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You misunderstand me. It is claimed ~3 million Jews were killed inside gas chambers disguised as shower rooms. But I am not acknowledging that 3 million Jews were killed by other means. I am simply saying that if you take away the Gas Chamber story, you are left with no alternative explanation for the mortality of 3 million Jews. Did they die in the Ghettos? Did they die at the hands of the Einsatzgruppen? Did they die in the concentration camps? The evidence affirmatively refutes any plausible alternative explanation for that level of mortality by German hands. This is why the gas chamber story is so important, and they can never dispense with it without giving up the narrative entirely. Without it, there is no explanation for how the Germans allegedly killed so many Jews.
So let's say I dispense with the extermination camp narrative, does that mean I acknowledge 3 million Jews died? No. I've already repeatedly described my position, without contention, that census differentials are not a reliable estimate of mortality, in the general case but especially in this cause. I agree with Ryan Faulk's suggestion:
I think this is closer to the truth, the global Jewish population estimate is today and always has been enigmatic and politically-loaded. It is not a reliable measurement of mortality, in particular given the pattern of measurement revisions that so happen to correlate with utility to the Holocaust narrative.
Yeah, that's actually kind of my point, that this whole fucking sensational story relies entirely on Soviet investigators and records. Do you think that's a reliable basis for confidence in this narrative of millions of Jews being gassed inside shower rooms?
There's a lot of claims here so I'll deal with them in turn:
Who was it that perpetrated the Katyn Massacre? When the Germans conquered this area of Poland and uncovered the alleged mass graves, what they did was excavate the mass graves and performed autopsies to determine cause of death and attempted to identify victims. They released American POWs to observe the investigation to report on its integrity, and they invited international observers from neutral nations. Essentially, they did everything the Soviets/Poles did not do when claiming that millions of Jews were gassed inside shower rooms.
And guess what?
The Soviet Prosecution still claimed that the Katyn Massacre was carried out by the Germans at Nuremberg, bundled with the accusation that they gassed millions of Jews inside shower rooms. I do not make this point to deny the Germans murdered Poles, but to deny that this war implies some prior likelihood for the Germans coming up with some scheme to engineer Death Factories in which they exterminated millions of Jews inside Shower Rooms. That was wartime atrocity propaganda. The Soviets were moreso intent on destroying Polish nationalism to a vastly greater extent than the Germans.
There was no hunger plan, what people call the "hunger plan" was an assessment that feeding the German army would leave insufficient food for conquered Slavs, which was accurate. It was not a plan, it was an accurate projection of the prevailing situation, that it was impossible to feed the German army and the occupied locals given wartime scarcity.
Also vastly overstated, no different than citing a random Israeli minister who talks about colonizing the Sinai. There were many variations of the post-war plan for the east, none of them were confirmed because the Germans lost the war, and the most salacious variations were viewed as unrealistic even at the time. The Germans were ethnically cleansed after the war, 12 to 14 million but some estimates to 16.5 million were ethnically cleansed. I don't say this to justify German colonization plans, but to point out that such plans do not lend credence to a scheme to gas millions of Jews inside gas chambers disguised as shower rooms..
Why would the Soviets fake something that goes against their own narrative? Anyway I think it's a reliable basis for arguing that the Germans killed a lot of Jews I don't personally claim to be able to prove the method but it seems extremely obvious they did. We are going a bit round and round do you think there were Jews in the Pale of settlement? Because the exact number doesn't matter. Why don't know the exact number of Dzungars before and after nor Armenians. but there were Jews there and now there aren't so where did they go? The pre-Soviet Imperial records show a large Jewish population the post Soviet Russian Federation census shows almost none, the same with pre and post Communist Poland. You need zero communist records to prove anything if you don't want. You keep talking about Soviet investigators we don't need investigators to know places like Warsaw and Kiev had huge Jewish populations and now don't
Again it's not just quibbling about numbers there were whole Jewish districts in these cities and now there aren't. There were whole Yiddish speaking farming villages of which zero exist today. The Germans created a special unit to fight partisans and then declared Jews partisans. It's not rocket science where they could have gone. There's plenty of witness testimony in Eastern Europe of their activities. Many of which incredibly problematic to Western narratives like the Baltic populations eagerly participating. You keep going on and on about shower rooms. I don't claim to be able to prove shower rooms (though I admit I do buy it) I'm confident the Germans killed the Jews and as you say without it, it creates a hole. But we should at least agree the Germans targeted Jews before we discuss method and I probably can't prove the gas chamber beyond a reasonable doubt for you. I think I can prove the Germans shot a lot of Jews in Eastern Europe. Notably because they created whole units to do it and we have a decent amount of evidence. Such as the Germans declaring all Jews partisans.
Yes the Soviet did Katyn the Germans did a bunch of their own massacres both the Germans and the Soviets wanted to elminate Poland that's what the Molotov-Ribbentrop pact was about.
The Western Allies and the Germans fought the war in a much more civilized manner. Compare how German POWs were treated by the Western Allies versus the Soviets or how the Germans deliberately issued orders suspending the laws of war and conduct on the Eastern front. The Germans did not view the Western Allies as racially inferior people's to be colonized in the way they viewed Slavs. The conduct of both the Allies and Axis was extremely different on the Western versus Eastern fronts.
The Soviets jacketed exaggerated warcimes on the Germans to divert attention from their own war crimes. The chief Soviet prosecutor at Nuremberg was a prominent judge in the Stalinist show-trials, this was his speciality. But I agree it's not a sufficient story because the USSR was not really that interested in generating this persistent narrative of Jewish victimhood. The Jews in the United States took that football and accelerated the cultural impact of the Holocaust narrative starting in the 1960s. Really the whole thing is the conjugation of the efforts of Hollywood and the apparatus of Stalinist propaganda. Unlike most historical events that peak in the public consciousness in the immediate aftermath and fade over time, I wouldn't peg the peak of Holocaust consciousness until the 1990s at least. That wasn't caused by the USSR that was caused by Jews in the United States.
The firebombing of civilian population centers, the nuclear attacks on Japan, the rape of Berlin by Soviet troops. Do you know that the Germans fielded the largest foreign volunteer army in history consisting of Slavs desperate to fight against the Soviets? The notion that the Allies fought in a more "civilized manner" is entirely downstream from the Gas Chamber and Extermination Camp accusations. The Western Allies demanded unconditional surrender, a barbaric and murderous war aim that Hitler did not even aspire for. Your narrative fundamentally relies on the Holocaust, because without it the entire WW-II narrative you have in your head falls apart.
That's the exact reason I said the Western Allies, meaning America, England France and not "the Allies." My entire point was that the war in the West was fought largely based on civilized European norms and yes bombing cities is part of that. Everyone in World War II and World War I did it. The war in the East was a racial war of extermination between two totalitarians nightmare states. Both of which destroyed entire peoples. Yes the Germans were able to field huge number of locals desperate to fight against the Soviets. And they were welcomed in a lot places in the Western Soviet union. Until the locals realized the German plan was not to restore private property but keep them on their collective farms and starve them to feed their armies. A lot of groups made choices between the Nazis and the Soviets and most got squeezed and ground into paste no matter what side they chose.
No I don't need the Holocaust for a World War II narrative. Germany and Japan both declared war on America after having started half a dozen wars of naked aggression and conquest between them. Fighting them would be totally justified without the Holocaust why wouldn't it be？ Germany and Japan were aggressive expansionist enemies of America and the West. Indeed the entire war was fought without the Holocaust being a central aspect of war propaganda because the unprovoked attack on Pearl Harbor. Your verging on being one of those Tankies who lifts up Stalin because he fought the Nazis. The Nazis fought the Soviets sure but they were also a totalitarian expansionist state and they only fought the Soviets after subjugating all of Western Europe and invading many neutral countries. They also didn't fight the Soviets for altruistic reasons but to steal and settle their land and alienated a huge number of the Soviet population with their brutality.
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