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There was a big story in Holocaust studies during 2020: it turned out the deputy commander of the alleged Sobibor extermination camp, Johann Niemann, took many photos of the camp during its operation and put them all in a photo album, which were completely unknown until they were published in that year. This was a highly significant story because this was the first set of photographs of the camp to ever be published. It was thought that due to the extreme secrecy of the extermination camps, photography would have been strictly forbidden- although there is a similar photo album of the alleged Treblinka extermination camp. None of the photographs show anything incriminating (although the Treblinka album verifies the surprising fact that the camp had a zoo).
Likewise, the new Sobibor photo album contained nothing incriminating in terms of the alleged homicidal functionality of the camp. The image that became the most prominently featured in the various news reports about this Sobibor photo album was this one, which shows camp officials relaxing at a table drinking with some German women. There are other photos showing similar scenes at the camp.
These photographs were the most "incriminating" photographs of the album, with the news reports invariably mentioning how evil these people must have been to be relaxing so while they are murdering hundreds of thousands of men, women, and children and cremating them on open fires. These photographs certainly do not look like they were taken of people in the process of murdering hundreds of thousands, so these photographs therefore become proof of the banality of evil.
I mention this because so much of the Holocaust is subject to dual interpretation:
Homicidal gas chambers disguised as showers -> real showers
Zyklon B for extermination -> Zyklon B for delousing
"Resettlement was code for gas chamber extermination in documents" -> Resettlement was actually resettlement
"Transit camp was code for extermination camp" -> Transit camp meant transit camp
If we assume that Revisionists are correct that Sobibor was a transit camp (which, by the way, is what Himmler said it was in documents), it would no doubt still be a place of suffering and violence (the commander who took these photographs, Niemann, was killed in a prisoner uprising), but it would be far removed from the orthodox narrative of mass murder in gas chambers disguised as showers.
Then, these photographs would not portray the "banality of evil": the greatest murderers of human history, so evil that they carouse and fiddle while they are murdering hundreds of thousands- they would portray normal people acting normally in a difficult situation.
The "banality of evil" trope is used to invert evidence of people acting normally, as if they are not the greatest mass murderers in human history as being incriminating rather than evidence that they didn't do what they are being accused of. Usually in a criminal investigation, the suspect acting as if he had not committed the crime he is being accused of would be interpreted as evidence against the allegation. But in Holocaust studies, it becomes "These people don't look like they are murdering hundreds of thousands of people, this just shows the banality of evil!"
I haven't seen Zone of Interest yet, but presumably it does not portray the brutal torture of Rudolf Höss by his British interrogators, which extracted his absurdly false confession that become the bedrock for the entire Holocaust narrative.
Oh look, SS pushing his Holocaust "revisionism" on the Motte again. Must be a day that ends in y.
We have been over this. Exhaustively. The "resettlement" plan was, by the Nazi administration's own admission, a murderous endeavour which the majority of the victims was not supposed to survive with the rest of them "treated" as not to serve as the "gamete of a new Jewish reconstruction".
You are well aware of this. Yet every week you repeat the same old claim and just hope that this time, your interlocutors will be too tired to push back.
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It's important to note that the behaviour of someone who had not committed the crime he is being accused of may not be the same as the behaviour of someone who does not know he's being investigated for a crime. Someone falling asleep in an airport lounge is totally normal. Someone falling asleep in an interrogation room is not, at least according to one of those criminal interview videos I can't seem to find now. Normal people being accused of a crime they didn't commit tend to freak out in ways that are apparently distinguishable from someone who knows they did the crime feigning outrage at being accused.
Overall, I think your point is sound. The "banality of evil" trope should really only be considered after the evil has been conclusively established. Soldiers acting like there isn't a genocide going on 50 feet away could be because there isn't a genocide going on 50 feet away. It may be evidence of banality, but not evil.
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One of the justifications for Holocaust was that Jews were implacable and treacherous, hence exacerbating the partisan problem on the eastern front by shipping in a million+ Jews there in 1942... yeah, pretty funny suggestion.
What's a next suggestion, that Stalin somehow accepted ~ 2 million assorted European Jews who didn't speak Russian in some sort of very sneaky prisoner transfer ?
Well, the alternative was for them to remain concentrated in the ever-growing ghettoes. They identified this is as a huge problem for three reasons: 1. The risk of organized revolt which is what happened in the Warsaw ghetto. 2. Sanitary conditions created health risks, including foremost epidemic typhus which threatened to spread to the Eastern Front and Germany, and 3. The desire to economically exploit the moveable/immovable property concentrated in the ghettos as well as Jewish labor.
There certainly were well-documented complaints about the risk of partisan activity with deportation. But it should be reasonable to see why the first three factors were given priority. It's not obvious that keeping all Jews in one place is less risky than having a Jewish labor pool dispersed across a larger area at many different, smaller camps.
So, according to you, keeping a mass of hostile people penned up in a ghetto, slowly starving to death and dying of disease is a less secure than having them dispersed over a large area ?
Typhus is spread by lice, thus dispersing the infected populations so they could mingle with non-infected would have been the wrong move.
Also, in 1942 the problems with feeding even non-Jewish forced laborers in Germany were such that attrition rate was high.
Really kind of ridiculous and I don't understand why you think Germans wouldn't have simply gassed the jews ?
By 1941 gassing undesirable people was policy in Germany - it's been ongoing on a small scale for a year.
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This entire post hinges on the idea that the Jews represented some insidious threat to Germany. The Nazi could have just, you know, not forced all the Jews into either ghettoes or camps.
Well, SS is correct on this point. The question is not whether the Jews were threats to Germany but whether the Germans perceived them as such, which they did. The existential threat that Jewry supposedly posed to Germany was the justification for all of the anti-Jewish measures up to and including the Holocaust (as Himmler put it, "we had the right to kill this people that wanted to kill us"). That said, because the Jews were viewed as such a menace, the Nazis concentrated them in ghettoes where they could keep an eye on them. This concentration was explicit Nazi policy, and as soon as the German Army conquered Poland, Heydrich issued orders for Jews to be cleared from the countryside and concentrated in a few large cities.. Sprinkling them piece-meal out over the eastern front, directly in the rear of the embattled German Army, makes absolutely no sense and is in direct contradiction to established Nazi policy. There is also no evidence for it.
Germany had many, many labor camps in the East, here is a map of only some of them put together by a Revisionist. The best known camps were all along the transportation lines that became the subject of the gas chamber extermination rumor.
Germany was setting up camps and collection sites everywhere:
https://www.nytimes.com/2013/03/03/sunday-review/the-holocaust-just-got-more-shocking.html
So you say "sprinkling them piece-meal... makes absolutely no sense" when it is absolutely proven there were at least 42,000 different camps and collection sites.
If you look at the maps you linked, you will see that the camps are mostly concentrated in the territory of the former Polish Republic and thin out rapidly the further east you go. Anyways, Himmler ordered the ghettoes in the occupied east liquidated in 1943 so obviously Polish and western European Jews weren't deported to ghettoes that didn't exist anymore. That same year he ordered that no Jews were to remain in the GG except absolutely essential workers, so they weren't there either.
Yes, no plan survives contact with the enemy. The eastern front collapsed and Germany lost the war. Plans in 1942 or orders in 1943 are not going to necessarily reflect the state of the East in 1944. The point is that it is demonstrable that Jews were separated piecemeal across tens of thousands of camps and used as a mobile labor force in a network of camps which existed along the lines that are alleged to have been homicidal Holocaust trains.
On the other hand, you claim to know the precise GPS coordinates of where every single one of 1.5 million+ Jews were murdered and are buried, but 0% of those remains have ever been identified in scientific excavation. In order to reverse the burden of proof for your extraordinary claim: that they were murdered in homicidal gas chambers disguised as shower rooms, buried, then unburied and burned on makeshift open-air pyres, the gambit is to demand that Revisionists find the Jews which would have remained in Communist-occupied territory.
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This is unironically what Holocaust revisionists believe.
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About the only thing that could make the Holocaust not be real is if the entire world isn't real and I'm just a brain in a jar. Otherwise, "evidence" when the probability is 100% with the evidence and also 100% without the evidence is not really evidence in any meaningful sense.
I think you are being disingenuous here and not speaking plainly. Your argument only makes sense if there's sufficient doubt about the Holocaust that "evidence" against it could actually mean anything.
That's an interesting choice of words. How many homicidal gas chambers did Majdanek have? It was the very first camp where Soviet investigators revealed to the world the truth of the Nazi gas chamber factories, months before the liberation of Auschwitz.
If the Soviet investigators did at Auschwitz in 1945 exactly what they did at Majdanek in 1944, the entire world isn't real?
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So, I had wanted to run this article by David Cole by you, since of anyone on this forum you seem to be the best equipped to address the validity of his claims. (Although certainly, others are encouraged to weigh in, since I know we have a number of uses here who are prepared to offer sophisticated and well-sourced defenses of the “non-revised” Holocaust historiography.)
Cole seems to make a very persuasive case that Sobibor was indeed one of the camps at which large-scale murder of Jews - including women and children - was carried out. As I’ve said to you before, I remain persuaded that this is in fact the case. I am genuinely eager and curious to get your perspective.
With David Cole, it's interesting to point out that he is a Revisionist when it comes to Auschwitz. He's one of only a couple others who maintain this "halfway" Revisionism and I have to say it's quite weird. There is much more surviving evidence for Auschwitz than there is for the Reinhardt camps as extermination centers. Basically all of the evidence Cole relies on to assert the genocidal function of the Reinhardt camps, there is much much more of it for Auschwitz. There are many more witnesses, surviving camp facilities, photographs, thousands and thousands of documents compared to those other camps where there are virtually none...
I don't find Cole's case persuasive. For one, his "contemporaneous documentary evidence section" is extremely sparse, containing 5 pieces of evidence, none of which so much as mention Sobibor. The first piece, the Goebbels diary, is paraphrased and editorialized even though Cole uses quotation marks. It's not what Goebbels actually wrote and the context is different. For example, Goebbels does not mention "the head of Aktion Reinhard", that is added in by Cole and it is in any case completely false that Odilo Globocnik was the head of Aktion Reinhardt. So right off the bat, he's being really misleading by saying "Goebbels writes in his diary" without specifying that the part in quotes is David's interpretation of what he wrote and not what was originally written.
Secondly, his citation of the Korherr report is again off the mark:
Just sloppy and inaccurate. The mainstream case is that there were 1.4 million, not 2.4 million as Cole states evacuated to the east. 1.2 of those millions were marked as "sifted through the camps of General Government" which the mainstream interprets as murdered at the so-called Reinhardt camps, but that is half of the 2.4 million he writes in the article. For both this and the previous I think he's working from memory and just getting details very wrong. His assertion that "those evacuees are “todesfallen”" is just completely false. You can search through the original German of the report here and see that this is simply not true. The term "Todesfalle" is not mentioned in the Korherr report, the expression "Todesfälle", which means cases of deaths, is used in two places in the report but not to describe the fate of 2.4 million evacuees.
The most controversial sentence in the Korherr report is "Transportierung von Juden aus den Ostprovinzen nach dem russischen Osten" which translates to "Transport of Jews from the Eastern Provinces to the Russian East", which is what Cole and historians say was code for extermination at the Reinhardt camps. Cole also neglected to mention that Korherr, the statistician who created this report, wrote a letter to Der Spiegel in the 1970s and said that he had asked what "special treatment" meant and was told it meant what Revisionists say it meant. So Korherr himself seconded the Revisionist interpretation in an unprompted letter to a newspaper (actually, Korherr wrote this before there was any Revisionist study or critique of these issues).
Cole mentions some documents from Kube, which is strange because Kube himself had nothing to do with the so-called Reinhardt camps. In fact, Kube's reports describe anti-partisan actions against Jews (very real) and complains about Jews being deported into his area of influence. Kube's letters provide insight into the partisan problem, but not to the camps that are the subject of the controversy. The fact Kube is complaining about deportees suggests they actually were transited east and not killed in secret gas chambers disguised as shower rooms.
Cole references the Stroop report, but keep in mind is use of quotes is again not what is actually written it's Cole's summary. Cole neglects to mention here that >90% of the Jews captured by Stroop were sent to other camps in the General Government, and they were not all sent to be exterminated according to that report.
Lastly, there's the 1944 speech which I assume is that Posen speech that we recently talked a lot about here. Again, it's not what Himmler actually wrote in his speech.
Cole is alleging the murder of 1.5 million - 2 million people at these camps, the "contemporaneous documentary evidence" case is so weak that it should make you highly suspicious.
David Cole also ignores that, for example, Himmler and Pohl refer to Sobibor as a transit camp in documents. But Cole in his case cannot apparently find a single document to include in his "contemporaneous documentary evidence" section that mentions Sobibor at all.
In all, there are a lot of outright factual errors and quotations passed off as quoting documents, but he is editorializing the documents he is referencing.
David Cole also doesn't wade into the debate on the side of the physical evidence, which is wise for him as it's the strongest area of the Revisionist position. 1.5 - 2 million people being killed in these camps would have left huge amounts of evidence, but no mass graves have ever been excavated from these sites.
To me, Cole is missing the big picture. He himself does not believe the mainstream Auschwitz narrative, he is a Revisionist on that camp, he believes the Soviets were systematically deceptive in how they investigated the camp and produced evidence. He should also see that there is a co-dependency of these claims. If Soviet propaganda was able to deceive the world on what happened in Auschwitz, and Cole claims they did, then why does he put so much weight into the Soviet investigation of the Reinhardt camps, when by all accounts the evidence is much fewer and farther between than it is at Auschwitz?
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Unless someone is suggesting that committing genocide makes it impossible to simultaneously drink alcohol and play the accordion, I'm not sure how those photos would constitute evidence against the allegations.
I think most people would look at that picture and be surprised to be told that these people are committing a genocide. So there are two interpretations: "the banality of evil", or that these are just normal people behaving normally.
Hannah Arendt invented the concept of "the banality of evil" to describe the inhuman evil of the Nazis. So then they point to this photograph as an example of the banality of evil. Or, it's just a photograph of normal people doing a normal thing that people do.
I guess I believe in the banality of evil in the sense that we can all get used to things and partake of times when dark reality is superceded by our ordinary day to day cares, where going along with is normal, and therefore normalised. I see it enough in modern times to grok the concept.
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Or thirdly, that evil or good are categories of behaviour that are actually just labels of emotional affect attached to third party observers, and not fit for use to understand the nuts and bolts whys and hows of the situation.
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Would they? Especially given that SS members were presumably self-selected to be ideologically committed Nazis, it doesn't seem at all implausible that many were sufficiently untroubled by genocide as to partake in jollity in their spare time. After all, depending on when these photos were taken, they might also not look like people staring down the barrel of total defeat in the war.
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