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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?
Tacitus also says that the Germans nailed people to trees and burned them alive as sacrifices to Wotan.
Old people and children are not wasted force labor, they're dead weight.
Here is Himmler talking openly about the extermination of European Jews without use of code-words in the Posen speech of October 6 1943:
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.
They were known for this up until their Christianization. And then they were known for their rather aggressive treatment of the Old Prussians and other peoples unfortunate enough to wind up in the path of the Teutonic Knights.
I think trying to answer a question about recent twentieth century history with appeals to national character is bizarre and wrong-headed in the first place, but if you're going to do so "the Germans would never do such a thing," doesn't wash.
I'll be honest in that I don't that much about A-B. That said I know Charlotte Delbo, a French resistance activist, was imprisoned at Auschwitz and later wrote a memoir. Google search turned up this list with a couple more written by gentile survivors of Auschwitz. And of course there are plenty of memoirs of gentile survivors of western camps like Dachau and Belsen.
I don't think any revisionists deny that gentiles were imprisoned and killed by the Nazis. They just weren't targeted for extermination and killed in gas chambers, or (with exceptions) lined up at the edge of pits and shot in. Everybody agrees on that. Revisionists just insist that Jews weren't targeted for extermination either.
Re: Germans as authoritarian automatons, I've seen it said, either here or on the old Reddit, that when the Soviets occupied East Germany, they saw the Nazi problem as specifically a Prussian problem and set about correcting that. Dunno if there's any truth to that, though.
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