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Culture War Roundup for the week of September 5, 2022

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This is how history works.

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:

As regards the conception properly called of the plan for a total extermination, the three or four principal actors committed suicide in May of 1945. No document has survived or perhaps has ever existed.

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:

The evidence of which there is too much is that collected for the trials of war-criminals in Nuremberg. Though these documents look imposing in their endless volumes, they are dangerous material for a historian to use. They were collected, hastily and almost at random, as a basis for the lawyer's briefs. This is not how historians would proceed. The lawyer aims to make a case; the historian wishes to understand a situation. The evidence which convinces lawyers often fails to satisfy us; our methods seem singularly imprecise to them. But even lawyers must not have qualms about the evidence at Nuremberg. The documents were chosen not only to demonstrate the war-guilt of the men on trial, but to conceal that of the prosecuting Powers... The verdict preceded the tribunal; and the documents were brought in to sustain a conclusion which had already been settled.

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.

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.

Oh it's even better than that. Höss's statement said:

I was ordered to establish extermination facilities at Auschwitz in June 1941. At that time, there were already in the General Government three other extermination camps: Belzek, Treblinka, and Wolzek.

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:

At that time, i.e. in late May and early June 1942, the clandestine press published reports on two camps in Treblinka: the labor camp and the death camp. The first reference to the killing center there is to be found in a text by Gutkowski entitled ‘The Scroll of Agony and Destruction,’ which probably constitutes the draft of an Oneg Shabbat press bulletin. In the entry dated May 29, 1942, we read: ‘There are two camps in Treblinka: a labor camp and a death camp. In the death camp people are not murdered by shooting (the criminals are saving ammunition), but by means of a lethal rod [in the Yiddish original: troytshtekn].’ This item, without mention of the ‘lethal rod,’ was printed on June 2, 1942 by the newspaper Yedies. The next issue of that paper, dated June 9, 1942, carried an article entitled ‘The Death Camp in Trenblinka [sic]’ In it we read:

‘A Pole who managed to bribe his way out of the camp relates: 'I worked with the German personnel of the labor camp. The Poles present there were assigned the task of digging huge pits. The Germans brought a group of about 300 Jews every day. They were ordered to undress and get into the pit. The Poles then had to cover the pits with soil, burying the people there alive. After they finished their work, they were shot.’”

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?

But there are no train schedules for trains from Treblinka and to the Soviet east

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.

I could buy that, maybe if some had confessed and others hadn't. Not for all of them.

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.

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.

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.

What do you make of Goebbels' statements in his diary, on Globocnik's operations in Poland?

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:

There are about 11 million Jews in Europe. Later it will be necessary to concentrate them in the East. After the war some island such as Madagascar can be assigned to them

Like other leaders, Goebbels expected a reboot of the Madagascar plan after the war, not some extermination plan.

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:

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.

Other than the fact that Wolzek was not a camp

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.

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.

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.

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.

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?

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.

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"?

Even Kurt Franz, the commandant of a camp that allegedly murdered hundreds of thousands, was released from prison after a long sentence.

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"?

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.

Did he challenge his conviction by denying Treblinka's status as an extermination camp? I don't believe he did.

Add to that postcards which deportees sent to Warsaw after their transit.

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.

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.

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.

His statements are vague, which is why Holocaust historians find it necessary to rely on them.

It isn't vague at all:

Beginning with Lublin, the Jews in the General Government are now being evacuated eastward. The procedure is a pretty barbaric one and not to be described here more definitely. Not much will remain of the Jews. On the whole it can be said that about 60 per cent of them will have to be liquidated whereas only about 40 per cent can be used for forced labor. The former Gauleiter of Vienna, who is to carry this measure through, is doing it with considerable circumspection and according to a method that does not attract too much attention.

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.

The start date of Treblinka's operation is not as set in stone as Kues has it.

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:

We provide here data [dane] on the state of affairs in Poland, presented the day before yesterday [i.e. 9 July 1942] by Minister Mikołajczyk to British and foreign reporters at a press conference held by the British Ministry of Information... All children aged 2-3 years from the orphanage, who numbered 108, were sent away from the city along with their nurses and murdered. Altogether 2,500 people were murdered that night, while the remaining 26,000 were sent to camps in Bełżec and Tremblinka... Reportedly in Bełźec and Tremblinka the killing is going on with the help of poisonous gas [za pomoca gazów trujacych].

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):

The ghost of death in the steam chambers would stand before the eyes of the whole Polish people... we all have become aware of Treblinka. Over there, people are boiled alive.

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:

"The Sobibór transit camp [Durchgangslager], located in the Lublin district, is to be converted into a concentration camp. A dismantling unit for captured enemy munitions is to be set up in the concentration camp."

And Osawld Pohl (head of SS-WVHA and camp system) replies:

"According to your above instructions, the Sobibór transit camp [Durchgangslager] in the Lublin district is to be converted into a concentration camp. I have discussed this with SS-Gruppenführer Globocnik...

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.

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.

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 Łukaszkiewicz report

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.

Why do you find "the Soviets destroyed all the evidence" any less risible than "the Nazis destroyed all the evidence" (not that they did)?

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.

Reinhard staff

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.

Did he challenge his conviction by denying Treblinka's status as an extermination camp? I don't believe he did.

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.

It isn't vague at all

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.

I would compare it to a man kidnapped by two of his mortal enemies

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.

Can you cite one historian who places the beginning of gassing operations before that?

In The Treblinka Death Camp by Chris Webb it is stated,

“It is known that in the other two Aktion Reinhardt camps at Bełżec and Sobibór test gassings were carried out on local Jews. It is therefore possible that some transports did in fact arrive at earlier dates on which the first gas chambers were tested.”

(I don't have a proper page number because I have the book as an epub).

But you've said you don't put much stock in mainstream historians anyways, so what does it matter? I'm claiming it is perfectly possible the gas chambers were tested prior to the first transport from the Warsaw Ghetto considering that A) there are multiple eyewitness accounts from inmates of the Treblinka labor camp that there were indeed earlier transports and B) this was reportedly done at the other two Reinhard camps before they were fully "operational."

Even if I granted that this paper reported gassings in Treblinka "ahead of time" as it were, I'm not sure how this helps the revisionist case. We agree Jews were sent to Treblinka, just strongly disagree on what happened to them afterwards. Granting that Dziennik Polski is reporting Jews sent to Treblinka before Jews were sent to Treblinka (whether they were gassed or not), does that imply no Jews were sent to Treblinka?

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."

The May report (I've tried to find a copy of the cited source online, I can't) doesn't even mention gas. I have no doubt prisoners were killed at Treblinka long before the gas chambers were installed. It is interesting that "lethal rods" are described as the murder weapon, because a number of inmates of Treblinka work camp described the guards beating prisoners to death with clubs.

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

The Warsaw underground did not inspect Treblinka for itself.

Historians don't even acknowledge these contradictions,

"The Nazis tried their best keep their mass murder secret, but considering the massive size of the operation, it inevitably leaked out." There is no contradiction there.

Why wouldn't he be an international superstar and why would his account be virtually unknown?

Most people didn't care about the Nazi war on the Jews. It was considered a sidebar to the eastern front. Allied propaganda before and after the war focused intently on Nazi oppression of the nations of Europe, but the Jews were rarely if ever singled out despite their place at the center of the Nazi worldview, and if they were mentioned at all it was as one in another list of peoples tormented by the Nazis.

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.

I am actually not sure why Łukaszkiewicz would write that he'd found a pit full of a "large quantity of ashes as well as human remains" and that "numerous human remains were found by these excavations, still partially in a state of decomposition. The soil consists of ashes interspersed with sand, and is of a dark gray color, granulous in form. During the excavations, the soil gave off an intense odor of burning and decay," and then say that he found no mass graves. Perhaps he meant mass graves of intact corpses? I can't read Polish, so I'm relying on the translation in Mattogno's Treblinka book. Perhaps something is lost in translation.

But this sounds like exactly what you're asking for. The supposed sites of the mass graves were excavated and "large quantities of human bone and ash" were discovered, which is precisely what was expected based on the accounts of the eyewitnesses.

Reinhardt staff

So if Reinhardt was an operation to plunder the Jews and ship them east, the question as to why so many of the men assigned to these camps came from the former euthanasia program remains.

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.

Armed men driving people out of their homes and onto waiting trains is not something that is "considerably circumspect" and "doesn't attract too much attention." If that's not attention grabbing nothing is. And it would make this the only time in his entire diaries that Goebbels uses the word "liquidation" to mean anything other than "killing." The revisionist interpretation of this passage is tortured at best.

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.

I don't think the Nazis had necessarily decided to kill every Jew in the world immediately. The Holocaust was much more haphazard and piecemeal than most people think, that much is true. AR was about getting rid of Polish Jewry in particular who were seen as an especial threat due to their proximity to the eastern front and concentration in large cities.

On that note, there is also Himmler's speech to an assembly of Wehrmacht generals at Sonthofen in 1944. It's about the solution to the Jewish question, and how it was necessary for the security of the Reich's eastern borders. He says,

In this circle, I can say this openly in a few words; it's a good thing that we were hard enough to exterminate the Jews in our territory.

He is talking about Reinhard, which is clear from what he says a few sentences later,

I am confident we could not have held the Lemberg front in the General Government if we still had the big ghettoes in Lemberg, Krakow, Lublin, and Warsaw.

No one doubts the Jews from those cities were sent to the AR camps. And if there was any doubt about what Himmler meant by "exterminate" (since he uses the infamous 'ausrottung') he makes it clear later, when he says:

A question, which will surely be thought of, I want to answer. The question is, "yeah, we know they kill the Jewish adults, I understand that much, but the women and children?" Let me tell you something: the children will grow up. Do we want to say, "no, we're too weak for that, so our children will have to live with them too. They will fight the same fight." Then this Jewish hatred will attack our children and grandchildren, and they will have to solve the same problem, but in a time when Adolf Hitler is no more. That would have been cowardly, and so we favored a clean solution, hard as it was.

No ambiguity there. The word is is "umbringen," kill. The Jewish Question was solved in Poland, and it was solved by killing the Jews of Warsaw, Krakow, Lublin, and Lvov, inclusive of women and children.

We agree Jews were sent to Treblinka, just strongly disagree on what happened to them afterwards.

The fact is, it's ambiguous how many Jews were sent to the camp known as "Treblinka II." The only existing train schedules identify the destination as Treblinka, with a stop right before at the Malkinia junction. Treblinka was the name of a train station some distance from the Jewish camp called TII. Malkinia was a significant hub right next to the Treblinka station. The disinfestation facilities at Treblinka II were likely used as a transit camp in some capacity, but I believe TII was primarily a Jewish labor camp, as stated in Erbel's letter- used for the sorting, storage, and disinfestation of confiscated Jewish property during Operation Reinhardt. But the train schedules do not identify TII as the destination of those transports. It's not known how many Jews set foot in TII.

But you've said you don't put much stock in mainstream historians anyways, so what does it matter?

Because it's another example of historians and their apologists playing "choose their own adventure." All historians since Arad said that gassing operations began in Treblinka on July 22nd or July 23rd. But you cite a 2014 book by Chris Webb, who no doubt included this speculative line in his book in response to these Revisionist findings published a few years before. It's not based on evidence, it's just a helpless attempt to patch another hole in the official narrative made by Revisionist findings.

The May report (I've tried to find a copy of the cited source online, I can't) doesn't even mention gas.

It identifies a death camp in Treblinka. There were thousands of German camps, and only 5 are claimed to have been death camps. What are the chances that the May report correctly predicted a death camp in Treblinka before it was even constructed? Astronomical. The more likely explanation is that the rumors which preceded the existence of the camps formed the basis for later accounts.

Granting that Dziennik Polski is reporting Jews sent to Treblinka before Jews were sent to Treblinka (whether they were gassed or not), does that imply no Jews were sent to Treblinka?

There's a very big gap between "no Jews were sent to Treblinka II" and "a million Jews were sent to Treblinka II." The fact that Dziennik Polski is reporting something before it happened according to official historiography lends credence to Revisionist claims that the nature and extent of this activity was misrepresented by politically-motivated rumor and propaganda, and polluted later accounts and tortured confessions. At any point in the past 75+ years, investigators could have done due diligence and followed basic standards of scientific investigation to determine approximately how many people were killed at Treblinka, but they have specifically forbidden investigators from doing so. The accusers do not want investigators examining the most important evidentiary fact of the matter. That is evidence in itself for Revisionist conclusions.

So if Reinhardt was an operation to plunder the Jews and ship them east, the question as to why so many of the men assigned to these camps came from the former euthanasia program remains.

The euthanasia program ended, so the special staff was available for this special task in the General Government. Much of this former staff were truck drivers employed in the transportation of valuables in General Government. This was the entire point of Operation Reinhardt. The deportation operations were decentralized and handled by the local districts. Operation Reinhardt specifically denoted the sorting, disinfestation, transportation, and utilization of confiscated Jewish property. This was centrally coordinated by SSPF in the district Lublin. It was not a codename for the extermination of the Jews as claimed by official historiography. It was an economic initiative named after Reinhardt- State Secretary of the Ministry of Finance.

AR was about getting rid of Polish Jewry in particular

No it was not, it was about the utilization of property confiscated from the Jews throughout the course of resettlement and liquidations of the ghettos.

Sonthofen in 1944

The context of those passages, which you omitted, was the execution of partisans as the result of uprisings. Revisionists do not deny that reprisals of partisans was a very real part of the history of this time and resulted in large deaths tolls. It's the gas chambers disguised as shower rooms, the alleged plans of a "Final Solution" as extermination, and the hyper-inflated death tolls that they challenge.

The Sonthofen speech also provides support for Revisionist arguments, right in a passage you just referenced:

I am confident we could not have held the Lemberg front in the General Government if we still had the big ghettoes in Lemberg, Krakow, Lublin, and Warsaw.

You know full well that the Revisionists do not deny the liquidation of the ghettos; they merely deny that nearly all the evacuated Jews received a 1-way ticket to gas chambers disguised as shower rooms. The ghetto liquidations were motivated by hygienic concerns of epidemic typhus, economic concerns for the confiscation of wealth and industry, and security concerns as stated here by Himmler. Not some top-secret plan to exterminate world Jewry with engine exhaust in gas chambers disguised as shower rooms.

The coup de grâce is the Revisionist critique of the alleged cremation operation at Treblinka, which is not credible in the size, scope, and methods attested to.

Even using extremely conservative estimates of the fuel that would have been required for the operation of cremations at Treblinka, the daily fuel required is roughly similar to the amount of wood combusted in a moderately-sized forest fire. This was a small camp with a small workforce. There is no logical explanation, or documentary evidence, or witness testimony, that explains how this alleged operation was logistically possible. For that matter, it was supposedly carried out without a single contemporaneous report from local villagers or the Polish Underground operating in the area of these raging infernos that were allegedly burning every single day during the cremation operations.

A London newspaper reported on gassing at Treblinka before it even opened, but nobody reported on the raging infernos from the open-air cremation pyres for months straight. That is not logical.

A significant proportion of people would become Revisionists if they learned the specific details of what historians claim happened at Treblinka. The devil is in the details, and the details are not believable. Even allowing that many, perhaps tens of thousands of Jews, died at the camp called TII, the 750,000+ estimated death tolls are equally as ridiculous as the original 4.5 million claim at Auschwitz, or 1.5 million claim at Majdanek. Circling back to the Caroline Colls investigation, her GPR results are not consistent with the shape, size, and scale of graves that would have been required to bury 700,000+ people. The alleged death toll is not credible and the ban on scientific investigation of the alleged mass graves is evidence that authorities are not confident in what they would find if they conducted those excavations.