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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?
I believe that SS's claim is that these people starved to death because logistics broke down late in the war and they didn't get sufficient food.
What I want him to explain is why prisoners of war didn't suffer similarly high casualty rates (or vice versa, why Jews didn't have much lower casualty rates like the prisoners of war), because if the cause was a shortage of food, rather than deliberate actions to cause Jews to die, then one would expect similar food shortages for all prisoners and thus similar casualty rates.
Furthermore, his narrative would logically mean that almost all of these deaths would have happened very late in the war, because it would be absurd to argue that the Nazis fought for years without enough food. So then the Nazis would suddenly end up with huge piles of bodies. We know that these were not found by the liberating soldiers. They found very limited numbers of dead bodies at the camps, not millions of them.
So I want SS to explain how the Nazis were able to make those bodies disappear, and how such a solution is possible logistically. Because the way I see it, this would require a narrative that is way more unbelievable than that the Nazis murdered the Jews and cremated the bodies, over a much longer period of time.
It is not the case that millions of Jews died in these camps and the Germans made all their bodies disappear- from death of any cause. Auschwitz registered the deaths of 69,000 prisoners (the plurality were Catholic) from 1941 - 1943. The mainstream historians are the ones claiming millions died in these camps and the Germans made their bodies disappear.
Revisionist estimates of mortality in these camps is derived from German documentation. The overall camp death toll, including Jews and non-jews was, IIRC, somewhere around 275,000 over the entire war- mostly due to typhus and catastrophic conditions near the end of the war. The notion that ~3 million Jews died in these camps and their bodies were disappeared by the Germans, never to be found, is the mainstream historical claim and not the Revisionist claim.
Your intuition is correct that it is outlandish to think the Germans could make millions of bodies from these camps just disappear, they couldn't and they didn't.
Yet very large numbers of Jews did not return after WW 2, so where did they go, if they were not murdered?
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Yep. I second all those questions. @SecureSignals , please answer them as best you can. The longer you fail to do so, the harder it is to take your arguments halfway seriously.
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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.
It did not happen. I'm not claiming they knew that they were getting executed, I'm claiming it never happened. My falsifiable claim though is that central to the operation was the claim that the Jews were tricked into believing they were taking a shower. Aamadan found this hard to believe, rightfully so, so he and others are trying to provide a justification for why a large crowd of people in a confined space would behave the way they did if they knew they were densely packing themselves into gas chambers. And without fail avoiding crowd panic or the "fire in a crowded theater" effect from people seeing through the deception- which by mainstream accounts never happened at Birkenau.
The reality is Amadan and others making this argument don't understand how important the concept of "shower room deception" is to the Holocaust. It is claimed that no more than 2-4 Germans guarded the entire extermination operation at Birkenau, and that the entire operation was managed and carried out by a group of 100 unarmed Jewish prisoners.
So you have 2-4 Germans overseeing 100 Jewish prisoners orchestrating the execution of 2,000 fellow Jews on a near-daily basis. That is the mainstream claim. If the group of victims panicked then it would be an extremely difficult situation and present a huge security threat to the entire operation. The notion of deception is important because according to the mainstream historical claims the crowds of victims did not panic, they densely packed themselves inside the gas chambers on the orders of Jewish inmates overseeing the operation with no more than 2-3 armed German guards.
The story as-is is not believable, but also the story that the crowd of 2,000 people saw through the ruse but cooperated and coordinated so well as to achieve a density of > 9 people per square meter in their own execution chamber with practically no guard presence at all is also not believable. Neither story makes sense, but the historical consensus is that the cooperation of the Jews was achieved through a "shower room" deception, and the Germans were so confident in the effectiveness of the ruse that they only had a couple of Germans guarding 100 Jewish "Sonderkommandos" managing 2,000 victims. None of the possibilities make sense, because it's just a myth that never happened.
I don't believe that the Jews that just arrived were aware of the procedure at the camp, and I have explained extensively why I believe that this is the case. If you want to argue with someone who accepts the claim that they knew this, then you need to find someone else to argue with.
This is an utterly deceptive way to frame it. So deceptive in fact, that I have a hard time believing that you are making this argument in good faith. Again, the size of the actual security force was way bigger than this, consisting mostly of Trawniki and Kapo 'volunteers' (who in reality were heavily coerced, as doing this job greatly increased their chance of survival or of living longer).
Given your clear interest in the extermination camps, I find it just about impossible to believe that you have not heard of the Trawniki and Kapos.
Let me be absolutely clear. The story you are countering here is not the actual mainstream claim. It is highly distorted in a way that makes it seem way less feasible.
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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.
Of course even if there were 1 billion prisoners and 150 guards the guards would outnumber each individual person 150-to-1.
There's no statements to the effect that 100% of the security force or garrison was involved in managing the prisoners- quite the opposite, with the vast majority of the work was said to have been done and orchestrated by the unarmed Jewish "Sonderkommando" with little guard presence.
And yet, there are numerous examples available of the simple maxim that one or two people with machine guns can control a far larger, even if not infinitely or arbitrarily larger, group of unarmed people. I maintain that my formulation is an accurate description of the psychology of humans in crowds, and that your reductio does not actually answer it. I am confident that a demonstrated capacity and willingness to employ overwhelming lethal force is sufficient to overcome 20:1, even 50:1 odds, and maybe higher, and certainly for brief durations. The ratio for the Bataclan attack was ~500:1, for example. I bet if we looked at, say, the Khmer Rouge or the Gulags, we would not find guard ratios of 4:1. I bet if we looked at Vietnamese POW camps we would not find ratios of 4:1. A quick googling indicates somewhere around 10:1 for the Russian Gulag as a whole.
There's no evidence that 100% of the gulag guard force was involved in managing the prisoners either; If we assume split shifts, that bumps the ratio immediately to 20:1, 30:1 with three shifts per day. I bet you we can find photos, stories or SOP docs of two or three guards handling fifty prisoners or more for work details. Humanity has a long, long history of people with guns putting people without them in chains or in graves. The comparisons you're drawing seem question-beggingly selective.
Your argument was that there weren't enough camp guards to force large groups of people into a small building.
This does not seem absurd to me at all. Again, Bataclan, three gunmen, 1,500 victims, who provided zero meaningful resistance. In this case, the victims have already arguably been repeatedly selected for meekness/ cooperation and keeping their head down, they've been subject to absolute power throughout their arrest, imprisonment and transport, and they presumably have no idea what's waiting for them. Uniformed men with machine guns and authority to use them on the resistant are directing their movements, as they have been on a regular basis for days, weeks, months previously. They tell you to go this way, all in a line. They tell you to go that way, all in a line. They tell you to go in there, all in a line. I see no reason to believe that people would panic at being crammed into a confined space, any more than they panicked when being into the confined space of cattle-cars for transport, as is generally claimed for both the Nazi death camps and the Russian gulag. humans will endure much misery if they don't see an alternative, or if they have even a glimmer of hope that they might survive.
Note that there are examples of procedurally-similar execution methods being used in other parts of history: loading prisoners into a barge, locking them in the hold, and then sinking the barge seems quite similar, and IIRC is attested to have been used repeatedly as an execution method in the French and Russian revolutions.
...If I had read the rest of the thread, I would not have bothered. Even from your evident priors, this does not seem like a productive line of argument. I'm not sure why you're expending this much effort to argue from such a weak position.
At Auschwitz it's claimed the extermination operation was managed by 100 (unarmed) Jewish prisoners and just 2-4 German guards. You can hear directly from a Jew who saw it all! So in the direct vicinity we are talking about thousands of people who ostensibly knew they were being led to an execution chamber guarded by a few Germans.
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