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I moderated a forum once.
Like many forums it struggled with one of the basic problems of forum moderation — how much niceness do you enforce, which I'll explain by way of some endemic user types in any forum with enough people and anything but the most milquetoast topic.
A: Here's the troll who comes by only to post egregiously offensive "go kill yourself [list of slurs]",
B: Here's the more subtle troll, who keeps toeing the line as much as he can get away with.
C: here's the user who is not a troll. They actually do participate in discussion and are clearly trying to be a part of the community. They're also abrasive and/or obnoxious and/or inflammatory.
D: And then here's the final type of user that's problematic as a mod: They're a sensitive snowflake. Honestly they need to be sub-divided further, because some of them are just born snowflakes that can't handle any opposition to their viewpoint at all, and others are retaliatory snowflakes, because if I got a ban for three days for saying this opinion is dumb then that guy also needs to get a ban for three days for saying this other opinion is dumb.
The forum was one that was trying really hard to be heterogenous in terms of opinions and also to be nice and moderating it was a nightmare, not because of the obvious ban on sight trolls but because inevitably when you want to moderate niceness now 90% of your mod time — and the mod time becomes a balloon that expands to fill all available space — is spent on dealing with constant playground supervision of the snowflakes. Also you've been slowly but steadily banning your type C members when they eventually accrue enough complains from the type Ds, and because they're really annoying you initially don't miss them until you realize that conversation in your forum is drying up a bit and also some of the valuable forum members who were friends with type Cs also got pissed off and left and also mixed into the type Cs and their friends were, inevitably, some of the more useful members of the forum who knew a lot (and hence got into arguments that annoyed snowflakes).
Also it turns out snowflakes are basically never satisfied as long and are just a self eating death spiral of a forum culture.
After my experience moderating that forum and swearing off moderating ever again, I ended up lurking the notorious kiwifarms. It was full of people who engaged in what would definitely be termed elsewhere as hate speech against me. Now, I never actually made an account there, and I also stopped visiting a few years back so idk if things have changed, but at the time I remember being struck by how much less of a threat I felt reading kiwifarms, because yeah slurs were being thrown around but users were actually arguing, you didn't just have someone with the viewpoint that was the forum consensus and then everyone else against that consensus gets to tiptoe around what they can say or get banned. Everyone shared their most idiotic opinions and had other people arguing with them no holds barred, the forum also had reaction emojis so you could freely post your insane conspiracy theory but wou would get 50 "lol look at this insane conspiracy theory" reactions.
I remember a few years ago people were still making fun of t*kt*kers and how they would asterisk everything or use idiotic word substitution like "krill myself" because otherwise they'd get blackholed by the TikTok algorithm.
Meanwhile I took a long long break from reddit and only recently returned, to a forum dedicated to a game I play, and discovered that in the interim reddit has added some kind of probably AI based site-wide moderation against violent language (or actual human beings are being this dumb idk) and it's impossible to talk like a normal person there anymore, because if you say, in a joking and friendly fashion perfectly understood by you and the person you are talking to to be friendly, "you said my build was bad, I'm gonna have to shove you off a cliff" (this example is not great because I forget the actual exchange, but whatever, fill in something more normal) then you get banned from all of Reddit and the poor guy you were talking with gets to post your exit speech from the discord you're both in as well. It does appear to be a strike system where first you get warned, since I got my first warning for telling someone who posted about a pedophile moving into their neighborhood that hopefully the pedophile would die suddenly.
It's hard not to turn this into some kind of doompost about how the internet is turning into a horrible little hellhole where no one has a normal argument anymore just constant barricading themselves into their own opinions lest they be offended by the not niceness of having to hear someone else's opinions, each little forum and its own narrow band of acceptable ideology, all while the biggest social media sites are enforcing the most transparently fake bullshit kindergarten language upon us all. It brings out the free speech absolutist instincts in me, it really does.
But what if you don't want an aggressively anti-censorship forum that will involve a forum culture of calling everyone slurs? You want the veneer of respectability and gentility but also the ability to have an actual conversation?
Well I already listed the shitty experience I had trying to moderate such a forum, against what was not bad faith actors but just human actors acting predictably human hence this being a pattern you can see all over the place, and now I have to address the flip side of the coin.
Let's by analogy discuss locker room culture. I don't actually know if locker room culture is a real thing irl so I'm going to discuss hypothetical locker room culture.
It's a group of like fifteen guys in a guy's only space. They're basically all normal guys, plus rapey Kenneth and edgy Doug. Sometimes rapey Kenneth makes a joke about how some girl in the school really needs to be fucked into her proper place in society and Doug will make some follow up joke and everyone else is maybe thinking "c'mon man can we not do this" if it's been like too many times that day but usually you're just trying to finish getting dressed and maybe John also is like "that's not cool man" and pushes back. But like, the rest of the time the atmosphere is just a comfy men's only space plus the occasional rape joke or comment about how women suck or are all gold-diggers or are responsible for everything wrong with society.
Anyway, if for whatever reason that locker room decided it wanted to actually be a co-ed discussion space instead, it would have a little problem, which is that any individual woman walking in would get the vibe — they're the barely tolerated outsider — and then leave unless they're like extra autistic/socially challenged.
Because there's just the microculture of what kinds of things are ok to say there and what aren't, and sometimes what's ok to say is anything negative about group A and what's not ok to say is anything negative about group B, and it's not really about an active policy one way or another it's just this is the overall culture of the social group, read the room and get out.
This is, unfortunately, the part where I admit that I've spent weeks now debating if I should just quietly show myself the door. I didn't mean to enter themotte under false premises, I just decided my first post wouldn't be some "here's all my labels and opinions" and would be an actual post about a controversial topic I wanted to talk about. And then before I had the chance to like, casually drop the relevant information about me and get it over with (I despise sharing personally identifiable information online, but it was nonetheless something that needed to happen eventually if I wanted to talk about any number of topics I wanted to discuss), my government did a surprise attack on Iran. I quite vividly remember someone posting a comment about there being a siren and someone else saying "can't find any news confirming it" and not piping in with "it's me, I'm the news, posting from the spotty internet in the bomb shelter". And then it became just increasingly not the right moment for it (also I was quite sleep deprived and dealing with lots of other more immediate concerns).
And in the meantime I got to have the uncomfortable sensation of listening in on conversations I felt were very obviously not meant to include me. For several days now I've been debating doing a rip the band-aid off kind of post (how? What framing?) to get it over with and be able to discuss things again or to just... Leave.
Because of course the alternative is to figure out the correct, respectful way to tiptoe around the conversation over whether Jews control the American government/assassinated Kennedy, since we aren't doing kiwifarms style dialogue where someone talks about the kikes ruining everything and someone else responds by calling him a retarded autist, you've got to politely request sources and carefully have respectful mutually productive dialogue.
Or to just like ignore that the conversation is even happening? Stick to discussion of feminism and essentially continue faking being a normal non-Jewish mottizen...
Polite respectful mutual dialogue.
But only for some opinions, because others are an "immense pain in the ass".
Yes this is the actual reason I ended up writing this comment instead of continuing to waffle over if I should just leave. Because it is actually really annoying, if I need to play nice with the neonazis and have polite and measured conversations — I am willing to do this, even though conversations with people who are (only theoretically!) interested in me and my family being dead are a "pain in the ass" to conduct civilly — and to then see someone else express some opinion that is more objectionable to the baseline motte culture, but expressed according to all the rules of the site, and get banned (temporarily) for it. Because it just means setting the lines around what kinds of people are in the locker room, which is pretending to be a co-ed discussion space, but isn't. And yes I'm biased by being more inclined towards free speech over banning and thinking that it's better to have the opinions and talk it out then constantly police what people say, sure, but if the forum can tolerate holocaust denial I think it can also stretch itself to tolerate libtards. I'm not interesting in doing some tit for tat thing where I'm like "well if you banned them for this, why didn't you ban that other person for that" because like I stated up front that's just the path to a death spiral where almost no one interesting sticks around. But still, come on, you didn't ban them for constantly sticking their conspiracy theories into every discussion couched as consensus building obvious fact. Apply the same low bar consistently. Let people have an actual conversation with actual disagreement.
Eh, you can't have a forum dedicated to political discussion and complain when people hold opinions you disagree with.
I've wasted a lot of time here arguing with Holocaust deniers, until I realised that if it were possible to convince them with evidence or sound argument, then they wouldn't be Holocaust deniers. I found the block function a better solution. I suspect many others have chosen the same approach of non-engagement.
I think the moderation here is excellent. There will always be a few users who manage to get their pet issue into every topic. That's the price we pay for moderation that doesn't descend to purity spirals or 4chan-esque vulgarity.
The comment you linked is a good example for how much of the evidence cited of the Holocaust is not really responsive to the claims made by Revisionists. So according to Hannah Lewis, she and her family was deported to labor camps, her father escaped and joined the Partisans. Hannah almost died of Typhus but received treatment and survived the war- somehow; remember the claim is that the Germans were trying to kill all Jews so a Jewish girl getting sick of Typhus in a German camp and surviving is in itself incongruent with that claimed policy.
Immediately after a Partisan action, Hannah's mother is allegedly executed in a reprisal. The thing is that Revisionists/Holocaust Deniers do not dey any of this stuff happened: Jews being deported into labor camps, becoming sick with Typhus, reprisals. Yes, reprisals are ugly and tragic but they were legal at the time according to international law. The Germans were not even charged with crimes pertaining to these (real) reprisals for that reason, and it was remarked by some German defendants themselves that shooting a civilian in a reprisal is not exactly worse than firebombing civilians in a city.
This is kind of similar to Anne Frank, where everyone acknowledges Anne Frank as being one of the most iconic witnesses of the Holocaust. But her story is that she was deported to an alleged "pure extermination camp" Auschwitz-Birkenau but then became sick with Typhus and was transferred to a different camp, Belsen, where she died in a hospital. HNone of her family was gassed despite being deported to an "extermination camp." It's another example of how the fact of the matter for a story like this doesn't substantiate the most important claims made by Holocaust Believers and the fact pattern better aligns with the Revisionist interpretation of actual historical events sans atrocity propaganda like millions being gassed in gas chambers disguised as shower rooms.
And then you have other prominent witnesses like Irene Zisblatt who was prominently featured in Steven Spielberg's award-winning Documentary The Last Days who do outright lie for a variety of reasons. Zisblatt claims she repeatedly ate and shat diamonds her mother gave her to hide throughout her internment in Auschwitz. Zisblatt also claimed she escaped a gas chamber and escaped Auschwitz by being thrown over the fence (Revisionist archival research proved this to be a lie, and there are records as to where she was sent and when). She also claimed her Auschwitz tattoo was surgically removed (to provide lore for why she does not have one). She claimed she was experimented on by Doctor Mengele by being injected in the eye in an attempt to turn her eyes Blue as part of the Nazi Aryan-supremacy medical research. She even claimed she was selected to be turned into a lampshade by Ilse Koch, and was deported to Majdanek for that purpose but for reasons unknown to her she was sent back.
This is the territory Revisionists have to navigate, Revisionists indisputably disproved Zisblatt's story with archival research but at the same time her lies were front and center in an Oscar-winning film produced by Steven Spielberg.
Witness testimony is understood as one of the least reliable forms of evidence. The Revisionist argument is that the well of physical and documentary evidence is so incredibly poor that the Holocaust Industry has to rely on propaganda-forms like Zisblatt and Steven Spielberg to make the story real to mass audiences, but the evidence is very unreliable in relation to the extremely unusual and unlikely claims made by Holocaust history.
As our resident holocaust expert: have there been any cases of elderly camp guards admitting to the holocaust? We should expect that some percent of elderly camp guards would admit to a bunch of traumas and atrocities once they develop age-related declines in inhibition. I imagine most of this is written in German, but I could only find cases of the opposite: elderly camp guards losing their inhibition and then expressing a denial of the event.
The most unusual "extermination camp" in Holocaust lore is Treblinka. There was virtually no evidence on that camp for decades beyond a literary pamphlet written by an alleged Jewish eyewitness Yankel Wiernik. They tried to shore up this deficiency with Treblinka Trials held in the 1960s. Camp guards were put on trial, and while they didn't deny the extermination/gas chamber narrative they downplayed their own knowledge and participation. They received extraordinarily lenient charges. One of the camp commandants Franz Stangl died in prison while appealing his conviction.
The mainstream interpretation of this is that the lenient charges in the Treblinka Trials prove the attempt of West Allies to essentially sweep things under the rug and move on to more pressing matters with respect to the Cold War and posturing against the Soviet Union. But there are your confessions- decades later.
The Revisionist interpretation is that the Treblinka Trials were an intent to build a record on top of a pre-existing propaganda narrative, and lenient sentences indicate reward for cooperation. These trials took judicial notice over the gassings and extermination narrative, so denial of that narrative was not even a defense they could have used if they wanted to. But ultimately these politically motivated trials decades after the fact are a poor form of witness testimony because there was strong incentive and legal necessity for them to use the defense they did.
Josef Mengele remained unrepentant in Argentina and engaged in denial according to his son's account of meeting him. Josef Mengele's diary written in exile from 1960-75 was purchased by some Orthodox Jew and has never been published, I personally assume that there is denial in that diary because if there was an admission it obviously would have been published.
Some of the most key figures engaged in denial or denial of knowledge. Hermann Goering- flat denial at Nuremberg, he testified the "Final Solution" as such was what Revisionists say it was and was not an extermination policy. Hans Frank, the highest leader of the SS and Police in General Government denied knowledge, and his huge personal wartime diary contains no concrete reference to the extermination policy or extermination camps that were allegedly under the operation of his organization.
The most important confession in the Holocaust was the Auschwitz was the SS-commandant Rudolf Höss. His confession contains many details that are known not to be true, and it is now known that his confession was extracted under physical torture. Revisionists point out aspects of that confession which prove it was essentially planted by interrogators. For example, Höss's confession said he decided to organizing the gassing procedure at Auschwitz in the way they did because he personally visited Treblinka in the summer of 1941 and observed the extermination process there. But Treblinka was not open until a year later. So not only did this not happen- it could not have happened, there's no explanation at all for why this claim would appear in his confession other than it being planted by interrogators.
There's evidence for witnesses being threatened with having their families deported to the Soviet Union if they don't confess, torture, etc.
Himmler died in custody so we don't get his post-war account of things. His wartime rhetoric is often cited by Believers as evidence for the Holocaust, but Revisionists point to his meeting with Norbert Masur WJC in 1945, in which Masur reported:
So Revisionists register this also as a Himmler denial, with Himmler's account here again aligning with the Revisionist interpretation of what actually transpired and evolved into a "mass gassing inside shower rooms as part of a top-secret extermination plan" propaganda-narrative.
Well if you can't trust a man like Himmler regarding the necessity of burning Jewish bodies en masse, whom can you trust? Just a public health intervention. Not a coverup. No sir.
"We did not want any wars with Russia." Wow, so true bestie. That's just what Hitler thought.
Ok but there's plenty of evidence of the German police and SS being involved in exterminations. "Wow the guy didn't write down war crimes in his journal, so that casts doubt on it" is not exactly a knock-down argument.
Does Hoss getting one thing wrong mean he got it all wrong? Does being tortured on the outset of his capture thereafter mean nothing he ever said could be taken as factual? Even if corroborated?
https://catalog.archives.gov/id/57323382?objectPanel=transcription&objectPage=2
Let's look at your assertion here:
Looks like this is the quote you take issue with:
https://catalog.archives.gov/id/57323382?objectPanel=transcription&objectPage=3
Far as I can tell, Treblinka I was active in summer 1941 and Treblinka II, the extermination camp, was opened in 1942. The fact you seem totally ignorant of the difference between Treblinkas I and II would seemingly cast doubt on you actually having done your homework here. If you had, you'd presumably head some amateur like me off from pointing that out.
Auschwitz I was active in 1940 and Auschwitz II-Birkenau, the extermination camp, came online in March 1942. However, executions by gas were happening well before the specialized extermination camps were built. The first Zyklon B gassings happened in August 1941, and the construction of Auschwitz II began the next month.
So the easy explanation here is that when Hoss said "extermination camps" as of 1941, he meant "concentration camps primarily for labor that were also doing exterminations at the time"; not "camps/facilities that had been built explicitly for mass extermination." Those efficiency upgrades came in 1942. There's no contradiction.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Extermination_camp#Gassings https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Auschwitz_concentration_camp#:~:text=Construction%20of%20Auschwitz%20II%20began,were%20killed%20during%20medical%20experiments.
Also, it's funny to argue there's not a lot of great evidence for Treblinka II when like the whole point was killing off potential witnesses, the extermination camp was dismantled in October 1943, there was literally a coverup, and then the Soviets didn't exactly do a lot of historical preservation. That the guards were not likely to confess decades after the fact is not remotely surprising. Stangl did admit to the murders though, right? There is aerial photography showing evidence of the dismantled structures, and the allowed archelogy and ground radar has found evidence. The main witnesses for the prosecution were Poles who worked at or observed the railways. Later, declassified British intel of the German Transport Authority backed the numbers.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Treblinka_extermination_camp
Well I just disproved that assertion in short order. There's a very natural explanation, that you and your kind are misinterpreting the labels the man used and conflating the early phases of experimentation and low levels of execution with the later mass scale ones.
After all this, I have to ask, are the Revisionists just incapable of basic historical research? I had higher expectations, honestly. I'm used to debating QAnon types.
Can you trust the Soviet investigators who "investigated" Auschwitz? The authors of the Soviet investigation of the Katyn massacre, which falsely blamed the Germans for a crime that they had actually committed, submitted their report as evidence in the Nuremberg trial (USSR-54), and they were the same as the authors of the Soviet report on the investigation of Auschwitz (USSR-8), with the addition of that biology quack Trofim Lysenko as a signatory to the Auschwitz investigation.
Can you trust the confession of someone that was extracted through physical torture, under duress with no access to legal representation and no access to documentary evidence? It's not about trust, it's about weighing the quality of the evidence against the nature of the claims being made. Himmler's denial is relevant because Himmler's explanation for the conditions on the Eastern Front aligns with an enormous body of documentary evidence, whereas the documentary evidence for gas chambers disguised as shower rooms performing executions of millions of people is completely nonexistent.
Hoess did not get "one thing wrong." He also claimed there were gas chambers at Dachau and Mauthausen, which is known not to be true. His confession also claimed 3 million people were killed in Auschwitz, a wildly inflated number that aligned with Soviet propaganda. He identified "Wolzek" as an extermination camp, but there is no "Wolzek" camp at all it doesn't exist. The lack of corroboration for these claims is what stands out. There's no documentary record or physical evidence to corroborate the claims of millions of people gassed in secret extermination facilities.
But more importantly, it's not that Hoess got "one thing wrong" it's that the sequence of events described are impossible.
According to mainstream historiography, there were no gassings at all, ever, in Treblinka I, which was a penal/labor camp. Treblinka II, the alleged extermination camp, did not open until July 1942 and nobody was gassed at Treblinka before that date. As you pointed out, gassings in Auschwitz allegedly began in August 1941 and construction of the alleged "extermination camp" began shortly after that. So this confession claiming Hoess visited Treblinka in 1941 and observed gassings and therefore decided to use Zyklon B is not possible. It's not that a date was mixed up, it's that the sequence of events is not possible. The Treblinka Extermination camp did not exist in 1941, there were never any gas chambers at the Treblinka I penal camp.
There is no claim anywhere by mainstream historians of any gassings in Treblinka I ever. The gassings are unanimously claimed to have started in July 1942. So the claim from Hoess's "confession" that he visited Treblinka in 1941 to observe gassings, and therefore decided to use Zyklon B for gassings at Auschwitz, is not a possible sequence of events.
But Yankel Wiernik's pamphlet on Treblinka had already been published by this point. So Hoess describing a visit to the Treblinka extermination camp, rather than being an independent account of the "Treblinka Extermination camp", was likely derived from Wiernik's work and intended to provide corroboration from a much more reliable witness than an anonymous escapee who wrote the pamphlet.
There have been no excavations of any mass graves on the site. The ground radar has not "found evidence", or any more evidence than the same ground radar evidence at Kamloops Indian Reserve found evidence for the mass graves of children. The ground radar results essentially disprove the narrative as there were no ground disturbances found consistent with the size, shape, or location of the graves allegedly used to bury 800,000 people.... before they were all supposedly unburied and cremated on open-air pyres over 120 days. It's an absurd story.
More than the Nazis who built the place I'd say. But notice that nowhere did I cite Soviet-only information as far as I can tell.
Funny, that episode is I believe a major reason why the Nazis wanted to burn evidence.
Frequently, yes actually. Especially if corroborated with other forms of evidence. Especially given what Hoss wrote after his interrogations. He never admitted guilt, only following orders.
Ok, sure. Let's agree on that.
By default, one expects a criminal to deny the accusation. By default, one expects a clever criminal to tell a lie that is plausible. By default, one expects a coverup if the circumstances allow it.
So you just don't understand how coverups work and deny the numerous witness accounts and artifacts? There were public accounts of the Holocaust in like 1942, Allied intelligence collected indications of it (which was not used at Nuremburg), and quite a bit of physical evidence for the whole shebang, including soil readings finding the relevant chemicals.
Is that known? https://www.ushmm.org/search/results/?q=dachau+gas+chamber+door
Best I can tell, there was a gas chamber at Dachau, but it was not used for extermination. The crematoriums did seem like they got some use though.
https://www.kz-gedenkstaette-dachau.de/en/historical-site/virtual-tour/crematorium-area/
Seems the mainstream disagrees with you about Mauthausen, too: https://www.mauthausen-memorial.org/en/News/Concerning-Doubts-about-the-Existence-of-a-Gas-Chamber-at-the-Mauthausen-Concentration-Camp
You've demonstrated to me that I cannot trust anything you say about even the simplest of facts, including representing the "mainstream," so you'll excuse me for wanting you to at least make an attempt prove your assertions by default when you say things like "which is known."
Oh, so you do know what Treblinka I was? That's nice. You know, it is entirely possible one account gets any given detail wrong. As someone with some background in the interrogation business, I definitely agree that's an issue. But here it seems like you're trying to pull a stunt of "well if he got some things wrong the entire testimony is out" as if there isn't evidence the Nazis were using gas chambers for one thing or another since like 1939. Or other confessions. Or other material evidence. The general history seems to be that in the summer of 1941, mass killings started by the SS and they decided to switch to gas instead of bullets. More efficient that way. Cleaner. Thereafter, they built out the extermination program for the Jews in 1942.
We'll never know, but it's entirely possible Hoss witnessed some experimental gassings at Treblinka I. Or his mind was addled and he mixed up the sites (there were three in Operation Reinhard: Belzec, Sobibor and Treblinka). Or, actually, his statement need not be read as his visit taking place in June 1941 either. Given the rest of his statements about the extermination of the Warsaw Ghetto Jews at Treblinka II, that aligns with July of 1942. Of course, that seems to conflict a little bit with Hoss also saying that his subordinate Fritzsch came up with the whole Zyklon B idea in August 1941. Hoss also says that at Treblinka the victims knew it was coming, whereas Auschwitz fooled 'em, which conflicts with at least later accounts of Treblinka also trying to fool victims. (But what did happen to all those hundreds of thousands of Jews in the Warsaw Ghetto?)
Here's a historical analysis of Hoss's memoirs: https://phdn.org/archives/holocaust-history.org/auschwitz/hoess-memoirs/
That's an impressive level of corroboration from multiple other accounts for a conspiracy this large, and over some decades too. I love that Hoss got the estimate of the exterminated at Auschwitz down to merely 1.1 million later on. Weird way to be a coerced witness. "Yeah it was mass murder, but less massive."
How, on earth, can you say this if you're even remotely aware of the mainstream evidence on the matter? It's all made up? Multiple nations, thousands of witnesses? Hoss is just a total liar, as are the other confessors telling similar stories? The showers with airtight doors are just an outcome of German over-engineering and commitment to hygiene?
Where did all the Jews in those Jewish communities in Europe end up then? Spirited to Heaven? What were these trains doing? https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/sciadv.aau7292
Your view is something like:
The real conspiracy isn't that the Nazis tried to exterminate the Jews, it's that the Allies and Jews created the appearance of the Nazis trying to exterminate the Jews. Which was believable, given how much Hitler and the Nazis seemed to have it in for the Jews. Yeah, sure, the Nazis really didn't like Jews. But the "Final Solution" didn't involve mass murder, let alone with gas chambers and ovens. Just some forced labor. Deaths from disease. Actually, it's better to trust the Nazis denials over any confessions, or eyewitnesses--Jewish or otherwise--or intelligence reports, or aerial photography, or soil samples. Instead, this was all a massive concoction to ...
... to do what exactly? The Nazis had lost the war. No one needed to execute them just for fun.
Reminds me of my favorite antisemitic sentiment (common in the Middle East) is: "Obviously the Holocaust is a Jewish myth; sure would be cooler if it wasn't though."
I was hoping you'd mentioned the Canadians.
So this is fabricated? https://www.livescience.com/44443-treblinka-archaeological-excavation.html
Last I checked the Canadians hadn't found anything or even pretended to. Also no corroborating evidence.
Frankly I trust the NSA and CIA on this analysis. Would be weird if they, decades after the fact, were still really committed to the bit using previously unpublicized information.
https://catalog.archives.gov/id/305894?objectPanel=transcription https://www.nsa.gov/portals/75/documents/news-features/declassified-documents/cryptologic-quarterly/sigint_and_the_holocaust.pdf https://www.govinfo.gov/content/pkg/GOVPUB-D-PURL-LPS92209/pdf/GOVPUB-D-PURL-LPS92209.pdf
You really gotta admire the competence of the international, multigenerational commitment to this fabrication across so many information sources.
Do you have any evidence there was intent and planning to construct such a false narrative?
At Auschwitz the documentary archives were essentially captured intact. There are many thousands of contemporary documents in the historical archive at Auschwitz, which is why the complete lack of documentary corroboration for the existence of an extermination plan that killed over a million people at the camp is so conspicuous. Even the top-secret decodes intercepted by the British, which captured top-secret communication between Auschwitz and SS command, contains not a single iota of reference to an extermination plan, in fact it contains precisely the opposite: reporting of death toll caused by epidemic typhus, with SS command ordering the death toll to be reduced "at all costs" in order to maintain a productive workforce.
In many cases the evidence was withheld by the Soviet Union themselves, like the Auschwitz Deathbooks- 45 volumes of from the camp political department registering the death of almost 69,000 prisoners from 1941 - 1943. Why would this evidence be withheld for so long? In other cases the evidence has been outright fabricated, as we discussed recently David Cole in 1992 exposed that the "gas chamber" shown to millions of tourists on the tour at Auschwitz was actually fabricated post-war in Soviet-occupied Poland and presented deceptively as an original structure.
So you have evidence which ought to be there if it had happened, but it is conspicuously and entirely absent- like any documentary reference to an extermination of a million people in the camp records or in the top-secret decodes; then you have evidence which is there- the gas chamber structure at Auschwitz itself, but it turns out it's fabricated post-war by the Soviet Union. The point being, the confession of Hoess is extremely important because without it the entire Auschwitz Extermination Camp narrative does not have a leg to stand on. There's no backup- the entire narrative rests on the reliability of this tortured confession extracted under duress during a World War which has been proven to be extremely unreliable in key respects, like the description of the sequence of events that led to the creation of the gas chambers at Auschwitz.
When it comes to burning bodies, crematoria featured at many concentration camps which are not claimed to have had any gas chambers like Buchenwald (although it was originally claimed Buchenwald was a Death Camp with gas chambers this was disproven). So you have concentration camps like Buchenwald with state-of-the art crematoria, but the Treblinka extermination camp did not have any crematoria and allegedly used the most primitive means imaginable to allegedly dispose of 800,000 bodies.
And even burning a body does not remove the evidence: if 1 million people were cremated at Auschwitz-Birkenau, according to Grok that would produce 2,5000 metric tons of 5.5 million lbs of cremated remains, or 3,000 cubic meters of human remains by volume. These remains, though, have never been found or identified. They are just gone. At Treblinka the cremated remains of 800,000 people are allegedly buried in precisely known locations, although scientific excavation of those mass graves has never been done, with Jewish authorities citing the exact same reason as the Canadian tribes for forbidding excavation of the Kamloops Children's mass graves.
There was non-invasive GPR analysis of the grounds of Treblinka studied by Caroline Colls, which you referenced, but the results essentially disprove the possibility that ~700,000-800,000 people were buried there before all allegedly being unburied and cremated on makeshift open-air pyres. But Caroline Colls was forbidden from performing excavations of those ground disturbances.
No, there was no gas chamber at Dachau. Dachau originally was perhaps the most notorious "Death Camp" originally according to Allied Propaganda. You review this clip of Dachau from the Concentration Camps film submitted and screened as evidence at Nuremberg where the narrator claims:
The Mainstream position admits that this film submitted as evidence at the Nuremberg trial was a lie. It's true that they still claim the "Brausbad" at Dachau was a gas chamber, but it was never used. The Dachau museum for years had a sign in that room that labeled it "Gas chamber disguised as a shower room- never used as a gas chamber". So the mainstream admits, despite the evidence submitted at Nuremberg making the claim, there were no gassings at Dachau.
I would definitely encourage you to watch this Revisionist analysis of the Treblinka: Hitler's Killing Machine cited in your link. They did not excavate any graves at Treblinka II, they found a clay tile and misrepresented a manufacturer's logo as being a Star of David intended to lure Jews into the gas chamber with a false sense of security. The absurdity of that TV special is so profound it is just best to review that film if you're interested in the Revisionist analysis of that TV special. Let me know what you think of it if you do.
No, it's not possible at all. There's not a shred of evidence for gassing at Treblinka I, not a single mainstream historian claims there was. Mainstream historians simply ignore the issue, the only people who point it out anyway are Deniers. I can't even give you an explanation for how mainstream historians would square the round hole there. I can tell you though they wouldn't claim there were experimental gassings in Treblinka I.
The precursor to the CIA- the OSS was the progenitor of many of these claims from the West Allies in the first place. This includes the Psychological Warfare Division (PWD) "investigation" of Buchenwald which falsely claimed to uncover lampshades made of human skin and shrunken heads of murdered prisoners manufactured by the SS.
Wartime atrocity propaganda is ubiquitous in warfare and especially modern warfare where mass media makes public perception extremely important. It's important to moralize the home-front and demoralize the enemy and provide moral justification for your war in the international community. In World War I the British conspired to create widely believed but false propaganda regarding "German Corpse Factories" which are eerily similar to the claimed "extermination camps" where millions were lured on the pretext of taking a shower to Factories of Death. There is a huge amount of historical precedent for false atrocity propaganda, it's an issue we have to deal with now with atrocity claims made by both the Israelis and Palestinians. There is no historical precedent for the German "Extermination Camps", it stands out as an outlier among all of history.
If you consider the perspective of the Western Allies, finding a moral justification for the war was extremely important. Poland was not liberated, it was conquered by the Soviet Union along with half of Europe. Europe was essentially destroyed with tens of millions dead. The Holocaust is very important in providing a post-hoc moral justification for the war which is essentially the foundational myth for American global empire and 20th-21st century morality. It's your own prerogative to trust the CIA, but in doing so you should at least understand the incentives involved in maintaining this narrative. Without it, a lot of historical and cultural perspectives we take for granted as black-and-white become much more ambiguous.
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