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Notes -
In the Posen speeches Himmler describes the policy as "Judenevakuierung", which is alleged to have been a code-word. So he is still using the "code" at Posen. And months later he continues describing a policy of evacuation/resettlement/emigration to the East with the killing of Jews being in the context of partisan reprisals (which revisionists do not deny happened).
In other speeches at Posen he uses the word "Judenevakuierung." In this speech he uses the word "umbringen," which unambiguously means "kill."
Partisans are in fact mentioned much earlier in the speech and then Himmler says, 'enough about partisans,' and then moves on to talking about other stuff, and finally when he discusses the solution to the Jewish question in the excerpted paragraphs partisans are not mentioned once.
Partisans are not a "Volk" and "the East" is a place on the face of the earth.
Goal is no Jews left in German-occupied territory by the end of 1943. Which included "the East," however you define it.
Yes, in speeches at Posen he describes the policy as evacuation. Two months after that October 1943 speech, in December, he also describes the policy as evacuation:
Although he mentions the killing of Jews in this December speech as well, in the context of partisans:
His defense of the decision to conduct reprisals against the families of partisans and commissars "If I was forced to take action" would not make any sense in the context of an extermination policy where extermination of all Jews would have been the policy. You are saying his statement here is just theater right? To provide cover for the fact he actually ordered the extermination of all Jews?
You are basically saying:
Posen October 4th <- evacuation euphemisms + partisans
Posen October 6th <- partisans + admitted the policy was to exterminate all Jews
Weimar December 15th <- evacuation euphemisms + partisans
Why did Himmler go "mask off" only in the October 6th speech but maintain the euphemisms in the other speeches? The Revisionist position is more sensible, that his statements about the hard decision to kill Jews in the October 6th speech resembles the same statements in the December speech which is unambiguously about partisans.
Hermann Goering- the one who actually gave the "Final Solution" order to Heydrich and would have been as aware as Himmler of its actual nature, maintained that it was a policy of evacuation for emigration and not a euphemism for extermination in the Nuremberg Trial. That stands as more significant than a narrow interpretation of a single passage which stands in contrast with other speeches before and after that single passage.
Partisans and commissars were not only Jews.
Memo from January 1944:
"No avengers" refers to the solution to the Jewish question in general. Which includes Jewish partisans and commissars but is obviously not limited to partisans and commissars. There were no 'commissars' in the General Government.
It's pretty clear the 4 October speech refers to physical annihilation as well, but the 6 October speech leaves even less wiggle room.
In one speech Himmler talked about killing partisans in particular and in another speech he talked about killing Jews in general. This demonstrates only that when Himmler wanted to talk about killing partisans he was fully capable of using the word 'partisan' to indicate that he was talking about partisans. The unjustified assumption that Himmler is talking about partisans on October 6th because he talked about killing partisans in a different speech two months later is not sensible at all.
No, he said it was a hard decision to wipe a "people/race" off of the face of the earth. Once again, partisans are not a "Volk."
Women and children killed along with the men. The race wiped off the face of the earth. No Jews to be left in occupied territories except those "in hiding."
Very clear.
So much of your case rests on an extremely narrow interpretation of a few selected passages, while dismissing the much more extant documentation as "euphemism" and "coded language."
You say that the 4 October speech refers to physical annihilation because Himmler describes:
Your entire assumption is based on the assertion of what "Ausrottung" is supposed to denote. The meaning of this term was something of a mild controversy at the Nuremberg Trial and in the David Irving trial as well. It's misleading to call it "pretty clear" when it has been a controversy in court.
This question was brought to Alfred Rosenberg at Nuremberg:
Hitler warned of the "Ausrottung" of all European peoples (including the Allies) if Germany lost the war. Obviously this did not mean that every single European person would be killed, but something more like "an allied victory will lead to the Bolshevization of Europe," which he considered to be an Ausrottung.
So to say that it's pretty clear Himmler is referring here to physical annihilation rather than the sense used by Hitler and Rosenberg, which completely fits the evacuation policy, is grasping at straws.
It's pretty clear because Himmler says things like:
and
Luckily we have the 6 October speech to take us from "pretty clear" to "crystal clear." Where Himmler says, one more time:
Please explain how "the hard decision to wipe this people off of the face of the earth" can refer to either the killing of partisans or resettlement.
The very first thing he said before the first two passages you posted was "Ich meine die Judenevakuierung": "I mean the evacuation of the Jews." So is he using a euphemism or is he being clear he means extermination? You are saying he is going back and forth, and then in Weimar two months later he's back to the euphemism.
Revisionists don't doubt the brutality of a forced resettlement/deportation operation which would have had a high mortality. Passages like:
Sounds like a recognition of a bloody affair, which the evacuation undoubtedly was. It sounds like a speech a general could have given to troops justifying the firebombing of German or Japanese cities: "You all know what it's like to see mass death, and we know these actions are taking the lives of women and children but we have to be tough or the fascists will conquer the world blah blah". A general giving such a speech would not even consider the possibility of people later trying to infer a secret policy to exterminate all German people from a speech like that.
There is obviously tough talk and recognition of a bloody affair, but inferring a specific policy from such a speech would only be the act of desperation from someone who cannot rely on the documentation to definitively establish the policy being claimed. Especially when the very first sentence completely contradicts your interpretation of the policy inferred from these general words, and when later speeches continue to describe the policy as an evacuation.
Because this:
Sounds like it's trying to convey the same point made in a speech only two months later, where he also describes the policy as resettlement and it's obviously tough talk to rationalize reprisals against partisans and commissars:
I know you want to claim that there's no way these two passages from two different speeches were intended to convey the same idea, you are saying that these two passages had completely different meanings, but just reading them side by side it seems clear the point of this part of the speech is the same: it's tough talk to justify reprisals and the undoubtedly brutal forced resettlement.
Lastly, the dilemma presented in the passage you are leaning on doesn't make sense if you assume he is admitting to an extermination policy. Himmler justifies killing women and children so the children don't grow up and take revenge... but if the plan was to exterminate them all then this would never have entered into the decision calculus. The dilemma between killing children or having them grow up to take revenge (a dilemma also presented in the December speech which describes a policy of resettlement) only makes sense in the context of targeted killings and does not make sense in the context of a policy of extermination, in which case this would be a non-issue.
"Ich meine die Judenevakuierung," and then he clarifies, "die Ausrottung des jüdischen Volkes."
Weird thing to say, considering "evacuation" was what the Nazis told the world they were doing with the Jews.
No, actually they have very similar meanings, I don't know what you are imagining that I am saying.
Five times Himmler refers to this idea of "not allowing avengers to grow up."
In the speech of 6 October, in the December 1943 speech, in his notes for January of 1944, in the Sonthofen speech of 5 May, and in the Sonthofen speech of 24 May, always in the context of the solution to the Jewish question, and only once does he refer to "partisans and commissars."
"No avengers" is a generic policy applied to Jews in general, as evidenced by the fact that 4/5 times that Himmler employs this formulation he makes no reference of partisans or reprisals. Naturally it also includes the families of Jewish partisans and commissars.
I will say once more, partisans are not a "Volk." Himmler uses the word two-dozen times in the speech and every single time it refers to a race or a nation.
What? Killing children to prevent avengers IS the extermination policy.
Your logic isn't new, it was brought up in the Nuremberg Trials as well and Otto Ohlendorf responded to your accusation:
So the prosecutor conceded that he wasn't making a very good argument, but you continue to present that argument as definitive because relying on a narrow interpretation of some speeches, while handwaving large amounts of other speeches and documents as "code" is what you have to work with.
The context of these speeches were in the aftermath the Warsaw uprising where the treatment of partisans was a salient issue. The issue of reprisals was a salient one internally during the war and after the war as well. You are saying that, on the one hand, Himmler made speeches about this controversy, but during this October 6 speech in Posen he was casually admitting to a policy of genocide in between his use of euphemisms, even though he was using identical terms to explain the partisan controversy in other speeches. It's just not a good argument, even the prosecutor had to admit it.
On more aspect of the Posen speeches is that Himmler describes a "strict order" he gave to Pohl to administer the utilization of confiscated property:
Of course this was Operation Reinhardt, whereas Himmler alludes to no such grand orders to Globocnik for secret extermination even though he's ostensibly confessing to an extermination policy in your interpretation.
As I'm sure you know, Operation Reinhardt ended with Himmler ordering Globocnik to submit a report to Pohl on the operation, which reinforces the revisionist interpretation as well. That report has nothing to do with extermination as you know, the report was about the utilization of confiscated property with not even a "euphemistic" reference to extermination. It's amazing there would be so much secrecy and compliance in their own top-secret internal reporting on the operation, where even the final report on Operation Reinhardt contains no direct or even euphemistic reference to extermination, but then Himmler would just casually admit to it in a speech in between other speeches where he continues to use the euphemism. That just doesn't make any sense.
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Death toll post-1943 is pretty much just the Hungarian Jews sent to Auschwitz, some 400-500,000 or so, with a few tens of thousands from western European countries. Polish Jewry had already been wiped out at Belzec, Sobibor, and Treblinka (all closed and demolished by late 1943) and likewise for Soviet Jewry in occupied territory. Most memoirs and most famous survivors come from western European deportees who were atypical of the slain in a lot of ways.
To respond to your other comment, yes it used to be a lot more common to lay the blame for the Holocaust and the world wars at the feet of some special defect in German character. But as you note this has fallen out of favor and I believe it was pretty silly to begin with.
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By October 1943 the Holocaust was in many ways complete; somewhere around 5 million Jews were already dead at this point. By far the largest remaining Jewish population in Europe was in Hungary, who was still an ally (and wouldn't start deporting its Jews to Auschwitz until after March 1944 when Germany seized control). The remaining Jews still on the chopping block were smaller populations in western countries: Italy, France, the Netherlands, and Germany itself.
The distinction is there were various kind of camps:
Arbeitslager (work camps), which were slave labour camps. Inmates were treated very poorly, but there was an active effort to keep them alive because they provided either useful manual labour or some element of skilled labour.
Konzentrationslager (concentration camps), where the inmates were more or less expected to work at menial tasks until they died.
Vernichtungslager (extermination camps) where almost all individuals were murdered immediately, usually within an hour or two of arrival. Only the strongest individuals would be selected as sonderkommandos, and these groups would be liquidated from time-to-time. If you had made it to November 1943 (the end of Operation Reinhard), the only extermination camp operational past that point was at Auschwitz (with the exception of a brief resumption of gassing operations at Chelmno in June 1944). The others were all farther east and by mid-1943 the Nazis realized they were at risk from a sudden Soviet advance.
The two main reasons why Auschwitz gets so much attention in memoirs/popular histories is that Auschwitz had a work camp, a concentration camp, and an extermination camp; so while more people were murdered there than anywhere else, there were also tens of thousands of survivors. Additionally, it was the principle destination for the western (and Hungarian) Jews who were the last to be targeted, so they were both those who entered the concentration and labour camp systems last (making them most likely to survive), and those able to freely write about their experiences post-war.
This, incidentally, reminds me of one of the logic problems of the "resettlement" thesis.
Let's consider Soviets. When Operation Barbarossa commenced, the Soviets did, indeed, brutally resettle/kill various ethnic populations considered unreliable, like Crimean Tatars, Chechens and Volga Germans, in operations that could well be considered genocidal. The logic was that if areas with such unreliable populations would fall to Germans, they might work or fight for them.
However... this resettlement happened eastwards, to Central Asia and Siberia, not westwards. If some Soviet official had suggested resettling them westwards, they would have probably been considered crazy, or a traitor. After all, the idea was not giving Hitler more workers faster!
Yet, the resettlement thesis seems to suggest the Germans were intent on moving a lot of Jews eastward, towards the Soviets, and continue this movement even after the tide turned and the Soviets started approaching Germany. If so, this would have meant that a population that the Nazi ideology said was particularly predisposed to Communism and supporting the Soviets - the Jews - would have been reached by the frontline more easily, making them potential and willing Soviet workers and soldiers.
Why would they do this? The idea that the Nazis just killed them solves that problem, at least.
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From the very beginning of the opening of the camps on the Bug (Belzec, Sobibor, and Treblinka) reports poured out, mostly through the Polish Underground, so much that the Polish Government in Exile published this white paper in the winter of 1942 while the killing was still at its height.
A number of Jews from the early transports to Treblinka escaped and returned to Warsaw and spoke about what they had seen. The testimonies of many of these witness were recorded and preserved in the Ringelblum Archive which was meant to be a record of life in the Warsaw Ghetto. It was buried in early 1943 and was not recovered until a few years after the war. It can be read here. At least one of these escapees gave a direct description of the gas chambers.
In April of 1942 the Polish Underground published a report on Belzec, which said that large trainloads of Jews arrived daily, and none ever emerged, though the people in the nearby towns did not know how the killing was done. It can be read on page 350 of Yitzhak Arad's book.
In 1943 a Slovakian Jew who had been deported to Sobibor, but then detailed to work on nearby labor projects rather than killed, escaped and gave a report. The labor site was near enough to Sobibor that he could smell the burning flesh from the ongoing cremations. Can be read on page 211 of Jules Schelvis' book on Sobibor.
Kurt Gerstein witnessed gassings at Belzec in 1942, and attempted to get the news out of occupied Europe through several channels (including Sweden and the Vatican). Gerstein's report contains a lot of huge exaggerations and is a favorite punching bag for revisionists, but the report was confirmed in its essentials by Wilhelm Pfannenstiel (who had been with Gerstein at Belzec) in a conversation with, of all people, French Holocaust denier Paul Rassinier in the 60s.
There is more but the above is from strictly 1942 to 43. There also survived a number of documents demonstrating the mass transports of Jews to these camps, but none concerning their transfers out.
If you count the shootings in the USSR as 'systematic killing' that is also pretty clear. The reports of these massacres survive. There are also plenty of pictures.
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