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naraburns  nihil supernum  2yr ago (text post)   35785 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of April 3, 2023

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Even reading Tacitus shows the same continuity of character.

Tacitus also says that the Germans nailed people to trees and burned them alive as sacrifices to Wotan.

The Germans wouldn't have wasted delousing chemicals to kill people or have wasted forced labor that would allow them to feel self-righteous in perpetuity.

Old people and children are not wasted force labor, they're dead weight.

The notion that Germans would use euphemisms in the one extant documented meeting concerning the implementation details is absurd to anyone that has ever met a rank-and-file German.

Here is Himmler talking openly about the extermination of European Jews without use of code-words in the Posen speech of October 6 1943:

In this connection, I may comment before this very tightly knit group on a matter which you, my Party Comrades, all take for granted, and which is the most difficult task I have ever faced in my life, the Jewish problem. All of you gladly take it for granted that there are no longer any Jews in your administrative districts. All Germans — with a few individual exceptions — are aware that we could not have endured the bombings, the hardships of the fourth year of the war, and could not endure fifth and sixth years of war that are perhaps yet to come, if we still had this demoralizing pest in our national body. "The Jews must be eradicated ["ausgerottet"]." This brief sentence is easily said. But for the man who must carry out what it calls for, it is the gravest and hardest thing in existence. Now, look, after all they're Jews, only Jews. That's plain enough. But just think about how many people — including Party comrades — have addressed to me and other officials those famous petitions of theirs in which they say: The Jews are all bastards, of course, but so-and-so is a good Jew and should be left alone. I daresay, judging by the number of such appeals and the number of people who express such opinions, the number of "good Jews" in Germany must have exceeded the total Jewish population! In Germany we have millions and millions of people who each have their "one good Jew." I mention this only because you can see in the vital field of your own administrative districts how many respected and upright National Socialists have their "good Jew."

I ask that you assembled here pay attention to what I have to say, but not repeat it. The question came up: Well, what about the women and children? — I came to a determinedly simple conclusion about that, too. I did not believe that I had the right to wipe out ["auszurotten"] the men — rather I should say, kill ["umzubringen"] them or have them killed — and let their children grow up to avenge themselves on our sons and grandsons. The hard decision to wipe this people ["Volk"] off ["verschwinden"] the face of the earth had to be made. For us, the organization that had to carry out this task, it was the most difficult one we ever had. But it was accomplished, and without — I believe I can say — our men and their leaders suffering any mental or spiritual damage. That was clearly a danger. To become too brutal, too heartless, and lose respect for human life, or to be too soft and bring oneself to the point of a nervous breakdown — the path between these two ever-present possibilities is incredibly narrow, the course between Scylla and Charybdis.

We have turned over to the Reich Ministry of Economics all the wealth we confiscated from the Jews — the sums were staggering — right down to very last penny. I have always maintained: We have a duty to our people, to our race, we have a duty to a leader such as has been given to our people only once in 2,000 years, not to be petty here, but to go the limit, as we must do in all things if we are to win the war. Yet we do not have the right to take even one penny of the wealth confiscated from the Jews. At the outset, I laid down the line: Any SS men who take so much as a mark of it are as good as dead. In the past few days, I've had to sign a number of death sentences — I might as well say it, there were about a dozen. One has to be strict here, or everyone will suffer. I considered it my duty to speak very openly to you — the highest bearers of the will, the highest dignitaries, of the Party, of this political order, of this political instrument of the Führer — about this matter and to give the facts as they are. By the end of the year, the Jewish problem in the lands we have occupied will be solved. There will be left only remnants, individual Jews who are in hiding. The problem of Jews who are partners in mixed marriages and the problem of half-Jews will, in accordance with this policy, be rationally examined, decided upon, and resolved.

Source is this thread on the CODOH revisionist forum, which anyone can read if they want to see whether the revisionist interpretation of such a speech holds up.

Here is Himmler talking openly about the extermination of European Jews without use of code-words in the Posen speech of October 6 1943:

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).

So he is still using the "code" at Posen.

In other speeches at Posen he uses the word "Judenevakuierung." In this speech he uses the word "umbringen," which unambiguously means "kill."

the killing of Jews being in the context of partisan reprisals

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.

The hard decision to wipe this people ["Volk"] off ["verschwinden"] the face of the earth had to be made.

Partisans are not a "Volk" and "the East" is a place on the face of the earth.

By the end of the year, the Jewish problem in the lands we have occupied will be solved. There will be left only remnants, individual Jews who are in hiding.

Goal is no Jews left in German-occupied territory by the end of 1943. Which included "the East," however you define it.

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.

Do we have any primary witnesses for the bulk of the killing during the 1941-1943 period before the Posen speeches were made? I was looking into the provenance of the Posen speeches and discovered that at least two Nazis testified to their authenticity and content during the Nuremberg Trials and the post-war period, but were there any other directly present witnesses that attested to the existence and deployment of systematic killing during the 1941-43 period, Nazi or otherwise?

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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