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Culture War Roundup for the week of February 6, 2023

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I've seen that video. It would be comparable if there was a wealth of testimonies from people who had personally spoken with these phantom Cossacks, and testimony from the Cossacks themselves.

Even better, there were witnesses to snow being shoveled out of the passenger wagons which were allegedly transporting the Russians. A very Holocaust-esque detail. There seems to be something about a passenger train with the shades drawn that excites the imagination of passersby in the right conditions and state of rumor.

Closed goods wagons do a lot of work in the Holocaust narrative as well. The British civilians thought they were witnessing mass transports of Russians when they saw random trains with the shades drawn. No doubt similar errors would be made with transports consisting of closed goods wagons and unknown cargo.

there is German documentation to support the arrival of very many mass transports of Polish Jews to Treblinka, as I outlined earlier in the thread.

There is no German documentation to support the arrival of mass transports of Jews to T-II. The only surviving train records denote "Treblinka" as the destination, but even the mainstream acknowledges that this did not refer to T-II, and they allege that there was some (undocumented) shunting operation from Malkinia that is not recorded anywhere. Those same records also specify lengthy stops at other locations known to be connected to labor camps.

The Hoefle Telegram says "T", and it shouldn't be assumed that this referred to T-II. We know the train schedules documented "Treblinka" as the transport destination but that did not actually denote or indicated T-II as the destination of the transport. The Korherr report is even more vague and describes the settlers as "sifted through the camps of General Government", which does not provide any sort of statement on how many Jews set foot in T-II either. Of course neither document makes the slightest mention of extermination, and Korherr himself claimed after the war to believe that it referred to actual resettlement.

Huge quantities of human ash and remains found on the premises in 1944.

Soviet investigators concluded that they found no mass graves and none likely existed in the camp. You have even acknowledged that a complete cremation cover-up to make the graves "spotlessly clean" was not possible. That makes the lack of discovery of mass graves, by the own conclusion of the Soviet investigation, much more unlikely given your recognition that a complete cover-up was impossible.

So there's no documentation of mass transports to T-II, investigators have never discovered any mass graves on the site by their own stated conclusions- you entirely rely on the testimony of witnesses.

The remains of the place(s) where these people were "concentrated"? The people themselves?

As far as I have seen, there is nothing of the sort.

Yes, there are. It turns out that there were many tens of thousands of camps in the East that historians were not aware of, and those camps have only recently been studied with very limited information available.

Researchers at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum have been documenting all of the Nazi concentration camps, ghettos, slave labour sites and killing factories which had been set up across Europe.

When they first started the project, the team expected to find about 7,000 camps and ghettos.

Shockingly, they discovered 42,500 camps across large swathes of German-controlled Europe.

Speaking to the New York Times, Hartmut Berghoff, director of the institute, said: 'The numbers are so much higher than what we originally thought...

When the project first started, the researchers expected to find about 7,000 Nazi camps and ghettos. But as the project has gone on, the numbers constantly increased to the current figure of 42,500.

It's pretty awkward of them to find 6x the number of camps that they previously thought existed. Obviously the greater number of camps than expected implies a greater operation of resettlement rather than mass extermination.

So historians missed tens of thousands of camps that existed in these areas. This revelation certainly gives more context to Korherr's interpretation of settlers "sifted through the camps of General Government" as opposed to documenting some exact number brought to T-II for extermination. It turns out there were many more camps than historians had ever imagined. Likely there are many more that have not been found.

You have said that the story of Treblinka is absurd. I think it is absurd to claim that the Germans carried out a massive action larger than any single Soviet deportation, and pulled it off without leaving a shred of evidence behind, but this is the revisionist claim.

You realize that your entire case relies on the reliability of Soviet investigation right? Because it is also possible (indeed likely) that exculpatory evidence would not have been investigated, retained, or presented by Soviet investigators. The Soviets denied access to Western observers during these investigations, which further reduces their credibility. You can't say that it didn't leave behind "a shred of evidence" unless you trust Soviet investigators to find and preserve the exculpatory evidence that would have been left behind. I certainly do not.

And of course, 40,000+ camps can only be interpreted as evidence for resettlement, as those camps would not have been necessary given the assumption of an extermination policy.

On the other hand, I do trust that if there had been mass graves of 800,000 people in Treblinka, the Soviet investigators would have found them and conducted a propaganda campaign with 10x the fanfare of the German exhumation of the Katyn Mass Graves. The fact that they concluded in their own report that no mass graves were found and never bothered to excavate any of them with international observers and the whole nine yards should be interpreted as evidence that the mass graves are not there.

They weren't able to actually do a grand mass grave exhumation like the Katyn Forest massacre because they weren't able to find any mass graves! That fact has been attributed to the magical cover-up by the magical cremations, but you and I know that's a lie.

Edit: One more point, which is that Majdanek had many, many witnesses to mass gassings in facilities which are now admitted to have not been gas chambers. I would daresay that there were more Majdanek gas chamber witnesses than Treblinka witnesses based on some thread I saw awhile back where a bunch of witness testimony was compiled from former Majdanek inmates who had identified the (real) shower facility as the center of gas chamber extermination.

The unreliability of witness testimony is legendary. I've already explained to you why the historical validity of the subsequent trials - decades after the fact - has low historical trustworthiness but you continue to just appeal to the witnesses anyway. Witnesses in a show trial are not good historical evidence, period. But that's all you really have to work with.