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naraburns  nihil supernum  1yr ago (text post)   35009 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?

For reference:

The 1926 Soviet Census counts about 2.6 million Jewish-ethnicity people.

The 1931 Polish Census counts about 3.1 million Jewish-faith people.

Granted, these figures might not be trustworthy. However, they roughly track with the 1897 Russian Empire census, which counts about 5 million Jewish native speakers, which I think lends credence to the figures. (Keep in mind that in 1897, the Russian Empire controlled much of 1931 Poland.) Also, I imagine that generally governments have a good incentive to keep accurate census information for the purposes of taxation, conscription, and other kinds of social control.

So we have good reason to believe that in the territories of Poland and the USSR alone, there were probably over 5 million Jews in 1939.

However, I suppose that for this to be part of a good argument in favor of the theory that the Nazis really did kill millions of Jews, it is also necessary to establish that the post-war Jewish population of the USSR plus Poland was substantially lower than 5 million. And to determine that would require some research that I have not done so far.

I am not sure that I really need much more convincing, though. The Nazi regime openly hated Jews, openly praised violence as a legitimate political method, demonstrably murdered members of many different opposition groups and even sometimes its own former allies, and between 1941 and 1944 controlled the part of Europe where most of Europe's Jews lived. Common sense tells me that it is much more likely that this regime actually killed millions of Jews than that the idea that it did is the result of a giant hoax that for some reason the US and USSR governments collaborated on during the Cold War, a hoax that also would have required the participation of many other governments, plus various eyewitnesses, family members, and so on.

it is also necessary to establish that the post-war Jewish population of the USSR plus Poland was substantially lower than 5 million.

It's pretty clear. In 1946 Jewish leaders in the cities and towns of Poland (where the vast majority of Polish Jews lived, they were not very rural people) conducted a census which found something like 250,000 Jews in Poland. However, it is important to remember that about 200,000 Polish Jews spent the war in the USSR, either because they fled of their own free will or because they were deported in 1939-1940 from the pre-war Polish territories annexed by Stalin. In 1946 the USSR repatriated all Polish Jews who wanted to leave, which was the great majority of them, and most of them went back to Poland, though most eventually kept moving to Palestine or the US.

So of those 250,000 odd Jews in Poland in 1946, the vast majority were those who had spent the war in Soviet territory. only about 80,000 remained of the 2,000,000+ Jews which actually spent the war in Nazi custody. It's a big balance to make up, and cannot be done. Jewish immigration to Palestine and the US up to 1946-47 are well accounted for, and so are the Jews in the DP camps in Germany and Austria. Uncertainty exists, but on the order of tens of thousands, not millions or even hundreds of thousands.

This was not a dark ages Völkwanderung. 20th century Europe, even at its most war-torn was not the kind of place where an entire nation could fall into a black-hole.

The best revisionists can do is handwave and insist Stalin deported all the Jews to Siberia so he could claim they had been killed by the Nazis, which is soundly contradicted by Soviet archives, which contain no mention of such a massive operation, which would have been the single largest of all the Soviet mass deportations (all of which are well-documented.)

Deniers have no actual answer for how 2,000,000+ people vanished into thin air and never will.

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