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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.
Which post-war accounts? You have a couple of accounts from former Jewish prisoners working with the Polish underground which are not at all plausible or reliable. The other accounts did not come until decades later during the Treblinka trials of the 1960s, well after the Treblinka narrative had already been created. The basic facts of the extermination narrative had already been established in court, and the broader narrative was subject to judicial notice, so "it didn't happen" wasn't a defense available to them. The former guards and even commandant all received very light sentences, either being acquitted or subsequently released from prison. If these guards had denied the Nuremberg narrative they would have been treated in a harsher fashion.
The case is not straightforward at all. The claim is that upwards of 2 million Jews were murdered at these "Aktion Reinhard" camps, and their remains were buried in precisely known locations. How many mass graves have ever been excavated at these known locations? Zero. An alleged 2 million murders and 0 mass graves ever excavated. You have a couple of witness accounts from Jewish sources that informed the conclusions at Nuremberg (Treblinka was barely discussed at Nuremberg) followed by the confessions decades later in the 1960s which earned the guards very light sentences. But ultimately, if you are claiming that 2 million people were murdered and buried in a known location, but you come up with all these excuses for why nobody should actually excavate to try to find these remains, you do not have a straightforward case.
To emphasize just how not straightforward the case is, notice how you spell the name of this operation- "Aktion Reinhard." This is the preferred spelling for the operation among mainstream historians, which according to mainstream historiography, is supposed to denote the secret plan to exterminate the Jews in the General Government of occupied Poland. The story goes, Reinhard Heydrich was given the honor of having this secret extermination named after him due to his assassination (though Heydrich had no role at all in the operation itself).
But, in fact, the operation was spelled Aktion Reinhardt (with a 't'), which, along with other evidence, ties the naming of this operation to the State Secretary of the Reich Ministry of Finance Fritz Reinhardt. Why the hubbub over whether it was Reinhard or Reinhardt? Because the former is used by historians as circumstantial evidence tying the operation symbolically to Heydrich, to imply a secret murder operation. Whereas the reality that the operation was named for an economist in the Finance Ministry does not at all fit that narrative. This corollary is conceded by mainstream historians, by the way, but they just use it to assert that it could only have been named after Heydrich and not Reinhardt:
So the implication of accepting the actual spelling of the operation (not the spelling you use) is that the operation was not what mainstream historians say it is. Aside from Revisionists, even some mainstream historians accept that Aktion Reinhardt was named after Reinhardt, like Joseph Poprzeczny in his 2004 biography on Globocnik:
So you have a murder case with 2 million victims and no bodies- and the main victims have used their considerable influence to avoid any excavations of the supposed mass graves (sounds a lot like a recent case in Canada). Even the spelling you used of the supposed murder operation is controversial, with mainstream historians again misinterpreting history in order to support their pre-canned narrative. Nothing about this is straight-forward, it is all highly unusual.
Edit: BTW, I don't know who is reposting my comments here. Probably a bad actor?
Yes, the witness accounts are full of exaggerations, contradictions, probably fabrication, etc. This is true for much history. In his Treblinka book Mattogno makes much out of these inconsistencies. This one said there were ten gas chambers, this one said there were twelve. This one said they were 7x5 meters, this one said 7x7. This one said it was diesel, this one said it was gasoline. This one said it took a half hour to die, this one said twenty minutes. It is mostly nitpicking, and really, discrepancy can be a marker of truth, because witnesses often misremember details.
They all describe pretty much the same thing, i.e chambers of roughly the same size, construction, and operation being used to kill deportees by the thousands. I don't see why I should expect prisoners to have an intimate grasp of the workings of the extermination facilities, anyways.
Kurt Franz and Franz Stangl both got life in prison. Franz was indeed released after thirty years imprisonment as an old man. I'm not sure I'd call that a "light sentence." Notably, Franz denied that he had actually commanded Treblinka, insisting he'd been in a subordinate position. But he didn't deny the gassings.
Franz and Stangl would have gotten harsher sentences than life imprisonment? The BRD had abolished capital punishment by the 1960s.
I don't have any excuses. As far as I'm concerned, they can go ahead and dig up Treblinka. But I can understand why modern-day Jews would be loathe to do this in order to appease a handful of neo-Nazis.
I don't care to take a position on this, I don't think it matters.
I'm curious as to why you think Irving, Cole, and Weber accept mass killings at the AR camps. They're pariahs at this point. Irving in particular is "the Holocaust Denial guy" as far as most people are concerned (they even made a movie about it), and he gives interviews where he says things like this so I think it's fair to say he's not very concerned with his mainstream reputation. Do you think they're lying? That they haven't actually looked at the evidence?
Indeed; and in the mainstream scholarly view, three unreliable witness accounts full of exaggerations, contradictions, and fabrications yield a reliable account when the inconvenient parts are ignored and the somewhat-compatible pieces can be fashioned together (and expunged when necessary, like the embarrassing, former consensus that diesel exhaust was used to gas millions of people in the AR camps). Such was the logic used in hundreds of witch trials and in the Court of the Red Tsar, where witnesses attesting to supernatural occurrences and confessions extracted under duress were considered sufficient in lieu of concrete evidence.
Earlier, you allowed that one could be skeptical of such confessions extracted from the NKVD:
But let's take stock of the most major players in the Holocaust, and what they had to say:
Himmler: Died in Allied custody
Globocnik: Died in Allied custody
Christian Wirth: Killed by Partisans
Göring: Denied any plan to exterminate the Jews, and explicitly denied ordering Heydrich to exterminate the Jews (contrary to scholarly consensus). And then died in Allied custody.
Göring is particularly notable because he was the highest authority in General Government, where these AR camps existed. There is no doubt that if there was such a secret extermination program, he would have known about it, and he explicitly denied it. So either he was lying or Revisionists are right. For that matter, Göring affirmed the Revisionist historical interpretation of the "Final Solution" as such:
Of course, the keystone of the entire Holocaust narrative, including the AR camps (which did not receive so much as 30 minutes of attention at the Nuremberg Trials), is the confession of the former commandant of Auschwitz, Rudolf Höss. His confession was extracted from the British, not the NKVD; but Revisionists had for decades pointed out the absurdities and contradictions in this confession which led the court to conclude that 4.5 million people were murdered at Auschwitz. Of course, that number was reduced to 1.1 million after the fall of the Soviet Union, but like water off a duck's back, it didn't motivate any sort of scholarly skepticism over the reliability of other court findings at Nuremberg, or at the subsequent trials which were downstream of this keystone confession.
It wasn't until a 1983 when a book by Rupert Butler, Legions of Death, audaciously bragged about how the confession of Höss was extracted after days of torture. The prime British-Jewish interrogator, Bernard Clarke revealed "It took three days to get a coherent statement out of [Höss]":
There are a lot more details in the article, like his statement was written in English and then translated into German in an attempt to make the latter appear as the original. This confession is the wellspring of the entire narrative and all subsequent trials, as the defendants were not permitted to dispute the findings of the Nuremberg trials. Earlier you also remarked:
Hard to say what you would do if you were suffering these same conditions, isn't it? There are of course those who did maintain their innocence, and they were found guilty and executed anyway. Again, not the NKVD, but Revisionist research has provided great insight into the tactics of these War Crimes investigations: incompetence, dishonestly, forging documents, witness intimidation, suppression of evidence.
For context, Bruno Tesch was accused of knowingly supplying gas chambers and Zyklon B for the purpose of exterminating human beings, a charge for which he was clearly innocent. He maintained his innocence, and that the entire extent of his work and that of his gassing technicians was for delousing purposes only. As just one example, this Revisionist researcher found that the original German transcript of the interrogation had been marked for modification in the official English court interpretation. Here's an example of a passage from the German interrogation that was deleted in the official English version, where a Sergeant Freud threatened extradition to the Soviets for not getting answers he wanted:
They still maintained their innocence:
They maintained their innocence- and they were railroaded, found guilty, and executed. If they had spun a story to Sergeant Freud about how they received an oral order from Himmler at some date then they would have been treated with more leniency. Instead, they were threatened with torture and executed anyway even though they were clearly innocent. This wasn't the NKVD. It was the Western Allies that did this.
It is not acceptable that they proclaim that their suffering was so profound that it transcends the most minimal standards of scientific and criminal investigation. An investigation of a single murder would yield an order of a magnitude more forensic investigation than was done for the alleged murder of up to 2 million people. Particularly given that the original extermination narratives in the Western camps, Auschwitz, and Majdanek have fallen apart over time and after Revisionist scrutiny.
The AR camp narrative remains the most unscathed precisely because it has the least amount of evidence for Revisionists to scrutinize (and that evidence was in the custody of the NKVD, who knows what exculpatory evidence has been hidden or destroyed). It behooves them to keep it that way by avoiding excavations, because more evidence has only made the work of Revisionists easier in their study of the other camps.
This is how history works. When a variety of independent accounts coincide on certain points, elevated confidence in the points of coincidence is warranted. It helps that they are backed up by the confessions of the perpetrators.
The Nazis got much propaganda mileage out of Bolshevik atrocities in the east, much of it fabricated or exaggerated. This does not mean Bolshevik atrocities didn't happen.
The confessions of Rudolf Höss, who if I recall correctly said he had visited the AR camps once, is not the keystone of the evidence for AR. It's significantly less relevant than the testimonies of the actual staff and inmates of the camps.
Gerald Reitlinger wrote in his book on the Final Solution that less than a million people had died in Auschwitz. It's not true that 4 million was agreed upon until the fall of the Iron Curtain, at which point it was shamefacedly revised. Hilberg also has a number of c.1 million in his book, also well before the fall of the USSR.
What's the relevance of this? Lots of different sorts of people died at Auschwitz. AR was Jews only. Most Allied propaganda downplayed the issue of the Jews to avoid playing into Nazi charges that it was a "war for the Jews."
We were talking about Treblinka, weren't we? Wrt to your digressions about Höss and Tesch, your argument is, what, that if the Treblinka guards in West German courts in the 60s hadn't gone along with the party line they would have been tortured by US troops and/or deported to Russia? Or perhaps it's a weaker argument that such past treatment created a chilling effect that frightened these men into compliance twenty years later despite the lack of any immediate threat of torture/deportation. I could buy that, maybe if some had confessed and others hadn't. Not for all of them. That's not even to mention the SS men who confessed outside of courtroom settings, like Franz Suchomel in his interview with Claude Lanzmann.
Speaking of paucity of evidence for a narrative, where is the evidence for the "Treblinka transit camp" narrative? There is plenty of evidence people were sent to Treblinka. Revisionists agree on that. There are train schedules, internal Nazi communications, eyewitness reports from Jewish transportees, eyewitness reports from railwaymen and locals, eyewitness reports from guards. But there are no train schedules for trains from Treblinka and to the Soviet east, there is no testimony from Jews transited from Treblinka to the Soviet east, there is no testimony from Nazi officials in the occupied territories receiving transports from Treblinka, there are no transport lists, there are no records of the massive logistical effort that would have been necessary to settle and supply these massive numbers of people. There is ample evidence that hundreds of thousands were sent to Treblinka, and none that they left.
Thomas Kues wrote three massive articles on CODOH supposedly demonstrating the "presence of 'gassed 'jews in the occupied eastern territories." He managed to do this without providing evidence of a single AR victim "in the occupied eastern territories." Because there isn't any. To give a more specific example, according to Kues ~70,000 Dutch jews (I believe lower than the 'mainstream' number, but I will go with it) were deported east from Holland in '42-'43. Kues thinks they were sent on to Belarus, the Baltic, and the Ukraine. His evidence for this is wartime rumor, second and third-hand hearsay, and reports in foreign papers. Wartime rumor, second and third-hand hearsay, and reports in foreign papers are course worthless when they talk about extermination facilities, but evidential gold when they talk about resettlement in the east. Apparently not one of those 70,000 Dutch Jews ever wrote anything down or spoke to anyone, before or after the war.
What do you make of Goebbels' statements in his diary, on Globocnik's operations in Poland? Revisionists often bemoan a lack of written documentation wrt to the murder of the Jews, yet there is a frank admission on the part of one of the Nazi elite that Globocnik is "liquidating" 60% of the Jews of the general government. Everywhere else in Goebbels' diaries where he uses the word "liquidation" to refer to human beings rather than a party or an institution or something like that, he plainly refers to killing. He even explicitly differentiates between "evacuation" and "liquidation" on at least one occasion.
It is not at all how history works. Witness accounts are treated as a single dimension that ought be corroborated with documents and physical evidence, particularly when the witnesses involved have a motive to lie, and they attest to extremely unusual events. The lack of documents is well known and has long been admitted to by mainstream historians, like Léon Poliakov in 1951:
No documents, no mass graves; a tortured confession with known errors and exaggerations, is the basis for the entire narrative which was already considered "history" well before the Treblinka trials in the 1960s. Renowned historian A.J.P Taylor acknowledged:
Surely you are aware that the defense at the Nuremberg trials only had available to them documents which had been selected by the prosecution as relevant to the case. This is not how history works, this is how show-trials work.
Oh it's even better than that. Höss's statement said:
Other than the fact that Wolzek was not a camp, the even more glaring problem is that it is universally agreed by historians that Treblinka did not open until July 1942 and received its first transport later that month. Some historians try to place a different year for Höss's order and visit to Treblinka, but none of the proposed timelines work. Every proposed timeline is contradicted by another part of the story. There is in fact no evidence at all that Höss visited Treblinka, so where does his descriptions of the gas chambers and such come from? Probably from the published accounts from Wiernik, Grossman, Rachman, etc which would have been known to the interrogators. In the same way the interrogators tried to lead the defendants in the Tesch Trial to admit to the "gas chamber disguised as shower room" scheme, which they never did. The fact is, even if you try to torture Höss's statement, there is no internally consistent account of his supposed visit to Treblinka.
This is of course not the only continuity problem with the Treblinka story. Revisionists uncovered a newspaper clipping from the Polish-language London newspaper Dziennik Polski which reported on alleged extermination actions at Treblinka a whole two weeks before the camp even opened. How does an international newspaper report on an extermination camp weeks before it even opened and received its first transport? It turns out that's not even the only apocryphal rumor of a "Treblinka extermination camp" published before the camp even opened. As early as May 1942:
Again, it is unanimously agreed that Treblinka did not open until July 1942 and received its first transport on 22 or 23 July 1942. So how is an international newspaper talking about gassings in Treblinka before the camp was open?
The entire body of evidence was in Soviet custody. If there were exculpatory records, do you trust that the Soviets would have introduced them as evidence as they were building a case against the Germans? Keep in mind they accused the Germans of conducting the Katyn Forest massacre, which they were guilty of. A lack of records is indeed suspicious, but that suspicion can be cast in multiple directions.
The extermination narrative at Treblinka was not even in question at the trials in the 1960s. The only question was of the guilt of the alleged perpetrators. "It didn't happen" was not a defense they could have used. Take Lambert for example, who was found guilty of constructing the gas chambers at Treblinka. What exactly does he "confess" to? He confesses to a construction project, but denies involvement or knowledge of the alleged murder operation. He got time served for minimizing his involvement that way, and he would have faced a much harsher punishment if he tried to deny the entire basis for the trial. Even Kurt Franz, the commandant of a camp that allegedly murdered hundreds of thousands, was released from prison after a long sentence. Franz Stangl died in custody while awaiting his appeal, so it's also disingenuous to mark him down as purely a confessor given he was challenging his conviction. And, as already mentioned, key figures like Goering and Hanks Frank did deny all knowledge and involvement even though they would have been in a position where they must have known, if it had happened.
Famously, 54 of 180 of the accused witches admitted guilt in the Salem Witch trials. 19 who refused to admit guilt were executed. Confessions extracted in military tribunals, after the alleged war crime had already been purportedly proven, is not a good way to do history.
Add to that postcards which deportees sent to Warsaw after their transit. Historians say that these were forged by the SS as a ruse to lure more Jews onto trains. Tracking the whereabouts with that level of granularity is basically impossible given the circumstances of the war. Even more so given the entire custody of the evidence was in the hands of the Soviet Union. Ultimately, historians are the ones who claim to know the precise remains of every single one of these people, but the evidence for their conclusion does not hold up to scrutiny.
If you accuse someone of having murdered and buried a busload of people in his backyard, it would be nothing more than a desperate attempt to reverse the burden of proof to demand that the accused must locate the people who were on the bus if he wants to dispute the claim. You're the one saying the busload of people was murdered and buried in the backyard, where's the evidence for that? Not a single grave has ever been excavated. It's a desperate strategy for an extraordinary claim that lacks evidence.
His statements are vague, which is why Holocaust historians find it necessary to rely on them. Excavating alleged mass graves? Nah. Vague diary statements? They make reliable evidence because you can just work backwards and fill in the blanks with your preferred narrative.
You're referring to Goebbels' vague statement on March 27, 1942. Earlier that month, March 7, 1942, he wrote:
Like other leaders, Goebbels expected a reboot of the Madagascar plan after the war, not some extermination plan.
There are documents concerning the transport of the Jews to Treblinka. There is eyewitness testimony, of both perpetrators and victims. There is physical evidence. The Łukaszkiewicz report, which you cited in the OP comment (or rather, the comment cited by the OP comment) as having failed to find any mass graves at Treblinka, excavated near the site of the old gas chambers (i.e, where the mass graves were reported to have been), and reported "a large quantity of ashes as well as human remains," in the pits they dug. This sounds like a mass grave of cremated remains to me, exactly as would be expected from the witness accounts. Not even to mention the 2 hectares of ground covered with human ash and bone Łukaszkiewicz found.
The Wolzek blunder is a point in favor of Hoess' testimony, not against it. Prior to giving the "Wolzek" statement, Höss was interrogated once before, and when asked about the three AR camps he named them as "Treblinka, Belzak near Lemberg and the third one was 40 kilometers in the direction of Kulm. It was past Kulm in an easterly direction." So for whatever reason it is clear Höss did not remember the third camp as well as the other two. Yet Sobibor just so happens to be ~40km northeast of Chelm by rail. Why he ultimately called it "Wolzek," I don't know, but it seems highly unlikely that Höss would make up a nonexistent camp that just happened to share a location with Sobibor. Apparently Höss had a bad memory, which would explain some of the other errors he made as well.
Hoess' statements are hardly critical to the AR story anyways. Apparently Kues agrees, since he believes Höss' confession was entirely cobbled together from previous testimonies. After all, Höss was tortured and spent only hours at Treblinka, so his testimony is significantly less valuable in this regard than that of the Treblinka guards, who were not tortured and who worked there for months.
The start date of Treblinka's operation is not as set in stone as Kues has it. At least two witnesses (Ryszard Czarkowski and Jan Sulkowski) testified to transports coming to Treblinka before 22 July. With that in mind it seems perfectly possible that the gas chamber was "tested" before the large transports began arriving regularly from the Warsaw Ghetto. Such happened at Sobibor and Belzec, which had been operational for months at this point.
Why do you find "the Soviets destroyed all the evidence" any less risible than "the Nazis destroyed all the evidence" (not that they did)? And of course it's not just documents. We're talking about 1,000,000+ people supposedly deported to the east (where in the east?). None of these people survived the war? None of these people told their stories after the war? None of these people talked to anyone else who might've told their stories?
Legally, maybe not, which is not what I claimed anyways. But none of them denied in their personal lives? None of them denied it to friends or acquaintances? On their death beds? Not one of these dozens of people--particularly those like Stangl and Franz who received the maximum sentence, anyways--decided to stand up, in court or elsewhere, and say, "to hell with this sham trial, I'm telling the truth"?
Yes, he was released as a sick old man in the early 90s, to die shortly afterwards. I would hardly call his sentence "mild" as you originally did.
I am not sure where Lambert denied any "knowledge of the alleged murder operation"? It doesn't seem to say that on the page you linked. What do you think the guy from Aktion T4 was building at a transit camp? For that matter, most of the Reinhard staff were former T4 men, why were they of all people put in charge of this "transit camp"?
Did he challenge his conviction by denying Treblinka's status as an extermination camp? I don't believe he did.
I'm familiar with the claim from this IHR article. All of the cited sources (footnote 47) were luckily available online, so I checked them, and not one offers the actual name or identity of a person attached to one of these supposed post cards. In fact one of the cited ghetto diarists explicitly says that no matter how hard he tried, he could never actually track down one of these elusive postcards or letters from the deportees in the east. Every lead he chased ended in a rumor.
I would compare it to a man kidnapped by two of his mortal enemies, bundled into a car in full view of dozens of witnesses, and then driven out into the woods. Later the kidnappers come back alone and the man is never seen again. Later still one of two kidnappers (the other one swallowed a cyanide capsule) confesses, "we shot him and buried him in a ditch." But you say in fact the victim was sent to live on a farm upstate.
It isn't vague at all:
Does "considerable circumspection and according to a method that does not attract too much attention" really sound like "a train to Riga"?
Or how about Jurgen Stroop's report, even clearer if possible, where he refers to a transport of a few thousand captured rebels from the Warsaw ghetto, that he's sent to Treblinka to be "destroyed." What's the sense in sending a few thousand people to a transit camp to be killed? Why not shoot them in Warsaw? Strongly suggests there was something special about Treblinka that made it ideal for the elimination of thousands of people in short periods of time.
Yes, it is. It is universally agreed that gassing operations began with the transports from Warsaw on July 22. Can you cite one historian who places the beginning of gassing operations before that? There's also the July 7th letter from the first Commandant of that Treblinka camp, Irmfried Eberl, which states that the "Work Camp [Arbeitslager] Treblinkla" will be ready on July 11th. But by July 9th there were already reports, published by the London-based Dziennik Polski:
Of course, that CODOH article shows even more rumors of an extermination camp in Treblinka going back to May 1942, where the original method of mass murder was described as "lethal rods." That was only the first of many variations of alleged method of mass murder. By November 1942, less than four months after the camp was open, the Warsaw ghetto resistance published claims of 2 million deaths by steam chamber in Treblinka (German disinfestation chambers during the war were often operated with steam):
Eberl's letter is also interesting because he refers to Treblinka as a work camp, not an extermination camp. It's not the only instance where an AR camp is explicitly identified as having a non-homicidal function. Himmler's 5 July 1943 directive for example reads:
And Osawld Pohl (head of SS-WVHA and camp system) replies:
There's a third document where Himmler's assistant referred to Sobibór as a transit camp. How do historians explain these documents? They say that the SS were using camouflage in their communications in order to maintain the utmost secrecy in their extermination operation. That's especially ironic given a London newspaper blew the lid on the Treblinka extermination camp before it was even operational. Historians don't even acknowledge these contradictions, they just act as if they don't exist because Revisionists are the only ones willing to point them out and show that the historiography does not explain the known evidence.
By the way, Oswald Pohl himself worked closely in Operation Reinhardt with both Himmler and Globocnik. He and the rest his SS-WVHA denied any knowledge of an extermination operation. He would have known if Operation Reinhardt was an extermination plan, and he denied any knowledge of that.
Heoss' statements are critical precisely because they were clearly cobbled together from previous accounts. The significance of Hoess is that having the story come from a camp commandant gives it a lot more credibility than a story said to be written by anonymous escapees.
The credibility of Wiernik for example has always been enigmatic. Imagine if Wiernik really did witness everything he claimed, and planned the great revolt and escaped after heroically killing a Ukrainian guard with an axe. Why wouldn't he be an international superstar and why would his account be virtually unknown? You cannot even buy A Year in Treblinka on Amazon despite the importance of his remarkable, first-hand account of the single most unusual event in WWII.
Goering, Hans Frank, Oswald Pohl; that is a notable list of top leadership that would have known about this extermination operation in General Government, but they maintained their denial through the end. Heoss gave credibility to these tall tales by recycling them under duress, but he was never in Treblinka; and historians can't even "choose their own adventure", as they so often do, and a pick a date of his visit that's consistent with the rest of the timeline.
The case is so straightforward that you are reduced to contradicting the conclusion of the report you are citing. "Łukaszkiewicz found mass graves!" According to Łukaszkiewicz, he did not. The murder, cremation, and burial of upwards of a million people would leave metric tonnes of evidence. Why are you reduced to these sorts of appeals for something that ought to have an enormous amount of physical evidence that should have easily been found at any point since 1945? Because the claim is extraordinary and the evidence is very weak.
It's a matter of the quantity and quality of the evidence not measuring up to the extraordinary nature of the claims. You are claiming that upwards of a million people were murdered, cremated, and buried in this small camp, and that all these cremations happened in about 120 days (with zero contemporaneous reports of such an enormous, non-stop cremation operation). The lack of evidence is the problem, and the reasons for the lack of evidence could be multiple. But ultimately, "it didn't happen" is the only plausible explanation for why such an allegedly enormous operation like this would have left behind so little evidence. And what little was left behind was in the custody of the Soviet Union, which denied access to outside investigators and even modified structures in existing camps to advance the gas chamber claim.
You've already dodged a defense of the official narrative regarding "Operation Reinhard". To answer your question, you first have to understand what Operation Reinhardt denoted, which was not what historians claim it denoted. Why are you so interested in the "Reinhard staff" if you aren't even interested in what Operation Reinhardt actually was? The reason is that the Revisionist interpretation of Operation Reinhardt fits the evidence far better than the mainstream story of a secret extermination plan named in honor of the Hangman Heydrich.
Stangl died under suspicious circumstances before his appeal was heard. We cannot say how it would have unfolded if he had not died in custody like Himmler, Globocnik, Eberl, etc.
Actually "considerable circumspection and according to a method that does not attract too much attention" is vague. You are starting with your own preferred conclusion and filling in the blank. But Revisionists claim that this was referring to the liquidation of the ghettos where Jews were indeed rounded up, robbed of their possessions, and deported. The Revisionist interpretation of these events explains both the March 27th entry and the March 7th entry which discusses a continuation of the Madagascar plan after the war. Your interpretation may explain the later but it does not explain the earlier entry. The Revisionist interpretation explains both entries.
This is the exact same logic used to hoodwink an entire country into believing atrocities that never happened, like the so-called mass graves at the Kamloops Indian Reservation schools. "The Catholic Church kidnapped those children in order to genocide their culture. You are a genocide denier if you think these GPR results aren't good enough to conclude that this is a mass grave of victims of the Catholic Church!"
In any serious investigation, witness testimony would be followed by excavations to try to identify remains, determine cause of death, and conclude if that evidence coincides with the various accounts. This has not happened in Kamloops and it has not happened in Treblinka.
It did happen in the German investigation of the Kayn Forest massacre. When the Germans discovered the mass graves of the Katyn Forest, they invited international observers and even released American POWs to monitor and report on the investigation to Western authorities. They (NSFW) excavated the remains in the mass graves, conducted autopsies, identified the remains they could, tried to determine cause and time of death, and documented everything. And the Germans were still accused of this crime by the Soviet prosecution at Nuremberg, and the truth was denied until the fall of the Soviet Union.
Not a single iota of similar investigation has happened for the alleged murder of around 2 million people in the so-called AR camps. Contradictory witness accounts and confessions extracted in tribunals are not a substitute for a minimum level of investigation that any reasonable person should expect in order to believe these extraordinary claims.
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