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Dear "revisionists", where are all the Jews?
A couple of months ago, I had a discussion with the self-proclaimed "revisionist" @SecureSignals concerning the veracity of the Holocaust, always a fun topic.
There was a bit of back-and-forth on the archaeological evidence and witness testimony, which I eventually gave up on because SS (very subtle username, by the way) clearly knew much more about the subject than me, and could thus, as the saying goes, drag me down to his level and beat me with experience. Calculating the number of corpses that can fit in a given volume definitely felt like I was being dragged down a few levels.
A more fruitful line of questioning is that of where millions of Jews disappeared to. In response to SS's accusation that:
I said:
SS replied with arguments as to why the "official narrative" on Treblinka is implausible, which I was unable to argue against because, as I said, I'm not familiar with all the details of every Nazi camp. It is possible that the consensus figures for a single camp are wrong. As in the Jasenovac example, this has already happened (though it should be noted that most of the victims at Jasenovac were not Jewish). Even if true, this is at most evidence that the consensus on Treblinka is incorrect. It says nothing about the other camps, where the vast majority of the murders happened. In my reply, I said:
As far as I can tell, SS never addressed any of this. It seems some of the comments in the thread have since been deleted, which apparently hides all child comments when viewing the thread directly, though they are still visible on the profile page. This makes it hard to reconstruct the exchange, but looking at SS's profile, I can't find anything where he addressed my argument. From his post below on Holocaust education, we can infer that he does indeed believe that not just Treblinka but the entire Holocaust is fake, a position for which he has not provided any evidence.
So, to SS and any other "revisionists" who may be lurking: Where are all the Jews?
IMO, a stronger argument is 'how hard is it to conduct a genocide'?
The Ottoman Empire was capable of killing 600K-1.5M Armenians in 2 years during WW1. Islamist militias managed to kill between 300K and 3M in Bangladesh back in 1971, in 9 months! Nazi Germany was a far more capable state and they had six years in WW2 to do their killings.
I cannot believe that Nazi Germany, a country that could conquer Western Europe with apparent ease, a country that killed about 10M Soviet soldiers, would struggle killing 6 million unarmed and disorganized Jews. The whole logic of 'oh the gas chambers weren't big enough or it was too hard' is ridiculous when you consider all the other things the Germans were doing at the same time.
Cambodia and Rwanda suggest an upper limit on how fast you can do a genocide before the act of doing genocide causes the state to cease to meaningfully function or lose the capacity to resist invasion. For Cambodia, it was 3 years 8 months to kill 25% of the population, so maybe 6.7% of the population a year, but they were able to put up meaningful resistance to Vietnamese invasion. For Rwanda, it was 8% of the population in 4 months, so 24% of the population a year, at the cost of getting their ass handed to them by Paul Kagame.
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The theoretical possibility of something happening is not proof of it actually happening. The specific claims made as to what happened and how matter far more in determining that.
There is nothing ridiculous about the logic relating to the size of an alleged gas chamber and the amount of people you could possibly fit into it when the claim made is that people were fitted into it and killed at a necessitated rate. If it turns out that you can't fit as many people into the chamber as you would need to maintain the rate then what can you make of the claim? You would have to revise it.
Do you revise back to a different estimate of killings? One false claim doesn't disprove a narrative based on a thousand claims, afer all. Well, what if we do this for most of the claims of the holocaust and come away from them with the conclusion that the vast majority of them don't hold up to scrutiny all that well. Does it then matter that it sounded plausible to us that the Germans could have done it?
This is rather pertinent since it calls into question on just what we are grounding our belief in the holocaust. I mean, yeah, of course, it sounds plausible to me that the Germans could have done it. After all I've been told all my life that they were evil back in the day, on top of being industrious and efficient. If that is our basis for belief is it even possible for us to question the holocaust at all? Won't it always sound plausible to us that the evil regime would do whatever evil thing?
Does it matter whether Germany killed 3 million or 6 million Jews + another 6 million Slavs, gypsies, homosexuals and so on? Nobody particularly cares whether Soviet casualties in Stalingrad were 1M or 1.2M. For nearly all purposes, it is enough to say that they were very high.
So what if there was some kind of accounting error (or deliberate overestimates) and they revised figures at Auschwitz down? You can prove or disprove anything with statistics if you try hard enough, especially if it's 70 years ago and the fog of war is involved. I don't buy the 'because of the Holocaust Jews deserve unique privileges to never be called out for their disproportionate role in promoting harmful social trends with their outsized political, economic and media influence' line. You can see this in the Holocaust wikipedia page, which relegates the non-Jewish victims to 'other victims' when they make up about half the total. Poles, homosexuals and gypsies clearly do not have as much clout as Jews. And Bangladeshis have no clout at all, nobody's heard of their genocide in 1971. The notion that megadeaths buy you moral superiority points is ridiculous. Otherwise we'd never be able to say a bad word about Russia or China, yet we're clearly happy to do so.
But the Holocaust surely happened. There's definitely some reason that Jews hate Nazism so much! Even if they exaggerated it, a large-scale killing effort is a natural conclusion of Nazi ideology and is within their considerable capabilities.
Absolutely. If people think you aren't being honest, they're going to ask what else they can trust you about. Trust is like a mirror and all that, you can't forget the cracks.
The reason is that we're talking about status via megadeaths conditional on being part of Western civlization. Bangladeshis aren't, the Kashmiri Pandits aren't, along with a host of other groups.
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Yeah, I think so.
Maybe it's just me but when I first learned that I had been heavily mislead by a supposed arbiter of truth I started questioning things that came from that arbiter. I mean, if they'd lie about the holocaust why wouldn't they lie about "Nazy ideology"? How could you trust them? Have you ever heard "Nazi ideology" expressed by an actual historical national socialist? Has anyone aside from select soundbites and quotes? Who selected those?
And don't get me started on the idea that this is just an error. If historians can collectively make errors like this there is no reason to take the field seriously.
I don't hold to that notion nor do I know anyone who does. The holocaust is pushed because jews have a lot of power in western society. There's nothing objective about the standard of placing it front and center in victimary discourse.
Hitler said something like 'If the Jews start another war in Europe, it will be the end for them in Europe' which is a relatively vague euphemism. But then there's Goebbel's slipup in the Sportspalast speech where he almost says 'exterminated' as opposed to 'excluded'. Then there's more of that speech:
Goebbels quite clearly lays out that the Jews are behind Bolshevism (and run the Anglosphere from behind the shadows) and are waging an existential war against Western civilization. Jews are the demonic incarnation of evil, decay and chaos. It is a plague, it enslaves, it terrorizes. The most radical measures will be adopted, at the appropriate point.
Or take 'The Jew as World Parasite' from Rosenberg: https://research.calvin.edu/german-propaganda-archive/weltparasit.htm
We certainly know Kristallnacht happened. There was some significant violent trend against Jews even before the war, so during the war when emotions are running high (the fate of Western civilization was at stake, millions had died and the existence of whole nations was in question), why not take the most radical measures, as Goebbels explains and Rosenberg encourages?
I'm not persuaded that there even was an accounting error and total Jewish Holocaust deaths were significantly below 6 million. The fog of war and whatever covering-up operations hastily conducted by Germany at the end of the war are enough to cloud our vision to some level. Why would we expect indisputable proof?
This methodological standard for historical evidence is, to put it lightly, unsustainable. By the same logic you can look at any war propaganda and use it as proof of genocide. Not genocidal intent, but actual genocidal events.
Who killed 22 thousand Polish military officers in Katyn forest? How could you know? You don't look at physical evidence. But going by the war propaganda that you happen to know, which just so happens to be the propaganda the victors of history want you to know about, everyone knows just how much Hitler hated the Slavs and wanted to kill every single one of them. Everyone also knows, because it is so true of course, that Hitler thought Poles were Slavs, not Aryan. So going by our methodology it just makes sense that the Germans committed the Katyn forest massacre.
I want you to be self aware of your position here. Your claims of not being persuaded that there were even 'accounting errors' is completely meaningless. You have already represented yourself as someone who acquires belief in historical events not through evidence but inference from broader historical narratives. You have no basis to question these narratives. You have no knowledge of what even constitutes historical evidence or proof in the context of these events. All you have are inferences based on what sounds plausible to yourself as a person who doesn't question historical events or the broader historical narrative you were raised with.
This position is unassailable. I can't do anything. Because no matter the fraught nature of specific evidence for any specific event, you always have the broader narrative to fall back on. And because you fall back on the broader narrative to protect individual claims, no individual claim can be refuted and the narrative can never be called into question.
Do you think I lack material evidence? There's a tonne of websites which will provide anti-Holocaust revisionist arguments! People can produce mountains of evidence. Tens of thousands of eyewitnesses, plenty of documents. I could list a bunch of them but you surely know of them.
The Sportspalast Speech is not Allied war propaganda, it's German war propaganda. Almost nobody reads through these Web 1.0 text files from Calvin University.
These assumptions of knowledge aren't based on thin air - we know the Soviets and Germans disliked the Poles, they partitioned the country earlier. If I were in 1942 or whatever, I'd be uncertain whether Germany or Russia killed those Poles.
Well what choice do I have? Am I supposed to go to Auschwitz and use my expert-tier knowledge of gas chambers to determine whether they made up a fake chimney or whatever? Scrutinize thousands of photographs to see whether the execution squads were using Mausers or some other kind of rifle, geolocate battlegrounds from seventy years ago, work out whether they're fake or not? Read through all the Holocaust memoirs and find the logical absurdities like people being frozen into ice or whatever? Dig up all these mass graves? Go find Goebbels's diary to see if he really wrote:
The whole point of arguing from capability and motives is that we can bypass the masses of facts that clog everything up. We can adjust our base rates such that the absolute mountain of pro-Holocaust evidence and fairly considerable amount of anti-Holocaust or minimal-Holocaust evidence is balanced. We can then conclude that, notwithstanding the fact that there's some confusion, some exaggeration and some concealed information, the Holocaust really happened.
Did Hitler like Slavs? Not really. Was Hitler planning to exterminate them all? No, there were various plans to subjugate or relocate them if possible. He would've settled for working with them. A fair few Slavs were fighting for Germany as Hiwis. Hitler was allied with the Soviet Union for some time. Hitler at one point wanted to ally with Poland where they'd return German territory in exchange for getting bits of Soviet territory. There's nuance there. The primary school version I got that Hitler wanted to get rid of non-blondes and non-blue eyed people is childishly silly.
But when it comes to Jews, there was never any desire to work with them, they were implacable enemies of Nazism. And they still are today!
I think you are going in circles just like I described above. You keep circling back to the narrative being true. When I proposed an evidence based approach to specific claims you wanted to rely on a heuristic that's partly based on the narrative being true. When I call that heuristic into question you are now circling towards an evidence based approach that's based on the narrative being true. Like I said before, I can't do anything here. If you just presuppose that the holocaust happened then it always did regardless of anything else.
I didn't say it was allied war propaganda. And you're not the first person to quote Goebbels to prove how evil the nazis were in pursuit of proving claims made against them without having to propose any specific evidence for any specific events. The point being made is that you can quote war propaganda to produce sentiment of genocidal intent because war propaganda is generally about killing the enemy.
In 2003 the USA along with its NATO allies invaded Iraq because they hated Iraqis and wanted to genocide them all. Every single civilian death was part of a genocidal judeo-christian neo-conservative plot to exterminate Iraq. We know this because the USA invaded Iraq and toppled its government. In fact, public sentiment at the time included rhetoric about 'glassing' the region. Directly invoking and promoting a nuclear holocaust. This is proof of murderous intent for every single Iraqi casualty during the war and subsequent occupation.
I am not asking you to do primary research. You can simply stop believing in the holocaust or be compelled to defend it. Stop maintaining differential standards for historical methodology based on social factors. You don't believe in other historical events in the same way. If someone calls the mainstream narrative of the war in Burma into question you don't care. You don't feel the need to weave together some methodology that can sustain the narrative. Belief in the holocaust, for 99,99% of people is just ridiculous.
See the genocidal invasion of Iraq above. You are not bypassing anything except your own critical faculties. Why do you need to believe in the holocaust?
Not true. See the Haavara Agreement and the Madagascar plan.
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No it doesn't.
In a sort of man bites dog analogy: holocaust education, like you describe it, is like listening to a CNN pundit explain why people voted for Trump with a CGI rendering of Capitol Hill on fire in the background.
Very similar to how people will frame National Socialism as an elaborate Rube Goldberg style mechanism to hate jews. With a hatred that practically sprung out of thin air via philosophies and theories, Hitler was just a sort of 'whacky idea man' and the German people voted for him because they were insane.
To be clear, you're right to be tired of this kind of argument, often used by midwits, but most serious historians do concede that Hitler had a point about Germany's crushing Versailles debt and that he did well in reconstructing Germany after taking power. Conceding these facts doesn't exonerate his behaviour during the war.
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Did Germany "struggle" killing 6 million Jews? I think people may not be aware of how condensed the timeline of the Holocaust actually was. Part of this I think is reflective of "survivor's history", which I talked about before here: the people who survived the Holocaust and disproportionately shaped western perceptions of it were by necessity aberrations from the norm. They were mostly western Jews whose march to the death camps began after the large majority of Jews were already dead.
The vast majority of victims of the Holocaust were eastern European Jews, whose mass extermination was conducted in a fairly narrow timeframe (with the notable exception of Hungarian Jews). The Holocaust as can be coherently defined started on June 22, 1941 with the invasion of the Soviet Union. Within six months of that mark, somewhere around a million Jews were dead - the victims of bullets, nationalist militias, POW camps, forced starvation, and experimental mobile gassing vans. In January 1942 Nazi bureaucrats assembled to plan the Final Solution, and by the end of that year roughly another 3 million Jews had died, mostly asphyxiated by carbon monoxide. This brings us to roughly two-thirds of the final total within a span of 18 months. The purpose-built extermination camps built for Operation Reinhard operated for another half a year or so until they were sabotaged or dismantled, and by that time most of the remainder had been killed. The remaining Jews still to die at this point were mostly westerners or Hungarians who would mostly be poisoned by hydrogen cyanide at Auschwitz.
Why? Schnellbrief was issues on 1939-09-21, shortly after joint Nazi Germany and USSR invasion of Poland.
By 1940 expulsions/ghetto formation by Germans was going full strength. See say https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Warsaw_Ghetto#Establishment_of_the_ghetto
Up until September 1939 German policies were focused on forcing Jewish emigration from Germany. From the beginning of the war movement of Jews was curtailed for security reasons, and there were a series of massacres by invading forces in Poland; but this violence was not deliberate policy, merely tolerated. The deliberate, purposeful, mass killing of Jews (although this was still absent some larger unifying plan) did not start until Operation Barbarossa.
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Quite right, Holocaust deniers and everyone else is too fixated on gas chambers. The Shoah by bullets or starvation is just as important. Bullets are the traditional method of mass extermination, not these great big centralized, industrial operations.
I think the response to that would be that gas chambers are a big part of the narrative. I recall seeing some images from Maus (that book people got upset over last year) and it reminded me just how much the Holocaust is considered industrialized i.e people being killed by the most efficient mass process, and that this uniqueness, to me at least, seems to be an important point that is reinforced in the conventional narrative.
Maus itself doesn't particularly fixate on the industrial killing process. Indeed, the part where Vladek Spiegelman's (ie. Art Spiegelman's dad and the main character of the book, alongside Art Spiegelman) is in camp is actually not all that long, and much of it concentrates on how he got through the camp by being a crafty little shit (the entire comic's thesis is basically "Even if you're a Holocaust victim you can still be a huge shithead, like my dad, and it actually helps you survive").
Vladek is probably portrayed as going through more "danger moments" (ie. parts where Spiegelman portrays his life as if it's actually on line) outside of the camps than inside, though it's clear that inside there's a constant background danger of being selected for death if he doesn't find new ways to be useful.
Interesting to know, I haven't read it myself. That was just what it reminded me of from some history lessons almost a decade old now.
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Yeah, a common revisionist argument is "why would Nazi Germany spend effort on killing Jews in the middle of an existential war?"
But this ignores the following:
Some of the camps were combined labor / death camps. The Nazis benefited from the Jewish slave labor.
To your point, the mainstream theory of the Holocaust is that Nazi Germany only spent a tiny fraction of its total resources on the Holocaust. The Einsatzgruppen were only a few thousand strong. The Nazi personnel in all of the camps put together were probably also only a few thousand strong. Rounding up and killing unarmed people is easy for a modern state, especially a state that has few forests or mountains for people to hide in, especially when the unarmed people are concentrated in cities and are ethnically distinct so have limited ability to blend in with others. To move six million Jews to camps* over the course of about three years would have taken about 1.5 train sets per day if we just divide six million by how many people the Nazis would pack into each train set. In practice of course Jews had to be gathered from multiple source points, so let us say an estimate of 5-10 train sets per day. By comparison, for Germany to supply its East Front alone required something like (200-300) train sets per day. Given the centrality of Jews in Nazi thought, this level of investment does not seem particularly large. Furthermore, from a resources perspective the Holocaust could largely be serviced using coal and coke, materials that Germany had in abundance. It did not require any resources that the Nazis had a shortage of.
The Nazis were not very efficient. Their political system was a bunch of overlapping fiefdoms that fought with each other and at no point during the war did they manage to standardize their weapons systems to simplify production.
*Edit: And not all Jews were moved to camps, many were killed on the spot.
I think the largest point you're missing is that in the eye of the Nazis, time spent killing Jews was not a distraction from existential war, but a fundamental part of it.
The Prussian officer corps had inherited a pathological fear of franc-tireurs from their experiences in 1870-71 and 1914. Nazi and reactionary political thought emphasized the duplicity of Jews, their creation and fundamental enmeshing with Bolshevism. The planned invasion of the Soviet Union was meant from its conception to be a Rassenkrieg. The Bolshevik system was to be torn out root and stem, and all its mouthpieces and enablers with it. To this extent Jews were a fundamental security risk to rear areas and a existential threat to the Heer's design for a rapid victory: they would be the inevitable saboteurs, partisans, Bolshevik agitators. That was the threat the Einsatzgruppen formations were meant to combat. Only the liquidation of the adult male Jewish population would secure the rear areas and ensure German victory. (Later this objective would be expanded incrementally to include all Jewish individuals in the Soviet Union).
After the failure of Operation Barbarossa the nature of the killing of Jews shifted more to that of retribution than immediate security concerns, but again this was in concordance with a future vision of a Europe that was Judenfrei.
edit: you get a sense of the Nazi perspective on this in Himmler's October 4 (1943) Posen speech. An excerpt:
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