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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.
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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