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I think the case for the Aktion Reinhard camps as killing centers is pretty straightforward.
As a matter of historical record, millions of Jews were transited to Belzec, Sobibor, and Treblinka from '42 through '43.
The vast, vast majority of these people subsequently disappear from the historical record. If the AR camps were simply transit camps to "the east" as deniers claim, there ought to be at the very least thousands (more likely tens or hundreds of thousands)of Jews post-war who recalled being shipped through the AR camps on the way to Minsk, or Riga, or Kiev, or wherever. As far as I know there are no such people at all.
Post-war, everyone who had been at Treblinka, guard and inmate alike, said it had been a killing center for the Jews. To the best of my knowledge not a single Treblinka guard or inmate ever said, "these are all lies, no one was gassed at Treblinka."
Goebbels outright says in his diary that Odilo Globocnik, the man in charge of AR, is "liquidating" the Jews of the General Government.
It's still entirely conceivable that the 750,000 figure is bogus.
Besides, is it really abnormal for large numbers of people to simply disappear from the historical record?
According relevant Nazi documentation, as of December 1942 1,000,000+ Jews had been sent to Belzec, Sobibor, or Treblinka. More were sent later, ultimately around 2,000,000. The standard denier argument, as put forward by people like Carlo Mattogno is that the AR camps were simply transit camps, from which the Jews were deported to the Soviet east. To the best of my knowledge, there is not a single example of an individual Jew who reported being transited through any AR camp to the Soviet east. Considering how many Holocaust survivors told their stories after the war, you would expect a large number to have had this experience. Not to mention if this huge number of people was sent east, they would have had to have been housed in ghettos, or labor camps. They wouldn't have been turned loose to roam freely in the middle of the war, since the Nazis considered Jews in the east equivalent to partisans. Yet there is no record of AR deportees arriving en masse in any eastern settlements. In other words, ~2,000,000 people are sent to Treblinka, Belzec, and Sobibor, and then vanish off the face of the earth.
Perhaps this wouldn't be enough to prove genocide on its own, except there are also the testimonies of dozens of both former AR guards and inmates that the AR camps were murder centers. A while back I read (chunks, because it is about 1200 pages long) of Mattogno's The "Extermination Camps" of "Aktion Reinhardt", which is his massive long-form response to his critics, and his explanation for why not a single AR guard ever maintained the falsity of the charges was pretty pathetic. In short, "they didn't bother to contest the charges, because they knew the Jews would railroad them anyway." Personally, if I was being accused of complicity in the murders of hundreds of thousands of people, and it was a lie, I think I would maintain my innocence for the sake of my conscience.
It's also worth noting that David Irving, Mark Weber, and David Cole, probably the most prominent 'revisionists' of the past several decades accept that Jews were killed en masse at the AR camps (not to mention shootings on the eastern front). They just deny that they were any gassings at Auschwitz. The usual denier line of "the historians are too afraid to contest the narrative" hardly works with regards to those three, because their professional reputations are shot anyhow, and acceptance of Aktion Reinhard isn't doing anything to rehabilitate them.
Just to clarify: are we here talking about the Treblinka / Sobibor / Majdanek / Belzec trials in West Germany?
Otherwise, point taken, thanks.
Yes.
There were also trials in the USSR, where the same basic story was maintained, but you may be more skeptical about confessions obtained by the NKVD.
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