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Notes -
The Destruction of the Rafah Ghetto
There has been intense debate between US and Israel on an impending ground operation into Rafah. It appears the operation is starting to take form, and it's going to look a lot like the evacuations from the Warsaw Ghetto on a much larger scale.
This is not going to look like the assault on the Northern Gaza, since the Israelis have already concentrated the Gazans within Rafah. One of the primary points of disagreement between US and Israel seems to be on the timeline of the evacuations, with the US insisting that it's going to take months to evacuate and sift through the civilian population while Israel has proposed a much more aggressive timeline. Here's how it is going to unfold:
concentration camps"humanitarian islands", they are calling them, with military-aged males likely being segregated from the rest of the population, or at least highly likely to be detained based on other criteria.Historical comparisons are always messy, and you aren't going to see journalists in good-standing noting this, but I can't think of another historical operation that is closer to the impending evacuation of Rafah than the evacuation of the Warsaw Ghetto. The second battle of Fallujah and the evacuation of Phnom Penh provide other examples of civilians evacuating cities by force or military action, but neither of those approximates the circumstances or tactics which will be used in Rafah.
The Brutal Reality of Resettlement and Partisan Wars
There seems to be two camps: on the one hand, Israel is waging a Genocide, a secret desire to kill all the Palestinians. On the other hand, Israel is engaging in a fight for its very existence and doing everything it reasonably can to limit civilian casualties. But the truth lies in the middle, and can be summarized with two points:
The actions of Israel, including the impending evacuation of the Rafah ghetto, can be understood by accepting the above two points. It so happens that the above two points are identical to the position of Holocaust Revisionists, or Holocaust Deniers, regarding the Nazi policies with respect to the Jews. Those policies also resulted in the concentration and mass resettlement of the Jews, culminating most famously in the evacuations of the Warsaw Ghetto, those infamous deportation trains, which took place over many months.
In contrast with the Official Narrative- that the secret policy of the Germans was to kill all the Jews, Revisionists maintain the policy was to resettle the Jews to a territory in Russia, with a Jewish state likely being created after the war in Madagascar or Palestine. The Revisionist position is supported by documents, which all refer to "resettlement" as the policy objective of the deportations. But historians maintain that, in all these documents throughout the sprawling German bureaucracy, everyone was "in" on the conspiracy to use "resettlement" as a codeword for "extermination". Even in internal, top-secret communication which was intercepted or captured after the war. That's why, they say, there are no documents outlining the German policy with respect to the Jews as claimed by historians, but there are very many documents outlining the Resettlement policies as claimed by Revisionists.
Israel's insistence it cannot win the war without evacuating Rafah speaks to a similar motive claimed by Revisionists for the evacuations of the Jewish ghettos. We lionize partisan efforts against the Nazis, including the Underground Resistance operating out of Warsaw, but Israel's calculus provides some evidence for the Revisionist claim that, also, the evacuation of the Jewish ghettos was not motivated by a secret policy to exterminate them all within shower rooms in secret death factories.
A Year in Rafah
Despite the similarities described above, there is obviously one major claim in Mainstream Historiography regarding the evacuation of the Jewish ghettos that is an outlier in all respects, from anything else that has happened in human history. Whereas documents all describe these evacuations being motivated by economic and security concerns, and deportees were told that they were being evacuated to Humanitarian Islands where they would have work, this is what actually happened according to orthodox historians:
The Nazis set a quota for the evacuations of the Warsaw ghetto. Deportees were given food and told they would be resettled to camps where they would have work. The deportation trains brought the deportees to a small, secret camp called Treblinka that was set up as a fake train station, complete with a fake train platform and clock, fake ticket booth and posted train schedules. They were told that they were going to take a shower before being transited onwards. They were given soap and a towel and tricked into entering what they thought was a shower room. Then, the doors were locked and they were poisoned by carbon monoxide exhausted by a captured Soviet tank engine.
More than 5,000 people were said to be killed daily in this secret camp staffed by no more than several dozen German personnel, a larger Ukrainian auxiliary, and Jewish workforce. After being killed, all of the victims were buried onsite in huge mass graves. According to the Standard Work on the Treblinka extermination camp by former director of Yad Vashem, Yitzhak Arad, Himmler visited Treblinka in February or March 1943 and:
So the 700,000 victims of the evacuation of the Warsaw Ghetto and other deportees were unburied and then cremated over the course of 4 months along with newly-arrived victims. In total, Arad estimated 850,000 victims at Treblinka, meaning that about 6,000 - 7,000 corpses were cremated every single day in this camp during cremation operations. Treblinka was not constructed with any cremation facilities, and so these corpses were cremated on huge outdoor pyres using locally-gathered brushwood although there are no documents or contemporary reports at all describing this process. The cremations were said to take place immediately adjacent to a major civilian rail-line, and adjacent to several Polish villages, and in spite of this there are no wartime contemporaneous accounts of this enormous cremation operation.
Yitzhak Arad heavily relies on an alleged eyewitness called Yankel Wiernik, whose account is by far the most important in the historiography of the camp. Given the complete absence of documentary or physical evidence for any of this- a Soviet excavation of Treblinka in 1945 found no mass graves on the site, and no investigation since then has ever found a single mass grave at Treblinka, Wiernik's eyewitness account is the keystone to the entire Treblinka historical narrative:
You can read the witness account for yourself if you are inclined. In spite of the enormous historiographical importance of Wiernik's work, you cannot purchase it on Amazon in either print or digital form. I only learned about this work from Revisionists, it seems to be something of an embarrassment despite its extremely important position in the historiography of the camp. Excerpts from Wiernik were submitted as evidence by a Soviet Prosecutor at the Nuremberg Trial, along with a ~15 minute examination of another Jewish witness, who claimed to have been deported to the camp from Warsaw. That's all the evidence that was presented at Nuremberg, for the murder of 900,000 people- a Soviet excavation of the site uncovered no mass graves and no physical evidence was submitted.
I interpret it as a tacit admission to the weakness of the source, that this work is not required reading in every school across America in contrast with, say, Elie Wiesel's Night or Anne Frank's Diary, both of which have important literary significance to the Holocaust narrative but no historiographical significance. Wiesel, for example, makes no mention of gas chambers in his account, instead opting for extermination by burning people alive, which is not claimed by mainstream historians today. Anne Frank's tragic story likewise provides no historiographical relevance to the "extermination camp" narrative and actually contradicts it. She was deported to an alleged extermination camp, Auschwitz, and then transferred to another camp where she died in a hospital of Typhus.
Needless to say, Revisionists regard A Year in Treblinka as literary fiction. This is supposedly a direct eyewitness to the murder of 850,000 people who organized a prisoner revolt in Treblinka (which also has no documentation whatsoever) and heroically killed a Ukrainian guard with an axe.
Wow! How have you never heard of this guy? If his account is true, this work must be so remarkable as to have nearly biblical significance. But you cannot purchase it on Amazon, and Holocaust Deniers are the only ones who actually talk about this guy, rather than historians who quietly use his account as the most important primary source in the historiography of the camp, but who otherwise do not attempt to attach any cultural significance to the man himself who witnessed these things. It is very suspicious, and it's likely because if you read his account yourself you would not find it believable.
Parallel Interpretations
In case the point of my post isn't clear:
Israel's motive and tactics for dealing with the Gazans generally, but especially the impending Rafah Aktion, mirror the Revisionist interpretation of the resettlement of Jews in Eastern Europe. The part of that history which has no parallel- the allegation that the Germans tricked millions of people into entering a shower room, gassed them with exhaust from a captured Soviet tank engine, buried them, then unburied them, cremated them on open-air pyres and reburied the remains, is the part which has no parallel and is also the part of the story which is contested by so-called Holocaust deniers.
In the several years in which I have studied Revisionism, I have only ever noticed Revisionists really talk about Revisionism. But this seems to be changing, on Twitter from a pretty broad array of Twitter accounts I am noticing people talk about Holocaust Revisionism who are not known for that. It might be going viral and become the next forbidden knowledge now that HBD is being digested by the Twitter intelligentsia. The fact that Israeli conflict with the Palestinians is presenting so many direct parallels: the brutal reality of partisan warfare, the mass resettlement of undesirable populations, the ease with which false propaganda becomes "news", are all contributing to what appears to be a growing skepticism among right-wing Twitter that I have never seen before outside of Revisionist circles.
The growth of Holocaust Denial will likely be another consequence of this war.
Edit: Forgot to mention, One Third of the Holocaust is the most well-known Revisionist video discussing these alleged secret extermination camps, although there are many technical studies done for each of the individual camps by Revisionist scholars.
For some reason I was thinking about the OJ Simpson trial today, and it reminded me of your comment.
The most damning evidence in the OJ trial (barring DNA which was little understood by juries at the time) wasn’t the glove, or the record of Simpson’s movements, or the police interview. It was the fact that his defense could not provide any alternate account of what happened to Nicole Simpson and Ron Goldman whatsoever. Two young white (well…) people killed in brutal fashion in a rich part of LA, somewhere that would have had witnesses to on-street commotion, and zero evidence (for any alternate explanation). They hinted or gestured at some kind of gang, or a drug deal, or something related to the restaurant where Goldman worked, but they had nothing, not one shred of evidence for even the most faintly plausible alternate theory of why these two people were murdered by someone other than OJ. This from an extraordinarily skilled legal team with unlimited budget to hire private investigators, research leads and come up with theories.
Holocaust revisionism functions in much the same way. Details about the process of execution, the precise methods, quibbles with testimony, calling the veracity of various accounts in question, all mirror OJ’s defense strategy. The glove don’t fit, the police officer who found the evidence was a virulent racist who had motivation to lie to convict a successful black man with a pretty blonde wife, and the whole trial was surely just another libel against a rich black guy and, especially after Rodney King, who would doubt the hostility of the cops toward black men etc…
But there was and is no alternate theory. The best revisionists can do is, as SecureSignals does, to gesture at possibilities. “Oh, maybe they all went to Russia, changed their names and lived happily ever after”, or “maybe the Austro-Hungarians randomly overcounted the Jewish population by 400% and there were actually far fewer Jews than anyone thought in Eastern Europe”. None of these are evidenced, they’re not supposed to be. They’re mere gestures, hints, seeds of doubt, held together by a narrative in which devious Jews are permanently hostile to white/aryan interests and therefore are probably lying anyway. There is, as @To_Mandalay has said, no real alternate hypothesis; some revisionists apparently argue that Himmler was supposed to kill all the Jews but then didn’t because he was actually a traitor to the cause, which conflicts with other revisionist theories, which conflict with others.
Revisionists avoid believing in strict alternate hypotheses (for example presenting multiple options in the same book or article and feigning ambivalence about which could be true) since doing so would pin them down and make very obvious the extreme dearth of evidence they’re built upon. But it is reasonable for historians to request that they provide and defend comprehensive and evidenced alternate theories for the disappearance of European Jewry.
The alternative theories are as follows:
Jews died of typhus and starvation en masse near the end of the war, in the same way that 200-400k Germans died of starvation in the final months of the war and the months that followed. We should expect very high starvation numbers in isolated concentration camps given that the Germans themselves were starving all over Germany, and they would feed themselves before feeding other nationalities. There’s even the question of, “these people are obviously going to starve to death, should we let them cannibalize themselves to the last man or take them out of their misery?” A lot of the infrastructure to supply concentration camps was bombed. The mainstream historical assertions about Jewish fatalities shows shockingly low typhus death rates which make no sense in light of the typhus death rates we see from the Civil War, WW1, Russians in WWII, and shipping voyage logs. Sometimes this question is answered by the fact that Germans really really cared about cleanliness in their camps, hence the delousing chambers, but this makes little sense in light of genocidal intent and the survivor testimony that confirms frequent typhus bouts.
Jewish population figures were actually accurate prior to WWII (holocaust historians claim that every figure of the Jewish population from before WWII undercounted areas of Russia by millions).
Many Jews after the war assimilated with a non-Jewish identity.
I don’t think holocaust proponents grasp how strong the motive would be to to cement a holocaust narrative. You effectively demoralize Germany, a rival nation that “caused” two wars and which historically created the upperclass of Europe. You effectively seal the moral superiority of America. If the Allied bombing campaign led to millions of starvation deaths among Jewish camp captives, this would be grounds for criticism, but instead the blame is solely laid on Germans. You bulwark against any European nationalism movement because this threatens American hegemony. You justify the creation of Israel and retcon the reputation of Jews as predatory moneylenders to “burnt offering” lambs (literally the word “holocaust”). And lastly you perfect all the neat psy-op techniques that you started in WW1, which also consisted of gas chambers and torturing people etc.
Well that’s the thing, in my opinion even the most virulent 20th century European racist would not gas family after family of downtrodden Jews. This is inexplicable when you consider (1) there were no camp whistleblowers, not even a friend or family member of a camp member who was confided in, which is improbable, (2) the elderly camp guards put on trial in Germany who have entered the “honest old people” phase of dementia more often than not assert that the holocaust didn’t happen. I don’t know, can you imagine hundreds or thousands of Russian soldiers putting family after family of innocent Ukrainians to death by gassing, women and children in all? None of them leaking or whistleblowing? And most of them, even when age has taken away their inhibitions, maintain that it didn’t happen? This is improbable to me.
400k Germans was like 0.5% of the German civilian population, "typhus" would have had to kill upwards of half the Jewish population of the region in a very short period for this explanation to make sense.
Then where are the bodies, if (as revisionists allege) mass cremations were not used? Is the argument that there were widespread crematoria but that they were only used for typus victims? Most damningly, gentile civilians in surrounding areas (subject to the same supply line collapses and bombed infrastructure) did not starve in any substantial numbers (relative). Again, it's merely gesturing at what 'could' have happened, it's not a serious or comprehensive alternative hypothesis.
On the other hand, large numbers of Nazi war criminals who would have been aware of the Holocaust and who were tried throughout the mid and late 20th century never claimed that it didn't happen, before or after trials (eg. even at times it didn't matter to their liberty) and in places where holocaust denial was not, at that time, illegal. One would expect more of them to protest their party's innocence, to claim libel.
Which exact figures, what's the number? As someone else said, Hitler himself discussed Vienna as having 200,000 Jews at 10% of the population in his youth. In 1939 Prague had 90,000 at 20% of the population, 390,000 in Warsaw at 30% of the population. Again, these figures track with the number of synagogues and Jewish schools considering religiosity and congregation size, and once extrapolated downward to smaller cities and towns with synagogues and other Jewish institutions they lead to the prewar estimate of the Eastern European Jewish population as at least 4m.
Perhaps ironically this extreme level of assimilation would be a strong argument against a lot of white nationalist arguments for antisemitism, but in any case it's an absurd hypothesis. It suggests that millions of people were separated from their families and friends, scattered all over the Eastern Bloc and then never attempted to contact eg. surviving family members in the West but also never got in touch with local Jewish communities that survived all across the region and which maintained meticulous pre and post-war records of brises, marriages, funerals and so on. Before the Iron Curtain fully solidifed in the late 40s and early 50s surviving Polish, Ukrainian, Czech, Hungarian, Russian and Romanian rabbis and other figures in the community conducted extensive population surveys of the surviving population.
So this theory involves millions of Jews who were taken to camps or fled into Russia and, despite spending their entire lives in largely Jewish communities before, never got in touch with the local extant Russian-Jewish communities whatsoever, which persisted through the whole Soviet Union. If they had surviving relatives in America or England or France or Israel, they never attempted to get in touch with them (yes, Soviet citizens could send mail to the West). They also never told their kids they were Jewish at all or anything about their family history. Many would even have survived the fall of the USSR and seen the success of Israel, and all this time they never said anything.
Why did the US only suddenly start to do this in the late 1970s, though, long after successfully turning West Germany into a deferential modern Western country under US occupation without discussing it much and while rehabilitating all but a few of the most senior Nazis? It's more accurate to see Holocaust remembrance as something that happened because of pressure from within German society, largely from students, and efforts from some survivors and their children over many decades after the war. It wasn't top down.
That's when the US started getting close with Israel, so all the ADL, holocaust propaganda, and other shit was to help cement the budding alliance through public relations manipulation, perhaps. We've seen how claims of antisemitism were used most recently to try and stifle dissent towards America's support for the ongoing 'police action' in Gaza, and various projects like the opening of new holocaust remembrance museums and movies directed by Spielberg depicting the suffering of Jews keep getting announced ever since 10/6. This strongly suggests that all of the anti-antisemitism buzz is just for propaganda purposes, not for actually contesting antisemitism (which would be bizarre if it was).
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It can be breathtaking sometimes just how much things coming out of the further ends of the right directly match up with the way critical theory works.
There are valuable insights from both postmodernism and the saner parts of the critical theory ecosystem. Particularly for an environment of mutually hostile groups struggling over the gun of state power.
As Kendi says: "knowledge is only power if it is put to the struggle for power." And these "critical ways of knowing" are the ultimate tools in the struggle for power.
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This doesn't work. Most of the Jews who were killed in the Holocaust died in 1942 - '43, well before supply lines began to collapse and starvation set in. The Nazis recorded that by this time, the General Government had been cleared of Jews.
There is absolutely no grounds for assuming the governments of Eastern Europe overcounted Jewish population to the extent that would be necessary to explain the complete disappearance of eastern European Jewry post-1945. Revisionists can say that the numbers are "uncertain" or "unreliable" but it isn't true. These are not population estimates of some ill-recorded migration 2000 years ago, this is Europe in the 20th century. The degree of uncertainty required simply does not exist.
Says who? Do you doubt Bolshevik atrocities also?
This is not true. Rumors of what was going in the east were everywhere in Germany. There is a book called The German War by Nicholas Stargardt which has a long chapter going into depth on what the Germans knew about the Final Solution as it unfolded.
This is also not true. I've never heard of a old Nazi in Germany denying the Holocaust happened. Moreoever, plenty of Nazis admitted to it when they had no actual motive to admit to it. Adolf Eichmann spoke openly about the physical extermination of the Jews while he was a free man in Argentina. Why do you think he did that?
According to the modern scholarship which is in dispute, which has no primary documents or primary evidence of the deaths at this time, and which does no archaeology to determine deaths.
You misread what I wrote. If you find pre-WWII population estimates of Jewry in Europe, published pre-WWII, as for instance in a Jewish encyclopedia, the numbers are lower than today’s estimates of pre-WWII Jewry in Europe. IIRC, by millions.
If you told me Bolsheviks in quiet camp positions had a weekly routine of murdering women and children, then yes I would doubt it. If you told me that some shellshocked war-scarred Soviet soldiers committed an atrocity after experiencing months of trauma, no I would not doubt it. In any case, we did have whistleblowers of Soviet atrocities.
I wish you would quote something from it. From a review,
With hundreds of thousands of participants, we should certainly find letters which speak to the organized and systemic campaign of killing Jewish women and children. Can you find these letters for me?
We don’t generally consider confessions made under torture to be reliable, such as the Nuremberg testimony. Neither should we consider the coerced confessions of the leaders of a defeated country who faced the risk of total destruction (Morgenthau plan) particularly reliable.
Really sorry to reply to this ancient comment, but I am having difficulty sussing out the facts in this giant thread. @2rafa and @To_Mandalay are saying that prewar vs postwar population counts of Jews completely destroys the revisionist narrative, you say it supports it. Does anybody have any sources on this? In theory this seems relatively easy to resolve factually. Chatgpt is hopelessly pozzed on this issue and absolutely worthless otherwise I wouldn't bother you.
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Contemporary Nazi documentation records that Poland had been almost entirely cleared of Jews by the end of 1943. The destruction of the Jews in the USSR is also copiously recorded in contemporary documents. These are the Jews in question; Jews that died in Dachau or Buchenwald towards the end of the war are a tiny fraction of the total that must be explained.
This is not true. The Polish government recorded more than 3,000,000 Jews in Poland alone in the mid-1930s. At the end of the war, there were not even 100,000. No other population in Europe suffered in anywhere near a similar proportion. There are numerous revisionist excuses for this collapse (Polish overcounting, emigration to Israel and the United States, deportation into the USSR) but none of them work. We can go into further detail there if you want, but you have to be absurdly charitable to the revisionist case at every turn for the numbers to even begin to come out the way deniers want them to.
Within the actual 'death camps' (Belzec, Sobibor, Treblinka, later Auschwitz) there was only a very small staff assigned to conduct the extermination at each camp, hundreds at the most, including Jewish prisoners forced to work as auxiliaries. It doesn't take that many armed men to murder unarmed civilians in the thousands.
Stuff still leaked though:
Here's one letter from the book (page number is from the epub; here's a link to a free download if you want to read it yourself.
Here's one, cited in Saul Friedländer's Years of Extermination (page 400):
A consul of neutral Sweden in Stettin, Karl Inge Vendel, learned about the exterminations in 1943 from his contacts with dissident figures in the German regime:
(Years of Extermination, page 460)
In 1942, OK Ostrow reported in its war diary that:
The mass shootings of Jewish civilians in the east, since they took place over a broad expanse of territory rather than in a few discrete locations, did directly involve thousands to tens of thousands of people, and thus produced many more letters and personal accounts:
(Years of Extermination, page 426)
The Italians knew what was going on:
Here's another:
I don't know if Franzl ever took any pictures, but
Some
Of
His
Comrades
Did
Then there are the Einsatzgruppen reports themselves, which helpfully catalogue the murdered by "men, women, and children."
This is mostly a meme. Few of the Nuremberg defendants were tortured. None of the defendants in later trials, such as Kurt Franz or Franz Stangl, commandants of Sobibor and Treblinka, were tortured. Nor did they have any incentive to lie, since they received the maximum penalty of life imprisonment under German law. None of this accounts for Nazis who admitted to the exterminations outside a courtroom setting.
I'll ask again:
You have posted a lot of information, so what I decided to do was pick one at random. I looked into your quote from Hosenfeld. This quote would be significant: it is perhaps the earliest admission by a Nazi officer of the conscious mass killing of Jews.
The provenance of the material is... questionable. Hosenfeld’s writings appear to be completely unknown to holocaust scholarship before the year 1999, appearing neither in a book nor in a scholarly article, not even in passing mention. The few book instances I could find on google scholar have the wrong publication date. It may appear, for instance, that page 905 of volume 9 part 1 of the sprawling “Germany and the Second World War” contains the oldest mention of Hosenfeld, but in fact this volume was published in 2012 and seems to be based on the material in the book version of the Pianist. On inspecting the book version of the Pianist, I find the following:
The book gives no account of how the letters and diary were ever obtained by the writer, but implies that they fell into the hands of a “Leon Warm”. He has no biographical details that can be found online. His full name is, allegedly, “Leon Warm-Warczynski”, and despite being integral to this story (and ironically a great amateur archivist) I can find no evidence that he ever lived. The book “the Pianist” was written by the 87 year old Władysław Szpilman, who died a year later. I am not sure if an historian has ever touched the documents, let alone examined and verified their authenticity.
We have been presented with documents that have no "authentic transmission", as the Muslims might say. So now I want to post some of the alleged writing of Hosenfeld. Knowing that the material appeared at first in a book which was an enormous commercial hit, we can consider whether they come off as authentic. Just from the writing itself. You know, does it pass the “smell test”. Here's an excerpt from our dear friend Wilm Hosenfeld:
What a focus on the commandments! We have denied God’s commandments and we will die as a result, “innocent and guilty” alike, and only have ourselves to blame for our punishment. You would think a Jew wrote this! Let me tell you why I giggled reading that excerpt. You see — and this was probably unknown to whoever actually wrote this stuff — Hosenfeld came from a family of devout Roman Catholics. His father was a Catholic schoolmaster and he attended Catholic school. His family held a strong family tradition of Catholicism. He was active in the catholic social movement “Catholic Action”. Hosenfeld was a pedigreed Christian Catholic, born when this was taken seriously (1895). The idea that a pedigreed Catholic like Hosenfeld would explain the evil of the world in terms of forgetting commandments is comically insane — that is a purely Jewish construct that isnt just missing from Christianity but repudiated. A Catholic like Hosenfeld would never see the evil of the world through this prism. If he were irreligious, which he is not given the “Christian teaching” mentioned (by the way, a Catholic would also never use the phrase "God and Christian teaching" lol), his education would have protected him from the error of thinking that following commandments earns salvation and protects against God's wrath.
We are lead to believe from this passage that Hosenfeld, the serious Catholic, saw the evil of the world primarily in terms of commandments. No early 20th century Christian would claim that the denial of commandments led God to inflict punishment on them. This line of thought could only come from a Jew. A Christian would say that a failure to follow Christ has led to sin and so forth. A failure to confess, a failure to repent, a failure to accept God's love, but never a failure to follow commandments. I can’t adequately describe how alien the thought process in this passage would be to anyone from a Catholic background born in the 19th century. “God is allowing evil to happen to show mankind” that we need God? Yet there’s no mention of Christ, of the Son, of salvation, of redemption? This Catholic believes the “innocent along with the guilty have themselves to blame for their punishment”? Nope. Sorry. This is a complete and utter forgery, I would stake my entire (completely irrelevant) reputation on the line here. This isn't the only thing that gives the gag away -- the other exerpts speak on humans "feeling the burden of our own evil and imperfections" with zero mention of Christ or forgiveness... we read phrases like "on a Sunday, when you can indulge in your own thoughts" with no mention of Mass... No.
This is an example of what we can call
gish"yiddish gallop". When there is a discussion on the holocaust, the mainstream narrative supporter can copy and paste some quotes he found within a few minutes on the first page of Google. He can just assume that they are “reliable”. The non-mainstream party has the onus to inspect the material, certainly. But this could take hours if it is even practical. Thankfully there are Russian ebook torrenting sites that permit me to illegally download such lofty and voluminous tomes as Germany and the Second World War Volume IX/I, and such triumphs of creative writing as the Pianist. Alas, I don't know if I can do more research after this one. I relent, believe your holocaust, I lack the strength.Here's Mit Brennender Sorge:
Also a Jewish forgery, no doubt.
I've read all the books I cited here, though naturally I had to go back to excerpt the precise quotes and page numbers since I don't have a photographic memory.
In short, this exchange has been:
"Provide some contemporaneous letters about the extermination of the Jews."
"Here are a few."
"Gish gallop. Also those are fake."
The very passage from which you selectively quoted two sentences begins with —
These word faith is absent from the alleged Hosenfeld writings, and replaced with a Jewish attempt at thinking like a Christian. From the encyclical:
Christ is mentioned something like 50 times, the Son 8 times, the Cross 4 times, yet commandments only 5 times in the encyclical. The encyclical does not address Hosenfeld’s topic:
This is not anything a Catholic hand would write. When Catholics are talking about why evil happens, and what happens to the innocent, they do not claim that the innocent are to blame for their punishment and “must die”. Again, there’s not a mention of redemption or salvation. In the encyclical you cite we read:
So yeah, as we should expect in the encyclical, things are understood through Christ/faith with “obeying commandments” having secondary or tertiary significance. Hosenfeld would not omit all reference to unique Christian thought when processing why countries become evil, and replace that with an exclusively legalistic dimension of obedience to rules.
This is the third time you’ve flat out misunderstood something. The first two times it was your desire to ignore and move the goalpost on pre-WWII population estimates of European Jewry. This time you are cherry picking two sentences from the encyclical which on the whole proves my point.
If you are intent on believing in this source, please show me an instance of an historian authenticating it. It appeared out of thin air in 1990 for a snappy new edition to the holocaust novel industry.
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You would be wrong to doubt it. Over 1.5 million died in the gulags, and over a twenty year period citizens were regularly snatched out of their beds, taken to the basement of the Lubyanka, and shot in the back of the head. At least 700,000 Russians were executed between 1936-1938 during Stalin's Great Purge.
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We have literally an orgy of evidence. We found the damn camps and even recorded it on video. Do you think that is fake? The Nazis also documented the shit out of their death camps.
Here yah go https://encyclopedia.ushmm.org/content/en/article/nazi-camps
The facts are indisputable, even if you think it is jewish propaganda, it is all correct.
We also have photographic evidence of bigfoot along with eye witness testimony, for what that's worth. Point being, the conversation pertains to looking at the actual evidence.
A great example of this would be the alleged death camp in Dachau. It has every single element used to prove everything the article you cite uses to prove the holocaust. Except for the fact that an SS document detailed there was no 'gas chamber' ever built at the site. So hundreds of jews who testified to American detectives about the killings lied. All the images from the camp alleging it was a death camp were not from a death camp at all. History rewritten at the stroke of a pen. Reality altered forever. Or, well, for us at least. The people executed for their participation in guarding a death camp that never was could not benefit from the correction.
You cite as evidence an SS document saying no gas chamber was ever built, I cite as evidence a US Army investigative report from 1945 that not only says "yup, there's gas chambers here, we saw them ourselves" but includes photographic evidence. Not based on the testimony of "hundred of Jews" but based on the testimony of American soldiers of the Counter Intelligence Corps Detachment, Seventh Army, who were sent to the camp to investigate and report back. They have photos of the crematoria, the gas chamber buildings, and a detailed physical description of the gas chambers themselves.
I don't see how a single SS documents saying that no gas chamber was built at Dachau beats a comprehensive US report, with photographs, saying that there was a gas chamber there.
My mistake, when I said 'gas chamber' I meant 'homicidal gas chamber'. The camp had a 'gas chamber' but it was never used to kill anyone, as was later reported, it was for decontamination. Funny how that term 'gas chamber' just gets thrown around heh...
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No SS guard was ever accused, tried for, convicted, or executed for gassing people at Dachau. No SS guard ever admitted to having gassed anyone at Dachau, under duress or otherwise. Dachau was not presented as an extermination camp equipped with gas chambers at Nuremberg, revisionist mythology to the contrary aside. The only Dachau inmate to claim there had been a functioning gas chamber at Dachau at the time (there were two or three many decades later, and to my knowledge all were gentiles, like the Polish priest Father Alexis Lechanski or the Turkish journalist Nerin Gun) was Franz Blaha, a gentile Czech doctor who claimed at the trial of Commandant Martin Weiss not systematic gassing, but that a dozen prisoners had once been gassed 'experimentally,' under his supervision.
It's entirely incomparable to camps like Treblinka, Sobibor, or Auschwitz-Birkenau where all testimony, without exception, regardless of whether it came from guard or prisoner, or whether it was delivered in or outside of a courtroom, confirmed their function as extermination facilities.
From the 'Blue Series', the official record of the trial of the major civilian and military leaders of Nazi Germany who were accused of war crimes.
Sir Hartley Shawcross, Britain's chief prosecutor at the Nuremburg Trials. Pay no heed to the other camps that are also not death camps anymore.
DOCUMENT 159-L ATROCITIES AND OTHER CONDITIONS IN CONCENTRATION CAMPS IN GERMANY
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So do you think the holocaust is a conspiracy? Faked?
I think there are a few elements of what we call the holocaust that are not up to scratch. But they are maintained through bad incentives.
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If this did happen this way - millions of Jews were killed by disease and starvation, the Germans would absolutely be culpable for all of these deaths beyond what might be calculated an expected amount of disease deaths in a non-locked-up population, since they had spefically closed the Jews (and others) in these camps and were thus liable for their general welfare. This would end up being simply another Holocaust narrative. Gulag camp deaths caused by starvation and typhus are generally counted as Gulag camp deaths just as much as the shooting deaths, indeed many of the most notorious cases involve starvation.
So basically we should expect camp guards with dementia to be truthful (despite having probably spent decades justifying and minimizing their crimes, at least in their own heads), but all these Jews would stridently hold on to their assimilated identities despite at least many of them being at some point eligible for Holocaust victim compensation and basically having a free pass to get the hell out of the collapsing post-Communist Eastern Europe by moving to Israel?
Some of the most popular "alternative theories" offered by denialists in past discussions have involved the Soviets conducting a genocide of deported Jews exactly like this - killing (perhaps not by gas but otherwise) hundreds of thousands of Jews in Central Asian camps with zero historical record, zero or close to zero camp guard memories of precisely this sort of an event happening (particularly risible since these guards would not be the most virulent 20th century European racists and indeed, as anti-Semites remind us, a number would have been Jews themselves) etc etc. Just vague gesturing that this must have happened since there has to be some, no matter how threadbare, explanation to the everpresent "Where did the Jews go" question, and we know it can't have been that they were killed in the Holocaust, and the Holocaust didn't happen.
The moral complaint against the Germans in such a scenario is nowhere near the moral complaint in the official holocaust scenario, even though they may still be ultimately culpable (full culpability and level of evilness are distinct things). Germans reasonably attempted to relocate Jews; any reasonable Germany would have to do something about the foreign nation living on their soil who have a history of revolution including in Germany, and who have compatriots in the rival Soviet Union, and who have never ever assimilated fully and unshackled themselves from ethnic solidarity. A Germany that didn’t place them in camps is a Germany that would likely have their munitions depots bombed. So they were placed in camps, like Japanese in America and like the Palestinians tomorrow. If you believe that Germany should have “evened out” their starvation so that if affected Germans and Jews equally, okay, maybe from the standard of moral perfection, but there is obviously less evilness here than purposefully taking lives which would not already be lost in a trolly problem sense.
Now if you mean, “America has no culpability because they are allowed to bomb a country to infinity”, okay, but this would have needed to be argued, and Jews might wonder why there was no attempt to negotiate their release in exchange for better terms of German surrender, or whether America even calculated their loss of life when they bombed railways.
Yes. You don’t just forget putting women and children to death in your 20s for years. Just like how the demented will at times confess infidelity (many such cases)
If they started families and have a new life, the isn’t an easy decision, and once old age hits that becomes harder. And do you expect the demented to fill out a complicated holocaust victim compensation plan? This isn’t a reasonable comparison. However, from my hypothesis we would see them remembering their Jewish adolescence and heritage, 100%. But I don’t know how we could measure or catalog such cases which occur in the armchair of an Eastern European home.
Right but you understand that both sides have this problem, because there has been no serious archaeological attempt at quantifying human remains or cremation remains around concentration camps. Which IMO strongly reinforces the revisionist side, because why on earth wouldn’t historians be interested in finding remains and quantifying numbers and so on?
According to Wikipedia, out of the 100,000+ Japanese interned during the Japanese internment, about 1 % died, which presumably is not that far off from the amount that would have died anyway. Even this is generally considered to be a black mark on American history and particularly on FDR's record; I can only imagine how it would be treated if it had been more like 80 % dead, even if the deaths weren't done directly. And it has been a popular argument that Gaza is a concentration camp/on the verge of megadeaths already before the current operation, if it turned out that 80 % of Gazans were dead (again, for any reason) after the operation is finished... well, it would at the very least create considerable troubles for Israel in the court of global opinion.
The whole idea that "well, the Germans just had to put the Jews in the camps" seems to be based on an assumption that Jews are some sort of a self-evident, ontological evil. The largely assimilated German Jews had not hindered the German WW1 effort in a material way, as far as I know (the revolutions that you refer to, which had both Jewish and gentile participants, happened after the Germans had already lost in the field of battle). Rather more importantly, the vast majority of Jews put to camps weren't German, they were Polish and Soviet Jews that Germans wouldn't have needed to bother one bit with if they hadn't decided to invade half of Europe. Hell, the Germans were specifically procuding Jews from other countries to put in the camps - they were actually temporarily importing Jews to their temporarily occupied territories!
When it comes specifically to immigration to Israel, they could bring their families along, and their children - who presumably would be privy to such memories from old-age people - would be the ones hearing such stories and being able to use them to justify immigration. Also, people who would have been, say, 12-18 years old around 1942-1944 would have been 58-66 in 1990, when the fall of the Soviet regime would have presumably allowed freer movement and claims application (was it possible for Soviet block citizens to apply for Holocaust compensation from West Germany anyway?) - hardly the age where most of them would have been demented.
American civilians faced no threat from Axis bombers, only a dozen or so died due to enemy action. Had any Japanese-American starved, it was either a hunger strike or a deliberate withholding of food. Meanwhile Japanese in Japan and Germans in Germany had their food supply distrupted by unrestricted bomber and submarine warfare. Even if Germans treated Jews as kindly as Americans did Japanese-Americans, a greater fraction would have died.
This argument reminds me of some who point out that diring the Pacific war a greater fraction of American soldiers captured by the Japanese died in captivity, than Japanese POWs in American custody. Sure, but while the American captors got delivered ice cream, Japanese captors were forced to eat belts and each other. To condemn Japanese for not giving more to Americans than even themselves got seems to be an isolated demand of charity.
As you point out, even the most righteous among the nations involved in WW2, the US, saw it fit to intern ethnic minority civilians. Minorities were everywhere looked at with suspicion.
This was after Japan had declared war on the US. Germany, by contrast, was not going to fight Israel, given that the latter didn't exist at the time. What threat did the various targeted minorities pose to the German people that the Germans did not invite unto themselves by invading the nations where those people lived?
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Wait, so if the Jews put all the Palestinians in camps, and then food became scarce, and almost all Palestinians civilians died but, say, only 10% of Jewish civilians died in the ensuing famine, you would say that didn’t count as probable genocide?
Letting prisoners of war starve to death is literally a war crime, a prison warden who cannot feed his prisoners has a duty to release them, and indeed Polish civilians who lived around the sites of many of the deaths had mortality rates of less than 10%, so we can ascribe the material difference to captivity.
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The Russian top-down propaganda, as well as most of the grassroots, fortunately, doesn't claim that all Ukrainians as a subspecies is a plague upon the face of earth - merely that the leadership is Nazis & American proxies.
Yet I can’t think of any case in European history where teams of thousands organized for the mass murder of women and children over a span of years. Men who were not made psychopaths from years of starving in war, but men who sat comfortably in camps. That didn’t happen when colonists invaded America. It didn’t happen in ancient history like after the siege of Melos. It is an enormous assertion to make that this occurred.
There are countless examples of women and children being massacred throughout history. The sack of Magdeburg, the sack of Baghdad, Nader Shah's sack of Delhi, the Sand Creek Massacre, or this massacre of Globular Amphora Culture women and children(they might have even been killed by proto-Germans). History is littered with stuff like this, human brutality isn't rare and it isn't exceptional.
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Ukrainians qua Ukranians maybe not, but what about Ukrainians as kulaks, counter-revolutionaries and fascist collaborators?
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