The problem here is assuming you've shown falsity, since this just creates a self-justifying spiral of throwing out evidence to only mention what one prefers to highlight, rather than considering the totality of the evidence. A further problem is that thinking you've knocked down other sources doesn't then transform your evidence-free interpretation or assertion into fact.Callafangers wrote: ↑Sat Nov 16, 2024 2:07 amTo review any document in isolation once certain "other evidence" is shown to be false or invalid is not unreasonable. If you disagree that the "other evidence" is false or invalid, then that's a debate which must first be settled before you can argue one should consider any "convergences". Without this, your argument amounts to deflection, avoiding a relevant focus on any single document. Moreover, there are certain characteristics that should always be considered in isolation such as the reliability of the document (and its source), itself. This comes before questions of the actual contents and any implications.SanityCheck wrote: ↑Fri Nov 15, 2024 11:25 pmDocuments from one provenance simply cannot be interpreted in isolation from other evidence, nor can one simply make shit up if the preferred provenance is not forthcoming. This is the persistent mistake that Mattogno and many other revisionists keep making.
There is ultimately no one way to tackle sources in a particular sequence.
History prefers contemporary sources but this means foregrounding them at the level of paragraphs and footnotes, while then bringing in later sources to fill in gaps and flesh out or corroborate the interpretation.
A 'hierarchy of evidence' appproach as asserted by Germar Rudolf a few times cannot in fact start with physical evidence, since nobody ever investigates a site or scene without someone saying 'come look'. But one could try to demonstrate how this might work, it is unlikely to ever stop with physical evidence, nor can one exclude all non-physical evidence, nor do revisionists in fact try to do this.
Then there is the order of discovery approach, which would start with the earliest public sources then proceed to post-liberation investigations in this case. But some like the Auschwitz investigation involved documents from the get-go. It is clear that on average, witnesses and site inspections came first, then documents were located in the surviving archives, sometimes years later. The order-of-discovery approach would be complicated by the east-west divide, and this would across all key camps and sites be quite problematic for revisionists, since they often forget about or don't know about sources which were recorded or discovered in the west vs ones in the east.
Isolating a document is also typically done from other documents, as with the circular firing squad of interpretations of the ZBL Auschwitz crematoria construction documents, with none of the explanations hitherto offered accounting smoothly for all the German documents, nor do any have a weight of corroboration from other sources (contemporary camp underground reports and postwar testimonies/investigations) to make them superior to the conventional explanation.
Separating out sources and making them bear the weight of explaining everything, or asserting an interpretation without supporting it and while ignoring the evidence to the contrary, is a very common tactic with revisionists in their write-ups, and is also mirrored by the focus on individual camps and killing sites in isolation from each other.
This swiftly breaks down with the documents as well as key witnesses, almost all German, but also key sets of underground reports, i.e. Polish, that do in fact discuss all of the camps together alongside discussing shooting actions, either explicitly or in clear relation to them.
Thus, the long and short Korherr reports cover up to the end of 1942 and the end of the first quarter of 1943 by geographic region and country. They only mention some KZs as concentration camps and not extermination sites, but do mention various ghettos and regions with ghettos in them. The report and statistics also include figures for the 'east' as well which are interpreted as referring to Einsatzgruppen bodycounts (but not other SS/Police unit reports which were evidently not transmitted to IV B 4 who provided Korherr with his sources).
The notorious editing of the report to excise all but one missed reference of Sonderbehandlung and replace it with 'transport to the Russian east' is hardly the only reason why everything in the report must be interpreted in the light of all evidence from all provenances that refers to events up to the end of 1942 and the first quarter of 1943. This is already hugely problematic if one focuses 'only' on German documents, even more so if one includes other contemporary sources, and one cannot actually exclude all postwar sources or later documents from consideration when interpreting the obviously censored or veiled remarks.
The choice here might appear binary - extermination or resettlement - but that in turn highlights the absolute lack of convincing sources for the latter, a problem that cannot be solved with the 'Dog Ate ALL My Homework' cope.
This example also hints at the problem with isolated reinterpretations of the meaning of words. The famous Goebbels diary entry of 27 March 1942 refers to liquidation of 60% of Jews in this phase of operations in Poland in the Lublin district, under Globocnik's supervision using methods he refuses to describe, which is certainly sinister. Some revisionists have tried defusing liquidation and argue that this meant dissolution or start with semantic-thesaurus babbling in an obvious attempt at deflection. But Goebbels elsewhere in 1941 and 1942 uses liquidation to refer to the mentally ill, i.e. T4, and in the same month as he notes Globocnik's liquidation he received one of the summary Einsatzgruppen reports and wrote about the liquidation of the Jews, evidently by shooting as reflected in the Einsatzgruppen reports.
The Goebbels diary from 27 March 1942 relates to Belzec pretty obviously, so one then needs to consider all of the other ways in which Belzec and the Reinhardt camps and Jewish policy in the Government-General were referred to and discussed in other German and non-German sources. That includes
- the Korherr report edit of Sonderbehandlung
- the Hoefle telegram noting the 'arrival' (Zugang) at B under the auspices of Einsatz Reinhardt, breaking down the same figure as appears in Korherr's report
- a Foreign Office document referring to an intention to subject unfit Romanian Jews to Sonderbehandlung, once transported to the Lublin district, together with a transport planning conference indicating Belzec was intended for these deportees
- Hans Frank referring to the annihilation or destruction (Vernichtung) of Jews in the GG being ordered from higher authority (i.e. Hitler) in December 1942
- a member of the German resistance leaking information that Jews were being gassed, and through referencing the Lublin ghetto action connecting this with Belzec, in 1942
- the Polish underground observing trains being unloaded at Belzec and not leaving with people, in April 1942, noting the speculation about either gas or electricity being used
to name but a few sources, which are all contemporary to before the Korherr report, and not the only contemporary ones, with more to be added for Sobibor, Treblinka, Majdanek, Chelmno, Auschwitz-Birkenau, the ghettos and labour/concentration camps also discussed in Korherr, and the mass shootings, also discussed in Korherr.
Of course, by the time Korherr's report was discovered, there had been postwar investigations of Belzec et al, and various other witness statements in 1945-47, including Gerstein's famous reports, plus more documents on the other camps and also proving the T4-AR connection in documents as well as witness statements, and Globocnik's final reports on AR. One could leave out the sources noted above that came to light after Korherr, but this still includes Hans Frank referring to the annihilation of the Jews, Victor Brack writing to Himmler about providing Globocnik with more men, the Belzec etc investigations, Gerstein, and so on. The interpretation reached by the 1940s that all of this meant mass murder was only confirmed by the later-discovered sources.
Ultimately it doesn't matter much which way around one proceeds, the key thing is consilience, and not boring the reader shitless as revisionists so often do with their wild swinging away at piecemeal evidence, rather than saving space and discussing sources together. Because you guys can't demonstrate that your long-winded 'methods' work when adopted and applied to other topics, and cannot stop others from addressing things more concisely and readably by combining different types of evidence and discussing different camps in tandem with shootings.
