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Culture War Roundup for the week of April 8, 2024

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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:

  • Israel will establish secure checkpoints and transit facilities around Rafah: registering, delousing, providing medical treatment and food to deportees.
  • There will be some weekly target for the number of civilians to process at these transit camps.
  • Deportees will then be transported to one of the many 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.
  • Israel will assault Rafah and the city will face a level of demolition similar to but probably not as intense as Northern Gaza.

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:

  • Israel is fighting a partisan war, which cannot be won without high civilian causalities, in the first place because the militants live among the community but, more importantly, because reprisals against the civilian population are a requirement for winning a partisan war (Israel knows this, the US could never accept that). "Reprisal" provides a better interpretation of the high rate of civilian casualties than either a secret plan to genocide all Palestinians or the absurd notion that Israel is doing everything it can to minimize civilian casualties.
  • Israel wants to resettle the Palestinians outside of its aspirational territory, to enemy territory like Egypt.

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:

Himmler learned from his visit to Treblinka that, in spite of his orders, the corpses of the Jews who had been exterminated in this camp had not been cremated, but buried. Immediately after this visit, the big cremating operation began in the camp. This was the main task imposed on Treblinka during the last months of the camp’s existence...

After Himmler’s visit, the date for closing and liquidating the camps of Belzec, Sobibor, and Treblinka became dependent on the completion of the cremation of the victims’ corpses and the erasure of all traces of the crimes that had been carried out in these camps. The timetable for carrying out this decision lay mainly in the hands of the camp commanders and in their ability and desire to accomplish the erasure of the crimes as quickly as possible...

In Treblinka, the camp command faced the most difficult task—unearthing over 700,000 corpses and cremating them while at the same time continuing to receive new transports with Jews for extermination. In this camp the entire cremation operation lasted about four months, from April to the end of July 1943. To accomplish the task, the cremating took place simultaneously in a number of sites and the largest number of Jewish prisoner-workers were put to work in the various required stages.

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:

He remembered the horrors of the enormous pyres, where "10,000 to 12,000 corpses were cremated at one time." He wrote: "The bodies of women were used for kindling" while Germans "toasted the scene with brandy and with the choicest liqueurs, ate, caroused and had a great time warming themselves by the fire."[6] Wiernik described small children waiting so long in the cold for their turn in the gas chambers that "their feet froze and stuck to the icy ground" and noted one guard who would "frequently snatch a child from the woman's arms and either tear the child in half or grab it by the legs, smash its head against a wall and throw the body away."[7] At other times "children were snatched from their mothers' arms and tossed into the flames alive."

He was also encouraged by occasional scenes of brave resistance.[8] In chapter 8, he describes seeing a naked woman escape the clutches of the guards and leap over a three-metre high barbed wire fence unscathed. When accosted by a Ukrainian guard (Trawniki) on the other side, she wrestled his machine gun out of his grasp, killed the guard, and shot another guard before being killed herself.

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.

Suddenly we heard the signal - a shot fired into the air.

We leaped to our feet. Everyone fell to his prearranged task and performed it with meticulous care. Among the most difficult tasks was to lure the Ukrainians from the watchtowers. Once they began shooting at us from above, we would have no chance of escaping alive. We knew that gold held an immense attraction for them, and they had been doing business with the Jews all the time. So, when the shot rang out, one of the Jews sneaked up to the tower and showed the Ukrainian guard a gold coin. The Ukrainian completely forgot that he was on guard duty. He dropped his machine gun and hastily clambered down to pry the piece of gold from the Jew. They grabbed him, finished him off and took his revolver. The guards in the other towers were also dispatched quickly...

Just as I thought I was safe, running straight ahead as fast as I could, I suddenly heard the command "Halt!" right behind me. By then I was exhausted but I ran faster just the same. The woods were just ahead of me, only a few leaps away. I strained all my will power to keep going. The pursuer was gaining and I could hear him running close behind me.

Then I heard a shot; in the same instant I felt a sharp pain in my left shoulder. I turned around and saw a guard from the Treblinka Penal Camp. He again aimed his pistol at me. I knew something about firearms and I noticed that the weapon had jammed. I took advantage of this and deliberately slowed down. I pulled the ax from my belt. My pursuer - a Ukrainian guard - ran up to me yelling in Ukrainian: "Stop or I'll shoot!" I came up close to him and struck him with my axe across the left side of his chest. He collapsed at my feet with a vile path.

I was free and ran into the woods. After penetrating a little deeper into the thicket, I sat down among the bushes. From the distance I heard a lot of shooting. Believe it or not, the bullet had not really hurt me. It had gone through all of my clothing and stopped at my shoulder, leaving a mark. I was alone. At last, I was able to rest.

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:

  1. 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.

  2. 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).

  3. 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.

police officer who found the evidence was a virulent racist

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.

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.

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.

Jewish population figures were actually accurate prior to WWII

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.

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.

Says who? Do you doubt Bolshevik atrocities also?

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

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.

(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.

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?

Most of the Jews who were killed in the Holocaust died in 1942 - '43

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.

absolutely no grounds for assuming the governments of Eastern Europe overcounted Jewish population

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.

Bolshevik atrocities

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.

There is a book called The German War by Nicholas Stargardt

I wish you would quote something from it. From a review,

case that knowledge of what would be later known as the Holocaust was widespread within the home front by the summer and autumn of 1941. By that time, he argues, German atrocities on the eastern front involved hundreds of thousands of participants, eyewitnesses, and passersby. While some addressed these mass executions openly in letters, others either referred to them euphemistically or kept their thoughts private in diaries. Stargardt also demonstrates that many citizens were involved in the process of death and deportation, whether as executioners, witnesses, photographers (“execution tourists”), railway men, government bureaucrats, or other functionaries. The author’s case makes it difficult to believe that “ordinary Germans” did not know what was going on

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?

plenty of Nazis admitted to it

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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?

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.

“On the ‘Aryan’ side of the city, the German captain in the garrison, Wilm Hosenfeld, wrote home on 23 July, the second day of the deportations from Warsaw, telling his wife that the ‘ghetto with its half-million Jews is to be emptied’ on Himmler’s orders: ‘History has no real parallel. Perhaps, cavemen ate each other, but to simply butcher a nation, men, women, children, in the twentieth century, and that it should be us, who are waging a crusade against Bolshevism, that is such a dreadful blood-guilt to make you want to sink into the ground with shame.” (page 302)

Here's one, cited in Saul Friedländer's Years of Extermination (page 400):

Wilhelm Cornides, a Wehrmacht noncommissioned officer, was stationed in Galicia in the summer of 1942. According to his diary entry of August 31, while he was waiting for a train at the railway station in Rava Ruska, another train entered the station: It carried Jews in some thirtyeight cattle cars. Cornides asked a policeman where the Jews came from. “ ‘Those are probably the last ones from Lvov,’ the policeman answered. ‘That has been going on now for five weeks uninterruptedly. In Jaroslav, they let only eight remain, no one knows why.’ I asked: ‘How far are they going?’ Then he replied, ‘To Belzec.’ ‘And then?’ ‘Poison.’ I asked: ‘Gas?’ He shrugged his shoulders. Then he said only: ‘At the beginning, they always shot them, I believe.’ ”

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:

“In a city, all the Jews were assembled for what was officially announced as ‘delousing.’ At the entrance they were forced to take off their clothes; the delousing procedure, however, consisted of gassing and, afterward, all of them would be stuffed into a mass grave. The source from which I obtained all this information on the conditions in the General Government is such that not the slightest shade of disbelief exists concerning the truthfulness of my informant’s descriptions.”

(Years of Extermination, page 460)

In 1942, OK Ostrow reported in its war diary that:

the Jews in Treblinka are not adequately buried and as a result an unbearable smell of cadavers pollutes the air.

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:

On June 18, 1942, Wehrmacht private HK wrote home from BrestLitowsk: “In Bereza- Kartuska, where I stopped for lunch, 1,300 Jews had just been shot on the previous day. They had been brought to a pit outside of the town. Men, women and children had to undress completely and were then liquidated with a shot in the back of the neck. The clothes were disinfected and used again. I am convinced that if the war goes on much longer, the Jews will be turned into sausage and served to Russian war prisoners and to the Jewish specialized workers. . . .”

(Years of Extermination, page 426)

The Italians knew what was going on:

In early 1943 Ciano was appointed ambassador to the Vatican and the Duce himself took over foreign affairs. A few days beforehand Mussolini and Ciano had seen the cable sent on January 3 by the Italian ambassador in Berlin, Dino Alfieri: “Regarding the fate of [deported German Jews], like that of Polish, Russian, Dutch and even French Jews, there cannot be much doubt. . . . Even the SS talk about the mass executions. . . . A person who was there recalled with horror some scenes of executions by machine guns of nude women and children lined up at the mouth of a common ditch. About the tales of torture running the gamut I will limit myself to the one told to my colleague by an SS official who confi ded that he hurled babies of six months against a wall, shattering them, to give an example to his men, tired and shaken by an execution that was particularly horrible because of the number of victims.”

Here's another:

On July 6 Pvt. Franzl also recorded the events at Tarnopol, for the enjoyment of his parents in Vienna. The discovery of the mutilated corpses of Volksdeutsche and Ukrainians led to vengeance against the local Jews: They were forced to carry the corpses from the cellars and line them up by newly dug graves; afterward the Jews were beaten to death with truncheons and spades. “Up to now,” Franzl went on, “we have sent approximately 1,000 Jews to the other world, but this is by far too little for what they have done.” After asking his parents to spread the news, Franzl ended his letter with a promise: “If there are doubts, we will bring photos. Then, no more doubts.”74 (Years of Extermination, page 214)

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."

We don’t generally consider confessions made under torture to be reliable, such as the Nuremberg testimony.

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:

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?

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 appendix publishes, for the first time, entries from the diary of Wilm Hosenfeld

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:

Why did this war have to happen at all? Because humanity had to be shown where its godlessness was taking it. First of all Bolshevism killed millions, saying it was done to introduce a new world order. But the Bolshevists could act as they did only because they had turned away from God and Christian teaching. Now National Socialism is doing the same in Germany. It forbids people to practise their religion, the young are brought up godless, the Church is opposed and its property appropriated, anyone who thinks differently is terrorized, the free human nature of the German people is debased and they are turned into terrified slaves. The truth is kept from them. They can play no part in the fate of their nation. There are no commandments now against stealing, killing or lying, not if they go against people's personal interest. This denial of God's commandments leads to all the other immoral manifestations of greed - unjust self-enrichment, hatred, deceit, sexual licence resulting in infertility and the downfall of the German people. God allows all this to happen, lets these forces have power and allows so many innocent people to perish to show mankind that without him we are only animals in conflict, who believe we have to destroy each other. We will not listen to the divine commandment: 'Love one another'. Very well, then, says God, try the Devil's commandment, the opposite: 'Hate one another'. We know the story of the Deluge from Holy Scripture. Why did the first race of men come to such a tragic end? Because they had abandoned God and must die, guilty and innocent alike. They had only themselves to blame for their punishment. And it same today.

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.

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.

Here's Mit Brennender Sorge:

To hand over the moral law to man's subjective opinion, which changes with the times, instead of anchoring it in the holy will of the eternal God and His commandments, is to open wide every door to the forces of destruction. The resulting dereliction of the eternal principles of an objective morality, which educates conscience and ennobles every department and organization of life, is a sin against the destiny of a nation, a sin whose bitter fruit will poison future generations.

Also a Jewish forgery, no doubt.

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.

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 —

It is on faith in God, preserved pure and stainless, that man's morality is based.

These word faith is absent from the alleged Hosenfeld writings, and replaced with a Jewish attempt at thinking like a Christian. From the encyclical:

No faith in God can for long survive pure and unalloyed without the support of faith in Christ

No coercive power of the State, no purely human ideal, however noble and lofty it be, will ever be able to make shift of the supreme and decisive impulses generated by faith in God and Christ

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:

they had abandoned God and must die, guilty and innocent alike. They had only themselves to blame for their punishment

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:

Since Christ, the Lord's Anointed, finished the task of Redemption, and by breaking up the reign of sin deserved for us the grace of being the children God, since that day no other name under heaven has been given to men, whereby we must be saved

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.

If you told me Bolsheviks in quiet camp positions had a weekly routine of murdering women and children, then yes I would doubt it.

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.

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.

Twelve million murders! Two thirds of the Jews in Europe exterminated, more than six million of them on the killers' own figures. Murder conducted like some mass production industry in the gas chambers and the ovens of Auschwitz, Dachau, Treblinka, Buchenwald, Mauthausen, Majdanek, and Oranienburg.

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.

A distinguishing feature of the Dachau Camp was the gas chamber for the execution of prisoners and the somewhat elaborate facilities for execution by shooting. The gas chamber was located in the center of a large room in the crematory building. It was built of concrete. Its dimensions were about 20 feet by 20 feet, and the ceiling was some 10 feet in height! In two opposite walls of the chamber were air tight doors through which condemned prisoners could be taken into the chamber for execution and removed after execution. The supply of gas into the chamber was controlled by means of two valves on one of the outer walls, and beneath the valves was a small glass-covered peephole through which the operator could watch the victims die. The gas was let into the chamber through pipes terminating in perforated brass fixtures set into the ceiling. The chamber was of size sufficient to execute probably a hundred men at one time.

The room in which the gas chamber stood was flanked on both ends by warerooms in which the bodies were placed after execution to await cremation. The size of each room was approximately 30 by 50 feet. At the time we visited the camp these warerooms were piled high with dead bodies. In one of the rooms the bodies were thrown in an irregular heap. In the other room they were neatly stacked like cordwood. The irregular pile of bodies was perhaps 10 feet high, covering most of the floor space. All of them were naked.

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.