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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.
Why was this a big problem? Because the bodies were discovered at the crime scene. Investigators scientifically studied the scene of the crime, documented evidence found at the scene, performed autopsies of the victims in order to scientifically prove the occurrence of a murder at a precise time and location, along with a cause of death.
The physical evidence found at the scene, and immediately investigated by authorities using standard-operating forensic practices, narrowed down the possibility space of "what happened to Nicole Simpson and Ron Goldman" by 99.99% compared to the counterfactual of no bodies being found, no forensic investigation of the scene of the crime, no murder weapon, no witness reports during the occurrence of any crime.
In contrast, at Treblinka, we have no bodies, we have no murder weapon, we have no contemporary witnesses, we have no documentary evidence. There has not been a single excavation or forensic study of any mass grave at Treblinka- ever. It has not - even remotely - been proven that approximately 900,000 people were murdered at that site. In fact, there is no evidence at all that even 2% of that number of people were ever at that site at any point in time.
If there were no bodies, no murder weapon, no witnesses, no forensic investigation of any crime scene, then there would never have been a trial in the first place.
But it gets even more bizarre.
Let's say that in the Simpson case there were no bodies ever found or autopsied, or forensic evidence ever presented. Then let's say that some witnesses come forward and say, years or even decades after the fact, that they witnessed the murder and know the precise location where the victims were buried. Can you even fathom that there would be no attempt to excavate the remains of the victims in order to procure the evidence that was so crucial to the case in the first place - the evidence you just flatly take for granted in your comparison? It's beyond the pale to imagine that prosecutors would say "we aren't going to excavate the remains or provide autopsies, because that would be disrespectful to the victims."
Your comparison fails, because in contrast with the Simpson case with Treblinka we have:
In contrast with the case of Treblinka, in which the Mainstream claims that they know exactly where the mass graves of 900,000 are located but have never excavated or proven the existence of a single mass grave of any size at any point in time, there is another case of a mass execution in which sound forensic practices were utilized: the Katyn Forest massacre.
When the Germans discovered the mass graves of the Katyn Forest massacre they:
In spite of the lengths the Germans went to in order to scientifically investigate the scene of the crime, they were still accused of the Katyn Forest massacre by the Soviet Prosecution at Nuremberg, which produced witnesses to attest to the fact the Germans committed the crime. The authors of the Soviet investigation of the Katyn massacre, which falsely blamed the Germans for a crime that they had actually committed, submitted their report as evidence in the Nuremberg trial (USSR-54), and they were the same as the authors of the Soviet report on the investigation of Auschwitz (USSR-8), with the addition of Trofim Lysenko as a signatory to the Auschwitz report.
Soviet investigators denied access to Western observers during their own investigations of these alleged "extermination camps." As mentioned before, initially there were claims of "death factories" with gas chambers in both the camps liberated by the Western Allies and camps liberated by the Soviet Union. But Western observers investigated those claims and proved they were false. The Soviets denied any access to Western observers during their own investigations, and those are the only camps where those claims exist today.
I sincerely hope, at this point, you are genuinely wondering why there has never been a single excavation to even prove the mere existence of a single mass grave at Treblinka. The answer to that question is that Jewish authorities forbid any excavation of any mass graves. They use the exact same excuse as cited by the perpetrators of the Kamloops Mass Grave Hoax. Genocide deniers ask: Where are the bodies of the residential schoolchildren?:
This is the -exact- same reasoning used by Jewish authorities to forbid any scientific investigation of the alleged mass graves of Treblinka. If they excavated the site it would immediately disprove the hoax - in both cases, so they cite cultural sensitivity and denounce anyone who expects a bare minimum-standard of scientific investigation as a "genocide denier."
It's unfortunate I was banned and couldn't respond to you in a timely manner. But your example falls completely on its face for the simple fact that the Simpson case had a crime scene and bodies which were forensically investigated, and there has never been any attempt to forensically investigate any mass graves at Treblinka! There isn't even proof that the alleged victims were even at that location at any point in time. There are no bodies. There is no murder weapon. There are no contemporary witness reports. Jewish authorities forbid scientific investigation of the site using the exact same logic as the perpetrators of the Kamloops hoax, a legal maneuver which would be unconscionable if the reported location of Simpson and Goldman was concluded by prosecutors, but the prosecutors blocked any attempt to scientifically prove that the victims are buried where they are claiming.
You have no grounds to compare the two cases here, only to prove the importance of the body of physical evidence in the Simpson that does not even remotely exist in the Treblinka case.
Wow. There are no bodies?
Cremation couldn’t have been involved, perhaps?
How do you feel about the archeological efforts that have been done?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Treblinka_extermination_camp
Like, it’s remarkable you bring up the apparently fake Canadian graves, when the same technique was used at Treblinka and they found stuff.
Is what they found made up? The reinterred remains faked? The confessions of Nazis like Stangl just irrelevant?
You’re not dealing with evidence cited on Wikipedia for Christssake. Your writing here seems to implicate you’re not even aware it exists as a claim—even if you think you can show it’s BS.
Try to at least be aware of evidence you claim doesn’t exist:
https://www.nbcnews.com/news/amp/ncna66241
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/unearthing-the-atrocities-of-nazi-death-camps/
https://www.nbcnews.com/news/amp/ncna66241
It's a common misconception that performing a cremation burns the entire corpse to ash. Even a modern crematory furnace leaves behind thousands of identifiable bone fragments. For example, teeth do not cremate to ash, they calcinate and remain perfectly identifiable after a cremation. As Revisionists have pointed out:
And there would have been orders of magnitude more identifiable bone fragments for each victim than teeth for that matter. If what is claimed actually happened, even if all the victims were cremated, there would be metric tons of physical evidence which could be easily found within a single afternoon of digging.
Even in a murder case, when there is a suspected cremation of the victim involved, it's equally important for investigators to excavate the remains of a murder victim. In no case would investigators say "oh well witnesses say the victim was cremated and buried there, so I guess there's no point in doing a dig to prove that's actually what happened."
No mass graves have ever been excavated at Treblinka. You say "they found stuff", whatever that means, but no mass grave has ever been excavated from the site.
I am well aware of the studies by Caroline Sturdy-Colls, I've read through her papers. You should be aware of the evidence you are citing:
"The techniques respected the religious law" is referring to the "technique" of purely using GPR to identify a mass grave with no subsequent excavation to actually prove what the ground disturbance was. She did not find any mass graves, she did exactly what they did at the Kamloops site.
You can even see the clip on the TV special covering that investigation, where the Jewish Chief Rabbi of Poland (with a New York accent) forbids her from excavating any mass graves.
The methods used by Caroline Colls to identify the "possible mass graves" were the exact same as the Kamloops hoax: GPR results were used to call ground disturbances "mass graves" and then they were forbidden from excavating the ground disturbances based on claims of cultural sensitivity.
She did, though, excavate human remains about 1km from the site of the alleged Treblinka mass graves. She went to a marked Christian graveyard, found a few bones, and then cried on camera. No problem disturbing those graves!
The most dramatic piece of evidence uncovered at the Treblinka extermination camp was not any mass grave, it was a clay tile which Caroline Colls misidentifies as showing a Jewish Star of David whereas in reality it was the brand mark of a porcelain factory in Poland.
Imagine you bring in the TV cameras with an archaeological team to investigate a crime scene where 900,000 were murdered. You don't find any mass graves, but you find a terracotta tile and immediately jump to the conclusion that the tile featured a Star of David to lure Jews inside the gas chamber, whereas in reality it was a manufacturer's branding. But nobody watching the TV show is going to learn the truth about that tile, or wonder why they are making much ado about a terracotta tile instead of investigating the enormous amounts of physical evidence that would be right beneath them, if what is claimed actually happened.
The reality is Caroline Colls did the exact same thing as the Kamloops archaeologists: use GPR to claim to have found mass graves, but don't excavate any of the disturbances you are claiming contain mass graves. It should also be pointed out the GPR results themselves run completely contrary to witness testimony regarding the size, shape, and locations of the mass graves. The GPR results do not prove any mass graves at Treblinka, but they disprove witness testimony about them. If they actually did a scientific investigation of the site and excavated them, it would immediately disprove the story.
Like I said, there has never been a single excavation of a mass grave on this site because Jewish authorities forbid it using the exact same claims as the perpetrators of the Kamloops mass grave hoax.
Edit: Here's an update on the Kamloops situation, if anybody is wondering, from a couple of weeks ago:
It's literally the exact same script as the Treblinka case. Rely on "oral truth-telling" and refuse to excavate, claiming cultural sensitivity, because you know it would disprove the stories which have gained enormous cultural prominence based on extremely thin physical evidence.
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