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The Alternative Hypothesis made a video on this topic. With a text version available. I've heard that the arguments presented come from Walter N. Sanning.
The general gist is probably best summarized on page 35 onwards of the text version. Long story short, the amount of jews Germany had access to in the Poland/USSR regions is lower than the amount of jews that are missing from the census. Attributing the deaths of 4.4 million jews to Germans who only occupied Polish/USSR regions with a total of 1.9 million jews is problematic.
As for 2, It depends on what you mean by "it". There were camps. They had guards. What exactly is not being denied and what does it prove? The Holocaust narrative that had already been 'litigated' during the Nuremberg Trials? Or the Holocaust narrative that didn't see the light of day until in the late 1960's? Or the Hollywood Holocaust that gets depicted in pop media? If the crime was putting jews into camps then they are guilty of doing that. That's not what Holocaust revisionism is taking issue with for the most part. So I don't see how its proof of any of the contested claims like the total number of deaths, specific number of deaths at specific camps, Zyklon B running through showerheads and whatever else any 'eyewitness' imagined.
The treatment of officials and public figures post-war is best illustrated by looking at someone undeniably influential like Carl Schmitt. Who was barred from teaching by the Allies since he refused to be 'denazified'. In broader terms I think your interpretation of what life was like for those who refused to bow their head to the new world order exists completely outside the bounds of reality.
If you wanted a life, which was hard to come by for a lot of Germans, going out in public and doing Nazi apologetics when you can barely feed your family is probably the last thing you do and very low on the list of immediate things to worry about. No matter how true your position could be. It's not like the German could go out there and post on twitter or make public statements about the kangaroo court that was the Nuremberg Trials on the radio. Or write about it in a newspaper, at least not without getting the same treatment as Schmitt got at the minimum.
I have talked about this before on this board but Sanning's analysis is total nonsense and by extension so is Faulk's. I actually did a long-form write-up of the question a few months ago, but the short version is Sanning dishonestly juggles numbers to force pre-war Jewish demographic numbers down by several millions, grossly overestimates the numbers of evacuees moved eastwards by the USSR, and just generally lies a lot. This isn't like talking about the pre-Columbian Americas where population estimates can differ several times over; and demographic uncertainty in this case is not nearly great enough to rescue the revisionist thesis.
Here's a particularly egregious example. In the latest edition of Sanning's book he says the following:
His source is here on page 308, and he has inserted "1946" and "Jewish," which makes sense because if you read to the very next page you see that this 600,000 number applies to DPs in general, Jewish or otherwise, and that the number of Jews specifically in the American zone by March of 1946 was not even 50,000.
Revisionism basically just consists of lying like this writ large in more or less obvious ways.
I remember AltHype's videos being huge on YT back when I was in HS and thinking that he certainly seemed like a smart guy since I sure didn't understand the first thing about genetics or psychometrics, but now that he's trying to engage the history of WWII I'm updating substantially towards him being a dumbass.
I'm going to try and separate the rhetorical flair and the numbers, just for my own sake.
For starters, saying that it's "Sanning's numbers" when he quotes a source for said numbers obfuscates things quite a bit. Especially when it is present throughout the entire text. As an example, “Opinion of the Institute for Contemporary History” is not Sanning. They say 100k per year emigrating from Poland between a certain time period. Sanning repeats the claim made. You reference other sources, which give a lower estimate. This is not a competition between your sources and Sanning, which is how you frame things. This is a discrepancy between different sources.
Another example of this sort of thing being that the Polish government can matter of factly undercount the numbers of jewish births by up to 60-some percent and that's completely normal. But to consider they undercount the numbers of jewish emigrants by 80% is somehow very obviously in the realm of absurdity. If it is incompetent enough to do one why not another? For every 'just so' story reason there is a 'just so' story reason for the opposite.
I'm sure Faulk and friends do this as well. But there's an obvious point to be made that everyone is transparently working towards separate finish lines through motivated reasoning.
To make a long story short, if the sources cited by Sanning are closer to reality than the sources cited by you, there is a matter of degree to which the question of 'where did the jews go' is answered. To that end I think the revisionist side has an obvious case that is based on sources and assumptions that are no greater or lesser than the ones used by exterminationists.
I fail to see how laymen can come to an obvious conclusion that the revisionist citations are not 'persuasive' in revising the holocaust narrative considering that, even if wrong to a degree, they would still exist as revisions to the total count and by extension cast aspersions on other claims made that rely on a minimum amount of jews present in the area Germany had access to.
I didn't think there was much rhetoric.
Not all sources are created equal. I presented several sources to counter Sanning's single source (which is a huge outlier numerically, while the rest of the sources are in the same ballpark, which casts some doubt on it from the start). If 100,000 Jews left Poland each year, this would be reflected in the growth of the Jewish populations of Palestine and the US, but it isn't. Emigration from Poland also dropped sharply after the onset of the Great Depression.
But actually that's all besides the point: since I wrote that piece, someone let me know where Sanning's source got the "100,000 per year" figure. It apparently comes from the Universal Jewish Encyclopedia of 1942, which refers to 100,000 emigrants per year from the Jewish "zone of suffering" which consisted of central and eastern Europe in general, not Poland specifically. So actually Sanning is just lying about his sources again.
It is much easier to be born in a Jewish shtetl unnoticed than to get on a ship to Palestine or the US unnoticed.
If your standard for history is "well this source says one thing but this source says another," without any attempt to discriminate between the quality of various sources, you can't do history at all.
I pointed out where you employed rhetoric and how. Maybe I should have pointed out how repeatedly accusing people of lying isn't productive to anything either so you could have dropped that as well. Otherwise I feel you are on a fast track towards the endpoint of all Holocaust arguments, especially for those who put a lot of time into the game, where both parties default to accusing one another of insanity.
I don't think all sources are created equal. Especially with regards to history. Which is why I said that there is not an obvious conclusion to be drawn. For starters I don't think the practice of looking at estimates like this is all that valid to begin with considering the error margins and the chaotic nature of events. All that is sufficient, from my point of view, is that the error margin for the discrepancy of 'missing' jews can exist as an alternative hypothesis to the question of 'where they went'. Which would also hinge on taking whatever estimates of the total number of jews to begin with as being valid. Keeping in mind that the question is open ended. To whatever extent jews went missing, there exists no baseline that necessitates they went into a camp and not somewhere else.
Any revisions downward seem to pose a rather obvious problem. Which prompts, in my view, a completely unwarranted confidence in any estimates that maintain a sufficient number of jews to fuel the holocaust narrative from the exterminationist side.
Like I said, for every 'just so' story reason there is a 'just so' story for another. What was being pointed out is the aforementioned unwarranted confidence in any estimates that fuel the holocaust narrative. 80% is 'absurd' not because you have any knowledge of actual events, but because it breaks too far from the baseline you need to maintain.
My standard for history is that historical evidence can be extremely bad. Battles and assaults during the war could go overlooked or misreported for decades despite them involving entire frontlines and death tolls in the hundreds of thousands or even millions. The largest tank battle of the war only existed as an anomaly for most of recorded history. To stand up with any degree of confidence and say that they know for sure, down to the 100k is the hallmark of someone who should reconsider their disposition towards what they are doing.
I accuse Sanning of lying because he lies, as the example I gave in my first response to you pretty clearly shows.
Just saying "it was chaotic" is hand-waving. Where, specifically, was the chaos? What chaos would have caused the British authorities of Mandate Palestine or the US immigration authorities, both quite severe in the restriction of immigration, to underestimate the number of Jews entering their borders by the hundreds of thousands?
Thankfully that's not what I 'just' said. As my point pertained to the general inaccuracies of demographic data collection in general confounded by the tumultuous times, where people were moving in great numbers. And not just via boats to Palestine and the US, as your reply suggests. This was said by me to further the broader point that claims of confident certainty, to a degree that the holocaust narrative seems to require to fill its minimum baseline of jews, are unwarranted. Admitting to a certain level of uncertainty with regards to the data in general seems much more prudent. But, again, prudence is not something exterminationists can afford.
Can I just chalk this misrepresentation of yours up to you being a liar? I say this half jokingly.
The 1930s were actually not really a time when people were moving in great numbers. Emigration from Poland dropped sharply in this period.
Palestine, US, and France absorbed almost the entirety of Polish-Jewish emigration, any other destinations are rounding errors.
Never said otherwise. Degrees of uncertainty exist. Degrees of uncertainty do not exist on the order of millions, which is what you need for this argument to go through.
Not comparable to inserting the word "Jewish" into a citation when the original source explicitly notes that the persons in question were majority non-Jewish.
I've already made my point, you misrepresenting it again isn't very interesting to me.
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