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Notes -
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?
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.
Did Germany "struggle" killing 6 million Jews? I think people may not be aware of how condensed the timeline of the Holocaust actually was. Part of this I think is reflective of "survivor's history", which I talked about before here: the people who survived the Holocaust and disproportionately shaped western perceptions of it were by necessity aberrations from the norm. They were mostly western Jews whose march to the death camps began after the large majority of Jews were already dead.
The vast majority of victims of the Holocaust were eastern European Jews, whose mass extermination was conducted in a fairly narrow timeframe (with the notable exception of Hungarian Jews). The Holocaust as can be coherently defined started on June 22, 1941 with the invasion of the Soviet Union. Within six months of that mark, somewhere around a million Jews were dead - the victims of bullets, nationalist militias, POW camps, forced starvation, and experimental mobile gassing vans. In January 1942 Nazi bureaucrats assembled to plan the Final Solution, and by the end of that year roughly another 3 million Jews had died, mostly asphyxiated by carbon monoxide. This brings us to roughly two-thirds of the final total within a span of 18 months. The purpose-built extermination camps built for Operation Reinhard operated for another half a year or so until they were sabotaged or dismantled, and by that time most of the remainder had been killed. The remaining Jews still to die at this point were mostly westerners or Hungarians who would mostly be poisoned by hydrogen cyanide at Auschwitz.
Why? Schnellbrief was issues on 1939-09-21, shortly after joint Nazi Germany and USSR invasion of Poland.
By 1940 expulsions/ghetto formation by Germans was going full strength. See say https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Warsaw_Ghetto#Establishment_of_the_ghetto
Up until September 1939 German policies were focused on forcing Jewish emigration from Germany. From the beginning of the war movement of Jews was curtailed for security reasons, and there were a series of massacres by invading forces in Poland; but this violence was not deliberate policy, merely tolerated. The deliberate, purposeful, mass killing of Jews (although this was still absent some larger unifying plan) did not start until Operation Barbarossa.
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