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naraburns  nihil supernum  1yr ago (text post)   35012 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of April 3, 2023

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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:

It's astounding how much nonsense you are willing to believe without any concrete physical evidence or without the claims even being remotely possible. But believing this story requires belief in the impossible, because the official narrative makes impossible claims only supported by witnesses who lack credibility and have an obvious motive to lie.

I said:

The best piece of physical evidence I have is the missing six million Jews. Where did they all go? If Treblinka was merely a transit camp, where did the Jews transit afterwards? Compare the pre-war and post-war census data in Europe, especially Eastern Europe. Even accounting for emigration, millions of Jews disappeared.

In general, I think census data is a reliable source for estimating the number of victims. I'm not familiar with the details of the Holocaust in Europe as a whole, so the best example I can provide is the Jasenovac concentration camp. Shortly after WWII, it was estimated that around 600,000 people were killed there. These estimates were widely accepted, including by the Encyclopedia of the Holocaust and the Simon Wiesenthal Center. Later claims went as high as a million or more. In the 1980s, two researchers independently arrived at much lower estimates based on demographic data. Eventually, after the end of communist censorship, a new consensus formed that the number of victims is around 100,000, an order of magnitude lower than previous estimates.

This shows that it is entirely to possible for new research to greatly lower the estimated number of victims. There is no conspiracy to suppress the truth. Indeed, despite the number six million being embedded in popular culture, some credible historians place it at closer to five million. Yad Vashem says "the number of victims was between five and six million".

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:

You clearly know much more about Treblinka than I do, so I'm not sure if I can provide any good counterarguments. Let's suppose, then, for the sake of the argument, that the archaeological evidence for the "official narrative" is insufficient. That means we don't know what exactly was done with the Jews.

Other evidence exists for the claim that over 700,000 people were killed at Treblinka, such as the Höfle Telegram and the Korherr Report. But looking at them, thanks to the euphemisms used, I suppose they might also be interpreted as supporting the transit camp theory.

However, you did not address the question in my previous post: if Treblinka was merely a transit camp, where did the Jews transit from there? Where were the hundreds of thousands of eyewitnesses after the war who testified that they passed through Treblinka and were peacefully resettled?

And more broadly, demographic data has millions of Jews unaccounted for after the war. Where did they all go? Or do you accept the rest of the "official narrative" and are only sceptical with regard to Treblinka? Auschwitz had proper crematoria, with fuel and everything – do you believe that over a million people were killed there?

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.

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:

  1. Some of the camps were combined labor / death camps. The Nazis benefited from the Jewish slave labor.

  2. 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.

  3. 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:

I want to also mention a very difficult subject ... before you, with complete candor. It should be discussed amongst us, yet nevertheless, we will never speak about it in public. Just as we did not hesitate on June 30 to carry out our duty as ordered, and stand comrades who had failed against the wall and shoot them -- about which we have never spoken, and never will speak. That was, thank God, a kind of tact natural to us, a foregone conclusion of that tact, that we have never conversed about it amongst ourselves, never spoken about it, everyone ... shuddered, and everyone was clear that the next time, he would do the same thing again, if it were commanded and necessary.

I am talking about the evacuation of the Jews, the extermination of the Jewish people. It is one of those things that is easily said. "The Jewish people is being exterminated," every Party member will tell you, "perfectly clear, it's part of our plans, we're eliminating the Jews, exterminating them, a small matter". And then along they all come, all the 80 million upright Germans, and each one has his decent Jew. [mockingly] They say: all the others are swine, but here is a first-class Jew. And none of them has seen it, has endured it. Most of you will know what it means when 100 bodies lie together, when 500 are there or when there are 1000. And ... to have seen this through and -- with the exception of human weakness -- to have remained decent, has made us hard and is a page of glory never mentioned and never to be mentioned. Because we know how difficult things would be, if today in every city during the bomb attacks, the burdens of war and the privations, we still had Jews as secret saboteurs, agitators and instigators. We would probably be at the same stage as 16/17, if the Jews still resided in the body of the German people.

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