Exterminationist Tactics - part 2

[curioussoul]

That's obviously complete nonsense as most of the key archives, such as the Polish Auschwitz Museum archive, is yet to be digitized (let alone in its entirety), as well as the Soviet archives in Moscow. The fact that almost nothing from the Polish Hoess trial is digitized should tell you everything you need to know about how serious this supposed historical field actually is. But even if these archives were entirely and completely digitized, that doesn't mean Holocaust revisionists attempting to publish their findings are not in legal jeopardy, not to mention the complete lack of funding for conducting large-scale, broad primary revisionist research on the Holocaust. In that sense, what only a few handful of revisionists have accomplished with little to no funding is almost superhuman. Compared to the lazy, sloppy and unscientific research conducted by most mainstream historians, it's truly remarkable how little the mainstream has accomplished since the war.

As you're still failing to demonstrate any *actual* familiarity with mainstream historiography, the concluding bluster is rather cute.

Digitisation has proceeded on several levels. The first public level of open access archives online has put more than enough out there to keep someone busy for years- all the NMT trials, all the key captured German records NARA microfilm series, many of the Bundesarchiv originals also added (Himmler's papers being brought to a high percentage just before Christmas), many other archives around the world uploading key collections. Yad Vashem and the Arolsen Archives provide a wealth of extra sources, so do the translations of Polish investigations at Chronicles of Terror. All of the West and East German trial judgements are open access now. The Eichmann trial has been online in full (with document exhibits) for almost 15 years. The key files of the German Foreign Office archive (Politisches Archiv des Auswärtigen Amts) have been online for about 3 years now. The Frankfurt Auschwitz Trial investigation files have been digitised for several years open access, as they're now part of the UNESCO Memory of the World Register. The Ringelblum Archive is also part of the UNESCO Memory of the World Register, and has been completely published alongside uploads of the originals, in Polish with a quarter of the volumes already translated to English.

Document editions, diaries and published sources beyond the Justiz und NS-Verbrechen series are pretty numerous, many being open access now - the entire VEJ series of 16 volumes for one. Others are accessible with a university login. The logic of document editions might be called into question with open access digitisation, but translations and annotations still add value. There are new editions of significance and relevance virtually every year. Russian and Ukrainian language document editions also abound on respective elibraries or websites, some new and some old. Retrospective digitisation of older works has made serious inroads into many early publications, too.

All of this represents a complete sea change from 15 years ago. A number of collections which were marketed through the commercial digital archive providers like Gale Cengage are now open access - the Wiener Library testimonies collection (open access and now also translated), Hans Frank's Diensttagebuch, and other things which looked rather limp when these were seemingly the only things on offer.

The pace has accelerated since 2020, and will only snowball in the coming years. One outcome of the 2022 war in Ukraine was the digitisation of USHMM's copies of various Ukrainian archive collections from their microfilms, while the archives in Ukraine also picked up their pace and have put more online.

The third level is digitisation internal to archives, which is where your complaints about the Hoess trial et al fall entirely flat. USHMM has digital copies of all of these collections, either in full (all of the NTN trials) or in extensive sample form (the former Osobyi Arkhiv collections, with the ZBL Auschwitz collection in full). Most cannot be put online open access due to the copying agreements or national privacy law concerns. But they can be downloaded on-site and taken away on personal hard drives. One signs waivers for a few of the European archives, with relatively little detail, the main concern seems to be people slapping things online without permission, beyond that the materials are fair game, and for the Polish and former Soviet archives, there are no forms, just statements about not publishing things without permission (which also holds true for British archives, among others, so is not some sinister conspiracy). The waivers aren't for specific files, just entire archives if the originating archive demanded this. So not even vaguely traceable.

David Irving was reported through the grapevine as visiting USHMM back in the 2010s, along with the reply to someone's query about why he was being let in, that he couldn't be turned away, as USHMM is a public archive. There are exceedingly few name 'revisionists' with any real notoriety, and a new researcher would pass entirely under the radar, especially as they might well decide to use a pseudonym for publications (like Thomas Dalton has).

These supposedly digitized archives is a complete smokescreen, for many reasons. Firstly, the most relevant of all these archives are the Moscow archives, including the secret FSB archives, and the Polish Auschwitz Museum archive. There is absolutely zero transparency in terms of what comes out of this particular archive. We know it still contains reams of unpublished, key documents that refute fundamental claims regarding the Holocaust at Auschwitz. We know this because minor documents are constantly being randomly published in minor studies, such as when Helena Kubica published her Mengele study, which for the first time ever contained information from Mengele's own research notes, biological samples, and more. Secondly, because this archive, and many of the other archives, are located in countries were Holocaust revisionism is illegal, the curators and researchers in these institutions have every reason not to allow them to be completely digitized and published freely online. Not only would this undermine the position of the very 'Holocaust researchers' who make their living 'studying' these archives, but it would potentially give millions of documents of ammunition to revisionists, which they can not allow to happen. As I've said, I've known and worked with these people and I know the struggles of academics trying to fight for relevancy, funding, notoriety, fame, etc. The one thing they fear most is regular people being able to access the contents of these archives freely online, especially in the case of the Holocaust.

The archives you mentioned as being already digitized are for the most part irrelevant as far as primary research is concerned. The Justiz und NS-Verbrechen archives was an admittedly valuable digitization, as well as some of the British intercepts, but, again, the key archives are not digitized and never will be. The USHMM was given special access to digitize some contents from the Auschwitz Museum but it's far from complete, and the USHMM is also never going to publish all of their scanned/digitized material freely online. Seriously, the Polish Hoess Trial, which is probably one of the most famous trials in history, is basically impossible to access. In fact, it's so hard to access the complete set of volumes that not even Carlo Mattogno was able to access a handful of the volumes for his Chronicle book and his critique of Czech.

The copyright excuse is laughable. 99.9% of the relevant contents of these archives are in the free domain. You'll find any excuse you can to pretend like revisionists are on an equal footing with orthodox 'researchers' because you've literally built a career on pretending to 'study', 'unlock' and 'map' revisionism and its members, as if its some sort of cult that needs to be put under the microscope and mapped out and registered.

Simply pathetic.

[SanityCheck]

Well, no, the material you've not seen won't tell a radically different story because it would generally confirm the story you currently don't believe.

In which case, why not focus on the most common material? Why make vague promises about more obscure material you are hoping/assuming people have not seen?

My guess is that something like 20-30 hours of research is enough to start reaching a tentative conclusion on this issue (whether the Holocaust is false). Once you get to 100 hours, 200 hours, 500 hours, I don't think many people will still be on the fence at that point. Most will have a fairly confident conclusion by then, and it would need to be something quite dramatic to swing things.

The polarized conclusions between the two sides are due to fundamental differences in perspective. It's not driven by the n+1th document or testimony.

The fundamental differences in perspective include whether one can leap to conclusions after 20-30 hours, and indeed on how one evaluates bodies of evidence, and indeed whether it's acceptable to dismiss evidence without reading it, and on what basis, and with what consequences, such as whether having an explanation for what happened is needed.

The issue with more evidence vs 'common material' is fairly fundamental in several respects. The first is that more sources corroborating what was used in earlier accounts become available; in classic terms the difference between 'Nuremberg' documents and the documents and sources found in archives.

A good example are the gas vans documents; in the 1940s there was the 501-PS bundle, then it was realised there was a further file in the RSHA records so this was known from the 1960s onwards, and then more came out in the 1990s. The range of sources corroborating the use of gas vans likewise expanded, and come from various perspectives. For example a German diary from the Warthegau whose author, Alexander Hohenstein, a local official, heard of the use of gas vans at Chelmno. It's not a Polish or Jewish source, so that makes it less immediately impeachable. Then one learns about a memoir written by the forestry official who supplied firewood to Chelmno, Heinz May, written in early 1945 before the end of the war. Welp, it ended up as a copy in Yad Vashem - maybe someone faked it? But then one learns about the interrogation of a SD official who deserted across the Swiss border, by Swiss military intelligence, a neutral country, describing independently how Nebe instigated the development of gas vans, after describing accurately the deployment of the Einsatzgruppen in 1941, and knowing also about Auschwitz using cyanide gas, the interrogation taking place before the big wave of publicity with Vrba-Wetzler.

These sources are discussed in various mainstream works - Saul Friedlander and others through to the specialists on Chelmno have cited Heinz May, the SD deserter report was discussed and transcribed for the crucial section in an obscure book in German on what was known in Switzerland from diplomatic and intelligence circles, then cited in a book by Christian Gerlach, and then cited on HC blog by Hans Metzner.

No doubt you or another revisionist could come up with various copes for why all of these sources don't corroborate the gas vans documents, and why we should disbelieve all the other sources, contemporary and postwar, about gas vans use. Some are very 'common', like the 'Szlamek' fugitive account from Chelmno, which Mattogno did not really defuse very well in his book on Chelmno. Non-specialist readers of Martin Gilbert, Saul Friedlander and David Cesarani would have encountered this source. You know, the kind of books that someone investing 20-30 hours in the topic might read, if they've not opted to waste 20-30 hours reading Butz, who discussed almost none of these sources.

They won't have encountered the SD deserter interrogation, which is far from 'new' since it was first discussed and transcribed in print 31 years ago (in Gaston Haas, ‘Wenn man gewusst hätte, wass drüben im Reich abspielte’. Was man in der Schweiz von der Judenvernichtung wusste 1941-1943 (Frankfurt am Main, 1994). The document in question is online at the Swiss Federal Archives. Hans Metzner ordered it from them in the 2010s before they began digitising so extensively.

They probably haven't seen blog posts on other documents, such as this one from Hans on a document noting that the purpose of SS-Sonderkommando Kulmhof was the "immediate fight against and annihilation of state enemies", which was of "crucial importance for the solution of one of the most important ethnic problems" and required "in particular a manly and strong mental attitude". The document was included in the document edition VEJ/PMJ 10 in 2020 (German) and 2024 (English). The blog post has nearly 3000 views, there aren't metrics for how many have looked up the VEJ/PMJ volumes at the publisher or now that the VEJ series is open access, but clearly it's not being hidden, kind of the opposite, really.
https://holocaustcontroversies.blogspot ... elmno.html
https://pmj-documents.org/free-download/

There are lots of other sources in the 5000+ entirely contemporary documents of the 16 volume VEJ series - remember the German volumes are now *all* open access - which would force someone who decided after 20-30 hours of reading revisionist bullshaite that the Holocaust didn't happen to have to think up a cope or handwave the entire series away. Which is likely why Mattogno only cited 31 documents out of 626 from the two volumes on the Soviet Union and systematically ignored the rest, also largely bungling the ones he did cite. (These volumes did not include the 'classic' Einsatzgruppen reports, which appeared separately in three very large volumes in small print, and which have since been made open access as original colour-scanned files.)

The documents ignored included now very 'common' diarists like the Polish journalist Kazimierz Sakowicz, who wrote a diary while living right next to the Ponary killing site outside Vilnius in 1941-43. Sakowicz has been cited in Martin Gilbert, Saul Friedlander and David Cesarani's books to name just a few by generalists, obviously also being cited in the more specialist literature on Lithuania. Gilbert cited him from a 1980s brochure, the full diary came out in English in 2005, twenty years ago. It's safe to say Sakowicz is now 'common', not least because he has his own Wiki page:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kazimierz_Sakowicz


It's pretty hard to know what someone has or hasn't come across, which is why transparency about one's reading is helpful in these discussions. If most attention was paid to Hilberg 1961 and Butz, then clearly an awful lot of sources will have been missed. But there are still many sources cited in Hilberg 1961 - especially in chapters other than the one on killing centres - which should have given would-be revisionists pause, which speak directly to the core issue (mass murder). There were a lot more sources by the time of Hilberg 2003, and 22 years on even more which would be contenders for 'must include'.

[SanityCheck]

....So there's no lack of references. Edele seems to have taken the figure of 1.7 million from Peter Black's article on the Trawnikis, which then gives a lower figure of 1.5 million in the next paragraph on p.2. But the footnote to the 1.7 million figure references ghetto deportations, which Black goes on to discuss as Trawnikis took part in these as well, while the 1.5 million 'direct' figure references the then-standard literature on the Reinhard camps (Black's article appeared in 2011).

15. For the killing centers and deportations, see Yitzhak Arad, Belzec, Sobibor, Treblinka:The Operation Reinhard Death Camps (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1987); Ru¨ckerl, NS-Vernichtungslager, 132–242. Only Sobibor has a solid historical monograph: Jules Schelvis, Sobibor: A History of a Death Camp (Oxford: Berg in association with the
United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, 2007). For Treblinka 2, see Jacek Młynarczyk, “Treblinka—Ein Todeslager der ‘Aktion Reinhardt,’” in Musial, Vo¨lkermord, 257–81; for Belzec, see Michael Tregenza, “Belzec—Das vergessene Lager des Holocausts,” Jahrbuch des Fritz-Bauer-Instituts (2000): 241–67.

So we rapidly find Arad 1987, a widely cited reference whose conclusion uses the 1.7 million figure and presented data on deportations in appendices citing also commonly cited overview articles on the regions of the Government-General. Arad 1987 has at least 486 citations according to Google Scholar (likely a slight underestimate, but this fits well with how often I've seen it cited)....

Here, Sanity Check is attempting to show us that his cited scholars are not guilty of appeals to consensus, circular reasoning and self-evident gassings. Join me in reading carefully what he has written to see for ourselves!

Edele's citation for 1.7m murders, is not a citation for murders, but rather a citation for deportations from Peter Black's article (we'll ignore the 1.5 to 1.7 million discrepancy as that is "close enough" for now). Peter Black's figure in turn is taken from the "then-standard literature" on the Reinhard camps (whatever that means)

Black in turn, cites Yitzak Arad! Those of you familiar with Arad will know he in turn, cites our good friend Jankiel Wiernik, amongst others. While on the topic of i) Arad, ii) Circular reasoning, and iii) appeals to consensus, here was an interesting artilce i remember reading, which has become relevant since Sanity Check has brought it up, which yet again demonstrates my exact point:

https://www.timesofisrael.com/how-i-mea ... holocaust/

key paragraphs

The full scope of this genocidal slaughter appears to be undocumented in history. Available information before this study was mostly reconstructed indirectly, partially conjectured, and usually given on an annual timescale, rather than daily or monthly. That meant completely missing the three-month slaughter.

My analysis was based on carefully compiled train records presented in a 1987 book by Holocaust historian Yitzhak Arad. Arad documents approximately 500 transportations from some 400 different Polish Jewish communities, recording for individual days the location, number of victims of each transportation and final death camp destination.

There you have it friends, the exact state of affairs from our friends in the Orthodox community! Remember, I am using his chosen citations, despite him telling me I've cherrypicked anything (in fact he;s cherrypicking my observation of poor old Mark Edele who's out here catching strays it seems, as in my original rebuttal I exposed approx half a dozen others he has yet to try defend!)

How is this any different to the way other mass fatalities are typically referenced?

[SanityCheck]

The self referential nature of holocaust historians and their generated literature is indeed disturbing. More interesting would be real history composed from source, though that is rare.

How is this any different to how other historians and social scientists reference other mass fatalities?

[Numar Patru]

Or different from any scholar writing about any topic? Has our guy ever heard of a literature review?

I once shared an office with an expert on game theory. She had dozens of books on the topic on her shelves. Every fucking one of them cited John Nash’s dissertation from Princeton in the first paragraph of its lit review.

[SanityCheck]

These supposedly digitized archives is a complete smokescreen, for many reasons. Firstly, the most relevant of all these archives are the Moscow archives, including the secret FSB archives, and the Polish Auschwitz Museum archive. There is absolutely zero transparency in terms of what comes out of this particular archive. We know it still contains reams of unpublished, key documents that refute fundamental claims regarding the Holocaust at Auschwitz. We know this because minor documents are constantly being randomly published in minor studies, such as when Helena Kubica published her Mengele study, which for the first time ever contained information from Mengele's own research notes, biological samples, and more. Secondly, because this archive, and many of the other archives, are located in countries were Holocaust revisionism is illegal, the curators and researchers in these institutions have every reason not to allow them to be completely digitized and published freely online. Not only would this undermine the position of the very 'Holocaust researchers' who make their living 'studying' these archives, but it would potentially give millions of documents of ammunition to revisionists, which they can not allow to happen. As I've said, I've known and worked with these people and I know the struggles of academics trying to fight for relevancy, funding, notoriety, fame, etc. The one thing they fear most is regular people being able to access the contents of these archives freely online, especially in the case of the Holocaust.

The archives you mentioned as being already digitized are for the most part irrelevant as far as primary research is concerned. The Justiz und NS-Verbrechen archives was an admittedly valuable digitization, as well as some of the British intercepts, but, again, the key archives are not digitized and never will be. The USHMM was given special access to digitize some contents from the Auschwitz Museum but it's far from complete, and the USHMM is also never going to publish all of their scanned/digitized material freely online. Seriously, the Polish Hoess Trial, which is probably one of the most famous trials in history, is basically impossible to access. In fact, it's so hard to access the complete set of volumes that not even Carlo Mattogno was able to access a handful of the volumes for his Chronicle book and his critique of Czech.

The copyright excuse is laughable. 99.9% of the relevant contents of these archives are in the free domain. You'll find any excuse you can to pretend like revisionists are on an equal footing with orthodox 'researchers' because you've literally built a career on pretending to 'study', 'unlock' and 'map' revisionism and its members, as if its some sort of cult that needs to be put under the microscope and mapped out and registered.

Simply pathetic.

Copyright or privacy law concerns but also the wording of original copying agreements drafted before the possibility of seem to be limiting what is put out entirely online and what might be digitised at USHMM or Yad Vashem. That still doesn't change the fact that one can very easily visit USHMM and access very substantial collections of source material, including the Hoess trial, Auschwitz SS Staff Trial, and much else.

Now you shift the goalposts to vaguely handwaved further collections in the Auschwitz Museum, ignoring how there are countless archives across Europe and the world with more sources on Auschwitz, including also Mengele's experiments (the DFG file on Verschuer's grants working with Mengele is digitised at the Bundesarchiv).

There's plenty to be getting on with, and no, the archives which have digitised files open access are far from irrelevant to the subject as a whole. One might think that the standard NARA microfilm series have been exhausted, but I could still find hitherto un-cited sources in them speaking directly to the question of mass murder of Jews, when sampling some of the fresh uploads over the past few years.

Given that archives as a whole seem to be at about 2-3% of estimated contents digitised (going by numerous examples of national and regional archives indicating the state of play), if they have the funding to digitise actively, then the whole process will take decades. In some cases one can see online catalogues where files are marked very conservatively for release in 2040 or beyond, in most cases one simply has no idea if the institution will ever put materials online. Russia has been massively more conservative with open access digitisation, Poland's state archives are much more open, but the IPN and museums seem behind.

The Third Reich and Holocaust eras have significantly above average rates of digitisation, with a variety of pilot projects over the past 15 years, due to the higher level of interest. Just as an example, the Wiener Library is launching a new digital collections platform on Holocaust Memorial Day, following previous digitisation of several testimonies collections. The newsletter about this landed in my inbox today.
https://wienerholocaustlibrary.org/even ... llections/

What is striking is how limited the use of the already open access digital archives has been from 'revisionists'. Mattogno has evidently twigged to some of the resources, but he's only managed to engage with a fraction of the resources, and with his age (74 on January 12, apparently) there are good reasons to wonder whether he could physically digest the new uploads from 2020-2024, since he did not exactly start where most conventional historians have done, with the classic captured German records microfilmed by the Americans and restituted to West Germany. I'll wait for any sign of a neophyte revisionist researcher who shows any signs of exploiting the open access resources, instead of playing the 'classified' card as you've tried to do.

Once again: there are literal years of research which can be done with the now open access materials, and every sign that ever more collections will be added to the growing pile during those years.

Of course, it would help if the likes of Mattogno are not so hopeless as to assert stupidities like “Even more inexplicable, from the perspective of orthodox Holocaust historiography, is the reopening of the camp in April 1944. The claim that it had to exterminate the Jews of the Łódź Ghetto has no documentary support” (in his book on Hilberg, pp.109-110), which would be regarded by anyone not falling for this blatant gaslighting as utterly refuted by the Greiser-Pohl correspondence of February 1944.

[SanityCheck]

I'm very much familiar with conventional, mainstream, orthodox research on the Holocaust and I try to stay up-to-date with the latest findings and publications (which, to be fair, is not an awful lot), in addition to the latest revisionist research (which tends to be higher in quality but also in its historiographical rigor and utilization of primary source documents). Since I've been involved in academia for many years and know the comings and goings of academic research in the humanities there's no point pretending that what mainstream Holocaust studies have accomplished in the last 20 years is anything short of laughable in the strictly scientific and historical sense.

Still no reply to my query about which languages this applies to and the sub-literatures. I'll give you a few more chances to demonstrate your familiarity before drawing conclusions about why you cannot answer a simple question in at least shorthand form, with some specifics.

[Archie]

The fundamental differences in perspective include whether one can leap to conclusions after 20-30 hours, and indeed on how one evaluates bodies of evidence, and indeed whether it's acceptable to dismiss evidence without reading it, and on what basis, and with what consequences, such as whether having an explanation for what happened is needed.

The issue with more evidence vs 'common material' is fairly fundamental in several respects. The first is that more sources corroborating what was used in earlier accounts become available; in classic terms the difference between 'Nuremberg' documents and the documents and sources found in archives.
[...]

1) Note that I said tentative conclusion after 20-30 hours. You seem to think that's too fast, yet the median for the believer side is ~ZERO hours of research.

2) Remember that we don't have to start from scratch. We can free ride on those who have already looked into it. We can listen to the best arguments from both sides and can get a sense of who has the better case very quickly.

3) If one side seems to have a much stronger case after 20 hours, then it is in fact reasonable to expect that to continue to hold.

4) The point is not to "dismiss" evidence. It's to discount promised evidence that hasn't really been presented.

5) You do not need to give people ALL of the evidence. You need to give people ENOUGH evidence.

[fireofice]

yet the median for the believer side is ~ZERO hours of research

Yeah most of my life believing in the holocaust I barely knew anything about it. As a denier I have learned more about the topic than when I accepted it. Is he saying that if one doesn't spend more than 30 hours on the topic, we should be agnostic about the holocaust? That would be an interesting position to hold. I've also heard some mock "deniers" who don't know German for taking a position. Oh so if we don't know German, we should be holocaust agnostic? They back off of that pretty quickly.

[Nessie]

Someone who, starting from scratch, researches what is evidenced to have happened during the Holocaust, will find evidence of;

- anti-Semitism and repression of the Jews by the Nazis, who regarded them as an enemy of the German state and their desired Reich. That establishes motive.

- A gradual introduction of laws that required the identification of Jews, removed Jewish rights and property and separated them from society with the first imprisonments, just for being Jewish. That establishes opportunity, meaning it gave the Nazis the opportunity to treat the Jews with increasing cruelty, without any risk to themselves.

- After the war started, the identification, registering and imprisoning of Jews gathered pace. Between 1939 and 1942 ghettos were created and filled rapidly with millions of Jews in the eastern territories, where the majority of European Jews lived. Western, in particular German Jews were transported east, to those ghettos. In 1941, the earliest reports of mass shootings come from the east, along with reports that areas were being declared Jew free.

- In late 1941 into 1942 a group of camps, Action Reinhard, were constructed in the former Poland and the ghettos started to clear their populations to those camps. Jews from camps elsewhere in Europe were also sent on transports. The documentary trail for the vast majority of those Jews ends in those camps. There is no evidence that the east, which was being cleared of Jews, is being filled up with Jews from the ghettos. Those camps have mostly ceased operation by the end of 1943. Many of the ghettos have closed. Korherr reports to Himmler that the Jewish population has fallen by 4 million. Of the Nazi occupied or aligned countries, only Hungary, Romania and France have large Jewish populations. Polish intelligence are reporting that the Nazis are operating death camps, killing people inside chambers.

- In 1944, the Nazis take over the governing of Hungary and its Jews are transported to A-B, where, just as happened at the AR camps, the majority are not needed for work and their documentary trail ends in the camp. The last of the ghettos at Lodz closes and also sends its population to A-B. Escaped Slovakian and Polish prisoners report the use of gas chambers.

- By the end of 1944, there is no sizeable Jewish population left anywhere in Europe. As the Soviets advance, they find empty camps and ghettos. Their liberation of Jews is counted in the thousands, may of whom had been in hiding. The Nazis flee west, taking as many prisoners with them as they can. In 1945 the western Allies find overpopulated camps, but only liberate a few hundred thousand Jews. The displaced persons agencies report only dealing with a few hundred thousand Jews. Every occupied country reports only small numbers of their Jewish citizens returning home. There is minimal Jewish emigration to the USA, Palestine or anywhere else. What had been a huge population in eastern Europe, particularly Poland, was now tiny, with places reporting no returning Jews.

Overwhelming evidence of mass murder, no evidence that millions were not killed and survived the war.

[Stubble]

The self referential nature of holocaust historians and their generated literature is indeed disturbing. More interesting would be real history composed from source, though that is rare.

How is this any different to how other historians and social scientists reference other mass fatalities?

Tragically, not very. Occasionally someone comes along and breaks new ground, but, usually it is just a tilling of the same ground.

That's part of what I respect about Irving's work, though I may not completely agree with him.

Part of my issue in this specific case is the reliance of the primary literature on demonstrable liars. Use of better primary witnesses would have been a plus.

Here the discussion has been more about demographics and distribution however, and a couple of flys shouldn't spoil the punch. When dealing with these numbers, it is accounting methods, not witnesses, that are at issue.

My remark was simply a lament about the nature of holocaust history. Unfortunately, for the Operation Reinhardt camps, not unlike ancient history, we are left in such a situation. Little to nothing remains in the east, short of a busted tile here or there or the outline of a foundation. That doesn't mean that the entire event should be so constrained. Out of hundreds of thousands it seems like the odd handful of demonstrable liars represent the lion's share of the historical spotlight.

To me, this is part of the tragedy.

[HansHill]

Tragically, not very. Occasionally someone comes along and breaks new ground, but, usually it is just a tilling of the same ground.

That's part of what I respect about Irving's work, though I may not completely agree with him.

Part of my issue in this specific case is the reliance of the primary literature on demonstrable liars. Use of better primary witnesses would have been a plus.

Here the discussion has been more about demographics and distribution however, and a couple of flys shouldn't spoil the punch. When dealing with these numbers, it is accounting methods, not witnesses, that are at issue.

My remark was simply a lament about the nature of holocaust history. Unfortunately, for the Operation Reinhardt camps, not unlike ancient history, we are left in such a situation. Little to nothing remains in the east, short of a busted tile here or there or the outline of a foundation. That doesn't mean that the entire event should be so constrained. Out of hundreds of thousands it seems like the odd handful of demonstrable liars represent the lion's share of the historical spotlight.

To me, this is part of the tragedy.

Hang on a second - other tragedies can usually be evidenced for a start. I spent the past few days peeling back the onion layers of Sanity Check's sources, and the Wizard of Oz behind the curtain, to evidence mass murder was.... train timetables

Imagine!

>A cataclysmic massacre has just taken place in New York City
>Here is a booklet of ticket stubs as evidence

Unfathomable levels of chutzpah here.

[SanityCheck]

1) Note that I said tentative conclusion after 20-30 hours. You seem to think that's too fast, yet the median for the believer side is ~ZERO hours of research.

I think you're misapplying median here. You're presumably referring to people encountering Holocaust denial and rejecting it outright, sometimes referring to their limited exposure to this or that film, book, museum visit, what they remember from school, sometimes misremembering things. Maybe they can be said to have done 'zero' research, but the minority who have read more will still pull that up past zero.

The same issue affects your side, since Nick Fuentes and the groypers are hardly avid readers of Mattogno, from what anyone can tell.

2) Remember that we don't have to start from scratch. We can free ride on those who have already looked into it. We can listen to the best arguments from both sides and can get a sense of who has the better case very quickly.

3) If one side seems to have a much stronger case after 20 hours, then it is in fact reasonable to expect that to continue to hold.

The pattern with people falling down rabbit holes is fairly well established by now; someone might encounter a contrarian idea and be drawn in by this or that much earlier than 20 hours, and by the time they've moved from X or a video to reading a book, they're already in an information bubble and putting on blinkers. Once they've invested time they will stick with the idea as long as it appears to be useful to them. That depends on their social environment and whether it's acceptable to voice the opinions. It can take years for the person who fell down a rabbit hole to admit they were wrong, since people don't like admitting they might be incorrect. Very few can revise their political, social, cultural or other opinions after proper consideration, which takes a lot longer and requires a genuine curiosity.

In practice, exposure to ideas takes place over longer periods in less formal ways. Someone might have marinated dozens or even hundreds of hours in a particular information bubble before 'doing their own research'. I am sure there are groypers who've wasted weeks of their lives online and are committed 'revisionists' who've never spent 20-30 hours actually doing any kind of reading. Such are the joys of the post-literate society.

The complacency and passivity works for mainstream opinions, too.

4) The point is not to "dismiss" evidence. It's to discount promised evidence that hasn't really been presented.

And that's where "hasn't really been presented" needs clarifying. The example I gave of the SD deserter interrogation by the Swiss mentioning the origins of gas vans has been discussed in several books, including a recent one in English, but there's no guarantee that you or anyone else might have read it. It was also discussed on HC blog, but again there's no guarantee you or anyone else read it.

This shows how individual sources are more like oldstyle flak shells than guided missiles.

There's no guarantee that in any one introduction or summary, xyz source might even be mentioned, because word lengths and how historians etc write things up.

Closer reading of an entire literature might establish when a particular memorable source/quote first was used, and then will notice that it does and doesn't recur in subsequent books. This is not unique to the Holocaust, one can see it in military history and other fields as well. Certain diaries, memoirs, documents recur, but not everyone cites every single example.

5) You do not need to give people ALL of the evidence. You need to give people ENOUGH evidence.

Again, therein lies the rub - what counts as enough evidence clearly varies from person to person. But with revisionists who are too proud to admit they might have reached a premature judgement, then there will be never enough evidence.

[SanityCheck]

Tragically, not very. Occasionally someone comes along and breaks new ground, but, usually it is just a tilling of the same ground.

That's part of what I respect about Irving's work, though I may not completely agree with him.

Part of my issue in this specific case is the reliance of the primary literature on demonstrable liars. Use of better primary witnesses would have been a plus.

Here the discussion has been more about demographics and distribution however, and a couple of flys shouldn't spoil the punch. When dealing with these numbers, it is accounting methods, not witnesses, that are at issue.

My remark was simply a lament about the nature of holocaust history. Unfortunately, for the Operation Reinhardt camps, not unlike ancient history, we are left in such a situation. Little to nothing remains in the east, short of a busted tile here or there or the outline of a foundation. That doesn't mean that the entire event should be so constrained. Out of hundreds of thousands it seems like the odd handful of demonstrable liars represent the lion's share of the historical spotlight.

To me, this is part of the tragedy.

Hang on a second - other tragedies can usually be evidenced for a start. I spent the past few days peeling back the onion layers of Sanity Check's sources, and the Wizard of Oz behind the curtain, to evidence mass murder was.... train timetables

Imagine!

>A cataclysmic massacre has just taken place in New York City
>Here is a booklet of ticket stubs as evidence

Unfathomable levels of chutzpah here.

Arad and Rueckerl only cited train timetables in their books?

[Stubble]

Tragically, not very. Occasionally someone comes along and breaks new ground, but, usually it is just a tilling of the same ground.

That's part of what I respect about Irving's work, though I may not completely agree with him.

Part of my issue in this specific case is the reliance of the primary literature on demonstrable liars. Use of better primary witnesses would have been a plus.

Here the discussion has been more about demographics and distribution however, and a couple of flys shouldn't spoil the punch. When dealing with these numbers, it is accounting methods, not witnesses, that are at issue.

My remark was simply a lament about the nature of holocaust history. Unfortunately, for the Operation Reinhardt camps, not unlike ancient history, we are left in such a situation. Little to nothing remains in the east, short of a busted tile here or there or the outline of a foundation. That doesn't mean that the entire event should be so constrained. Out of hundreds of thousands it seems like the odd handful of demonstrable liars represent the lion's share of the historical spotlight.

To me, this is part of the tragedy.

Hang on a second - other tragedies can usually be evidenced for a start. I spent the past few days peeling back the onion layers of Sanity Check's sources, and the Wizard of Oz behind the curtain, to evidence mass murder was.... train timetables

Imagine!

>A cataclysmic massacre has just taken place in New York City
>Here is a booklet of ticket stubs as evidence

Unfathomable levels of chutzpah here.

I understand what you are saying, and I get the point. I was pointing at a deeper problem with the history as it has come to us. Why were the mouths of demonstrable liars chosen to bring us the golden yarn? Them there is the problem of who has done most of the spinning.

So far as the ticket stubs go, however one can go about counting heads, they will choose to go about counting heads.

The train stubs are a good way to show how many people arrived in an area, it is a terrible way to presume how many people left an area.

Imagine if you will, you have a major event at a stadium. You have the ticket stubs from the box. You have some plane tickets that show arrival and departure for the event. Some people called a cab, so there is a record of that. You have some percentage of people you have no record for after the event is over.

Do you assume that all of those people were killed at the event?

This is of course straw manning, and it is not representative of the exact facts and details concerned. I am simply using it here as an example of how flawed such an analysis can be.

It's kind of like basing history unironically on black propaganda generated by the Polish Government in Exile, the Soviet, etc. You know?