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naraburns  nihil supernum  1yr ago (text post)   5681 thread views

Quality Contributions Report for December 2022

This is the Quality Contributions Roundup. It showcases interesting and well-written comments and posts from the period covered. If you want to get an idea of what this community is about or how we want you to participate, look no further (except the rules maybe--those might be important too).

As a reminder, you can nominate Quality Contributions by hitting the report button and selecting the "Actually A Quality Contribution!" option. Additionally, links to all of the roundups can be found in the wiki of /r/theThread which can be found here. For a list of other great community content, see here.

A few comments from the editor: first, sorry this is a little late, but you know--holidays and all. Furthermore, the number of quality contribution nominations seems to have grown a fair bit since moving to the new site. In fact, as I write this on January 5, there are already 37 distinct nominations in the hopper for January 2023. While we do occasionally get obviously insincere or "super upvote" nominations, the clear majority of these are all plausible AAQCs, and often quite a lot of text to sift through.

Second, this month we have special AAQC recognition for @drmanhattan16. This readthrough of Paul Gottfried’s Fascism: Career of a Concept began in the Old Country, and has continued to garner AAQC nominations here. It is a great example of the kind of effort and thoughtfulness we like to see. Also judging by reports and upvotes, a great many of us are junkies for good book reviews. The final analysis was actually posted in January, but it contains links to all the previous entries as well, so that's what I'll put here:

Now: on with the show!

Quality Contributions Outside the CW Thread

@Tollund_Man4:

@naraburns:

@Bernd:

@FiveHourMarathon:

@RandomRanger:

@Iconochasm:

Contributions for the week of December 5, 2022

@zeke5123:

@ymeskhout:

@FiveHourMarathon:

@gattsuru:

@Southkraut:

@Bernd:

@problem_redditor:

@FCfromSSC:

@urquan:

@gemmaem:

Sexulation

@RococoBasilica:

@problem_redditor:

Holocaustianity

@johnfabian:

@DaseindustriesLtd:

@SecureSignals:

Coloniazism

@gaygroyper100pct:

@screye:

@urquan:

@georgioz:

Contributions for the week of December 12, 2022

@SecureSignals:

@Titus_1_16:

@Dean:

@cjet79:

@JarJarJedi:

@gattsuru:

@YE_GUILTY:

@aqouta:

@HlynkaCG:

Contributions for the week of December 19, 2022

@MathiasTRex:

@To_Mandalay:

Robophobia

@gattsuru:

@IGI-111:

@NexusGlow:

Contributions for the week of December 26, 2022

@FCfromSSC:

@gattsuru:

@LacklustreFriend:

@DaseindustriesLtd:

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All the above said, “where did the Jews go” is the most persuasive anti-revisionist argument. Revisionist explanations, which involve a balanced measure of “to Russia”, “to the West”, “they died but not deliberately”, “they stayed in place but secularized and assimilated unbelievably quickly under communism” and “they never existed in the first place” are deeply unpersuasive.

I don't think this entire debate is about the numbers though. It's misdirection to say that it is. It's about a) the methods used b) the political and cultural legacy of it all.

That’d just lead you pointlessly down a rabbit hole in this context. First of all, you’re starting off from the assumption that genocide is defined by proportionate numbers of victims and not genocidal intent, which I’m sure many people will find objectionable, plus you’ll have to come up with accurate numbers of potential and actual victims, which again leave a lot of room for disagreement. If you want to argue with Holocaust revisionists, in most cases I’m sure it makes more sense to question their ideas about Holocaust remembrance being an industry, its memory being weaponized to further the goals of the Israel lobby and enforce ethnomasochism etc.

One thing that has impressed me in the Revisionist space, unlike a lot of heterodox spaces where everyone has their own cockamamie theory, is that there's 100% consensus on the core claims. The claims are:

  • There was no German plan for the physical extermination of world Jewry

  • There were no gas chambers disguised as shower rooms used to exterminate millions of Jews

  • The "six million" number is a propaganda/symbolic figure that has no relation to actual Jewish population losses

I would say the high-end of Jewish population losses among Revisionist estimates is 1.5-2 million, but most estimates are lower than that. The question of whether or not these events count as genocidal is a semantic question that I have not seen treated by Revisionists.

I don't have a problem with, even if you take those 3 claims away, still calling the real parts a "genocide." It really is all about the three claims above- no more and no less.

I really don't want to get into this, mainly because of the reasons described by 2rafa above, but:

There was no German plan for the physical extermination of world Jewry

Not for the world, but for Europe there definitely was. This is well-documented in the protocols of the Wannsee conference. It's full of euphemisms, but it clearly states:

  1. Expulsion efforts have been unsatisfactory

  2. We are now switching to an approach we'll call "evacuation to the east" where we will force the victims into hard labour

  3. A majority of people will not survive this

  4. The survivors will have to be "treated" as not to serve as a "gamete" for the reconstruction of European Judaism

  5. Mixed children will, with some exceptions, be expelled, forced into "evacuation", or sterilised.

It's full of euphemisms

This is what historians say to hand-wave the fact that the minutes of the Wannsee Conference, a direct reading, supports the Revisionist case for the "final solution." Revisionists claim the "final solution" was the expulsion of the Jews from the European sphere, and the minutes from the Wannsee Conference are evidence of that interpretation. The plan was to concentrate them in the East and then resettle them out of Europe, Madagascar was the most serious proposal as that territory would be negotiated from France, after the war. Although there is evidence that a reservation in (planned to be conquered) Russian territory was also considered.

It is historians who say that the minutes are full of "camouflage and euphemism" because a direct reading of the documents simply does not support their case.

No. The minutes are explicitly stating that the expulsion approach is lacking, expulsion has been banned, and that a different path is to be taken. This path means deportation to the east for forced labour, during the course of which a "majority" of victims is expected to die. This is explicitly in the minutes. It then states that the survivors have to be "treated" as not to serve as the "gamete of a new Jewish reconstruction". This is a euphemism but it will be very hard to argue that it doesn't mean killing, given that this plan is explicitly introduced as an alternative to expulsion.

The minutes are explicitly stating that the expulsion approach is lacking, expulsion has been banned, and that a different path is to be taken.

The different path was evacuation to the East. This is what is explicitly described in documents and this is what Revisionists claim the plan was. Historians say that "evacuation to the East" was coded language for gassed in gas chambers. But a direct reading of the document supports the Revisionist case for the German plan.

In the same way, Himmler will refer to a camp, like Sobibor, as a "Transit Camp", which is what Revisionists claim it was, while historians will say "Transit camp" was "coded language" for death camp. The historians rely on assumptions of euphemism and coded language while the documents supports the Revisionist case.

In the same way, Himmler will refer to a camp, like Sobibor, as a "Transit Camp"

Transit? Between what? Somehow people were ending in camps and disappearing there, never heard about again.

And even if we believe all that (and there is no good reason for that), then according to own plans they were expecting that they will be enslaved and most of them will quickly die.

Seriously, starving people to death in concentration camps is not better - in any way - than gas chambers. So even if this specific denial you peddle would be 100% accurate then it would not change much, except historians being even more suspicious.

And your outright "mass murder of Jews never happened" is just absurd. Are you also denying that Germans mass-murdered Gypsies? Poles?

And thanks to RococoBasilica, nice to have confirmation that you were lying or being misleading about "no documents".

But a direct reading of the document supports the Revisionist case for the German plan.

It doesn't. Just read it. It's like 10 pages.

The different path was evacuation to the East.

And I am telling you, for the third time, that the protocol explicitly states what this "evacuation" entails:

  1. forced labour (p.7)

  2. which means that a majority will die (p.7)

  3. the survivors will have to be "treated" as not to serve as the "gamete of a new Jewish reconstruction" (p.8)

The Wannsee Conference was organized after Goering gave a famous order to Reinhard Heydrich “to submit to me as soon as possible a general plan of the administrative material and financial measures necessary for carrying out the desired final solution of the Jewish question.” Reinhard Heydrich was killed by ;artisans during the war.

But after the war Goering flatly denied the exterminationist interpretation of the "final solution" in the above context:

SIR DAVID MAXWELL-FYFE: Do you still say neither Hitler nor you knew of the policy to exterminate the Jews?

GOERING: As far as Hitler is concerned, I have said I do not think so. As far as I am concerned, I have said that I did not know, even approximately, to what extent these things were taking place.

SIR DAVID MAXWELL-FYFE: You did not know to what degree, but you knew there was a policy that aimed at the extermination of the Jews?

GOERING: No, a policy of emigration, not liquidation of the Jews. I knew only that there had been isolated cases of such perpetrations.

The Wannsee Protocol explicitly establishes that this was the planned proposal:

Chief of the Security Police and of the SD, SS-Obergruppenfuehrer Heydrich, reported that the Reich Marshal [Goering] had appointed him delegate for the preparations for the final solution of the Jewish question in Europe"

The Reichsfuhrer-SS [Himmler] and the Chief of the German Police (Chief of the Security Police and the SD) [Heydrich] was entrusted with the official central handling of the final solution of the Jewish question without regard to geographic borders.

The Chief of the Security Police and the SD then gave a short report of the struggle which has been carried on thus far against this enemy, the essential points being the following:

a) the expulsion of the Jews from every sphere of life of the German people,

b) the expulsion of the Jews from the living space of the German people.

In carrying out these efforts, an increased and planned acceleration of the emigration of the Jews from Reich territory was started, as the only possible present solution.

By order of the Reich Marshal [Goering], a Reich Central Office for Jewish Emigration was set up in January 1939 and the Chief of the Security Police and SD was entrusted with the management. Its most important tasks were

a) to make all necessary arrangements for the preparation for an increased emigration of the Jews,

b) to direct the flow of emigration,

c) to speed the procedure of emigration in each individual case.

[...]

In the meantime the Reichsfuehrer-SS and Chief of the German Police had prohibited emigration of Jews due to the dangers of an emigration in wartime and due to the possibilities of the East.

III. Another possible solution of the problem has now taken the place of emigration, i.e. the evacuation of the Jews to the East, provided that the Fuehrer gives the appropriate approval in advance.

Here, the protocols explicitly identify the "evacuation of the Jews to the East" as the planned proposal. This is also how Goering describes the plan. This is also how Lina Heydrich, Reinhard Heydrich's wife (the one who organized the Wannsee Conference and appointed by Goering) denied the Holocaust and said the plan was to implement a 'territorial solution’ as described in the protocols.

The Wannsee Conference makes no mention of a gas chamber extermination policy whatsoever. A direct reading supports the Revisionist case, and historians have to rely on the accusation of camouflaged language and euphemism.

Josef Bühler, the deputy governor of the General Government and attendee of the Wannsee Conference testified at the IMT as a defence witness for Hans Frank, and claimed that the purpose of Wannsee was to discuss the forced resettlement of Jews in the northeast of Europe:

I ask you now, did the Governor General send you to Berlin for that conference; and if so, what was the subject of the conference?

BUEHLER: Yes, I was sent to the conference and the subject of the conference was the Jewish problem. I might say in advance that from the beginning Jewish questions in the Government General were considered as coming under the jurisdiction of the Higher SS and Police Leader and handled accordingly. The handling of Jewish matters by the state administration was supervised and merely tolerated by the Police.

During the years 1940 and 1941 incredible numbers of people, mostly Jews, were brought into the Government General in spite of the objections and protests of the Governor General and his administration. This completely unexpected, unprepared for, and undesired bringing in of the Jewish population from other territories put the administration of the Government General in an extremely difficult position.

Accommodating these masses, feeding them, and caring for their health-combating epidemics for instance-almost, or rather, definitely overtaxed the capacity of the territory. Particularly threatening was the spread of typhus, not only in the ghettos but also among the Polish population and the Germans in the Government General. It appeared as if that epidemic would spread even to the Reich and to the Eastern Front.

At that moment Heydrich's invitation to the Governor General was received. The conference was originally supposed to take place in November 1941, but it was frequently postponed and it may have taken place in February 1942.

Because of the special problems of the Government General I had asked Heydrich for a personal interview and he received me. On that occasion, among many other things, I described in particular the catastrophic conditions which had resulted from the arbitrary bringing of Jews into the Government General. He replied that for this very reason he had invited the Governor General to the conference. The Reichsfuehrer SS, so he said, had received an order from the Fuehrer to round up all the Jews of Europe and to settle them in the Northeast of Europe, in Russia. I asked him whether this meant that the further arrival of Jews in the Government General would cease, and whether the hundreds of thousands of Jews who had been brought into the Government General without the permission of the Governor General would be moved out again. Heydrich promised me both these things. Heydrich said furthermore that the Fuehrer had given an order that Theresienstadt, a town in the Protectorate, would become a reservation in which old and sick Jews, and weak Jews who could not stand the strains of resettlement, were to be accommodated in the future. This information left me definitely convinced that the resettlement of the Jews, if not for the sake of the Jews, then for the sake of the reputation and prestige of the German people, would be carried out in a humane fashion. The removal of the Jews from the Government General was subsequently carried out exclusively by the Police....

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Boy, it sure would've been a big coup if somehow, someone had managed to get a hold of the guy who prepared those minutes and asked some questions about it. Maybe have a big trial or something, I'm just spitballing. Then we could really get to the bottom of this. Too bad it never happened.

I would like to note that this entire time Mr. SS has been using the exact "levering" tactic I wrote about in the comment that sparked this whole chain of discussion. Of course it's all disingenuous, and there's ultimately no end to it because the impetus isn't just a bullish sort of contrarianism but also (rather obviously) a hate for Jews. There's no way to win on logic or a sound argument because that's not what put him in his position.

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I think the main thing that people are actually interested in is an explicit accounting of what you think has happened with the rest of the Jews (ie 4 out of 6 million in the usual number). I haven’t seen you address this issue in the discussion.

Here and here. I linked to Sanning, who among other things, concludes an over-estimate of the 1939 Polish Jewish population due to fertility decline and emigration in the interwar period, an under-estimate of the post-war Jewish population in the Soviet Union. Mainstream studies have also neglected the large scale deportations of Polish Jews, and their subsequent mortality, into the Soviet interior and Siberia.

On the other side, the "six million" number was ordained when the official Soviet-reported death tolls at Auschwitz and Majdanek were 4 million and 1.5 million, respectively. Today those official numbers are 1.1 million and 68,000, but despite these mutli-million reductions in death tolls over the decades the sacred number remains unchanged. Demographic studies are not a substitute for the historical burden of proof to show where and how these six million died, so we have to rely on other evidence to investigate these claims.

Here and here. I linked to Sanning, who among other things, concludes an over-estimate of the 1939 Polish Jewish population due to fertility decline and emigration in the interwar period, an under-estimate of the post-war Jewish population in the Soviet Union. Mainstream studies have also neglected the large scale deportations of Polish Jews, and their subsequent mortality, into the Soviet interior and Siberia.

It would probably serve the reader well to also read @Stefferi's excellent reply here.

I have, actually, read the Sanning book, and found it, to put it mildly, underwhelming. It's essentially a series of it-just-so-happenses - it just so happens that the Polish demographical data on local Jewish population was vastly overcounted without either the Poles or the occupying Germans catching on to this, it just so happens that once this is established the same overcount can be expected to apply on other Eastern European nations as well, it just so happens that out of that population a larger-than-assumed share left for Soviet Union and the Soviets then deported/killed them (even though Soviet sources don't show such deportations and deaths - sure, such sources became available after the Sanning book was written, but that's no excuse for us to ignore them), it just so happens that there was a vast Jewish wave of emigration in the 30s to other countries not shown in official data etc.

And once you add all the it-just-so-happenses together, presto - the numbers advocated by the revisionists! Data massaging would be putting it lightly - and in many cases the data is essentially based on just the sort of testimonials, memoirs and what amounts to guesstimates by individual figures that revisionists don't generally consider to be valid (ie. the idea of Soviet deportations is justified by referring to several testimonies made in front of US House Select Committee on Communist Aggression) in establishing a Jewish genocide by Germans.

Beyond that, though, has there even been an attempt from the revisionist camp to make a similar demographic analysis post-Sanning, taking all the new data (methods of estimating populations in cases where demographic data is considered undertain, post-Soviet archives etc.) into account? If not, it speaks volumes that on this crucial field all that there seems to be is this one book from decades ago, while the general effort of the revisionist sphere seemingly concentrates on individual memoirs and technical camp details, and such.

Also, Karlin's predictive abilitites have not exactly shown their worth in 2022, regarding, well, most aspects of the Russian invasion and its presumed successes.

Like, even if you're going with "the Soviets lied about their numbers" narrative, why would NVKD lie about their internal numbers in their reports to the party? The NKVD's job, or one of them, was deporting people and putting them to camps. They're deliberately trying to diminish the job they're doing in internal party assessments?

If the refutation of the demographic question for revisionists continues to rely on one 50-year-old book relying largely on guesswork, anecdotes and guesses about information they didn't have access to (but later researchers do have access to), doesn't that at least somewhat indicate there's a problem here?

To which you respond by retreating to a position of "Well, it's complicated".

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