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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.
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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