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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?
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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