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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.
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.
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