being destroyed in the final days of the war.

What you then claim what happened with Polish Jewish pre-war population? Are you also claiming that forcing Jews into ghettos by Germans was fake? Executing people across conquered territories?

I bet that there is plenty of propaganda (add "soap made from human fat" to that) but presenting in a way that claims "Germans have not mass-murdered millions" is even more misleading.

Also, is it intentional that your username in short is SS?

I think the whole demographic question (ie. what happened to the prewar Jewish population) is the crucial question here, much moreso than the concentration camp doors or camp memoirs etc., but this is also a month old subthread so it's probably not a good place to discuss such issues.

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Oh well, that's all right then; they didn't deliberately murder the people they rounded up and held in camps, it was all down to collapsing infrastructure and typhus.

That is not really any better, SecureSignals, because you still have to explain "why did they round up all these people and hold them in camps?"

No, he actually doesn’t have to explain why they were in concentration camps, because the claim of the holocaust is not that Germans kept Jews in camps like the Americans did the Japanese. The claim of the holocaust is the intentional killing of millions of Jews in these camps.

The reason intentionality was such a big deal for holocaust historiography is because a lot of other nations have this on their records.

The gas chambers and skin lampshades and SS-she-wolves and Looney Tunes electric roller coasters have to be real, because if was all just starvation and cholera and slave camps and mass reprisal executions the holocaust starts looking too familiar. And it has to be seen as a categorically different and historically unique event, not just a quantitatively worse successor.

(Of course, future generations of historians might not care, and will instead prefer to treat the holocaust as just one of many related examples of "naturally evil white devils being evil")

Wikipedia is incredibly ambiguous regarding the consensus on the authenticity of the shrunken heads and lampshades.

A human skin lampshade was reported to have been displayed by Buchenwald concentration camp commandant Karl-Otto Koch and his wife Ilse Koch, along with multiple other human skin artifacts.[2] Despite myths to the contrary, there were no systematic efforts by the Nazis to make human skin lampshades.[3]

This seems to leave their authenticity an open question (systematic doesn’t mean it never happened). Google’s top results also seem very evasive and weasely. Do you have anything more solid or unambiguous regarding current mainstream consensus?

General Lucius Clay, the military governor of the US zone of occupied Germany, explained the lampshade story, "Well, it turned out actually that it was goat flesh. But at the trial [of Ilse Koch] it was still human flesh." (Interview with Lucius Clay, 1976, Official Proceeding of the George C. Marshall Research Foundation Quoted in M. Weber, "Buchenwald: Legend and Reality," The Journal of Historical Review, Winter 1986-87 7(4), pp. 406-407.)... A similar statement from General Clay:

There was absolutely no evidence in the trial transcript, other than she [Ilse Koch] was a rather loathsome creature, that would support the death sentence. I suppose I received more abuse for that than for anything else I did in Germany. Some reporter had called her the 'Bitch of Buchenwald,' [and] had written that she had lampshades made out of human skin in her house. And that was introduced in court, where it was absolutely proven that the lampshades were made out of goatskin."—General Lucius Clay, quoted in: Smith, Jean Edward, Lucius D. Clay, An American Life, p. 301. New York: Henry Holt and Company, 1990

Moreover, Ilse Koch had left Buchenwald nearly two years prior to the liberation and PWD table display of these artifacts. If you are interested in a deep-dive into the circumstances surrounding this lampshade and shrunken head display, I would suggest this Revisionist film because the circumstances of these legends are far sketchier than you would probably believe.

The "mainstream consensus", however, is to categorically ignore the issue. They just don't talk about it.

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The photos only prove that many starved and many died. Look at photos of Andersonville prisoners from the American Civil War, they look the same. That doesn’t mean necessarily that there were gas chambers or a deliberate extermination program.

Well then help bring back the people who would potentially be swayed upon learning that there are no such documents ordering the extermination of the Jews. You say "if you would read a history book, you would know", but can you just explain it to everyone real quick and save them the trouble? Why are there no documents, @johnfabian?

Well there were documents ordering the killing of Jews, and unless you read exclusively denialist writers you would know this. With your wording I'm not sure if you're being deliberately dishonest or if you're just nonspecific in your wording. But I'm going to assume honesty and believe you're referring to the lack of a Führerbefehl: an order from Adolf Hitler, starting the Holocaust.

First of all, you might want to flip the question: would you necessarily expect an order to undertake a vast criminal conspiracy to survive? Ignore the context of everything else for a second: there were 9 million Jews in Europe, give or take, in 1939 (the Nazis believed a higher number because of their racial theories). Planning to kill that many people would qualify as the greatest conspiracy of all time. The key perpetrators might want to conceal their decision-making a bit. Certainly the lack of similar documents haven't stopped the same people who believe in Holocaust denial from alleging in 9/11 or moon landing conspiracies, as an aside.

And the Nazis were quite keenly aware of the importance of secrecy in what they were undertaking. Not only were they not so un-self-aware that they anticipated the rest of the world might quibble with them murdering millions of civilians, the Aktion T4 program had been undermined by insufficient internal secrecy leading to a considerable protest movement against it both within and without Germany. Awareness of the systematic murder of Jews, POWs, and "useless mouths" could (and eventually did) harden resistance and resolve to German conquest, pacification, and occupation of lands in the East. Institutional and operational secrecy was as important and necessary as the undertaking itself. It was, as Himmler later said, a "glorious chapter that has not and will not be spoken of."

Take the Commissar Order, for example. It acknowledged quite openly that it was brazenly in violation of international law, and there was a concerted effort to limit possible leaks: only thirty copies of the original were created, and the ultimate promulgation to the Army Groups was only extended to 340, and ultimately all copies were ordered to be destroyed. If they had been, presumably you'd also argue that "there was no proof of the order to kill Soviet commissars!" which would again be untrue, because even if the primary source documents had not survived we have plenty of contemporary secondary sources, both of those who received the order (including many who subsequently lied about receiving it) and of those who carried it out.

That at some point Hitler ordered the extermination of Jewry is not contested among historians. The specific date is contested; some favour an "early" hypothesis (around September 1941) and some favour a "late" hypothesis (around November-December 1941). The order was almost certainly issued verbally to Heinrich Himmler, hence the lack of "documents", but many of the key figures in the Nazi regime discussed being aware of such an order. In any case, by the time this order had been issued somewhere between 500,000 and a million Jews had already been murdered, but that's a different discussion and deniers tend to very pointedly ignore the Holocaust by bullets anyways.

The big problem deniers have to always work around is that the Nazis themselves never denied the Holocaust. While individuals might have tried to shirk their specific responsibility, when it came to the criminal trials and executions the one legal defence never attempted was "it didn't happen."

Well there were documents ordering the killing of Jews

Let's not do a Motte and Bailey here, there were documents ordering the killing of a lot of people in WWII. There are of course documents, well-studied by Revisionists, explicating the executions of Jewish partisans and reprisals against the local population. The executions and reprisals are the grain of truth within the wider Holocaust lore, but at the time reprisals were legal under international law and those reprisals were not even considered a warcrime at Nuremberg for that reason. When people talk about the Holocaust and the "final solution", they are obviously referring to the historical assertion that the extermination of the Jews became a matter of policy of the German government as the "final solution" to the Jewish question, and that most of six million Jews were exterminated in makeshift gas chambers disguised as shower rooms. "There were documents ordering the killing of Jews" is a Motte and Bailey at a comical level.

Let's see how the most eminent Holocaust Historian, Raul Hilberg, describes the origin of the "final solution":

But what began in 1941 was a process of destruction not planned in advance, not organized centrally by any agency. There was no blueprint and there was no budget for destructive measures [of the Jews]. They [the measures] were taken step by step. Thus came about not so much a plan being carried out but an incredible meeting of minds, a consensus mind-reading by a far-flung [German] bureaucracy.”

You correctly posit the Holocaust as one of the greatest conspiracies in human history- the trans-continental extermination of millions of people in bedroom-sized gas chambers disguised as shower rooms, using Zyklon B pellets or carbon monoxide from the engine of captured Soviet tanks. But Hilberg would have us believe that there was no plan, no blueprint, no budget for this mass conspiracy. It wasn't carried out by a "plan" but by "an incredible meeting of minds, and consensus mind-reading".

On the other hand, a simple matter like an order for the execution of Commissars, was unable to escape exposure in the documentary body of evidence despite being limited to 30 documents that they tried to keep secret and later tried to destroy. Hilberg and you would have us believe that the greatest conspiracy in human history was accomplished without the benefit or survival of written plans, blueprints, or budgets. It was just mind-reading across the German bureaucracy, according to Hilberg.

If the Commissar order couldn't escape being exposed in the documentary body of evidence, it is entirely incomprehensible that the trans-continental extermination of millions of people in bedroom-sized gas chambers was accomplished without the survival of explicitly written plans, blueprints, or budgets, and without bodies or mass graves that have ever been excavated. The Commissar order was directly exposed in the documents, why wouldn't this far more gargantuan conspiracy?

That at some point Hitler ordered the extermination of Jewry is not contested among historians.

Actually, some historians suggest that it could have not been known by Hitler but that's besides the point. The assertion that this was a homicidal gas chamber disguised as a shower room used to gas Jews is also not contested among historians, but it has been completely refuted by Revisionists nonetheless.

The specific date is contested; some favour an "early" hypothesis (around September 1941) and some favour a "late" hypothesis (around November-December 1941).

Historians are all over the place in formulating a date on when the extermination was apparently decided upon, but none of them are internally consistent. Historians who pick a date too early are contradicted by documents proving Hitler and Nazi Leadership still considered the Madagascar Plan to be the "Final Solution." Historians who pick a date later than that run into the fact that it is claimed extermination camps were already built and operational, so they are saying the order came after the construction of the earliest extermination centers. But there is no consensus because there is no evidence to establish any of their positions.

Here's an alternative hypothesis: there was no order and never a plan to exterminate the Jews as the "final solution", and that's why the historians have been unable to find documents or even agree on a basic timeline of how this occurred.

Lastly, I'm sure you are aware that upon liberation it was the Western camps which featured most prominently in the propaganda surrounding German "death camps," like Dachau, which were claimed to be the centers of gas chamber extermination. But the Western Allies investigated those claims and found them to be false. The entire death camp narrative shifted to the East, where the Soviets denied access to outside investigators and freely modified structures post-war (like the Auschwitz "gas chamber.")

If the Western camps were originally accused of perpetuating the greatest conspiracy in human history, and those claims turned out to be completely false, why wouldn't that lower your confidence in the authenticity of identical claims in the Eastern camps where all of the evidence and investigation was managed in the Soviet sphere? The "current" map is now oudated as the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum finally revised their website to revise Majdanek from "extermination camp" to "concentration camp", so that's another "death camp" that is in the dustbin of history due to Revisionist research. And that one was in the East and was in fact liberated before Auschwitz.

You can see this article form August 1944, before the liberation of Auschwitz declaring a mass murder of "1,500,000 in Huge Death Factory of Gas Chambers and Crematories" at Majdanek. Then the Soviets liberated Auschwitz in January 1945 and made the exact same claim. The problem is that in 2003 the death toll at Majdanek was revised to something like 50,000. The entire gas chamber narrative began at Majdanek, and just recently historians are finally admitting it was not an extermination camp.

Given your obvious bent and contempt for academic history, again I don't know if you're being deceitful, ignorant, or just plain dumb. The "functionalist" camp is the pre-eminent one in Holocaust studies; scarce few contemporary historians hold that the Holocaust was masterminded by Hitler from the beginning. The Holocaust began roughly simultaneously within three separate Nazi bureaucracies, each with specific problems, methods, and goals. Again, like almost all deniers do, you steadfastly ignore the Holocaust by bullets. By the time the Holocaust moved onto a more deliberate stage and the combined resources of the Nazi state begin to dedicate itself to the task, yes then we have plenty of documentation of that effort (which again you just ignore). Surely you know you're not convincing anyone who has ever opened a history book on the subject?

Here's an alternative hypothesis: there was no order and never a plan to exterminate the Jews as the "final solution", and that's why the historians have been unable to find documents or even agree on a basic timeline of how this occurred.

Well, Himmler would've disagreed with you. And Heydrich and Eichmann, and Goebbels. C'mon dude, these are your heroes! Why are you denying them their greatest works? Think of the shame they would have if 80-odd years on people who claim to follow in their footsteps would disavow the immense effort and sacrifice in attempting rid Europe of Jewry!

This exchange is a lot like this classic meme. You are being extremely condescending and scornful, sneering that anyone that “ever opened a history book” would know better (but refusing to elaborate or engage), while FarNearEverywhere is saying he would break the nose of anyone questioning genocide.

On the other hand, @SecureSignals is providing numerous sources, links and actual arguments regarding the historiography of the Holocaust.

I understand there is the whole issue from Epistemic Learned Helplessness, that a crank with a hobby horse can be much more prepared than a mainstream normie. But you should understand, SecureSignals is coming across better here. In this exchange, the mainstream looks smug and dismissive, but simultaneously evasive and heavily reliant on emotional manipulation.

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You know, stuff like this really doesn't help convince people. Obvious consensus enforcement works in most places, but a lot of people here are instinctively suspicious of it to the point that it becomes counterproductive to even try.