Exterminationist Tactics - part 2

[HansHill]

I felt it better to start a new thread inspired by the previous “Exterminationist Tactics”, which was a very insightful look into the fallacious argumentation, circular reasoning and deus ex machina strategies employed by our exterminationist friends. This thread will focus on a line of arguing trotted out by Sanity Check which I will link back to here so Sanity Check has some avenue to self-reflect and see what he has to say for himself:

Those are the rules of informed evidence based discussion. Otherwise you're a crank or falling for crank tactics.

To summarise what we have:

I) Appeals to authority
II) Appeals to consensus
III) Circular reasoning
IV) ”Go back to Holocaust School”

Sanity Check’s I) appeals to authority fall completely flat when one actually reads through the cited material, as these sources assert a priori that gassings and exterminations took place, often invoking additional sources and / or eyewitnesses of these gassings and re-asserting this position over and over again, which leads to II) appeals to consensus. This of course then leads us to III) circular reasoning as I will show below in this handy diagram.



To assert a priori that gassings took place renders any sort of good faith investigation utterly impossible, as we know the murder weapons as described are not feasible. For Sanitycheck and co to double down on this, is to yet again appeal to a consensus that is utterly indefensible.

Let’s review the sources he has spat out, and perusing their works, with just a quick ctrl+f reveals the following:

Markus Nesselrodt:

“In den Gaskammern wurde ihre Jugend verbrannt, ihre Träume und Hoffnungen aufgezehrt.”

Quoting a primary source, translated to:

“In the gas chambers their youth was burned, their dreams and hopes were consumed”

Atina Grossmann:

Quoting a primary source “My sister was at that time thirteen years old. My sister was gassed when she was sixteen years old”.

Albert Kaganovitch:

To his credit, Kaganovitch breaks from Orthodoxy when estimating the numbers dead in Rechitsa, however still commits cardinal sins, such as on page 268 of “The Long Life and Swift Death of Jewish Rechitsa”, where he is using available data on those executed which is very much in keeping with those figures presented by Mattogno, but he then i) simultaneously acknowledges integrity issues with the Yad Veshem figures, ii) uses them anyway, iii) then bafflingly applies a 3x bonus multiplier to the victim count (???)

Mark Edele:

“...and in ‘Operation Reinhard’: the extermination of 1.7 million Jews…”

Katharina Friedla - “Juden in Breslau/Wrocław 1933–1949”

“Die übrigen 809 Menschen, darunter 125 Männer sowie 684 Frauen und Kinder, wurden in den Gaskammern getötet”

Translated to:

“The remaining 809 people, including 125 men and 684 women and children, were killed in the gas chambers.”

Eliyana R. Adler, Reconstructing the Old Country: American Jewry in the Post-Holocaust Decades:

“...Additionally, the most mechanized centers of the killing, the gas chambers of Auschwitz-Birkenau, Treblinka, Majdanek, Chelmno, and Sobibor, were situated in Poland”

Lidia Zessin-Jurek, A Lost World: The Galician Shtetl and Siberia

“they cannot be compared with the fate of our fellow men who lived under the Nazi occupation in the shadow of the crematoria and gas chambers.”


>”B-but Graf was a naughty boy”

Pathetic. For exterminationists to claim any sort of higher order of integrity in this charade is despicable, as their very next step is asking the world to believe these people were choked to death on diesel fumes and pesticide, ignoring all material evidence to the contrary. More a priori assertions, bogus consensus, and more circular reasoning.

For me however, the remarks about hitting the books and going back to Holocaust school for us to re-enter the circular reasoning circus are by far the most brazen. Yes Sanity Check, we know the story. We know the story of your bogus academics, and no you don’t get to just simply fall back into these tired old routines. Your academics are bunk, your sources are bunk, you don't have a murder weapon, and your narrative is bunk.

>Please go re-read the same tired old orthodox tripe
>No

[Nessie]

...

Those are the rules of informed evidence based discussion. Otherwise you're a crank or falling for crank tactics.

To summarise what we have:

I) Appeals to authority
II) Appeals to consensus
III) Circular reasoning
IV) ”Go back to Holocaust School”

...

You are claiming that how history has been investigated, for centuries, the established historical method, is wrong. You can claim that is an appeal to authority and consensus, but, if you were asked to evidence another historical event, such as did the Rwandan genocide, you would revert to the historical method.

https://study.com/learn/lesson/historic ... ation.html

In regard to your I to IV, please explain why the above methodology, which basically involves gathering evidence from multiple sources to establish what took place, is wrong.

[SanityCheck]

I felt it better to start a new thread inspired by the previous “Exterminationist Tactics”, which was a very insightful look into the fallacious argumentation, circular reasoning and deus ex machina strategies employed by our exterminationist friends. This thread will focus on a line of arguing trotted out by Sanity Check which I will link back to here so Sanity Check has some avenue to self-reflect and see what he has to say for himself:

Those are the rules of informed evidence based discussion. Otherwise you're a crank or falling for crank tactics.

To summarise what we have:

I) Appeals to authority
II) Appeals to consensus
III) Circular reasoning
IV) ”Go back to Holocaust School”

Pointing to existing research is none of those things.

The whole point of informed evidence based discussion is to take what others have already done and use it critically, not to treat a citation as an unimpeachable authority.

Moreover, it helps to realise why a particular study is being cited, since no study can include chapter and verse on every possible related or adjacent issue.

You trot out various cherry-picked things in some of the authors in the collection I linked to which you disagree with, but none appear to relate to the issues which was previously under discussion, the fate of Polish Jews on the Soviet side of the frontline, how they got there, how many there were, and so on.

It's rather obvious that you're seizing on their remarks about the extermination of the Jews who did not escape, but that is not the subject of the collection. Nor was it the topic at hand when this was brought up, it was clearing up some of Graf's misconceptions about Polish Jewish refugees after September 1939.

Just because you're a Holocaust denier doesn't give you, or Graf, the right to ignore studies even if they invoke claims about extermination you reject. That would be falsus in uno, falsus in omnibus just applied to scholarship rather than an eyewitness (where the falsus in uno angle is also generally regarded as fallacious). The point is what do such studies - in this case - say about the issue in the section by Graf which you brought up. I.e. about the supposed whereabouts of a chunk of Polish Jews who fled east in 1939.

Critical engagement with existing literature requires going beyond whether this or that study is perfect, or contains the answers to life, the universe and everything; they never do, because there are word limits.

Informed evidence based discussion requires firstly examining the previous studies, ideally in order and trying to track down every one available to you, which for someone with a university login means more than the open access studies (although those are now very numerous).

One does not then just contrast the headline main text results or interpretations but also examines the sources used and the discussion of them, both the primary and secondary sources, to find out what gaps might exist, and whether they're acknowledged - as was very clearly the case with Mark Edele's estimate ranges.

And then to classify and evaluate the numbers - to learn the difference between wild ass guess estimates, informed estimates, incomplete data and parts which are clearly complete, as well as how the numbers overlap or don't.

[curioussoul]

The whole point of informed evidence based discussion is to take what others have already done and use it critically, not to treat a citation as an unimpeachable authority.

I'm surprised at this concession. What you just said invalidated the vast majority of orthodox Holocaust "research" conducted since the war.

[SanityCheck]

The whole point of informed evidence based discussion is to take what others have already done and use it critically, not to treat a citation as an unimpeachable authority.

I'm surprised at this concession. What you just said invalidated the vast majority of orthodox Holocaust "research" conducted since the war.

No, it doesn't.

[Numar Patru]

HansHill wants to reject all “exterminationist” research because it accepts a priori that homicidal gassing took place.

If you want to reject all sources that make this assumption, you would need to prove more or less conclusively that the gassing was impossible.

Your side hasn’t proved that. Not by a long shot. Not only haven’t you taken the easiest path toward conclusively proving gassing didn’t happen — which is recreating the conditions of a homicidal gassing as described and seeing whether the subjects survived* — but you haven’t provided any evidence that people who are reported to have been gassed even survived.

Documented deportations to camps + testimonies of perpetrators, victims, and bystanders to gassings at those camps + the presence of bodies in the ground at those camps = gassing at those camps.

You don’t have train records showing further travel from camps, testimonies saying no gassing happened, or the people turning up elsewhere. If anyone is operating on an a priori assumption, it’s you.

* I’m certain you can find 1,000 Holocaust deniers willing to be subjected to gassing if they’re so sure it wouldn’t work.

[HansHill]

Pointing to existing research is none of those things.

The whole point of informed evidence based discussion is to take what others have already done and use it critically, not to treat a citation as an unimpeachable authority.

Moreover, it helps to realise why a particular study is being cited, since no study can include chapter and verse on every possible related or adjacent issue.

You trot out various cherry-picked things in some of the authors in the collection I linked to which you disagree with, but none appear to relate to the issues which was previously under discussion, the fate of Polish Jews on the Soviet side of the frontline, how they got there, how many there were, and so on.

It's rather obvious that you're seizing on their remarks about the extermination of the Jews who did not escape, but that is not the subject of the collection. Nor was it the topic at hand when this was brought up, it was clearing up some of Graf's misconceptions about Polish Jewish refugees after September 1939.

Just because you're a Holocaust denier doesn't give you, or Graf, the right to ignore studies even if they invoke claims about extermination you reject. That would be falsus in uno, falsus in omnibus just applied to scholarship rather than an eyewitness (where the falsus in uno angle is also generally regarded as fallacious). The point is what do such studies - in this case - say about the issue in the section by Graf which you brought up. I.e. about the supposed whereabouts of a chunk of Polish Jews who fled east in 1939.

Critical engagement with existing literature requires going beyond whether this or that study is perfect, or contains the answers to life, the universe and everything; they never do, because there are word limits.

Informed evidence based discussion requires firstly examining the previous studies, ideally in order and trying to track down every one available to you, which for someone with a university login means more than the open access studies (although those are now very numerous).

One does not then just contrast the headline main text results or interpretations but also examines the sources used and the discussion of them, both the primary and secondary sources, to find out what gaps might exist, and whether they're acknowledged - as was very clearly the case with Mark Edele's estimate ranges.

And then to classify and evaluate the numbers - to learn the difference between wild ass guess estimates, informed estimates, incomplete data and parts which are clearly complete, as well as how the numbers overlap or don't.

Thanks for your reply and taking the time - I hope you don't find this rude, but I'll address my response here to the Revisionist audience, to strategically analyse your rebuttals.

>"Cherry Picked Examples"

i) These were his sources which he requested I review, and so I did, over the Holidays much to the annoyance of my inlaws and kids. I was able to review all of them to a name (except one or maybe two i couldn't find over the holidays)

ii) His attempts to paint these genocidal accusations as "cherrypicked" is to try assert they are incidental to the authors' methods, biases, and ideologies. They are not incidental at all, and as I've demonstrated, these predetermined genocidal conclusions are inherent to the methods and ideology of these academics. As such, these passages are foundational to these authors' values.

iii) i and ii above address directly the appeals to authority and consensus issues, along with the circular reasoning to always arrive back at the pre-determined genocidal outcome.

>"Just because you're a Holocaust denier doesn't give you, or Graf, the right to ignore studies even if they invoke claims about extermination you reject"

Yes, it does actually - when the "incidental" claims made by exterminationists as part of their works are i) central to the outcome, ii) circular and ideological in nature, and iii) demonstrably unfeasible, Revisionists absolutely have the right to interrogate the veracity of these works, and to rightly identify the inherent problems contained within

>"falsus in uno falsus in omnibus applied to scholarship"

This is a slippery one - what he is attempting to do here is to invoke a cognitive bias / logical fallacy on the part of Revisionists for rejecting ideologically unsound works, where in reality it's completely the other way around.

Consider a silly example: You are reading a meteorological paper, and the author spends some passages discussing why the Earth is flat, and uses primary sources like his Uncle and some drinking buddy at the bar. Technically, the Flat Earth model here doesn't necessarily impact his meteoroligical research. Being consistent, our friend Sanity Check must implore we retain the work in full lest we commit "falsus in uno falsus in omnibus" applied to the institutions of academia. This despite the clearly unsound ideological grounds from which the author has written from.

In this instance, Revisionists would absolutely be correct to bin the entire thing and call into question the integrity and ideology of the authors.

>"Critical engagement with existing literature requires going beyond whether this or that study is perfect, or contains the answers to life, the universe and everything; they never do, because there are word limits."

Fluff. We don't demand that Sanity Check, or his cohort of academics contain the keys to the universe, only that they are free from obvious ideological biases, such as asserting a priori that gassings occurred. This is basic stuff.

>"to find out what gaps might exist, and whether they're acknowledged - as was very clearly the case with Mark Edele's estimate ranges"

Mark Edele believes 1.7 million Jews were gassed at the Reinhardt camps.

[Nessie]

HansHill wants to reject all “exterminationist” research because it accepts a priori that homicidal gassing took place.

...

HansHill is wrong to think that gassing claims have just been accepted. They were not accepted, until there was sufficient corroborating evidence to prove that they happened.

"In Latin a priori means “what comes first.” A priori understandings are the assumptions that come before the rest of the assessment, argument, or analysis."

Gassings were not assumed. That is typical revisionist nonsense, as they delude themselves into believing that gassings are not evidenced.

[HansHill]

Your side hasn’t proved that. Not by a long shot. Not only haven’t you taken the easiest path toward conclusively proving gassing didn’t happen — which is recreating the conditions of a homicidal gassing as described and seeing whether the subjects survived* — but you haven’t provided any evidence that people who are reported to have been gassed even survived.

* I’m certain you can find 1,000 Holocaust deniers willing to be subjected to gassing if they’re so sure it wouldn’t work.

I'm really not sure I follow this argument. Are you referring to a HcN gassing with Zyklon pellets?

Revisionists know full well that these conditions would be fatal had they occurred. In fact revisionists (for example Rudolf) even reflect on the suffocation aspect of these theoretical gassings would be fatal due to Oxygen depletion, no Revisionist would want to suffocate themselves as there's not really anything to prove here.

You could also be referring to CO gassings, which technically are not fatal under the conditions described.

Here's a list of over 100 studies were various cohorts of test subjects in varying sizes are exposed to diesel exhaust:
https://files.catbox.moe/tsvztw.ods

As far as I can see, all exposed subjects survived their respective exposures.

What exactly is your point? Apologies if I have misunderstood what you're asking.

[SanityCheck]

Mark Edele believes 1.7 million Jews were gassed at the Reinhardt camps.

I extended you the charity of assuming you had found Mark Edele mention this in the chapter I pointed to, indeed in the collection I pointed to (Shelter from the Holocaust). But it turned out that Reinhard appears nowhere in Edele's chapter in Shelter from the Holocaust, nor is there any reference to Reinhard anywhere in the entire collection, including the co-authored introduction. I could find one reference to Treblinka in someone else's chapter (and in the index, pointing to p.207).

So exactly where did the quote come from?

One of the most unavoidable rules of informed evidence-based discussion is providing traceable references, citing the correct publication, providing a page number or citing from a source. Relaxed discussion - on forums and in seminars - will relax this rule, but when it becomes really important, then /citation needed.

Mark Edele's chapter in Shelter from the Holocaust referenced studies identifying and counting Jewish victims of Katyn as well as Soviet deportations in 1940-41 and the repatriations. He also helped point to sources on the repatriations which refuted one of Graf's claims in the section of Sobibor you quoted.

[Numar Patru]

Revisionists know full well that these conditions would be fatal had they occurred. In fact revisionists (for example Rudolf) even reflect on the suffocation aspect of these theoretical gassings would be fatal due to Oxygen depletion, no Revisionist would want to suffocate themselves as there's not really anything to prove here.

I can assure you that not all "revisionists" believe that gassing with Zyklon-B pellets would be fatal under the conditions described.

If Rudolf concedes many would have died from suffocation, then that's to his benefit. In that case, however, why bother to measure for cyanide on gas chamber walls?

Here's a list of over 100 studies were various cohorts of test subjects in varying sizes are exposed to diesel exhaust:
https://files.catbox.moe/tsvztw.ods

Two things
* Your link requires that I download a file onto my computer, which I'm not going to do.
* I see what you did there.

[SanityCheck]

these predetermined genocidal conclusions are inherent to the methods and ideology of these academics.

That you've not demonstrated in the slightest.

Sheila Fitzpatrick and Mark Edele, two of the editors of Shelter from the Holocaust, are both primarily known as Russianists and are specialists in the history of Stalinism.

Methods = sources used, based around 1) language knowledge, 2) literature and published sources used, and 3) archives visited.

So Edele's chapter cites studies and document editions in English, Russian, Polish, and archives in Ukraine (with Russian documents), the UK - both the National Archives and Sikorski Museum in London, and US - registration cards of Jewish refugees in Central Asia copied to USHMM and put into a database, as well as copies from the evacuation commission records out of the State Archives of the Russian Federation, and copies of the Central Jewish Committee for Poland's records for postwar survivors (from the Jewish Historical Institute in Warsaw). Memoirs and oral histories of Polish Jews who fled east are also cited for illustration purposes. The 72 footnotes don't include the very extensive sourcing for the six tables.

Edele's other books cite from German documents about the Eastern Front and occupation, and even more about Red Army defectors, collaborators and POWs, so he also knows German. He wrote an overview on Stalinism at war a year or two ago. This gave due space to the Axis occupation and yes, discussed the extermination of the Jews under Axis occupation of the Soviet Union, but not at great length. There are more direct studies for that theme. Digging into his background further, he was born in Bavaria and attended several German universities before studying in Moscow and Chicago, then securing a post as a historian of Russia and the Soviet Union in Australia.

There are many historians and academics like Edele - who demonstrably write on many other topics and have breadth and range, but who have also touched on aspects of the Holocaust in their research and writing. They're not monomaniacs like the very small number of 'revisionist' authors. They have to teach and write about other forms of mass violence, in Edele's case Stalinist mass violence in particular. Which is why he was citing articles on the Jewish victims of Katyn in his chapter.


Attributing a particular ideology or political stance to a historian is often trickier than it looks. Unless by 'ideology' you mean 'not a raving neo-Nazi', since the entire political spectrum, barring only some of the extreme right, as well as the full range of Christian denominations in the western world agrees on the historicity of the Holocaust, so it's no more ideological than saying historians of the First World War have a 'WWI ideology'. Insisting that something which is consensus is ideological is basically gaslighting on your part - in a charitable interpretation - or more likely, a form of projection.

There are certainly historians who have identifiable ideological or political commitments. But there are many more whose precise politics can hardly be worked out from their research. For example, I could not tell you much about the political views of Peter Holquist, who specialises in the WWI-Russian Civil War era of Russian and Soviet history, based on his writings. There are vanishingly few historians who have a political commitment to the Soviet Union, even when they have spent their lives studying revolutionary Russia and the Soviet regime. That was already true decades before the collapse of the USSR thanks to Khrushchev's secret speech in 1956 (and the 1930s-1940s for others).

[Numar Patru]

For example, I could not tell you much about the political views of Peter Holquist, who specialises in the WWI-Russian Civil War era of Russian and Soviet history, based on his writings.

To one of your points, Holquist has published an article (in a volume) about the Armenian genocide, which is pretty far outside his usual wheelhouse except that it happened near a front between the Ottomans and Russia to a population that lived in both spaces. AFAIK, it's the only piece he's published not specifically on his primary area.

[curioussoul]

The whole point of informed evidence based discussion is to take what others have already done and use it critically, not to treat a citation as an unimpeachable authority.

I'm surprised at this concession. What you just said invalidated the vast majority of orthodox Holocaust "research" conducted since the war.

No, it doesn't.

It very much does. Mainstream Holocaust historians skirt the historical method and do not critically examine previous research or conclusions, but rather uncritically build upon previous conclusions as if they were absolute truth. This is a common problem in the humanities as a whole. The reproducibility crisis and the crisis of modern peer review is not limited to the humanities but the problem is at its absolute worst in those disciplines, and reaches its peak within Holocaust academia.

This is one of the reasons almost nothing of value has been published in terms of primary Holocaust research from orthodox historians in the past 20 years. Most "research" consist of rehashed meta studies, reviews, etc.

[Numar Patru]

It very much does. Mainstream Holocaust historians skirt the historical method and do not critically examine previous research or conclusions, but rather uncritically build upon previous conclusions as if they were absolute truth. This is a common problem in the humanities as a whole. The reproducibility crisis and the crisis of modern peer review is not limited to the humanities but the problem is at its absolute worst in those disciplines, and reaches its peak within Holocaust academia.

Actually, the biggest discipline in which this crisis has arisen is in psychology, which is a social science and not among the humanities.

Reproducibility, by the way, is something that the humanities doesn’t really engage with since it’s not a field based on experimentation.

The crisis in peer review is more complicated but lies in a few factors: a continued emphasis on high-volume publishing; a proliferation of open access journals, some of which are predatory; and finally, the fact that peer review isn’t paid, which means the most active scholars can’t afford to do it very much since their futures in scholarship depend on publishing their own work.

Hope that helps.