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Gee, I guess these American photographers who took pictures like this were all lying and faking too, then, SecureSignals?
Or this one:
Who are the actors playing Patton, Bradley and Eisenhower in this one?
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:
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:
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.
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.
It is mostly intended as feedback to SS - in case they are interested why normies like me react to them as they react.
(especially as typical reaction may be based in the end on it, even if ends phrased as "go away")
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Yes, the revisionists do have answer. Here is the CODOH reply to mainstream historians. You see that they agree that holocaust happened, only Stalin instead of Hitler was the perpetrator.
https://holocausthandbooks.com/index.php?page_id=29
Anatoly Karlin predicted that this line will become official Western history line in 21st century as Second Cold War heats up. We will see.
edit: links added
I have, actually, read the Sanning book, and found it, to put it mildly, underwhelming. It's essentially a series of it-just-so-happenses - it just so happens that the Polish demographical data on local Jewish population was vastly overcounted without either the Poles or the occupying Germans catching on to this, it just so happens that once this is established the same overcount can be expected to apply on other Eastern European nations as well, it just so happens that out of that population a larger-than-assumed share left for Soviet Union and the Soviets then deported/killed them (even though Soviet sources don't show such deportations and deaths - sure, such sources became available after the Sanning book was written, but that's no excuse for us to ignore them), it just so happens that there was a vast Jewish wave of emigration in the 30s to other countries not shown in official data etc.
And once you add all the it-just-so-happenses together, presto - the numbers advocated by the revisionists! Data massaging would be putting it lightly - and in many cases the data is essentially based on just the sort of testimonials, memoirs and what amounts to guesstimates by individual figures that revisionists don't generally consider to be valid (ie. the idea of Soviet deportations is justified by referring to several testimonies made in front of US House Select Committee on Communist Aggression) in establishing a Jewish genocide by Germans.
Beyond that, though, has there even been an attempt from the revisionist camp to make a similar demographic analysis post-Sanning, taking all the new data (methods of estimating populations in cases where demographic data is considered undertain, post-Soviet archives etc.) into account? If not, it speaks volumes that on this crucial field all that there seems to be is this one book from decades ago, while the general effort of the revisionist sphere seemingly concentrates on individual memoirs and technical camp details, and such.
Also, Karlin's predictive abilitites have not exactly shown their worth in 2022, regarding, well, most aspects of the Russian invasion and its presumed successes.
Karlin was wrong together with the whole world. Everyone from Putin to Biden, from CIA to OSINT twitter expected replay of 2014 Mosul or 2021 Kabul.
Russian maskirovka worked perfectly, everyone saw the manly recruitment videos full of brick smashing and bear wrestling stunts and believed in world's second super power.
Was there anyone notable who predicted that Russians will disastrously fail to defeat Ukraine?
Except our commenter Ilforte/ @DaseindustriesLtd ?
https://old.reddit.com/r/TheMotte/comments/t0cnbx/ukraine_invasion_megathread/hyduv1l/
https://old.reddit.com/r/TheMotte/comments/sxnftk/culture_war_roundup_for_the_week_of_february_21/hy70oxd/
Sure, a lot of people (me included) expected Russia to do much better against Ukraine than it did. Karlin did out of his way, though, to predict that serious Ukrainian resistance would last a week and that of course Ukrainians wouldn't fight back in an insurgency because they're "hipsters in rainbow masks who use their cell phones every hour", which goes rather a bit farther than your usual Russian overestimation prediction.
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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.
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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")
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Wikipedia is incredibly ambiguous regarding the consensus on the authenticity of the shrunken heads and lampshades.
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:
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.
Watched the doc, thanks for the recommendation. There were some mildly cringe parts (wanting to give Ilse Koch a hug lol), but whatever still interesting. Seems fairly clear the skin and heads were planted by the Allies, and this certainly does make me significantly revise my estimate of the likelihood of things. If the allies were provably engaged in conspiracies to fabricate evidence relating to the Holocaust in some cases, it has to make it more likely that other pieces of alleged evidence are merely fabrications as well
Unfortunately it's just the tip of the iceberg. I mentioned in another comment that Majdanek, near Lublin, was the first camp liberated by the Soviets in 1944 months before the liberation of Auschwitz, where identical claims of gas chamber extermination were later made. I would highly suggest This Revisionist film on Majdanek, keeping in mind that Majdanek was the first camp where the story of mass gas chamber extermination in the popular press went viral. There were Soviet investigations, trials, and executions all before Auschwitz was liberated in 1945.
That video was the most influential in gaslighting me to study these issues a lot closer. Revisionists are obviously correct about Majdanek. But mainstream historians maintain a policy of categorically refusing to acknowledge Revisionist arguments. They never do any concessions to Revisionists, they just shore up their own narrative by quietly making modifications to strengthen it against Revisionist critique. For example, the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum only last year had this on their website, using the Wayback Machine, April 26 2021:
That page now reads:
With Majdanek excluded. It was Revisionists who did the research decades ago proving that Majdanek was a concentration camp, and not an extermination camp.
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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.
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