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naraburns  nihil supernum  1yr ago (text post)   35010 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?

But... we have quite a lot of information about Soviet crimes, including the various genocides ("ethnic campaigns") that they did. Perhaps not the exact details, but the general gist of it, at least. Often much of this data comes directly from various Soviet archives that were opened up after the fall of the Soviet Union for researchers, as - from what I've understood - Boris Yeltsin wanted to showcase the new Russia's openness and find reasons to ban the Communist Party/Parties (reformed as CPRF and a bunch of other smaller instances) entirely.

This doesn't mean we have all the data or that all the research that could be done has been done; for instance, when it comes to the Soviet ethnic purge of Finns in East Karelia (tens of thousands of Finnish communists and immigrants died), we don't know everything about it, but we know that it did happen, we have a fair idea of the scale, the locations, the historical process, and some in Finland knew as early as the 30s, when it actually happened.

NKVD often documented their "transfers" and camp system ins/outs in detail: there might have been some polishing of the details (ie. people not counted as camp deaths as they were released at the edge of perishing and then died and so on). However, this theory proposes that there was an entire genocide of a group that was left completely undocumented, including the transfers, the camps, the deaths and everything. Heck, when you mention Kolyma, you talk about an entire well-documented camp, suggesting that there was some class of deaths entirely missed by statisticians during the period of research.

There's no paper trail. There's no witnesses - you might imagine that some of the NKVD camp guards and functionnaires who were themselves Jewish (and we know there were such guards and administrators, Holocaust revisionists themselves remind us of that when discussing Soviet crimes as a counterweight to Holocaust) might have noted a crapload of Jews arriving to their camp to be slaughtered and, I don't know, at least told someone about it.

There's basically nothing, expect an argument something like that must have happened, because it's needed to serve as a (partial) explanation to "Where did the Jews go?" question. If I remember my reading of Sanning correctly, the most concrete argument that it happened was based on some HUAC witness statements by people who didn't claim to be eyewitnesses themselves.

This is really one of the most bewildering things that revisionists do, in these debates in the forums and elsewhere. The "mainstream view" holders are challenged on quite specific details of Holocaust camps and their correctness; yet revisionists see it proper to propose an entire hidden genocide of Jews by Soviets with extremely vague allusions to who did what to whom where and when and basically no concrete evidence at all to show for it. Everything can be handwaved away quite simply: "Well, the commies would lie about it, wouldn't they?". The revisionists would themselves laugh and scorn at any attempt to talk about the Holocaust this way, and indeed do so, frequently.

Funny note about Sanning. He recently released a new edition of his book with a postscript.

I’ll post links when I get home but in the postscript he engages in his usual numerical wizardry to try and get the numbers of Jews in Eastern Europe as low as possible. He quotes an American report on displaced persons in post-war Europe like this:

“Some 500,000 [Jews] were in the American zone by summer 1946”

If you actually check his source, it is specifically noted that the “500,000” number refers to displaced persons in general, and one page later it is clarified that only about 70,000 are Jews, so Sanning is just lying about his source. This sort of thing pops up constantly in revisionist literature.

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