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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?
Revisionists have written many published works on the so-called "Operation Reinhardt" death camps, the most recent of which was published in 2021 and covers all three camps. But these technical studies aren't very approachable without a high level of background knowledge. My first exposure to the Revisionist position on those camps, which includes Treblinka, was in the well-known Revisionist documentary One Third of the Holocaust.
I wasn't a Revisionist when I first saw that and knew virtually nothing about these camps, so I took everything presented with a huge grain of salt. But there were some relatively straightforward claims presented in the documentary that seemed easy to verify, and if true, raised questions. For example, in the video the creator describes that the official historical narrative is that the Nazis buried about 1.5 million - 2 million Jews and then later dug them all back up and cremated them on grills to hide the evidence. I assumed that had to be some sort of straw man or misrepresentation but it turned out not to be- it's what historians actually claim. Or when he presents silly statements made by witnesses you are going to assume he is just cherry-picking, but it turns out those witnesses are as important to the whole story as he presents in the video.
Having learned that the story itself is simply pretty hard to believe, stranger than fiction even, I learned a lot more about these camps and the Holocaust in general, and the more I learned the more I realized that Revisionists have the stronger case. The evidence for these claims should be considered holistically. I would separate the categories of evidence in four parts:
Census data: Inconclusive, it's the most important evidence cited by anti-Deniers here due to the deficiencies in the other categories of evidence. But there are so many uncertainties and contradictions in the numbers. How many Jews are in the Princeton class of 2026? We couldn't figure that out, we could only conclude that the Jewish organizations presenting the estimates were fudging them based on political and economic incentives. But so many here stake the truth of this tall tale on some Jews that should exist on paper, by doing some simple additions and subtractions from many different demographic studies conducted before, during, and after the war in the Russian empire, Poland, and Soviet Union. It heavily relies on a level of precision (how many Polish Jews became "Soviet Citizens" on paper after the war?), accuracy and honesty that simply does not exist.
Physical evidence: Strongly favors the Revisionist side. Historians claim ~2 million were murdered in these camps, but the remains of approximately 0% of those two million victims have been identified in scientific excavations. This also includes technical arguments around things like burial density or cremation capacity, fuel requirements, etc. Although these arguments are usually not influential to non-Revisionists because they just assume that Revisionists are using math deceptively or not representing the mainstream position accurately (they are).
Documentary evidence: Strongly favors the Revisionist side, as the Revisionist case mostly takes the documents at face value whereas the mainstream narrative claims that there was systematic euphemism and coded language. For example, there are documents where both Himmler and Pohl, head of the concentration camp system, identify Sobibor as a transit camp (Durchgangslager). The Revisionist theory is this camp was what the document says it was, the mainstream theory is that in their own internal secret documents they used coded language to camouflage the extermination camp. There are some documents that Revisionists struggle to explain, which is to be expected given that there are millions and millions of them. There are documents that the mainstream struggles to explain. But most important of all are the documents that should be there but which are not.
Witness testimonies: The most strong aspect of the Revisionist case in my opinion. Witnesses are by far the most important part of the body of evidence for the mainstream narrative, so the Revisionist critique of that body of evidence is devastating.
The "Where did they Go?" trump card is the most popular retort against Revisionists as it's an attempt to reverse the burden of proof. The mainstream narrative makes these claims which are honestly pretty hard to believe, Revisionists build an extremely strong case against that narrative, so the ultimate strategy is to try to demand Revisionists track the population movements of Jews in the final years of the war, right before the Soviet Union conquered that half of the continent and the most important German officials involved had died or been killed.
The fact is, there are no surviving documents at all pertaining to transports to or from the alleged Treblinka extermination camp. The Korherr report does not mention Treblinka at all, and the author of that report wrote a letter to Der Spiegel in the 1970s stating that he interpreted those numbers in his report to mean what Revisionists say those numbers meant. The story is the same at Belzec, where the mainstream admits that unfortunately:
So it's highly convenient to demand Revisionists answer questions that rely on evidence which has been destroyed in unlucky circumstances or otherwise fallen into Soviet Custody. But neither is there documentary evidence remaining for transports into those camps either.
In recent years it has been revealed, to the surprise of historians, that there were tens of thousands of labor and concentration camps which were previously unknown:
So historians missed tens of thousands of camps that existed in these areas which happened to exist in a network around rail lines that were subject to the gas chamber extermination rumors. This revelation certainly gives more context to Korherr's interpretation of settlers "sifted through the camps of General Government", of which there were many more than historians had previously understood.
The retort "Where did the Jews go?" would not be necessary if there was strong evidence that they were murdered in the precise location where it is said they were murdered. When the Germans (NSFL) discovered the mass graves in the Katyn Forest, they invited international observers from all sides and released American POWs to observe the investigation. They exhumed the mass graves to conduct autopsies, investigate time and cause of death, and to identify victims. They were still accused of this crime by the Soviet prosecution at Nuremberg, and the Soviet authors of that Katyn report submitted into evidence (USSR-54) were the same as the authors of the Auschwitz report (USSR-8), with the addition of Trofim Lysenko as a signatory to the Auschwitz report.
No similar investigation was conducted for the alleged murder of about 2 million people at these three camps. While the Western Allies had conducted investigations disproving the allegations of gas chamber extermination in the camps liberated by the Western Allies, the Soviet Union denied access to outside observers and freely modified structures in Soviet-Occupied Poland, including most importantly the gas chamber at Auschwitz which has been shown to millions and millions of tourists.
The difference between the data on the number of Jews at Princeton and the number of Jews recorded in a census is that at Princeton no one goes around asking everyone if they are Jewish, yet this is exactly what happens during a census. And the census data was certainly not collected by Jewish organizations.
Censuses record the population at the local level, too, not just the country level. We can look at the number of Jews within Poland's current borders, for example: a table on Wikipedia records over 3 million Jews in 1939 and less than 300,000 in 1946.
I don't know what your point is with "Soviet Citizens". Census takers don't look at a list of citizens, they go around from place to place recording how many people there are and various data on those people. It's hard to over- or under-count people in a census.
As I understand, you believe Operation Reinhardt was about resettling 2 million Jews, and the few deaths that happened were unintentional. If this is the case, if Sobibor and the other Operation Reinhardt camps were just transit camps, where did all these Jews who passed through them end up? Where are the testimonies of Jews who passed through the camps and were peacefully resettled?
It's a perfectly reasonable question. Millions of people don't just disappear. It should be possible to track the movements of millions of people.
Compare the Armenian genocide. (You believe this one happened, right?) Even though most of the deported Armenians died, some managed to escape and today there are significant Armenian communities in places like Lebanon and Syria. Armenians were already present there, but most of the modern population descends from victims of the deportations. There are hundreds of thousands of them today. Where are the comparable Jewish populations in the "Lublin district" or wherever it was they were being resettled to?
(Edit: see also this comment by @To_Mandalay.)
What is the "revisionist" interpretation of the more than one million Jews the Korherr Report says were "processed" in various camps? The letter to Der Spiegel is presumably the same one quoted on the report's Wikipedia article:
So, more than a million Jews entered those camps. This is uncontroversial, right? Either they didn't leave or they left and were resettled. In the latter case, where were they resettled? Where are the testimonies of the more than one million Jews who were resettled?
The Korherr report says:
This is pretty unambiguous: the number of Jews in Europe has decreased by 4 million. What is the "revisionist" interpretation here? There certainly weren't millions of Jewish refugees outside Europe at this point.
This number includes labour camps, "detention facilities", "a variety of penal camps, prisons, and other sites for mostly non-Jewish prisoners" and POW camps. The total number of people who were imprisoned in these camps is much higher than 6 million and many of them, probably a majority, were not Jewish.
Of course such an investigation wasn't done because the bodies were destroyed. Indeed, the Germans' discovery of the Katyn massacre is said to be the reason why they decided to destroy the bodies, as they didn't want their own murders similarly discovered.
Edit: As a counterfactual, suppose the Nazis did murder millions of Jews and destroy the evidence by cremating the bodies and then destroying the crematoria and all the documents relating to the genocide. What sort of evidence would prove that this happened?
What Operation Reinhardt was about is an important issue.
It was one of my first topics of interest, because if Wikipedia had it right and this was the code-name for the secret plan to exterminate the Jews, then that would have settled the matter and satisfied my curiosity. But the mainstream consensus is clearly wrong.
Operation Reinhardt was an economic initiative for the utilization of Jewish labor and confiscated property in the General Government. One of the primary motivations for liquidating the Jewish ghettos was to confiscate and exploit Jewish movable and immovable property for the German economy and war effort. This required a significant amount of administration and labor, and all of this was organized under that operation. The Nuremberg Military Tribunal WVHA trial (1950), for what it's worth, also identified this as the purpose of the operation. From the court's finding of facts:
This can be compared with Wikipedia's description:
The NMT got it right. Mainstream historians have appropriated the "Reinhardt" code-name to claim it was code for extermination for the simple reason that they don't have other options for suggesting how the secret extermination plan was supposed to have been denoted in documents.
The point was that counting people is not a politically-neutral act, neither is it for a census. The Alternative Hypothesis in his recent Revisionist work identified controversy surrounding the 1937 Soviet census:
The assumption is that thereafter Soviet population figures were inflated in the 1939 census, with the help of the "brave NKVD" destroying the "snake's nest in the statistical bodies." The assumption of political neutrality in the census is highly dubious. Keep in mind that historians accuse the Germans of manipulating their concentration camp inmate and death statistics by excluding the gas chamber victims in order to hide evidence of the crime. So they are accusing the Germans of manipulating internal statistics while taking Soviet statistics at face value.
It is actually pretty ambiguous, the estimated decrease is meant to take into consideration excess mortality and emigration since 1937, so asserting that this figure is some "unambiguous" admission to the murder of 4 million people is quite silly and not even the mainstream interprets this figure in that way. The most controversial figure is "Total Evacuations" which is 1.8 million. Historians say that was code for the number of Jews murdered in gas chambers on the pretext of taking a shower. Revisionists that this was the number of Jews deported into one of the many camps in General Government or deported further east. Korherr said he was told it referred to Jews deported into camps in Lublin, which fits the Revisionist claim.
Revisionists have proven beyond a doubt that the Soviet Union systematically inflated death tolls by orders of magnitude in their investigations, and modified structures to give them an apparent criminal intent, and accused the Germans of war crimes that the Soviets were responsible for... and you're asking why the Soviet Union didn't gather exculpatory testimonies and submit them as evidence? The Soviet Union did not allow Western investigators access to this entire body of evidence. Among the body of evidence that Western investigators had access to, the gas chamber extermination story was disproven.
At Nuremberg, Belzec, Sobibor and Treblinka were discussed in the trial for no more than 20 minutes. Electrocution floors were the alleged method of murder at Belzec at the time, and at Treblinka it was steam chambers. The alleged murder of millions at these camps was represented by a single witness who was examined for not more than 15 minutes and was not cross-examined by the defense. These camps were almost entirely ignored at Nuremberg, the Western camps were at the time more central to the gas chamber extermination claims, particularly Dachau.
The problem with all the evidence these eastern camps being behind the Iron Curtain is that you have to contend with the fact that this body of evidence was in Soviet Custody. So when you ask, for example "why weren't resettled Jews interviewed?" you don't seem to grasp the purpose of a show trial.
The Katyn Forest massacre is an example of the counterfactual. The German's didn't have access to documents proving the Soviets did it, they had to scientifically investigate the crime scene to try and prove it. They didn't do it out of the goodness of their hearts, it was a very important propaganda opportunity. Your mistake is thinking that "cremating the bodies" is the same thing as "destroying the evidence", when they are not the same thing. A cremated body leaves behind a lot of evidence, 800,000 cremated bodies would leave an amount of evidence that is hard to fathom. But the Soviet Union would have had every motive to excavate those tens of millions of cremated bone fragments with international observers for all the same reasons as the Germans in their investigation of the Katyn massacre.
Imagine if the Germans interviewed a witness to the Katyn massacre, and the witness said the bodies were cremated and buried. And then the Germans covered the area of the mass graves in concrete and forbade anybody from excavating in order to protect the religious beliefs of the victims. Would that course of action at all make any sense if they were motivated to reveal Soviet crimes to the world? It would make sense in the case of a mass grave that wasn't actually there, and the world bought the story without the scientific investigation.
Only this one census is generally considered unreliable. And mainstream historians agree that it is unreliable. The censuses conducted before Stalin went completely insane and after he died are generally considered reliable, as are the Polish censuses.
It says the number of Jews in Europe has decreased by 4 million:
This means that it doesn't include Jews who were just deported to a different part of Europe.
Assuming Korherr's claim that he was told those Jews were just resettled is even true, that just means they didn't want him to know what was going on. Need to know and all that.
That explains why no testimony was submitted to the trials. What about independent research since then? Where are all the interviews historians conducted with survivors? Published memoirs? There are plenty of available accounts of the Japanese internment camps in the US, for example, where only a tenth of the number of people were imprisoned.
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