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Color me unconvinced. I see your appeals to panic and I raise you despair. Capture hundreds of people off the street and immediately try to feed them into a gas chamber - yeah, you'll get riots. But abused, half-starved prisoners of an omnipotent-seeming war machine, shipped hundreds of miles from home to a forbidding camp surrounded by barbed fencing, with armed men watching you in all directions? By the time the guards are leading you to what you're pretty sure is the slaughter… call it irrational, call it a coordination problem, or call it weakness, but I am not at all surprised if few people ever bothered to try and make a run for it. To do so would have been heroism, not the expected human response. I would expect as much even if the gas chambers had had big neon signage saying 'DEATH CHAMBERS, ABANDON ALL HOPE YE WHO ENTER HERE'. We seem to have very different intuitions here.
Please reread the quoted claim you were replying to. It was not "Hitler, once in power, gave orders for all Jews to be killed". It was, in fact, "Hitler, even before he took over the country, wanted to kill all the Jews". This is true. It just is. He says so in Mein Kampf. He said so in speeches. He got in power in large part by promising to make the Jews pay (and the commies, and the Jewish commies). Hitler and his followers hated the Jews. They did not simply regard them as a practical hindrance to German prosperity, which could be dealt with as practicality allowed: they hated them, viscerally, and wanted them dead if possible, the more painful the better.
What I am doing here is establishing motive. Opportunity, I hope, speaks for itself.
My overriding question to you and anyone else who argues that the Holocaust didn't happen is: why not? Why wouldn't a regime who had spent decades painting Jews as a plague upon mankind, and found itself in the process of gathering them all up in faraway camps, take a stab at slaughtering them? It isn't as if pogroms were a new concept. You say Hitler merely "wanted the Jews out of Europe", but what do you think his plan was, exactly? Having shipped all those hundreds of thousands of Jews to eastern work camps, do you believe that his earnest intention was to win the war, then graciously release all those people and pay for their resettlement to the Middle-East? Why? What do you believe would have motivated Hitler to spend a single red dime on peacefully resettling them when he had all the makings of an extremely successful genocide at his disposal? It just doesn't make any damn sense unless you're trying to argue that the Nazis had some moral objection - that they valued Jewish lives and would have balked at attempting genocide. I don't know how to characterize that kind of claim, other than "hilarious".
Or was I wrong about opportunity speaking for itself? Are you so concerned about the crowd-control practicalities that you think organizing a successful Holocaust would have been too hard? But then we return to the "so what" angle. If you grant that Hitler would have organized the Holocaust if he'd had the means, and simply argue that he didn't because golly, the logistics were too goshdarn persnickety to crack… well, I'm not sure what you're trying to prove. "The Nazis were evil, but luckily, as it turns out, they were also morons" wouldn't be a bold world-changing revelation.
And here we go again. Please stop talking about the shower rooms. You believe the shower rooms are the crux of this whole matter. I don't. We will not get anywhere with this if you insist on reverse-motte-and-baileying me like this.
What do I believe? I believe that any Jews who fell into Nazi hands were systematically sent to camps from which they were never seriously expected to come out alive. I believe that this policy was not merely a wartime precaution against agitators, but a means of erasing Europe's Jewish population in the long term, as Hitler had long said he wanted. I believe that six million Jews died as a direct result of this policy, and that as far as the Nazis were concerned, this amounted to the policy working as intended. This is what any sane person would describe as "the Holocaust". Anything else, the method of the killings, the timeline of the killings - is commentary.
I believe, fractionally more weakly, that the official consensus on those details is directionally true if perhaps over-dramatized. But I could be completely wrong about that last bit - there could have been no fake shower rooms whatsoever - and it would not impinge on the bottom line that "the Holocaust", by any meaningful definition, happened, and happened on purpose.
No, defiance. Which makes it even less likely, because defiance requires being an asshat just out of spite, usually at the expense of yourself. And anyone who was so inclined had plenty of chances to do so earlier, and would have not been on the train.
Heroism requires that there is at least a slight chance of success, which there isn't really, with a single person acting alone.
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Your confidence just seems completely divorced from all human experience. We have innumerable examples of crowds panicking, often for no reason at all. The pure physical force exerted by hundreds of people in fear and the difficulty of controlling them is very well known. But you are confident that the Germans designed a murder operation that fundamentally required the cooperation of crowds of thousands of people walking inside their own execution chambers with hardly any security, and with them all knowing they were going to get gassed to boot. It's just absurd. It's not "weakness" it's just a tall tale about something that never happened.
Getting that many people into these narrow entrances to stand with extremely high density in these small rooms requires military-discipline level of coordination by the victims. That's the impetus for the whole "they were tricked into taking a shower" story in the first place, to provide an explanation for why ~3 million people coordinated so neatly in walking inside the gas chambers without resistance. But in your mind, they mostly knew they were going to die but just cooperated anyway.
You are asking why I believe this? Of course I believe this because there is an enormous body of evidence to believe that these were real policies, unlike the claim that the German plan was to murder all the Jews inside shower rooms. That is to say, I believe those things because there is a lot of evidence for them, and I don't believe the gas chamber story because it is an a priori outlandish claim that lacks evidence. The motive you mention is also explained by these policies, and if your claim is that the Germans departed from these long-standing policies and decided to kill them all inside shower rooms then that is a claim that requires more than appealing to motive.
The reason the gas chamber story is so important is because, if you say, "the Germans killed 6 million Jews" the natural follow-up from any thoughtful person is: when? where? how? why? The fact is, there is no "alternative hypothesis" other than the story of millions of Jews being gassed inside shower rooms. So if it turns out that claim is false (which it is) then mainstream historians are categorically unable to answer those other questions with respect to the Holy 6 million. The entire narrative rests heavily and solely on the truth of the claim that millions of Jews were gassed inside shower rooms. You can't hand-wave it away without being faced with those other questions that historians have no answer for whatsoever.
Ehhh, no. They could just make them walk in and then once the natural density has been reached, push more people in, and those people will push the people who are already inside, etc. This is also what they do for Japanese trains: https://youtube.com/watch?v=o9Xg7ui5mLA
What part of this requires military discipline? Do you imagine that the Jews marched in, in formation, and they took specific designated spots? What discipline is required to move when you get pushed?
For comparison, you can look at various tragedies at festivals, stadiums and such, where crowds got packed tight by people pushing from behind, which can easily cause extreme density at the far end. I'm not sure where you get the claim from that there was some extremely high density in the gas chambers anyway.
It seems to me that this is actually your problem if you reject the gas chambers, since then you need to account for where all those people went that provably disappeared. Where is your explanation?
Just like it actually seems to be you for whom the 6 million is Holy and it somehow matters if the actual number is 3 million, and those people where mostly executed by firing squads or gassed in trucks and box cars (but not gas chambers that looked like showers).
The evidence of the Holocaust is overwhelming, but you seem to believe that you merely need to prove one part wrong and then suddenly all that evidence will disappear.
It is claimed that up to/at least 2,000 people were gassed at a time in gas chambers that were by all accounts and according to construction documents (although they were documented to be Morgues) 7m x 30m. That means it is claimed there were stacked 9.5 victims per square meter. Here's an image to scale showing what that would look like. So you are saying the Jews stacked themselves like that even though they knew they were going to be murdered? You realize a person at the door pushing people inside would do nothing in the face of panic towards the door from a crowd like that.
You can watch this Revisionist film if you want to see a very well-sourced breakdown of the extermination process as claimed by mainstream historians. But yes the mainstream claims relies on the notion that Jews cooperated in arranging themselves with that much, or greater, density inside these structures. Through a single small entrance. Talk another look at that picture and tell me that this is a rational design for an extermination operation... it's just made up.
The people in the train want to reach their destination in a timely manner, they all have a strong incentive to accept being herded in that manner and if they didn't need to be there they would just go somewhere else. You are saying that the Jews would have exhibited the same level of cooperation as those Japanese train passengers but, instead of an attempt to take a train to get to work or whatever, to cram themselves inside their own execution chambers. I am saying they would not have cooperated like that. What exactly could the guy at the entrance do if the crowd inside the train panicked and all tried to leave the train at the same time?
Yes, crowd control is the most dangerous part of those events and when panic is caused for any reason it creates an incredibly dangerous situation for everyone involved. But you are saying the Jews would not have panicked, even though they knew they were being killed, and not only that but the Germans knew the Jews wouldn't panic so they didn't foresee an issue with a very light security detail simply telling thousands of Jews to arrange themselves inside the gas chambers.
No, it is not overwhelming. The lack of contemporary documentary evidence for the operation is one of the biggest problems, with probably the biggest problem of all being the lack of physical evidence.
First of all, I have no idea whether your 'it is claimed' actually reflects strongly held beliefs by historians. And my strongly held belief is that lots of historians take bad estimates by eye witnesses as gospel, or simply copy claims by other historians, no matter how weakly supported that claim is, or they just make stuff up that sounds good to them. There is a reason why a lot of sensible people try to validate historical records through practical methods.
Anyway, because of this, the more specific historical claims get, the more likely that they are wrong. And historical records get more believable the more independent evidence there is, and the more we stick to more generic claims. For example, I am a lot more confident that the Battle of Actium happened, than that the claimed number of ships and men are correct.
So my belief that the Holocaust happened and involved intentional mass murder and gas chambers is not based on a specific figure being correct that is allegedly being claimed, but because there is a lot of evidence all pointing in the same direction, supporting a much more generic claim, that is thus not dependent on a single data point being true. Your narrative that these people died due to food shortages and the like, does not merely require you to reason away the gas chambers, but also gas vans, the development of an odorless Zyklon-variant, the mass executions behind the Eastern Front, various experiments in clinics/camps early on, etc. Essentially, there is a very clear progression in the methods used, and a lot of independent evidence, which adds a lot of credibility to the claim that there was a plan to annihilate the Jews.
In contrast, your narrative of deaths due to chaos near the war's end, completely fails to explain such things as why such a small fraction of deported Jews survived, versus prisoners of war. Because if the Jews were not targeted but just victims of chaos, then logically, that chaos should impact all prisoners somewhat equally. And your narrative requires you to explain why there weren't a ton of bodies lying about. Because how does it make sense for there being mass starvation late in the war due to chaos, but for the Nazis to then still be able to neatly dispose of almost all of the bodies? And with immense speed, since it the deaths would occur over a much smaller period than in the Holocaust narrative.
According to your own image, 2000 people is actually quite possible if you have 30% children in the mix. You provide no reason why 30% children is the upper limit. In fact, we have records for a transport of 1,196 children and 53 adults. That is less than 2000 people, but I have no clue whether the figure of 2000 is supposed to actually have been reached, or whether it is a calculation.
Again, according to this reasoning it would be impossible for people to be pressed to death at a festival/stadium, because people would panic and press back again the people applying pressure. Yet we know for a fact that people get pressed to death in such circumstances, and that survivors report panic, but are unable to push back. So your narrative goes against established facts on how people behave.
I indeed think that it is quite plausible that malnourished, dehydrated people who had just suffered from horrible conditions during a long transport, and who know that they get beaten if they do not comply, act in a docile manner.
How could you know? Do you have experience being a person with 1940's Jewish culture, who has experienced a long train ride in a packed box car, and has been beaten by Nazis or has seen his fellows get beaten by the Nazis? Or are you just projecting your modern beliefs on the past?
It's my opinion that projecting modern beliefs on the past, rather than actually understanding how people of the time thought, is a huge cause for false beliefs of history.
I never claimed that there was no panic, or that the Jews knew that they would be killed before the Zyklon-B was administered. At that point the doors would be closed.
What I am claiming is that your narrative that panic must have happened at the moment and to such an extent that it would have prevented the people from being packed tight is being disproved by the fact that people do end up packed tight and unable to resist this, at festival/stadium tragedies where people get pressed to death.
You completely ignore that the Nazis scaled up their operations gradually. So your narrative that they gambled that thousands of people would revolt, does not match the historic record, where they experimented and learned what worked, and thus could simply scale down their security to a level that was sufficient, based on experience.
And it is a fact that occasionally, the Nazis did not actually know what security was sufficient, like at Sobibor, where there was a semi-successful revolt (but again, this was planned).
Yes, it is truly damning for the Holocaust narrative that there is no video where the Nazis demonstrate exactly how the gas chambers work. It's not like they had a policy of keeping it a secret, with them using code words, destroying the evidence, etc. And all the witnesses who gave testimony shortly after the war were obviously all coerced into making that testimony, even though there is a total lack of evidence for that coercion happening. It's utterly believable for there not to be a whole bunch of Nazis who would complain about that coercion if it had happened.
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there are also numerous examples of crowds-to-be-massacred not making any successfully resistance or 'mass panics' hindering the massacre. Barbed wire, physical violence, and machine guns are usually quite sufficient at crowd control. You and others in the crowd may panic, but if you are in enclosed space designed to prevent panicked prisoners escaping, 'panic' does not lead to successfully running away or overpowering the armed guards.
Suppose we discount all evidence from German operations. Pick aftermath of any 20th century civil war (Russia, Spain, Korea), some dozens of armed men can easily march a crowd of prisoners from a camp/prison to a place where they know they will be shot, have them dig a ditch, and shoot them. Rinse and repeat, and thousands have been killed during a single day. Soviets had zero trouble with prisoners panicking at Katyn. Many fled from Pol Pot's Cambodia to avoid death, but no mass panics of prisoners hindered the mass murder.
It is not beyond belief that same principles of crowd(-to-be-killed) control could have been applied to herd prisoners from train cars to a gas chamber.
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I assume you also think that every account of a prisoner being forced to dig their own grave is implausible? For instance, surely this old man was just blatantly lying about the atrocity he committed because it would make the victims look... better? Worse? I have no idea.
Of course if someone doesn't cooperate digging, you shoot him and it's a little inconvenient. A full-blown riot of a thousand people is a massive security threat to what is supposed to be a top-secret operation. The operation's reliance on the cooperation of the victims to function at all is so conspicuous. That's why the shower room cover story is so important. Such a sensitive task would not have, by design, fundamentally relied on the cooperation of the victims. That's where the shower room story comes into play, it's not just a small detail.
I don't understand your logic here. You seem to claim that when people are forced to dig their own grave, then any resistance is going to be individual and can be dealt with easily due to that. But when people are merely asked to walk into a room, then that would somehow set off a coordinated riot. Why? How?
Note that this doesn't make much sense anyway, since the separation of the Jews into workers and those who got sent to the gas chambers, would be a much more logical place to riot, when you have not just strength of numbers, but the most healthy & strong Jews would still be present. Women, children, the elderly and the ill would be over-represented in the group being sent to the gas chamber.
Which is why Sobibor was razed to the ground after the revolt. That was actually a carefully planned operation though, not a riot. And the workers of Sobibor were much more suitable for a revolt, being mostly healthy adults.
You have failed to explain why the Nazis would be particularly afraid of a riot by starved Jews who had been forced to stand for an average of 4 days, where many of those Jews would be women, children and the elderly, and where those Jews would have no particular reason to revolt then as they would not know the procedure at the camp (in fact, their previous 'arrive at a concentration camp' experience would have been at a non-extermination camp, so if anything they would assume that this is another camp where they would stay for a while).
Cooperation of the Jews with the Nazis has been documented every step of the way, so why would it be notable, or a weak spot in the narrative for that to also have happened at the extermination camps? The notable situations are when there was a revolt (Warsaw & Sobibor). And those were planned, not spontaneous.
Your narrative greatly suffers from double standards anyway. The Nazis also gassed some Jews in box cars. And Jews were packed tightly in box cars for transport. Yet you don't question the official story that has Jews being packed tight in the box cars for transport or for gassing, but suddenly when the Jews were packed tight in a gas chamber that looks like a shower, this required military discipline. Yet apparently no military discipline was required to be packed tight in box cars? And it was not logical for the Jews to revolt when being packed tight in the box cars, but somehow when being led to the showers, it is so unbelievable that they would not resist, that this supposedly undermines the entire narrative.
Have you ever been part of a large crowd entering a very small building through a single entrance? It takes a long time and requires everyone's cooperation. A couple of people panicking could stall or derail the entire operation. Getting a huge crowd of people to walk through a tiny corridor and stack densely inside "shower rooms" is a difficult task, more so for a crowd that knows they are about to be murdered.
And then if they do riot at the entrance, they would have been required to shoot thousands of people panicking and running and hiding and trying to fight... creating a huge mess that would require full cleanup before the operation could start again. It does not make sense the German extermination plan would fundamentally require the cooperation of a large crowd of people walking to their own deaths. By all accounts the security was light. A single transport of Jews would vastly outnumber the entire security force garrisoned at Treblinka for example. Treblinka was supposed to by run by something like a couple dozen Germans...
I have explained why the Germans would not design an execution system that so heavily relied on the perfect cooperation of large crowds of people. The mainstream explanation for this is that the Germans employed deception to trick the Jews into believing they were taking a shower. But many users here do not find that explanation believable because the Jews would have been able to see through the ruse. So the mainstream explanation is they employed deception to get the crowd to cooperate, others here are proposing deception was not necessary and the crowd would cooperate with the operation because they were tired and hungry. Neither holds any water.
They had a bunch of aggressive guards exactly to hurry people along, and to pull people out of the line who caused an issue, 'convincing' these people to be more cooperative, or alternatively, to take a little rest until their dead body was taken away.
What is your claim anyway? That gas chambers are impossible because getting people inside them takes too long? You do realize that they could just make the next group wait at the railway station, and could even leave entire trains parked without letting people out? The Nazis had transit/buffer camps, so it's not like they had to let the Jews go free if there was insufficient capacity to gas all of them right away. It just meant that the Holocaust took them longer.
Is this a joke? Surely you must know that the Germans were outnumbered by the Trawniki. And then you had the Kapos, prisoners who had security duties. The actual security force was way bigger than the Germans who were present.
A big mistake you make is that you seem to believe that the Nazis made a plan on paper and that it is unbelievable that this plan would work out perfectly.
But in reality, they experimented with a lot of solutions, where most of these failed to do what they wanted. So they made all kinds of evolutionary steps along the way. Going from shootings to exhaust fumes, to poison gas, to odorless poison gas (hint: that was to reduce/prevent panic). Similarly, they changed the gas chamber designs along the way. Surely they also simply looked at what security detail was sufficient, and brought enough people.
The very nature of evolutionary solutions is that they can easily go against what common sense tells you should work, and that they can be very efficient, being just good enough to work, without being overengineered.
Yes, based on 20/20 hindsight.
But put yourself into the shoes of a Jew of the time, being fed propaganda about relocations/forced labor, which is perfectly believable in itself because the Nazis employed a lot of forced labor of even their fellow Aryans. Then surely there were all kinds of rumors floating around, but lots of those rumors would be wrong, and even those with an element of truth would suffer from the Chinese whispers' distortions that completely distorts rumors that start out true. It would have been common sense to assume that the more extreme rumors are nonsense. And then the Jews would mostly be transported to a transit camp at first, which would be a lot closer to the places of origin of the Jews. So the archetypal camp that people would be most familiar with, would be a camp that did not feature gas chambers, and that was unpleasant, but generally survivable.
For example, Westerbork was in The Netherlands, so Dutch people would be familiar with that camp in all sorts of ways, like delivering goods there, or passing by. Prisoners in the camp would even send letters to other Dutch people. Yet how do you imagine that Dutch people would get information about Sobibor or Auschwitz? Dutch people would not make deliveries to those camps, would not pass by on their way to work, would not go there on holiday, would not get letters from prisoners at these camps, etc. Back then, travel was highly restricted, requiring permits, so it was not like people could go without permission. And why would the Nazis ever give permission all but those who were actually needed to run the camp, which would be a small group of German soldiers, picked for being amoral bastards, and the rest would all be locals.
I have failed to see an explanation why the Jews would quickly come to the realization upon arrival at an extermination camp that they would be gassed there, rather than believe that this is a work camp (which Auschwitz actually was for some of the Jews that arrived there). Don't forget that a whole bunch of Jews actually had the experience of traveling from a transit camp to a work camp. If they had revolted thinking that they arrived at an extermination camp, they would have done something very stupid.
Don't forget that rejecting the idea that the Jews believed in the ruse, and that they would have panicked/resisted, is utterly inconsistent with the fact that Jews had many an opportunity to resist/panic way before arriving at the concentration camp. For example, they could have attacked the police/gestapo with a knife upon their arrest. And the ones that provably showed up for transport voluntarily, could have gone into hiding/fled/etc instead of showing up. And they could have organized a revolt in the transit camp. And they could have panicked/revolted when brought to the railway station at the transit camp.
But apparently it is not at all unbelievable that they didn't revolt/panic at any of these moments, but that they didn't revolt/panic at the entrance of the gas chamber, which was designed to not look like a gas chamber, is somehow unbelievable.
So the narrative that the Jews knew that they would be killed, and that they would become non-compliant because of that, requires you to either reason away all kinds of facts that are very inconvenient for that narrative, or to believe in an epiphany-narrative, where people collectively go from not knowing something, to being sure about it, in the space of a few hours or even minutes, and without seeing any slamdunk evidence.
Let's review how we got here: I claimed it was silly to believe that ~3 million Jews were tricked into walking inside gas chambers on the pretext of taking a shower. Amadan, I believe, said that it was a straw man because obviously the Jews would know they were being led to their deaths. I have explained the necessity for the "shower room" deception as an indispensable part of Holocaust mythos, because otherwise it would make no sense for Germans to design a system that would cause a massive security threat in the event of the crowd panicking and not neatly arranging themselves inside gas chambers in the manner claimed by mainstream historians. Of course the liars that spun the gas chamber story knew that too, that's why they claim deception was employed because otherwise it's difficult to explain why the system would be designed this way, to so heavily expect the cooperation of crowds of thousands of people to behave the way they allegedly did.
My claim is very clear, that leading a crowd into a small building and crowding them into a gas chamber with this density would be a very difficult task. It would require not only cooperation but extreme discipline among the victims to get themselves all in a room like that. The question is why would a group of thousands of people achieve this level of group coordination in achieving their own execution when any sort of resistance would make this task purely impossible regardless of any guards with machine guns.
There is an explanation for why the Jews, without resistance, crammed themselves at a density of over 9 people / sq meter inside gas chambers. The mainstream explanation is that they were deceived into believing they were going to take a shower, so that's why they behaved the way they did. But people here don't find that explanation plausible, of course it isn't. Yet at the same time it's even less plausible that this crowd behavior reliably and routinely emerged, many times on a daily basis without fail, when the crowd knew they were cramming themselves inside their execution chambers. There is no room for guards inside the building to manage a panicking crowd... If any Jews were hesitant to walk inside the gas chamber any guard would be in a very confined space with 2,000 people- machine gun or not would not be able to manage a riot if the crowd rushed the exit... which apparently never happened at all despite 1 million people allegedly being killed at Auschwitz with this system... and of course the remains of those people have never been found and this operation escapes any documentary reference even among top-secret SS communication intercepted by the British coming out of Auschwitz.
They did not believe they were going to gas chambers. They believed they were going to work/concentration camps (which they were). That was why they boarded the trains without much resistance. But the problem here is you are admitting that the notion of deception in convincing 2,000 Jews to cram themselves inside a small gas chamber is not plausible. So you lose your explanation for why the crowd would behave the way they did, and why they wouldn't panic or show any resistance.
What you explained after this statement is not in fact your claim; it is your counter to the conventional claim. I believe @Aapje58 would like you to plainly state what you believe did in fact happen, as would I. You mention that "the remains of those people have never been found", but as has already been brought up elsewhere in the thread without reply from you, this would still be an issue if those millions of Jews had died of starvation and typhus, except with less motivation for the Germans to make the bodies disappear. When a person goes missing, there is an extent to which the absence of a body is itself evidence of foul play. The same applies when we're talking about hundreds of thousands. Where do you think they all went to?
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You are just begging the question here. It has not been established that they knew that that they were getting executed, nor have you established that they got anywhere close to the 'up to' amount you claimed when operating normally and it has not even been established that they ever hit that figure. It could be like one of these 'up to' figures that you see in advertising, and that is only possible in conditions that are perfect in every way.
The number of people that were actually put in the gas chamber was one of the few things that the Nazis did not actually seem to keep records of, so who knows how many people were actually in there on average? But again my question is why you think that this even matters?
Also, this narrative you keep pushing that merely walking into a room and getting pushed further and further into the wall or others, by people pushing into you, is actually some sort of North Korean coordinated mass event, is beyond absurd. That is not coordination in any way, but pure reaction.
Anyway, if you want to prove that historians make up all kinds of details, or accept claims from witnesses that are likely to be false, etc, etc; then it's not like this is the smoking gun you need. There are examples aplenty. But that kind of general criticism of history as a profession, doesn't actually do anything to prove that your narrative is better than the official one, because your narrative would suffer from the same kind of criticisms of the evidence you use, that has been presented by historians.
You have some really strange ideas. A crowd that is sufficiently densely packed is obviously going to control itself, because the people have no autonomous control over their movement.
Again, this is because you ignore that these people had already been crammed into overcrowded box cars. So the people who resisted going into those crowded box cars, had already been beaten and perhaps killed days ago, or even earlier. So why do you assume that people who had already accepted overcrowding, would suddenly not accept that anymore?
Again, your story is build on ignoring the immense weaknesses of your narrative, and making assumptions that you absolutely cannot prove.
Your narrative makes zero sense again. Earlier you argued that simply entering through a supposedly small entrance would itself be a huge hindrance to getting in at a somewhat decent pace, but now these people could somehow rush out with such speed that they would overwhelm the guards. You are not applying consistent logic.
And again, you have not established at all that there was a decent chance of panic or revolt.
You cannot imagine a scenario where these people thought that they were actually getting showered, and would finally get food, shelter, and a chance to lie down, after a brutal trip. But you can only imagine a scenario where these people could somehow magically tell that an execution was about to happen, and they would somehow suddenly revolt after missing out on opportunity after opportunity to revolt in ways that would have a better chance of success; or would panic despite there not really being a more important reason to panic than earlier on.
One of these scenarios makes a whole lot more sense, and it is not the one you believe.
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Unconvincing argument. In my experience, people manage to exit and enter subway cars and airplanes with bare minimum of cooperation. Granted, people usually want to get where they are going. If they did not but found themselves fenced in except for one obvious path forward, attendants were wielding heavy sticks, willingness to beat people to pulp and allowed shoot to kill anyone intervening, it is not implausible. It is how large crowds of prisoners can be managed elsewhere, in other times and places than German concentration camps. I would be greatly surprised nobody here had first-hand experience, however.
Yes, if. One if happens to be not true- estimate for Treblinka personnel is a couple of dozen SS officers, about one hundred Ukrainian soldiers, and some hundred(s) of Sonderkommando more or less reliably pressed to work. Yad Vashem estimates that Treblinka received typically a single trainload of 60 cars with 7,000 prisoners, with max 20 cars brought into camp at single time, with some fraction dead during transport, yielding 2,000 prisoners herded through enclosed route to their deaths. As a crude estimate, American correctional system employs 1:5 ratio of guards to inmates ("As of the most recent census in 2005, BJS estimated the ratio of inmates to correctional officers in state prisons nationwide was 4.9 to 1") and use less brutal methods for crowd control; in comparison, 1:20 ratio of guards to prisoners and 1:5 ratio with Sonderkommendo is not implausible. Second major if in your claim is: if there were constant riots, the camps would have been inoperable, therefore there was no camps. Quite much hanging on that single if. It is not impossible that there were minor disturbances and riots: the full day-to-day records are not available as a matter of record-keeping policy, and when numbers exist, camp commanders had incentive to present their operation as smooth and successful. The mainstream thesis only requires that any disturbances could be managed (except when it is documented they were not, as in the case of known escapes and revolts).
Nobody is making such weird either-or statement. The mainstream position includes several factors: the prisoners were starved and dehydrated after days in unsanitary train cars and those fit to work usually had been selected for work and the camps had an initial deception in place while unloading them out of train cars to processing and we have knowledge of other unrelated atrocities where people to be executed often walk into it, in face of apparently superior force and zero deception and other methods than gas chambers had been the method of execution, so SS had experience in managing such system and iterating it for efficient operation and possibly something I forgot; different users are writing about the part each considers the strongest counterargument, but they are a coherent whole, not individual pieces.
eta: ratios wrong way around
Do you have any experience with large crowds of thousands of people walking orderly towards confined imminent danger and death? Obviously people coordinate disembarking an airplane because they want to travel. At Auschwitz it's claimed that 2,000+ Jews at a time were crammed in a 7m x 30m room, over 9 people per square meter. LLM estimates the density of people is 1-1.5 people per square meter in a full airplane. You are unwilling or unable to grasp the scale of what you are claiming happened. Marching people into such a confined space in which they knew they were going to be killed would be an extremely difficult task, if not outright impossible. You physically cannot fit enough guards in the structure to force the crowd to do anything, the process would entirely rely on the cooperation of the victims to achieve this process we are told was virtually seamless and routine.
The "Sonderkommando" were not armed and there would have been a danger of them joining in on the riot. The idea that <150 guards (assuming every single guard and SS officer was at every single transport, which is not attested to) would be sufficient for the task of forcing 2,000 people to walk to their deaths without resistance is absurd. At Treblinka it's claimed the perimeter was secured merely with a barbed wire fence interwoven with tree branches. US prisons keep prisoners in very secure conditions, the ratio of guards to prisoners assumes most prisoners are secured in a cell. More importantly, US prisoners do not exterminate crowds of prisoners, and if they did they would not rely on a 4:1 ratio.
When it comes to the execution of a single prisoner, there is a huge number of personnel and security to manage the execution of a single prisoner. Comparing security in general population to security in the execution of 2,000 people is apples and oranges.
Does starvation and dehydration explain a crowd of people so diligently cooperating in their own mass execution? Of course it doesn't. Look at the picture of the claimed density of the gas chambers at Auschwitz. It is absurd to believe that those people put so much effort to allow the Germans to kill them instead of panicking and ruining the entire operation.
It doesn't seem that absurd to me. The guards outnumber each individual person 150-to-1.
Arm the guards with automatic weapons and make it clear that they're ready and willing to use them and will suffer no consequences for doing so, and I bet we could get American prisons down to considerably less that a 14:1 ratio.
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No. I am asking you why you believe the Nazis would have bothered. Kindness? Saving face? The impracticality of genocide? What? There is nothing in Nazi ideology which remotely motivates going out of their way to help the Jews where killing them would have been cheaper, more straightforward, more popular with their core supporters, and more in line with Hitler's decade-spanning rhetoric. Any lip service paid to re-settlement plans strikes me as the paperwork equivalent of dad telling little Billy that he's driving Fido to a nice farm in the country.
Well, surely there has to be. Those millions of Jews did, in fact, die without ever seeing the gleaming shores of Madagascar. Your explanation for this seems to be that they were left to starve (in you view, purely by accident as supply chains deteriorated), which is what I analogized to a murderer turning out to have left his victim to starve to death in his basement, instead of poisoning her. That seems perfectly sensible to me; "lock them all someplace under armed guard, in cold and squalid conditions, don't give them enough food, and while you're at it, maybe extract some slave labor out of them for as long as they still have a bit of life on them, that way you'll recoup costs and wear them out faster" is a perfectly cromulent way to kill six million people. Slower than gas chambers, possibly more expensive as a result, but it would get the job done, given time.
I would much sooner believe that was the plan, than believe that Nazi Germany was ever prepared to allot significant resources to Jewish resettlement in the event of German victory. Granting no gas chambers, I think the most likely scenario is that resettlement remains the official policy for international PR purposes, but its implementation is endlessly deferred until an overwhelming majority of Jewish prisoners are found to have already died in custody, tsk-tsk, what a shame, our bad. And by then, everyone with a brain knows what really happened, but what are you going to do now, even if you disapprove?
Shouldn't you be asking that question? If their plan was to kill them all, why did they bother bringing them to all of these camps, feed them, give them shelter, etc.? Why didn't they just kill them? Jewish labor was crucial for the German war effort. If they were so intent on killing all the Jews, why didn't they pursue that before the war? Why did they enter diplomatic arrangements with Zionists and why did they go through the trouble of planning to transfer the Jews in Madagascar? It's up to you to explain why they planned to do that initially, but then changed their minds and decided to gas them all. But I'm struggling to understand why you're asking "why do you believe the Nazis would have bothered" when by all accounts that was the policy they were pursuing before the war and before 1942. I'm only saying they didn't radically shift their policy position in favor of some secret gas chamber conspiracy. If you are saying they changed their minds and drastically changed their policy you should be able to provide some evidence for that.
So you think the Havaara Agreement and Madagascar Plan were just fake or something? Or they were just cover stories? Why don't you believe they would have pursued a policy they were obviously pursing before and during the early part of the war?
The death toll in the concentration camps is not in the millions, I can't remember off the top of my head but it's overall <100k IIRC. That's why the gas chamber story is so important. You think it was Germany's plan to lose the war and have their infrastructure get completely destroyed from both fronts? That was their plan to kill all the Jews? The collapse of Germany was unplanned, and yes that created catastrophic conditions in the camps. It says more about your biases that you are more willing to believe the Germans planned the collapse of their infrastructure in order to kill the Jews than to believe that they would have pursued the policy they were pursing before the war and through 1941...
Huhuh. "This is how you deal with questions…"
I have counters to many points in that paragraph, some of which @Amadan has already fielded. But I think addressing them would distract me from pointing out that I asked you a very simple question and you are still refusing to answer it. Let me repeat it:
What do you think was going through Hitler's brain? If you're so convinced that right up until 1945 he totally wanted to deliver as many healthy Jews to Madagascar as possible, why do you think he was clinging to that plan instead of attempting the "annihilation of the Jewish race" which he had long promised his base, and was now in a position to deliver? I genuinely want to know. Do you think he didn't want a Jewish genocide? That he wanted it, but he didn't think he could get away with it? That the Madagascar thing was just easier? Tell me!
No, obviously not. I think that, if all else failed, their long-term plan would have been "put all the Jews in camps and, once we no longer need their slave labor, let them all starve". You can, in fact, deliberately let prisoners starve even if your infrastructure is just dandy. In this scenario, to the extent that the breakdown of German infrastructure forced their hand, it would simply have accelerated an outcome which was already in the cards long before.
All specifics aside, if you have hundreds of thousands of people in camps (even camps which had only been work camps up til that point!), it is just evidently quite easy and quite cheap to let them die. It is certainly easier and cheaper than shipping all those people from Poland to Madagascar.
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