SecureSignals
Civilization is simply a geno-memetic-techno-capital machine
1yr ago
Looking through the past CW threads, I'm not seeing it - "ONLY witchy ramblings." This is basically the only space of this kind that doesn't ban critical discussion on Jews or the Holocaust, which are very important topics in the Culture War, so when it does come up it is probably bothersome to a certain type... but:
I personally REALLY don't care about this topic... That topic makes the motte worse for me.
Does not follow. There are some topics that come up here frequently that I REALLY don't care about, and I click the '-' button within the 0.5 seconds it takes me to realize I'm not interested in the thread. You should just say that it's a topic that you do care about, and it bothers you when people discuss it with a critical perspective. That would be a more honest complaint, and it would ring true for the vast majority of people.
Allowing those topics (though I personally have posted 0 top-level threads on Holocaust denial (so far)) will lower the status of the community in adjacent spaces like SSC. I get the impression the mods are more committed to the purpose of the community than they are status signaling to other rationalists (and I don't mind the token denunciations from the mods here in that thread).
This is basically the only space of this kind that doesn't ban critical discussion on Jews or the Holocaust, which are very important topics in the Culture War, so when it does come up it is probably bothersome to a certain type... but:
It would really help if you wouldn't do a Gish Gallop speedrun whenever the topic comes up. Your MO so far has been:
make dozens of highly specific claims that are very hard to factcheck without domain knowledge
ignore any factual objections to your more outlandish claims or drown them in more irrelevant minutiae
evade, evade, evade
ignore whenever you have been disproven and just claim the same thing elsewhere
rinse, repeat
That's not a discussion by any stretch of the imagination.
When you're talking about a taboo topic you're held to an impossible standard. You are either accused of not providing enough evidence relative to the strength of your claim, or of Gish Galloping if you provide a lot of evidence, and I was accused of both in the very same discussion.
But I certainly didn't evade any of the topics of discussion. None of the people in that conversation, including yourself, even tried to defend the mainstream position, so there was no evasion on my end. I didn't even get into the minutiae since nobody even tried to defend the claims of mainstream historiography- because the people in that conversation who clearly know something about the debate know that it's the weakest part of the mainstream historiography. Maybe one day someone will try (or we can have that debate which was proposed in that thread) and you will see what minutiae really looks like in this topic.
We don't need to rehash the debate, as that is not the point of this thread. If you want to continue you can make a new thread somewhere, although I would ask that you actually try to defend the mainstream position that actually constitutes the mythos of the Holocaust narrative, rather than limit yourself to far less sensationalist but easier-to-prove claims that nobody contests.
faul_sname
Fuck around once, find out once. Do it again, now it's science.
SecureSignals 1yr ago·Edited 1yr ago
None of the people in that conversation, including yourself, even tried to defend the mainstream position, so there was no evasion on my end
And your responses were to an imagined opponent who defended the mainstream position, instead of the actual people who were responding to you with actual specific questions.
If you want to debate the what you see as the mainstream position with someone who supports the mainstream position, you need to go find someone who supports what you believe the mainstream position is, and then go debate them. If you want to take a stronger position than "the mainstream position is not 100% accurate", you need to defend your stronger position, not just fall back to "well you're not defending the mainstream position so I will not engage.
Lest you think I'm being uncharitable, I'm thinking in particular of this comment, where you said
It is strange to accuse Revisionists of "moving the goalposts" when you refuse to defend the core elements of the mainstream narrative. You are of course free to not take the mainstream position and propose your own historical interpretation, and that makes you a Revisionist. Congratulations.
This being in the context of someone repeatedly challenging your very specific claim that
There was no German plan for the physical extermination of world Jewry
and your repeated refusals to actually engage with their evidence that such a plan did, in fact, exist.
SecureSignals
Civilization is simply a geno-memetic-techno-capital machine
faul_sname 1yr ago·Edited 1yr ago
If you want to debate the what you see as the mainstream position with someone who supports the mainstream position, you need to go find someone who supports what you believe the mainstream position is, and then go debate them.
They do support the mainstream perspective, they are just defending the mainstream narrative with a non-mainstream framing. It's called a Motte and Bailey... the mainstream claims that the "Final Solution" was the German government's decision to exterminate the Jews in gas chambers, and that they exterminated millions of people in gas chambers and buried them in known locations. But they don't try to defend that narrative- they functionally concede the Revisionist position that the "Final Solution" denoted the deportation and concentration of the Jews East. They then try to say that the latter still counts as an "extermination plan" because of a single paragraph in a document that predicts high mortality from forced labor deployed East. Nobody except for Revisionists considers that to be the "Final Solution."
After the war, from 1944 to 1948 at least 12 million Germans were expelled and resettled from areas annexed by Poland and Czechoslovakia. It's estimated that between 10-30% of those expelled, about 2 million, died. Many others were deported to Soviet labor camps where the mortality rate (according to official statistics) was about 35%. Nobody would call the expulsion of the Germans an extermination plan, they would probably celebrate it as a reprisal. Likewise, the expulsion and concentration of the Palestinians by the Israelis could be criticized in its context, but it could not be regarded as a plan to physically exterminate the Palestinians using some absurd murder contraption.
Nobody established any plan for the extermination of the Jews. The Wannsee Conference - that 90 minute meeting with a bunch of mid-level nobodies was the best they could come up with to establish such a plan, although the document supports the Revisionist interpretation.
Let's just pause a moment to appreciate all the ink that's been spilled so far, with not one person raising any sort of physical or documentary evidence for the murder of three million people in gas chambers. It speaks volumes that they dance around the central myth of the entire Holocaust narrative .
faul_sname
Fuck around once, find out once. Do it again, now it's science.
SecureSignals 1yr ago
They do support the mainstream perspective, they are just defending the mainstream narrative with a non-mainstream framing. It's called a Motte and Bailey
The fact that someone opposes your particular perspective does not mean that they support every argument ever made by anyone else who opposes your perspective. I do not doubt that there are places where the 10th-grade-history-class version of the Holocaust is inaccurate. Nobody here, to the best of my knowledge, has said that they do think that the 10th-grade-history-class version is 100% accurate.
Let's just pause a moment to appreciate all the ink that's been spilled so far, with not one person raising any sort of physical or documentary evidence for the murder of three million people in gas chambers. It speaks volumes that they dance around the central myth of the entire Holocaust narrative .
I guess if your opinion is "the Holocaust was bad because the Nazis killed people using gas chambers". I don't know any real people who believe that. To me, the genocide is the central thing about the Holocaust. I do not care whether the specific "there were exactly 6 death camps with gas chambers, and it was in those gas chambers that the majority of murders happened" claim is accurate, I do care whether the "about 12 million people were murdered" claim is accurate.
In terms of concrete evidence, I expect that you have more in-depth knowledge on any part of this topic that you are trying to steer the conversation to, so I expect that if I allow you to guide where the conversation goes, I will indeed see something that looks like "oh look the conventional narrative is inaccurate". However, I expect that the conventional narrative that the Nazis rounded up Jews and other undesirables and then shipped them to concentration camps where they were killed in large numbers, coming out to about 12 million total, is broadly correct. So I expect that if I pick a random link on Wikipedia and then do a deep dive on it, it will turn out that the assertion is basically accurate.
So let's do that. Starting at the wikipedia page for extermination camps, choosing a link at random on that page leads me to the page on the city of Łódź (right between the links for "chelmno" and "gas vans" -- I'm pretty sure those links each lead somewhere equally damning, but my goal here was to get somewhere that is both damning and also unfamiliar territory to someone who knows a lot about a few very narrow, very particularly selected topics). Skipping to the section on "Second World War (1939 - 1945)", wikipedia has this to say:
The Nazi authorities established the Łódź Ghetto (Ghetto Litzmannstadt) in the city and populated it with more than 200,000 Jews from the region, who were systematically sent to German extermination camps.[72] It was the second-largest ghetto in occupied Europe,[73] and the last major ghetto to be liquidated, in August 1944.[74] The Polish resistance movement (Żegota) operated in the city and aided the Jewish people throughout its existence.[75] However, only 877 Jews were still alive by 1945.[76] Of the 223,000 Jews in Łódź before the invasion, 10,000 survived the Holocaust in other places.[77] The Germans also created camps for non-Jews, including the Romani people deported from abroad, who were ultimately murdered at Chełmno,[78] as well as a penal forced labour camp,[79] four transit camps for Poles expelled from the city and region, and a racial research camp.[80]
So I see a number of factual claims here. I will list them off -- let me know which, if any, you think would be wrong or misleading if I dug into them further.
The city of Łódź contained over 200,000 Jews before the Nazi invasion.
The city of Łódź contained less than 1000 Jews by 1945
Fewer than 10,000 Jews from the city of Łódź were alive anywhere after the Holocaust
In August 1944, most of the 70,000 Jews remaining in the Łódź Ghetto were sent to Auschwitz-Birkenau. Considering the "less than 10,000 total survivors" above, most of these people died within the following 6 months.
Additional evidence on clicking on the wikipedia page for the Łódź Ghetto
55,000 people were transported from Łódź to Chełmno.
Chelmno did not have anywhere near enough buildings to contain 55,000 people, no matter how crowded and unsanitary the conditions.
Do you think any of this is substantially inaccurate? Because it sounds about like what I expected going in (besides being somehow even worse than I imagined in terms of conditions within the Łódź Ghetto).
estimated that between 10-30% of those expelled, about 2 million, died. Many others were deported to Soviet labor camps where the mortality rate (according to official statistics) was about 35%. Nobody would call the expulsion of the Germans an extermination plan, they would probably celebrate it as a reprisal.
The Genocide, concentration camps, and slave labour section of the World War II page on Wikipedia has one paragraph for the Nazi genocide, immediately followed by a paragraph describing the soviet gulags, with associated links. "The soviets committed atrocities against the Germans during WWII" is not a fringe position. If you find yourself frequently interacting with people who celebrate those atrocities, consider that that might be an opinion specific to the people you interact with.
SecureSignals
Civilization is simply a geno-memetic-techno-capital machine
faul_sname 1yr ago·Edited 1yr ago
Nobody here, to the best of my knowledge, has said that they do think that the 10th-grade-history-class version is 100% accurate.
But that is not my claim. My claim is that there were no homicidal gas chambers disguised as shower rooms or "extermination camps." They believe those things, they just do not care to defend them because it's much harder to engage the physical and documentary evidence for those claims. So instead of defending the sensational but hard-to-prove claim, which they believe (otherwise they are Revisionists), they retreat to a much less sensationalist but easier-to-defend claim of "murderous intent" with deportation and forced labor.
Deportation, imprisonment, and forced labor are all very common experiences in wartime. We are told that Jewish suffering is special because of the factory-extermination of about 3 million Jews in extermination camps using gas chambers. That is the mythos which captures the imagination of the public, and it's the mythos that's worshipped in popular culture. Saying "I don't think 10th-grade-history-class version is 100% accurate" is not what Revisionists claim.
However, I expect that the conventional narrative that the Nazis rounded up Jews and other undesirables and then shipped them to concentration camps where they were killed in large numbers, coming out to about 12 million total, is broadly correct.
You expect wrong. Your "12 million victims of the Holocaust" understanding is based on an older Holocaust software version which claimed that there were 6 million Jewish victims of the Holocaust and 5 million non-Jewish victims. But the claim that there were 5 million non-Jewish victims of the Holocaust was a big lie allegedly made up by a Jew in order to manipulate Gentiles into caring about Jewish suffering: ‘Remember the 11 million’? Why an inflated victims tally irks Holocaust historians
“Five million non-Jews died in the Holocaust.”
It’s a statement that shows up regularly in declarations about the Nazi era. It was implied in a Facebook post by the Israel Defense Forces’ spokesperson’s unit last week marking International Holocaust Remembrance Day. And it was asserted in an article shared by the Trump White House in defense of its controversial Holocaust statement the same day omitting references to the 6 million Jewish victims.
It is, however, a number without any scholarly basis.
Indeed, say those close to the late Nazi hunter Simon Wiesenthal, its progenitor, it is a number that was intended to increase sympathy for Jewish suffering but which now is more often used to obscure it...
The “5 million” has driven Holocaust historians to distraction ever since Wiesenthal started to peddle it in the 1970s. Wiesenthal told the Washington Post in 1979, “I have sought with Jewish leaders not to talk about 6 million Jewish dead, but rather about 11 million civilians dead, including 6 million Jews.”
Yehuda Bauer, an Israeli Holocaust scholar who chairs the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance, said he warned his friend Wiesenthal, who died in 2005, about spreading the false notion that the Holocaust claimed 11 million victims – 6 million Jews and 5 million non-Jews.
“I said to him, ‘Simon, you are telling a lie,’” Bauer recalled in an interview Tuesday. “He said, ‘Sometimes you need to do that to get the results for things you think are essential.’”
Bauer and other historians who knew Wiesenthal said the Nazi hunter told them that he chose the 5 million number carefully: He wanted a number large enough to attract the attention of non-Jews who might not otherwise care about Jewish suffering, but not larger than the actual number of Jews who were murdered in the Holocaust, 6 million.
So 5 million non-Jewish victims of the Holocaust, clearly the basis for your 12 million-overall estimate, was a wholesale lie that was uncritically accepted by our finest institutions. You'll still see the "11 million victims of the Holocaust" as popular understanding on Reddit. For the record, I doubt that Simon Wiesenthal was solely responsible for the creation and proliferation of this lie. He's a convenient scapegoat so that the historical establishment can wash their hands of a big lie that, to any reasonable person, should also make them suspicious of the authenticity of the holy 6 million number.
Fewer than 10,000 Jews from the city of Łódź were alive anywhere after the Holocaust
Incidentally the source for the "10,000 survivors of the Lodz ghetto" is a publication from the Simon Wiesenthal Institute hosted on the Museum of Tolerance website. The author simply states the figure with no apparent basis. And if you think "they wouldn't just make up a number with thin or no basis, would they?" Oh yes they would.
Abraham Peck writes:
German employees paid 0.70 Reichsmarks per day per slave to a special account of the German administration of the ghetto. It was from this account that the henchmen were paid for snatching other Jews for extermination. Such a heinous evil as this "partnership" was not able to snuff out the decency and spiritual resistance of the Lodz ghetto, even though only about 10,000 Jews from pre-war Lodz survived the Holocaust.
Here you see the popular claim that the SS were paid a special bounty for "snatching Jews for extermination." But what does the document say?
On your request, the wages and salaries of the people employed in the interest of the Sonderkommando are paid from the special account 12,300.
In Kulmhof, all people receive besides the usual salary also a daily danger bonus of RM 15. It would be appropriate, as our people are exposed to at least the same danger of infections, that we should also pay this danger bonus, already for the simple reason that if if really something should happen, no accusations can be made.
The "special account" was used for hazard pay for exposure to risk of infection. The risk of deadly diseases like typhus, which threatened to spread to the Eastern Front and Germany, was one of the top reasons for the liquidations of the ghettoes. In the minds of historians, this hazard pay becomes a bounty for snatching Jews to be exterminated in gas chambers.
There are no documentations for such transports to Chelmno. They are claimed by eyewitnesses and then estimates deriving from eyewitness testimony were used to pull up estimates of gas chamber victims from thin air, i.e. from Mattogno's work on Chelmno:
On 20 May 1945 the Commission for the Investigation of German Crimes in Poland, a delegation of the Central Commission for Investigation of German Crimes in Poland, fixed this number at 1,300,000! The witness Andrzej Miszczak was more precise (Blumental 1946, p. 242):
“After an exact and precise calculation, the number of people murdered by the Hitlerite cannibals amounted to 1,300,097"!
...
At the end of 1945 Judge W. Bednarz carried out a preliminary investigation into the camp. In his report, dated 7 January 1946, he devoted a whole chapter to the number of victims:
“There is no way of determining the number of those murdered in Chełmno, neither on the basis of the camp’s reports nor based on reports relating to Jewish rail transports, because the camp authorities destroyed all documents, and all tickets were taken away during the evacuation. Regarding direct transports to Chełmno the preliminary investigation had to restrict itself to testimonies.
The number of 330 days of activity of the extermination camp Chełmno thus corresponds to reality. Assuming that each day 1,000 people were killed, we arrive at 330,000 murdered during the period of 330 [active] days of the death camp.
Can you imagine the case for the alleged murder of 330,000 people being based on such nonsense? "Eyewitnesses" and napkin math? Does that seem like a fair trial to you, or a show trial?
The judge used the witness-reported total of 1,000 Jews killed per transport, supposed 1 transport per day for 330 days the camp was open, and came to an estimate of 340,000 victims at Chelmno. This was the official number of victims for half a century and was the official figure reported at Nuremberg. This figure was quietly reduced by more than half in the 1990s, but it was never based on documentary or physical evidence in the first place. It was built on a mishmash of wildly inconsistent testimonies of "eyewitnesses" and napkin math. Western observers, who after investigation disproved the "extermination" narrative in all camps liberated by the Western Allies, were denied access to these Soviet-led investigations.
If you find yourself frequently interacting with people who celebrate those atrocities
Most people have likely not heard of them. The Soviet Gulags became well-known because that propaganda aligned with US policy interests against communism. But the mass expulsion and death of German civilians after the war is not well-known because German suffering in those events is considered not even a small fraction as important as the gas chamber legend.
faul_sname
Fuck around once, find out once. Do it again, now it's science.
SecureSignals 1yr ago
My claim is that there were no homicidal gas chambers disguised as shower rooms or "extermination camps."
Is that really your only claim? In this comment, you said
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
Is your claim that revisionist spaces believe all of those things, but you explicitly don't believe all of those things, only the "there were no gas chambers disguised as shower rooms" one? If that's the case, then when people keep steering the topic away from gas chambers towards "ok, but where did the Jews go" you can say "they died in the genocide, but mostly from disease and bullets, not gas chambers". And then explain why you think that the way they died is central or important.
If "the gas chamber bit was the important bit, not the genocide bit" is not in fact your core claim, then I find it suspicious that you keep coming back to that topic after people have repeatedly told you that we do not find it an interesting or important topic of discussion, and that you keep evading topics where more substantial documentation exists.
You expect wrong. Your "12 million victims of the Holocaust" understanding is based on an older Holocaust software version which claimed that there were 6 million Jewish victims of the Holocaust and 5 million non-Jewish victims.
Looking at wikipedia, it does appear to me now that the modern convention is indeed to classify the murders of non-jewish people by Nazis as "not holocaust victims". So, for example, the over 3 million Soviet POWs who died during the time period of the Holocaust, while in Nazi custody, to things like starvation, murder, and death marches, are not considered "Holocaust victims".
You are thus technically correct that there were not "12 million victims of the Holocaust" according to modern definitions of who is considered a "victim of the Holocaust". Consider me corrected.
Incidentally the source for the "10,000 survivors of the Lodz ghetto" is a publication from the Simon Wiesenthal Institute hosted on the Museum of Tolerance website. The author simply states the figure with no apparent basis. And if you think "they wouldn't just make up a number with thin or no basis, would they?" Oh yes they would.
Explicit question - do you explicitly think that the "10,000 survivors" claim is factually incorrect? If so, approximately how many survivors do you expect that there actually were? Playing the "I will say that specific claims are not well enough supported without explicitly saying that I think those claims are wrong" game is not exactly making a strong case for your position.
Here you see the popular claim that the SS were paid a special bounty for "snatching Jews for extermination."
I have not seen that claim, no. I am also not clear on how it's relevant to the question of what happened to the majority of the people who were in the Łódź Ghetto.
Can you imagine the case for the alleged murder of 330,000 people being based on such nonsense? "Eyewitnesses" and napkin math? Does that seem like a fair trial to you, or a show trial?
Is your assertion that no people, or extremely few people, were murdered at Chelmno? Because I think if I got together with my buddies and we did a mass murder, and then we covered up as much evidence as we could, then saying "we didn't kill 300,000 people, we only killed 150,000 at most" would not in fact lead to a better outcome for me at my trial.
So here are some concrete questions for you:
Of the people who were in the Lodz Ghetto, how many do you think survived the war?
Do you think that large numbers of prisoners were shipped to Chelmno? If so, what do you think happened to them? If not, then where did the 20,000 children and elderly people referenced in the September 4, 1942 "give me your children" speech go instead? (content warning: this is the "worse than I had imagined" bit from my previous comment)
Do you think that the fate of the Jews of the Lodz ghetto was unusual? If so, would you be willing to bet money, at even odds, that at least half of the Jews at a ghetto randomly selected from this list of 278 Jewish ghettos in Poland survived the Holocaust? If not, why not? If so, how much are you willing to stake?
SecureSignals
Civilization is simply a geno-memetic-techno-capital machine
faul_sname 1yr ago·Edited 1yr ago
You are thus technically correct that there were not "12 million victims of the Holocaust" according to modern definitions of who is considered a "victim of the Holocaust". Consider me corrected.
Your "12 million" estimate was not errant based on any changes to "who is considered a victim of the Holocaust." The implication of your about-face would be that you were also counting 3 million non-POW-non-Jews as Holocaust victims, a number which has no basis no matter how you arbitrarily define a "Holocaust victim". Neither the 11 nor 12 million number are even approximately consistent with any of those definitions at any point in time. It was a pure propaganda figure.
You were not uninformed, you were misinformed- the problem was not that you failed to keep up with modern definitions of Holocaust victims, the problem was you were deceived by liars who, according to the Times of Israel, created the lie of 11 million Holocaust victims in order to manipulate the opinion of people like you towards Jewish suffering.
Your "expectation that the conventional narrative was broadly correct" was wrong- you were intentionally deceived by those with high institutional status.
If "the gas chamber bit was the important bit, not the genocide bit" is not in fact your core claim, then I find it suspicious that you keep coming back to that topic after people have repeatedly told you that we do not find it an interesting or important topic of discussion, and that you keep evading topics where more substantial documentation exists.
The gas chamber claim is the mainstream explanation for how the Germans murdered approximately 3 million Jews. You are also claiming that those 3 million Jews were murdered, you are just refusing to take any position on when they were murdered, where they were murdered, or how they were murdered. Because people are so inoculated against Holocaust denial you can probably get away with flagrantly making a sensational claim like that and then refusing to elaborate on any specifics for how this sensational crime actually happened.
At least some people should find it odd that you are claiming the Germans killed 6 million people, a serious accusation, and then absolving yourself of any responsibility to specifically explain when, where, and how they committed such a crime. The reason the gas chamber question is important is because it is the method by which mainstream historians claim the Germans murdered about 3 million people. You want to sidestep the issue entirely and make no specific claims at all for how these murders happened.
Explicit question - do you explicitly think that the "10,000 survivors" claim is factually incorrect? If so, approximately how many survivors do you expect that there actually were?
My claim was that the 10,000 figure lacks any apparent basis and has no reference, it is simply stated as true by the author with no elaboration or references. This is a great microcosm for the mainstream historiographical approach because instead of pointing to any solid basis for the figure you have claimed, you immediately reverse the burden of proof. It doesn't help that the author simply states this figure, with no explanation or reference or apparent basis, right next to a similar outlandish claim of a special account in the ghetto administration that existed to pay bounties for snatching Jews for the gas chambers- whereas a sober reading of the document shows this bonus pay was nothing of the sort, it was hazard pay for the risk of exposure to deadly disease like epidemic typhus.
The authoritative source of the new, by-over-half reduced death toll at Chelmno (1995 Julian Baranowski) is reproduced in a table by Mattogno here. It places 167,540 Jews in Lodz in December 1941, and records about 78,000 "Number of Murder victims" in that city. Of course Revisionists do not accept that figure, but I cite it to point out that even the official revision by Polish historiography claims that "only" 78,000 Jews in that city were murdered. So the figure you have cited of 10,000 survivors, and the rest murdered, has no apparent logic or basis. This is a good example of why reversing the burden of proof, making a claim with no support and then demanding Revisionists debunk your claims is an alluring strategy but massively fallacious.
we didn't kill 300,000 people, we only killed 150,000 at most
Did you even read the source I provided for the 300,000 estimate? It was based on absolutely nothing except napkin math by a judge. No documentary or physical proof. It would be more like if I accused you of murdering 100 people on the basis of no physical or documentary evidence, and then when pressed for evidence say "fine, you murdered 50 people." A reasonable person would not assume that the accusation of 50 murders is more likely just because the initial estimate was reduced. The proper conclusion is that the entire accusation was baseless, so a reduction of an estimate with no basis has no more credibility than the original estimate.
Of the people who were in the Lodz Ghetto, how many do you think survived the war?
This is a question that cannot be answered conclusively. Certainly there would have been high mortality during the war due to many causes. Ryan Faulk estimated that, assuming Jewish civilians had the same rate of death as other civilians in the areas which they lived, then something like 1.1 million Jews would have been expected to die during the conflict. Furthermore, the evidence that at one point could have been conclusive was purely in the custody of the Soviet Union, who had a motive and an opportunity to present false information.
Do you think that large numbers of prisoners were shipped to Chelmno? If so, what do you think happened to them?
The number of prisoners who arrived at Chelmno is not known. Mattogno shows that the large majority of Jews evacuated from the Lodz ghetto where Jews of working age (starting page 113), while many young children and elderly remained in the ghetto. This would be consistent with the documents Mattogno provides explicitly describing the motive for the evacuation. Mattogno has a section on the deportations in Chapter 12.
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Notes -
Looking through the past CW threads, I'm not seeing it - "ONLY witchy ramblings." This is basically the only space of this kind that doesn't ban critical discussion on Jews or the Holocaust, which are very important topics in the Culture War, so when it does come up it is probably bothersome to a certain type... but:
Does not follow. There are some topics that come up here frequently that I REALLY don't care about, and I click the '-' button within the 0.5 seconds it takes me to realize I'm not interested in the thread. You should just say that it's a topic that you do care about, and it bothers you when people discuss it with a critical perspective. That would be a more honest complaint, and it would ring true for the vast majority of people.
Allowing those topics (though I personally have posted 0 top-level threads on Holocaust denial (so far)) will lower the status of the community in adjacent spaces like SSC. I get the impression the mods are more committed to the purpose of the community than they are status signaling to other rationalists (and I don't mind the token denunciations from the mods here in that thread).
It would really help if you wouldn't do a Gish Gallop speedrun whenever the topic comes up. Your MO so far has been:
make dozens of highly specific claims that are very hard to factcheck without domain knowledge
ignore any factual objections to your more outlandish claims or drown them in more irrelevant minutiae
evade, evade, evade
ignore whenever you have been disproven and just claim the same thing elsewhere
rinse, repeat
That's not a discussion by any stretch of the imagination.
When you're talking about a taboo topic you're held to an impossible standard. You are either accused of not providing enough evidence relative to the strength of your claim, or of Gish Galloping if you provide a lot of evidence, and I was accused of both in the very same discussion.
But I certainly didn't evade any of the topics of discussion. None of the people in that conversation, including yourself, even tried to defend the mainstream position, so there was no evasion on my end. I didn't even get into the minutiae since nobody even tried to defend the claims of mainstream historiography- because the people in that conversation who clearly know something about the debate know that it's the weakest part of the mainstream historiography. Maybe one day someone will try (or we can have that debate which was proposed in that thread) and you will see what minutiae really looks like in this topic.
We don't need to rehash the debate, as that is not the point of this thread. If you want to continue you can make a new thread somewhere, although I would ask that you actually try to defend the mainstream position that actually constitutes the mythos of the Holocaust narrative, rather than limit yourself to far less sensationalist but easier-to-prove claims that nobody contests.
And your responses were to an imagined opponent who defended the mainstream position, instead of the actual people who were responding to you with actual specific questions.
If you want to debate the what you see as the mainstream position with someone who supports the mainstream position, you need to go find someone who supports what you believe the mainstream position is, and then go debate them. If you want to take a stronger position than "the mainstream position is not 100% accurate", you need to defend your stronger position, not just fall back to "well you're not defending the mainstream position so I will not engage.
Lest you think I'm being uncharitable, I'm thinking in particular of this comment, where you said
This being in the context of someone repeatedly challenging your very specific claim that
and your repeated refusals to actually engage with their evidence that such a plan did, in fact, exist.
They do support the mainstream perspective, they are just defending the mainstream narrative with a non-mainstream framing. It's called a Motte and Bailey... the mainstream claims that the "Final Solution" was the German government's decision to exterminate the Jews in gas chambers, and that they exterminated millions of people in gas chambers and buried them in known locations. But they don't try to defend that narrative- they functionally concede the Revisionist position that the "Final Solution" denoted the deportation and concentration of the Jews East. They then try to say that the latter still counts as an "extermination plan" because of a single paragraph in a document that predicts high mortality from forced labor deployed East. Nobody except for Revisionists considers that to be the "Final Solution."
After the war, from 1944 to 1948 at least 12 million Germans were expelled and resettled from areas annexed by Poland and Czechoslovakia. It's estimated that between 10-30% of those expelled, about 2 million, died. Many others were deported to Soviet labor camps where the mortality rate (according to official statistics) was about 35%. Nobody would call the expulsion of the Germans an extermination plan, they would probably celebrate it as a reprisal. Likewise, the expulsion and concentration of the Palestinians by the Israelis could be criticized in its context, but it could not be regarded as a plan to physically exterminate the Palestinians using some absurd murder contraption.
Nobody established any plan for the extermination of the Jews. The Wannsee Conference - that 90 minute meeting with a bunch of mid-level nobodies was the best they could come up with to establish such a plan, although the document supports the Revisionist interpretation.
Let's just pause a moment to appreciate all the ink that's been spilled so far, with not one person raising any sort of physical or documentary evidence for the murder of three million people in gas chambers. It speaks volumes that they dance around the central myth of the entire Holocaust narrative .
The fact that someone opposes your particular perspective does not mean that they support every argument ever made by anyone else who opposes your perspective. I do not doubt that there are places where the 10th-grade-history-class version of the Holocaust is inaccurate. Nobody here, to the best of my knowledge, has said that they do think that the 10th-grade-history-class version is 100% accurate.
I guess if your opinion is "the Holocaust was bad because the Nazis killed people using gas chambers". I don't know any real people who believe that. To me, the genocide is the central thing about the Holocaust. I do not care whether the specific "there were exactly 6 death camps with gas chambers, and it was in those gas chambers that the majority of murders happened" claim is accurate, I do care whether the "about 12 million people were murdered" claim is accurate.
In terms of concrete evidence, I expect that you have more in-depth knowledge on any part of this topic that you are trying to steer the conversation to, so I expect that if I allow you to guide where the conversation goes, I will indeed see something that looks like "oh look the conventional narrative is inaccurate". However, I expect that the conventional narrative that the Nazis rounded up Jews and other undesirables and then shipped them to concentration camps where they were killed in large numbers, coming out to about 12 million total, is broadly correct. So I expect that if I pick a random link on Wikipedia and then do a deep dive on it, it will turn out that the assertion is basically accurate.
So let's do that. Starting at the wikipedia page for extermination camps, choosing a link at random on that page leads me to the page on the city of Łódź (right between the links for "chelmno" and "gas vans" -- I'm pretty sure those links each lead somewhere equally damning, but my goal here was to get somewhere that is both damning and also unfamiliar territory to someone who knows a lot about a few very narrow, very particularly selected topics). Skipping to the section on "Second World War (1939 - 1945)", wikipedia has this to say:
So I see a number of factual claims here. I will list them off -- let me know which, if any, you think would be wrong or misleading if I dug into them further.
The city of Łódź contained over 200,000 Jews before the Nazi invasion.
The city of Łódź contained less than 1000 Jews by 1945
Fewer than 10,000 Jews from the city of Łódź were alive anywhere after the Holocaust
In August 1944, most of the 70,000 Jews remaining in the Łódź Ghetto were sent to Auschwitz-Birkenau. Considering the "less than 10,000 total survivors" above, most of these people died within the following 6 months.
Additional evidence on clicking on the wikipedia page for the Łódź Ghetto
And, after looking at maps of Chełmno
Do you think any of this is substantially inaccurate? Because it sounds about like what I expected going in (besides being somehow even worse than I imagined in terms of conditions within the Łódź Ghetto).
The Genocide, concentration camps, and slave labour section of the World War II page on Wikipedia has one paragraph for the Nazi genocide, immediately followed by a paragraph describing the soviet gulags, with associated links. "The soviets committed atrocities against the Germans during WWII" is not a fringe position. If you find yourself frequently interacting with people who celebrate those atrocities, consider that that might be an opinion specific to the people you interact with.
But that is not my claim. My claim is that there were no homicidal gas chambers disguised as shower rooms or "extermination camps." They believe those things, they just do not care to defend them because it's much harder to engage the physical and documentary evidence for those claims. So instead of defending the sensational but hard-to-prove claim, which they believe (otherwise they are Revisionists), they retreat to a much less sensationalist but easier-to-defend claim of "murderous intent" with deportation and forced labor.
Deportation, imprisonment, and forced labor are all very common experiences in wartime. We are told that Jewish suffering is special because of the factory-extermination of about 3 million Jews in extermination camps using gas chambers. That is the mythos which captures the imagination of the public, and it's the mythos that's worshipped in popular culture. Saying "I don't think 10th-grade-history-class version is 100% accurate" is not what Revisionists claim.
You expect wrong. Your "12 million victims of the Holocaust" understanding is based on an older Holocaust software version which claimed that there were 6 million Jewish victims of the Holocaust and 5 million non-Jewish victims. But the claim that there were 5 million non-Jewish victims of the Holocaust was a big lie allegedly made up by a Jew in order to manipulate Gentiles into caring about Jewish suffering: ‘Remember the 11 million’? Why an inflated victims tally irks Holocaust historians
So 5 million non-Jewish victims of the Holocaust, clearly the basis for your 12 million-overall estimate, was a wholesale lie that was uncritically accepted by our finest institutions. You'll still see the "11 million victims of the Holocaust" as popular understanding on Reddit. For the record, I doubt that Simon Wiesenthal was solely responsible for the creation and proliferation of this lie. He's a convenient scapegoat so that the historical establishment can wash their hands of a big lie that, to any reasonable person, should also make them suspicious of the authenticity of the holy 6 million number.
Incidentally the source for the "10,000 survivors of the Lodz ghetto" is a publication from the Simon Wiesenthal Institute hosted on the Museum of Tolerance website. The author simply states the figure with no apparent basis. And if you think "they wouldn't just make up a number with thin or no basis, would they?" Oh yes they would.
Abraham Peck writes:
Here you see the popular claim that the SS were paid a special bounty for "snatching Jews for extermination." But what does the document say?
The "special account" was used for hazard pay for exposure to risk of infection. The risk of deadly diseases like typhus, which threatened to spread to the Eastern Front and Germany, was one of the top reasons for the liquidations of the ghettoes. In the minds of historians, this hazard pay becomes a bounty for snatching Jews to be exterminated in gas chambers.
There are no documentations for such transports to Chelmno. They are claimed by eyewitnesses and then estimates deriving from eyewitness testimony were used to pull up estimates of gas chamber victims from thin air, i.e. from Mattogno's work on Chelmno:
Can you imagine the case for the alleged murder of 330,000 people being based on such nonsense? "Eyewitnesses" and napkin math? Does that seem like a fair trial to you, or a show trial?
The judge used the witness-reported total of 1,000 Jews killed per transport, supposed 1 transport per day for 330 days the camp was open, and came to an estimate of 340,000 victims at Chelmno. This was the official number of victims for half a century and was the official figure reported at Nuremberg. This figure was quietly reduced by more than half in the 1990s, but it was never based on documentary or physical evidence in the first place. It was built on a mishmash of wildly inconsistent testimonies of "eyewitnesses" and napkin math. Western observers, who after investigation disproved the "extermination" narrative in all camps liberated by the Western Allies, were denied access to these Soviet-led investigations.
Most people have likely not heard of them. The Soviet Gulags became well-known because that propaganda aligned with US policy interests against communism. But the mass expulsion and death of German civilians after the war is not well-known because German suffering in those events is considered not even a small fraction as important as the gas chamber legend.
Is that really your only claim? In this comment, you said
Is your claim that revisionist spaces believe all of those things, but you explicitly don't believe all of those things, only the "there were no gas chambers disguised as shower rooms" one? If that's the case, then when people keep steering the topic away from gas chambers towards "ok, but where did the Jews go" you can say "they died in the genocide, but mostly from disease and bullets, not gas chambers". And then explain why you think that the way they died is central or important.
If "the gas chamber bit was the important bit, not the genocide bit" is not in fact your core claim, then I find it suspicious that you keep coming back to that topic after people have repeatedly told you that we do not find it an interesting or important topic of discussion, and that you keep evading topics where more substantial documentation exists.
Looking at wikipedia, it does appear to me now that the modern convention is indeed to classify the murders of non-jewish people by Nazis as "not holocaust victims". So, for example, the over 3 million Soviet POWs who died during the time period of the Holocaust, while in Nazi custody, to things like starvation, murder, and death marches, are not considered "Holocaust victims".
You are thus technically correct that there were not "12 million victims of the Holocaust" according to modern definitions of who is considered a "victim of the Holocaust". Consider me corrected.
Explicit question - do you explicitly think that the "10,000 survivors" claim is factually incorrect? If so, approximately how many survivors do you expect that there actually were? Playing the "I will say that specific claims are not well enough supported without explicitly saying that I think those claims are wrong" game is not exactly making a strong case for your position.
I have not seen that claim, no. I am also not clear on how it's relevant to the question of what happened to the majority of the people who were in the Łódź Ghetto.
Is your assertion that no people, or extremely few people, were murdered at Chelmno? Because I think if I got together with my buddies and we did a mass murder, and then we covered up as much evidence as we could, then saying "we didn't kill 300,000 people, we only killed 150,000 at most" would not in fact lead to a better outcome for me at my trial.
So here are some concrete questions for you:
Of the people who were in the Lodz Ghetto, how many do you think survived the war?
Do you think that large numbers of prisoners were shipped to Chelmno? If so, what do you think happened to them? If not, then where did the 20,000 children and elderly people referenced in the September 4, 1942 "give me your children" speech go instead? (content warning: this is the "worse than I had imagined" bit from my previous comment)
Do you think that the fate of the Jews of the Lodz ghetto was unusual? If so, would you be willing to bet money, at even odds, that at least half of the Jews at a ghetto randomly selected from this list of 278 Jewish ghettos in Poland survived the Holocaust? If not, why not? If so, how much are you willing to stake?
Your "12 million" estimate was not errant based on any changes to "who is considered a victim of the Holocaust." The implication of your about-face would be that you were also counting 3 million non-POW-non-Jews as Holocaust victims, a number which has no basis no matter how you arbitrarily define a "Holocaust victim". Neither the 11 nor 12 million number are even approximately consistent with any of those definitions at any point in time. It was a pure propaganda figure.
You were not uninformed, you were misinformed- the problem was not that you failed to keep up with modern definitions of Holocaust victims, the problem was you were deceived by liars who, according to the Times of Israel, created the lie of 11 million Holocaust victims in order to manipulate the opinion of people like you towards Jewish suffering.
Your "expectation that the conventional narrative was broadly correct" was wrong- you were intentionally deceived by those with high institutional status.
The gas chamber claim is the mainstream explanation for how the Germans murdered approximately 3 million Jews. You are also claiming that those 3 million Jews were murdered, you are just refusing to take any position on when they were murdered, where they were murdered, or how they were murdered. Because people are so inoculated against Holocaust denial you can probably get away with flagrantly making a sensational claim like that and then refusing to elaborate on any specifics for how this sensational crime actually happened.
At least some people should find it odd that you are claiming the Germans killed 6 million people, a serious accusation, and then absolving yourself of any responsibility to specifically explain when, where, and how they committed such a crime. The reason the gas chamber question is important is because it is the method by which mainstream historians claim the Germans murdered about 3 million people. You want to sidestep the issue entirely and make no specific claims at all for how these murders happened.
My claim was that the 10,000 figure lacks any apparent basis and has no reference, it is simply stated as true by the author with no elaboration or references. This is a great microcosm for the mainstream historiographical approach because instead of pointing to any solid basis for the figure you have claimed, you immediately reverse the burden of proof. It doesn't help that the author simply states this figure, with no explanation or reference or apparent basis, right next to a similar outlandish claim of a special account in the ghetto administration that existed to pay bounties for snatching Jews for the gas chambers- whereas a sober reading of the document shows this bonus pay was nothing of the sort, it was hazard pay for the risk of exposure to deadly disease like epidemic typhus.
The authoritative source of the new, by-over-half reduced death toll at Chelmno (1995 Julian Baranowski) is reproduced in a table by Mattogno here. It places 167,540 Jews in Lodz in December 1941, and records about 78,000 "Number of Murder victims" in that city. Of course Revisionists do not accept that figure, but I cite it to point out that even the official revision by Polish historiography claims that "only" 78,000 Jews in that city were murdered. So the figure you have cited of 10,000 survivors, and the rest murdered, has no apparent logic or basis. This is a good example of why reversing the burden of proof, making a claim with no support and then demanding Revisionists debunk your claims is an alluring strategy but massively fallacious.
Did you even read the source I provided for the 300,000 estimate? It was based on absolutely nothing except napkin math by a judge. No documentary or physical proof. It would be more like if I accused you of murdering 100 people on the basis of no physical or documentary evidence, and then when pressed for evidence say "fine, you murdered 50 people." A reasonable person would not assume that the accusation of 50 murders is more likely just because the initial estimate was reduced. The proper conclusion is that the entire accusation was baseless, so a reduction of an estimate with no basis has no more credibility than the original estimate.
This is a question that cannot be answered conclusively. Certainly there would have been high mortality during the war due to many causes. Ryan Faulk estimated that, assuming Jewish civilians had the same rate of death as other civilians in the areas which they lived, then something like 1.1 million Jews would have been expected to die during the conflict. Furthermore, the evidence that at one point could have been conclusive was purely in the custody of the Soviet Union, who had a motive and an opportunity to present false information.
The number of prisoners who arrived at Chelmno is not known. Mattogno shows that the large majority of Jews evacuated from the Lodz ghetto where Jews of working age (starting page 113), while many young children and elderly remained in the ghetto. This would be consistent with the documents Mattogno provides explicitly describing the motive for the evacuation. Mattogno has a section on the deportations in Chapter 12.
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