No Sources, No History

[Stubble]

I just got here, and I was kind of wondering what all the fuss is about.

I see this fella here in the OP has raised a valid argument, no sources, no history.

If anyone would be so kind, could they provide me with an extant, primary, credible source for the claim that 6,000,000 jews died in the holocaust?

I understand that this post may be considered off topic, but, I'd like to ask the admins to entertain it ever so briefly and I promise I will bring the point back to the original intent of the thread.

Large-scale events are not proven by single sources, especially not when they concern millions of people.

They also have to be defined properly, so the six million figure is rounded up and not the actual death toll as can be reasonably determined like other death tolls in mass fatality events (wars, famines, genocides).

So while you go on to talk of six million gassed, this is and has always been incorrect; if your teacher taught you this they weren't very good, or you misremembered what was taught. The actual total is around 5.3 million Jews dying in confinement or by direct killing, with circa 600,000 dying in camps and ghettos not considered extermination camps, a proportion of whom were shot or hanged, over 2 million shot in mass or individual executions, and around 2.6 million dying en route to or at the main extermination camps and sites (in numerical order: Auschwitz, Treblinka, Belzec, Sobibor, Chelmno, Majdanek, Maly Trostenets and Semlin).

Higher numbers were certainly in circulation in the 1940s and during the Cold War, but either these were rapidly reduced with cross-referencing countries and regions for deportations to particular camps, or persistent overestimates were of people - thus non-Jews as well as Jews.

The Auschwitz 4 million number was a particularly egregious case of this, essentially seeking to swamp the 1 million Jewish victims in a universalising total that would allow post-war Poland and the East Bloc in particular to downplay the Jewish dimension of Auschwitz. Millions of non-Jews died elsewhere, e.g. 2.7 million Soviet POWs in POW camps with only a minority taken to be killed or worked to death in concentration camps (including some thousands to Auschwitz).

So when the Auschwitz museum recalculated the death toll after the end of the Cold War, this made no difference to the Holocaust total, since Jewish historians such as Raul Hilberg had been operating with 1 million since 1961, out of a death toll he calculated at 5.1 million, not 6 million. The continued repetition of six million by others doesn't change this, either, since the lower end of 5 million is what is best supported by sources too innumerable to list here.

16 volume document edition series downloadable for free in German (VEJ series), and first three volumes in English (PMJ series), roughly 5000 documents covering 1933-45 across Europe (so not exclusively about mass murder - the title stands for the Persecution and Murder of the European Jews).
https://pmj-documents.org/free-download/

USHMM Encyclopedia of Camps and Ghettos downloadable for free from the museum or as chapters on JSTOR open access
https://www.ushmm.org/research/publicat ... s/download

The 1991 collection Dimension des Völkermords: Die Zahl der jüdischen Opfer des Nationalsozialismus, with an unreliable introduction failing to eliminate border-change induced overlaps, but acknowledging them points to the lower end of 5 million, and reliable chapters for all countries in 'the rest of Europe', good introductions to Poland and the USSR where clarification has been greatest after the end of the Cold War. Also open access
https://www.degruyter.com/document/doi/ ... 08332/html

Open access literature including articles, dissertations and ebooks
https://holocaustcontroversies.blogspot ... ndary.html

Open access archives and published sources
https://holocaustcontroversies.blogspot ... s-and.html



I'm curious: are there other complex events in human history involving millions of people across two dozen nation-states which can be reduced to one or a few sources? Is this the norm or might the 'few sources' in fact be secondary studies and not per se primary sources, or a couple of single national censuses for an event that only happened in one country, or something like Khrushchev's 1956 secret speech which admitted to excesses and repression without concrete numbers and then acknowledged 20 million wartime dead?

You don't seriously entertain 'The Destruction of the European Jew' as a credible source, do you?

Not only was I taught that 6,000,000 jews were killed by the Germans in Gas Chambers in Death Camps, that was the curricula of the time. My teacher was following the guidelines set forth for her. Generations of American students were instructed this way. That you are asserting that Ms Brown was a poor teacher because of this is frankly incorrect. She was fine. So was Mr Cervetto. The list could go on.

So far as your defense of the 6 million number as a rounding thing, why not say 10? More than 5 is 10 after all. Or why not 5.5? Rounding to the nearest half. With 5.1 though, generally one would think you would round down, not up by 900,000.

It's also an oddly specific number that just so happens to fit with estimates of how many jews would die in a holocaust in Europe going back to the late 1800's.

I'm surprised that you actually do seriously entertain the idea of so many jewish casualties during the war. Then again, you support the claim of an extermination campaign so I suppose I shouldn't be surprised.

I will check out your sources and give them a good once over. Given the volume, it will take me a few days. If you would be so kind, in the future, could you be a little more concise and point to specific passages that are pertinent and any tables that can be referenced? If so, I would greatly appreciate this effort on your behalf.

Concerning your last point, the trojan war comes to mind along with various other historical events. Mao's 'Great Leap Forward' doesn't have very many sources either. The 'Holodomor'. The Soviet 'Triumph of Man Over Nature'. The list could go on.

[Nessie]

.....
Well, in school they told me that 6,000,000 jews were exterminated by the nazis in gas chambers in death camps. They even showed me black and white footage of the shower room at majdanek and the mass burials at Belsen as proof.

That was not evidence to prove, it was just a limited history of key events.

Now, let's assume that 6,000,000 is an accurate original estimate and not a holy number bandied about since the late 1800's. We will just grant the number out of hand, without evidence, because the einsatzgruppen reported back about pogroms in places like Ukraine, so, obviously the evil Germans had a policy to exterminate the jews in place, because after jewish bolsheviks killed 10,000,000 Ukrainians, some Ukrainians shot some jews in a ditch outside Kiev and the einsatzgruppen wrote a report.

So, we take the 6,000,000 as an accurate original estimate based on extant records at the time, without any proof mind you. So now, when you revise downward the estimates at the Auschwitz complexes and majdanek, you lose 4,000,000 dead bodies roughly.

How do you maintain the 6,000,000 figure? Were the 4,000,000 'extra' bodies behind the couch?

Historians give a range from 5 to 6 million killed by gassings, mass shootings and other deaths in camps, based on evidence primarily from documents.

I can give you extant documentation to support the revisions at these camps. I can provide you documentation from the einsatzgruppen. I can give you cables intercepted by the allies from the camps to Berlin.

That is part of the evidence to prove the mass murders.

You simply tell me 'it's complicated' and 'take it on faith'.

It is complicated, but I am not telling you to take it on faith. I am telling you the opposite and to learn about all the evidence that proves mass murder from Babi Yar to the A-B Kremas.

To the OP's point, 'No Sources, No History'.

That applies to revisionist claims. They cannot agree on, let alone evidence, the history of the Jews of Kiev, or what happened inside the Kremas.

[Stubble]

.....

That was not evidence to prove, it was just a limited history of key events.

It was presented to my peers and my self as 'evidence of a genocide perpetrated by the Germans against the jews during ww2'. Along with pictures of the victims of the firebombing of Dresden and other out of context photographs and motion pictures.

Historians give a range from 5 to 6 million killed by gassings, mass shootings and other deaths in camps, based on evidence primarily from documents.

Would you kindly cite these 'documents'?

That is part of the evidence to prove the mass murders.

Have you read the cables and the reports?

It is complicated, but I am not telling you to take it on faith. I am telling you the opposite and to learn about all the evidence that proves mass murder from Babi Yar to the A-B Kremas.

Babi Yar was a pogrom. Read the einsatzgruppen report. The perpetrators were Ukrainian militia. So far as the Krematoria, that's a huge can of worms. It boils down to 15 minutes for a body. If I took my brain out of my skull and set it on the shelf, I might be able to buy it.

That applies to revisionist claims. They cannot agree on, let alone evidence, the history of the Jews of Kiev, or what happened inside the Kremas.

The jews of Kiev spent roughly 200 years with the native population, did they not? Maybe more if you buy in to the khazirian thing from Chabad Lubavitch. What 'exactly' are you referring to here that I have missed?

I would assume that the bodies of the dead were hygienicly cremated inside the crematoria, I don't consider that to be a wild statement. In Auschwitz for example, burial wasn't exactly an option given the water table, same with treblinka, oddly, that didn't have crematoria.

[Hektor]

The reason why no such evidence exists is the Nazi cover up, which gathered pace as they knew they would lose the war. Documents were destroyed, corpses were exhumed and cremated, buildings and entire camps razed to the ground.

The old Aktion 1005 ploy.

The excuse is that if they left them intact they would be put on trial, but several leaders committed suicide, such as Hitler, Himmler, Goebbels and others, even with this fanciful clean-up. So who or what were they concerned about preserving?

The scorched earth of the Soviets had no conspiracy to cover up anything, only the Germans.

Notably, not a single Nazi provided any alibi evidence, to prove that the Jews were not dead as alleged, but were still alive, in their millions, in 1944, to be liberated by the Allies in 1945.

As if such courts followed recognized norms of law that apply to the parties, reversing the presumption of innocence, after all these were crimes of common knowledge.

"The Holocaust is the best documented genocide in human history".

OK, lets have a look at this. There is no evidence in the documents or material evidences for this, mmmh?

"The Nazis destroyed the evidence to cover up their crimes".


Historiography requires documents and actually focuses on this... But there is also the thing called archaeology and that, if the Holocaust was true as alleged, this would have less piles of archeological evidences that simply aren't there.

[Stubble]

The reason why no such evidence exists is the Nazi cover up, which gathered pace as they knew they would lose the war. Documents were destroyed, corpses were exhumed and cremated, buildings and entire camps razed to the ground.

The old Aktion 1005 ploy.

The excuse is that if they left them intact they would be put on trial, but several leaders committed suicide, such as Hitler, Himmler, Goebbels and others, even with this fanciful clean-up. So who or what were they concerned about preserving?

The scorched earth of the Soviets had no conspiracy to cover up anything, only the Germans.

Notably, not a single Nazi provided any alibi evidence, to prove that the Jews were not dead as alleged, but were still alive, in their millions, in 1944, to be liberated by the Allies in 1945.

As if such courts followed recognized norms of law that apply to the parties, reversing the presumption of innocence, after all these were crimes of common knowledge.

"The Holocaust is the best documented genocide in human history".

OK, lets have a look at this. There is no evidence in the documents or material evidences for this, mmmh?

"The Nazis destroyed the evidence to cover up their crimes".


Historiography requires documents and actually focuses on this... But there is also the thing called archaeology and that, if the Holocaust was true as alleged, this would have less piles of archeological evidences that simply aren't there.

Schrodinger's Documentation...

[SanityCheck]

You don't seriously entertain 'The Destruction of the European Jew' as a credible source, do you?

Actually, Hilberg's book is a collection of sources. The 1961 edition had 3,413 footnotes, the 2nd edition in 1985 had 4,329 footnotes and the final edition in 2003 had 4,711 footnotes. Today there are whole books on many points he dealt with in a few pages or even expanding on a single source, so a lot has been superseded. But a lot remains the same, and some of his sections are still useful introductions. On the camps, there are more extensive and better books now, but his final edition was still updated and cited Pressac while also using the Auschwitz construction office archive directly himself, to give one example,

On the death toll, Hilberg was closer already in 1961 to what can be reconstructed in recent decades with more sources, in part because of paying attention to borders, in part because the country by country numbers were already a lot clearer in the 1940s-1950s.

Not only was I taught that 6,000,000 jews were killed by the Germans in Gas Chambers in Death Camps, that was the curricula of the time. My teacher was following the guidelines set forth for her. Generations of American students were instructed this way. That you are asserting that Ms Brown was a poor teacher because of this is frankly incorrect. She was fine. So was Mr Cervetto. The list could go on.

I don't believe you. Not one single mainstream overview of the Holocaust has ever stated 'six million gassed', they have all pointed to ghettos and shootings as well. Six million is the standard number, and extermination camps certainly have been emphasised as the perfecting of mass murder, but attributing all six million deaths to gassing is simply false.

So far as your defense of the 6 million number as a rounding thing, why not say 10? More than 5 is 10 after all. Or why not 5.5? Rounding to the nearest half. With 5.1 though, generally one would think you would round down, not up by 900,000.

Some did round down, like the SS officer Dieter Wisliceny when interrogated at Nuremberg; he demonstrated a breakdown of his estimates and knowledge which came to 5 million.

Many others rounded up, with the most official attempt at a calculation arriving at 5.7 million in mid-1945, based on estimates.

So in 1945, a range of 5-6 million was voiced, with all these figures being much of a muchness. Then six million stuck in part because it was endorsed using Hoettl's claim of what Eichmann told him at Nuremberg. Repetition did the rest, even if calculations then produced a range as low as 4.2 million (Reitlinger in 1953) to close to six million.

It's also an oddly specific number that just so happens to fit with estimates of how many jews would die in a holocaust in Europe going back to the late 1800's.

The Jewish population of Europe passed six million in the early/mid 19th Century, by the late 19th and early 20th Centuries, censuses were showing six million Jews just in Eastern Europe, between the Russian empire and Habsburg Galicia, with growth still visible, so some rounded up (from the Tsarist census which was not much over five million) and some commentators warned of looming threats based on harsh experiences, i.e. the increased violence of pogroms which went from not that lethal in 1881 to quite lethal in 1903-1906 to wiping out some entire communities in 1918-1921, after a million Jews were deported by the Russian Army in 1915. Referring to six million Jews being threatened with violence or worse was an entirely unsurprising generalisation to make when there were, in fact, six million Jews in Eastern Europe. There were also many references to five million Jews and other numbers, depending on the speaker and the occasion and which areas were being talked about.

By the late 1930s and 1940s, there were 9-10 million Jews in all of Europe, something boosted by revelations of the 1939 Soviet census which showed 3 million alone in the USSR, separate to the well over 3 million Jews in Poland, and then the rest of Europe. So it was highly likely that six million would recur as a crude two-thirds estimate of deaths when more and more reports of mass killings came through and territories were liberated with next to no survivors. This time, six million did not refer solely to Eastern Europe but the whole of Europe. It was an overestimate, but not by much. As I've said, the more realistic total once the dust had settled was something slightly over five million.

I'm surprised that you actually do seriously entertain the idea of so many jewish casualties during the war. Then again, you support the claim of an extermination campaign so I suppose I shouldn't be surprised.

I will check out your sources and give them a good once over. Given the volume, it will take me a few days. If you would be so kind, in the future, could you be a little more concise and point to specific passages that are pertinent and any tables that can be referenced? If so, I would greatly appreciate this effort on your behalf.

Concerning your last point, the trojan war comes to mind along with various other historical events. Mao's 'Great Leap Forward' doesn't have very many sources either. The 'Holodomor'. The Soviet 'Triumph of Man Over Nature'. The list could go on.

The Trojan War is a semi-legendary event dated to 14-15 centuries ago, so aside from archaeology all we possess are literary sources, or rather source, from the ancient world. It did not however involve millions as far as can be determined.

Your other two examples are man-made famines which have copious sources about them available. But the nature of famines is they cannot produce an exact death toll, every single case involves some degree of estimation even if within increasingly tight ranges.

Wars of all kinds vary widely for how precisely one can calculate death tolls; much depends on whether both sides have functioning bureacracies to keep track of military and civilian deaths. So we have a very good idea for WWII Britain and Italy (for example) and a very unclear idea for the Sino-Japanese War of 1937-1945. The Russo-German War of 1941-45 is in between, with great confidence on the headline total of around 26 million on the Soviet side, but record-keeping even for Soviet military deaths was imperfect and the numbers too explosive to admit to fully, plus the first admissions came through only in the mid-1990s.

Civilian deaths from war causes or deliberate killings are usually less precise than military deaths. There might be no interest in counting them or imperfect access to the sites, which is why an event like the Partition of India in 1947 has an estimate range of 200,000 to 2 million deaths. Those took place on either side of a border to the rival country, so who would bother to count? We have many sources to help clarify the scale so the highest number is clearly too high, but it would require a lot of work to be sure. And despite its explosiveness and continued salience to Indian-Pakistani relations due to ongoing conflict, the estimate range is fine. Both sides killed so it's not a one sided event anyway.

Civil wars, counterinsurgencies and "pacification" campaigns in empires are also good examples of mass killings where precision cannot be fully expected. There were many examples of these in WWII which can be lost in the struggle - the Ukrainian ethnic cleansing of Poles starting in 1943 which morphed into a Polish-Ukrainian war by 1944 in today's Lublin region. Both the Germans and Soviets noticed this as did Ukrainian and Polish observers, but the rival empires had little incentive or ability to count precisely. The Soviets could count more precisely when they conducted their own counterinsurgency against the UPA after 1944.

The Holocaust is thus much more reliably determined than many mass fatality events in the 20th Century. Comparing deportation figures which are generally very well documented, often with name lists, to survivors reporting in produces a very reliable death toll once one appreciates that the missing are considered legally dead after a few years. This principle existed already before WWII to deal with disappearances, but had to be instituted on a mass basis after 1945 because there really were so many missing from the war, non-Jews and Jews. The fact that a lot of other sources identify the cause of death of the deported Jews who did not return is somewhat secondary to the irrefutable fact of legal death because they are missing. There are a lot of sources for extermination in the death camps nonetheless.

The other half of the Holocaust in 'regular' camps, ghettos and mass shootings is extensively documented, with physical evidence not lacking since far from all bodies were cremated. There is greater certainty about the number of Jews killed by such means than there is about the number of Soviet citizens killed in antipartisan warfare or by repression, since much of the killing of non-Jews happened in the countryside, while Jews were a largely urban population, and killed in larger groups in comparatively fewer events rather than in small groups over prolonged periods. Moreover, the Jews were a distinct minority recorded on censuses such as the 1939 Soviet census, whereas villagers killed in German reprisals were members of the majority. Genocides are easier to be more precise on than general onslaughts against a population as a result of this.

Thus, the really largescale massacres of entire populations rarely produce precise figures, such as the Nanjing massacre of 1937 or the killings of Poles in Warsaw during the Wola and Ochota massacres of 1944, which certainly ran to five figures even narrowly defined, as part of six figure death tolls for the entire complex of events in and around those cities in those years.

By contrast it is much easier to be certain of the extermination of a minority, within a narrower range of possibilities based on all contemporary sources, censuses and investigations.

There are many other examples; the major cases of mass killing as politicide or genocide are almost invariably estimate ranges, with higher numbers or rounded totals more likely to be 'memorialised' and metaphorically or literally carved in stone, much like the six million of the Holocaust.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mass_kill ... s_killings - since 1955
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_genocides#List
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_w ... _toll#List

[Stubble]

I don't believe you. Not one single mainstream overview of the Holocaust has ever stated 'six million gassed', they have all pointed to ghettos and shootings as well. Six million is the standard number, and extermination camps certainly have been emphasised as the perfecting of mass murder, but attributing all six million deaths to gassing is simply false.

Well, you might find it hard to believe, but, it happened, I saw it with my own eyes...

A lot of your other points are well reasoned enough for me to not nit pick just to try to bust your balls or anything. That's not to say I agree with your points, just to say I will not argue them to save us both some time and headache. An example would be the bar you have set for other historically documented events. Instead of arguing about it, I'll change my previous answer to your query to none. There are no specific events in history that I am aware of that exactly meet your criteria.

Just like you not believing me about the indoctrination I personally experienced, I don't believe you about the 6,000,000. Unfortunately, I cannot cite the curricula that no longer exists. You have given me much to grind my nose on in the form of literally thousands of pages. I'll make an effort to have my homework done in a timely manner. With the season, it may take me a bit. Please forgive me if I'm a bit tardy, I assure you, just like a 12 o'clock shadow, stubble will be back.

I appreciate your time and your geniality. Thank you Sir. In my experience these discussions have usually devolved rapidly and I'll freely admit, I came here unsure of what to expect.

As a rather crass person myself, I will make an effort to mind my manners.

I would like to point out that wikipedia cannot be used as a source, as outlined by, wikipedia. None the less, I can get a shovel and dig in there to separate some wheat from chaff I suppose. I'll probably go through the wikipedia articles, that mossad pays an army to edit, after I go through the homework previously assigned.

[SanityCheck]

"The Holocaust is the best documented genocide in human history".

Other genocides lack as many perpetrator documents as survived from the Nazi defeat, and were often indifferently investigated either for physical sites or in general (e.g. the Armenian genocide), so this is a fairly low bar.

But documentation does not solely consist of perpetrator records. The extent to which victims document their experiences or can preserve documentation varies, starting with simple things like literacy rates and whether a targeted group has a community. Aborigines in Australia or the Herero in Namibia or indeed Roma and Sinti in Nazi dominated Europe left few records of their own. European Jews left masses, in addition to which Jewish organisations were tracking events closely. So were diplomats of Axis, neutral and Allied states, NGOs and various non-Jewish groups inside and outside Europe. All of this is documentation, whether it's from the Italian Foreign Ministry, the World Jewish Congress in Geneva, the Lodz ghetto chronicle, or an individual diarist. Eventually it ends up in archives. Contrasting the differing perspectives is a basic task and one that can use them together to get closer to what happened.

Documentation is also not limited to contemporary sources, as documentation processes may continue long after the end of a conflict, war, genocide or mass killing wave. Again this will vary, since the killings might happen under dictatorial or colonial rule or be hushed up, while others will be exposed promptly and self-prosecuted (think of My Lai, or the Hungarian court martials of the Novi Sad massacres in 1942 during the war).

Missing persons enquiries, soliciting declarations of death from authorities/courts in some cases, restitution of property, compensation claims, state inquiries into recent events as well as historical commissions, truth and reconciliation commissions, war crimes investigations and trials happen to varying degrees. Those who experienced events may be motivated to write down their personal accounts, or preserve letters and diaries from the time, which then find their way into library manuscript divisions and archives. Oral history interviews might be recorded at the time or a generation or two later, as is also demonstrably the case with other upheavals and genocides. A change of regime might delay this for decades (as with the Holodomor), or it might begin promptly after an upheaval. Community associations and organisations may exist or there might be veterans' or survivors' associations, as with associations of deportees to Nazi concentration camps in western and central Europe, created for political deportees as much as or more than for racial deportees.

Added to which one can find varying examples of community based justice such as the Gacaca courts in Rwanda, or denazification Spruchkammern in postwar Germany, with again varying degrees of relevance - the denazification proceedings typically whitewashed recent careers but still generated records that do intersect with the events. One can add the fallout in other everyday venues, such as divorce proceedings - a Hamburg housewife sought a divorce from her husband, a veteran of Reserve Police Battalion 101, after the war, and this came to the attention of the authorities, who extradited the policeman to Poland, who then ignored the involvement of the unit in mass killings of Jews and tried the policeman for participating in a reprisal against a Polish village.

Media coverage and political deliberations during upheavals as well as afterwards can also contribute to documentation; journalists and politicians might listen to witnesses, as US politicians did in their hearings on Katyn, and as allied reporters did when touring liberated concentration camps in 1945. The extent of reporting varies.

The extent of photography and film footage will also vary based on technological advances and the relative wealth of the society or restrictions on these media from the circumstances. There are apparently no known private photographs from the era of the Great Leap Forward in China, according to Frank Dikoetter's Mao's Great Famine. Cameras were confiscated or deemed community property during socialising villages, so all that appears to survive are staged photographs and state media photographs. In the 21st Century, smart phones in everyone's pockets have changed the dynamics entirely. 20th Century wars were incredibly destructive but also could create cycles of voyeurism and shame, so many 'private' photographs could be taken and developed then destroyed either by the effects of war or out of fear that they might incriminate people, others were preserved and again - archived.

Documenting crime scenes after events has been done to quite varying degrees, while archiving the photographs often tends to be quite separate in photo and film archives rather than alongside texts and classic documents, so researching the extent to which events were photographed can be tricky. There is also an ick factor and a potential concern for privacy and decency when photographing corpses and remains, which means that it might be hard to find extensive photography from say Rwanda without some digging.

Documentation is not something done solely by a state or official authorities. As mentioned, personal accounts, letters, diaries and other personal papers are often deposited in archives in a form of crowdsourcing. This is especially apparent for the two world wars in general, since personal papers arising from dramatic events are more likely to be seen as valuable than if they chronicle other parts of recent history, and there are usually distinctive archives for them, like the Imperial War Museum in the UK. There are numerous potential depositories for Holocaust-related materials and they all show considerable growth in recent decades with survivors coming to the end of their lives and depositing their papers with USHMM etc. This is why USHMM has 13,000 collections of unpublished textual records. But one can also see this with manuscript divisions of libraries as well as regional and national archives in Poland for non-Jewish witnesses, or the archives of letters and diaries that exist in Germany. The formal Nachlass for an official or officer or protagonist should also not be forgotten here; these run to the many thousands for Germans of the Nazi era just for the main federal archives, and they have yielded further sources on the persecution and murder of European Jews as well.

So while active documentation will cease with the deaths of eyewitnesses and protagonists, the archiving of documentation will continue for a while, as attics and houses are cleared and previously private papers might be turned over to depositories.

[TlsMS93]

The definition of genocide requires more intent than the question of deaths. Note that there is a division as to whether the Holodomor was a genocide or a side effect of collectivization. Wikipedia treats the Katyn massacre as a genocide because Stalin signed the order, despite the number of deaths being several orders of magnitude lower.

Hitler did not sign anything official, but he made inflammatory statements, something that Israeli leaders also make today to the Palestinians without the West recognizing an ongoing genocide.

[SanityCheck]

I don't believe you. Not one single mainstream overview of the Holocaust has ever stated 'six million gassed', they have all pointed to ghettos and shootings as well. Six million is the standard number, and extermination camps certainly have been emphasised as the perfecting of mass murder, but attributing all six million deaths to gassing is simply false.

Well, you might find it hard to believe, but, it happened, I saw it with my own eyes...

A lot of your other points are well reasoned enough for me to not nit pick just to try to bust your balls or anything. That's not to say I agree with your points, just to say I will not argue them to save us both some time and headache. An example would be the bar you have set for other historically documented events. Instead of arguing about it, I'll change my previous answer to your query to none. There are no specific events in history that I am aware of that exactly meet your criteria.

Just like you not believing me about the indoctrination I personally experienced, I don't believe you about the 6,000,000. Unfortunately, I cannot cite the curricula that no longer exists. You have given me much to grind my nose on in the form of literally thousands of pages. I'll make an effort to have my homework done in a timely manner. With the season, it may take me a bit. Please forgive me if I'm a bit tardy, I assure you, just like a 12 o'clock shadow, stubble will be back.

I appreciate your time and your geniality. Thank you Sir. In my experience these discussions have usually devolved rapidly and I'll freely admit, I came here unsure of what to expect.

As a rather crass person myself, I will make an effort to mind my manners.

I would like to point out that wikipedia cannot be used as a source, as outlined by, wikipedia. None the less, I can get a shovel and dig in there to separate some wheat from chaff I suppose. I'll probably go through the wikipedia articles, that mossad pays an army to edit, after I go through the homework previously assigned.

Wikipedia points to sources, so one can see very clearly how death tolls for wars, genocides, political mass killings etc greatly vary in the numbers estimated or thrown around by interested parties (politicians, activists) and scholars (historians, social scientists). One can google for individual examples that aren't the Holocaust and see how the numbers are or are not justified, one can read the literature on these cases and see how authors arrive at their conclusions and estimates.

The general standard for such things is extraordinarily low and vague, and rarely outside of low death toll conflicts or individual event in very recent eras can one find precision. The official inquiry into the Jallianwala Bagh massacre of 1919, also known as the Amritsar massacre, counted 379 dead, but did not do a thorough job, and some fell into a well and were not recovered from it. So the death toll is disputed.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jallianwa ... Casualties

Same with the Setif and Guelma massacres in French colonial Algeria in 1945, the colonial authorities admitted a much lower death toll than was being reported by Algerians at the time, then Algerian nationalists ratcheted up the numbers over time.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jallianwa ... Casualties

It's not necessarily in the interests of states who end up overseeing mass killings however 'accidental' to acknowledge higher numbers, especially if the killings happen in full public glare. Only when the numbers are smaller and there is a fully functioning advanced modern society with citizens being killed whose affairs need sorting out do we find accurate numbers, such as the 1972 Bloody Sunday massacre when British troops fired on a demonstration in Northern Ireland, resulting in 14 deaths (one later from wounds), or the 1970 shootings of demonstrators at Kent State University, when four were killed. Unlike causes of death during the recent pandemic it's a little hard to cover up gunshot wounds from coroners in contemporary western societies.

It's screamingly easy to end up with nobody paying any detailed attention if villagers of another tribe or ethnicity are massacred deep into the jungle or countryside in Guatemala or the Democratic Republic of the Congo. Easier still for a dictatorship to burn its incriminating records if regime change is on the way, should its exuberant military and paramilitary state servants have boasted about their slaughters and for this to become inconvenient in a new world.

As the Setif example of Algerian nationalists shows, there is the countervailing tendency of victimised groups to inflate their losses and death tolls. So this is why it's most reasonable to combine perspectives and sources, and why researchers on mass violence will often simply contrast numbers and not seek to resolve them to the nth degree. Because they either can't be, or because it would be assholish to leap from such discrepancies to denying an event happened. If discrepancies are all it takes, then there was no Black September massacre of Palestinians in Jordan in 1970, and indeed pretty much any massacre or major air raid can be erased from the history books.

[SanityCheck]

The definition of genocide requires more intent than the question of deaths. Note that there is a division as to whether the Holodomor was a genocide or a side effect of collectivization. Wikipedia treats the Katyn massacre as a genocide because Stalin signed the order, despite the number of deaths being several orders of magnitude lower.

Hitler did not sign anything official, but he made inflammatory statements, something that Israeli leaders also make today to the Palestinians without the West recognizing an ongoing genocide.

And this is why I referred to wars, genocides, famines, mass political killings - whether something is genocide or otherwise classified, there will be similarities and differences with all such mass fatality events, in terms of how they are determined, what fallout ensues, and so on.

I don't "identify" with genocide studies but with violence studies. Only studying genocides would be very restrictive, and unhelpful for the NS-era never mind modern history as a whole (or earlier eras).

[Archie]

"Six million gassed" vs "six million dead" (about half by gas)

Most of us who spend a lot of time on this will appreciate this distinction but you can't blame regular people (including teachers) for ending up with the slightly inaccurate former version. There was an clip where Cockerill was on a stream and there was confusion/misunderstanding on this point and Cockerill kept pedantically insisting that "six million gassed" was not the story (without really explaining) and everyone else was totally befuddled by this.

[Hektor]

The definition of genocide requires more intent than the question of deaths. Note that there is a division as to whether the Holodomor was a genocide or a side effect of collectivization. Wikipedia treats the Katyn massacre as a genocide because Stalin signed the order, despite the number of deaths being several orders of magnitude lower.

Hitler did not sign anything official, but he made inflammatory statements, something that Israeli leaders also make today to the Palestinians without the West recognizing an ongoing genocide.

That's an issue that is ignored. Intent is the key issue with genocide. means and multitude not so much.

Overall it can be said that the NS-German intent was to physically remove Jews from their sphere of influence. There is some harsh language. But the overall evidence is against an intend total physical destruction of Jews globally.

As far as 'witness reports are concerned, atrocious content can easily be explained with them being malicious for being made to work by the Germans during WW2. But this is strangely ignored. Also ignored is that there are plenty of *potential* witness who did not notice anything of an extermination program.

[Callafangers]

I will check out your sources and give them a good once over. Given the volume, it will take me a few days. If you would be so kind, in the future, could you be a little more concise and point to specific passages that are pertinent and any tables that can be referenced? If so, I would greatly appreciate this effort on your behalf.

Hello Stubble, welcome to the forum. I think your quote above captures one of the key problems I have emphasized previously when it comes to SanityCheck's presentation. Being concise is simply not something he is able or willing to do, on virtually any topic you will see him debating within these forums. This is because his position relies not on quality of documentation, testimony, or other forms of evidence, but upon sheer quantity of references and interpretations (akin to a perpetual 'Gish gallop'; the more obscure the better) which, when analyzed case-by-case, consistently falls apart with any amount of fair scrutiny.

Do take the time to review the sources he has referenced, for good measure, but ensure you recognize the wartime and postwar political/power dynamics, the patterns of behavior of the various players throughout and postwar, and above all the quality of evidence presented on either side. What I mean by "quality" pertains to the question of (and capacity for) objective validation of any given claim or contention, for which certain forms of evidence are much better than others. Whereas the major victors of this world war (all of whom have implemented clear patterns of deceptive social-engineering-propaganda narratives, especially in the name of 'denazification') could:

• Control and conceal exonerating documentation
• Limit presentation of exonerating interpretations (e.g. 'judicial notice')
• Propagate miscontextualized or false interpretations of legitimate documentation
• Apply explicit or implicit coercive pressure to trial defendants (with their families being held captive)
• Prevent or limit cross-examination
• Sway public opinion through global media networks
• Have total, covert control over all alleged 'crime scenes' useful for their narratives

...there are certain types of evidence which are much more difficult to manipulate, such as:

• Verifiable, contemporary wartime documents with clear chains of custody postwar
• Physical/forensic evidence at the alleged 'crime scenes'
• Hundreds (if not thousands) of false and absurd allegations of German atrocities (even exterminationists admit did not occur)
• A lack of technical plausibility and independent corroboration of claims by 'eyewitnesses'
• The history of false evidence produced by Allied powers, coercion and even torture of key defendants
• Abuses of power by Allied victors and Jewish networks globally in attempts to solidify their 'Holocaust' narrative
• How all of these factors converge to favor the revisionist position

More here: https://www.codohforum.com/viewtopic.php?t=59

This is because things like logic and physical/forensic evidence are considered a higher level of evidence than testimony, for obvious reasons:

Evidence can be divided into two categories:

Testimonial - statements or the spoken word from the victim(s) or witness(es).
Physical - also referred to as real evidence, consists of tangible articles such as hairs, fibers, latent fingerprints, and biological material.

The concept known as the "Locard's Exchange Principle" states that every time someone enters an environment, something is added to and removed from it. The principle is sometimes stated as "every contact leaves a trace," and applies to contact between individuals as well as between individuals and a physical environment. Law enforcement investigators are therefore taught to always assume that physical evidence is left behind at every scene. This will be generally true, and the amount and nature of the evidence created will be largely dependent on the circumstances of the crime.

[...]

Oftentimes, evidence tells a story and helps an investigator re-create the crime scene and establish the sequence of events. Physical evidence can corroborate statements from the victim(s), witness(es) and/or suspect(s). If analyzed and interpreted properly, physical evidence is more reliable than testimonial evidence; testimonial evidence is more subjective in nature. An individual's perception of events and memory of what happened can be incomplete or inaccurate. Physical evidence is objective and when documented, collected, and preserved properly may be the only way to reliably place or link someone with a crime scene. Physical evidence is therefore often referred to as the "silent witness."

https://nij.ojp.gov/nij-hosted-online-t ... s-evidence

Note that the above acknowledgement of subjectivity of witnesses does not even factor in deception, for which there is usually (in most investigations) not an obvious, widespread pattern in-place. But this pattern of deception is quite clear with the alleged 'Holocaust', both on the side of 'witnesses' and that of the WW2 victorious powers (and their respective propaganda networks), overall. Simply put, for every 'key eyewitness' that SanityCheck and other establishment historians would claim are even so much as 95% reliable, there are several others (or sometimes dozens or more) telling obvious/absurd fabrications, stark inconsistencies, or sheer impossibilities.

This is a crucial point, given that their corroboration in other forms of evidence simply is not there.

I have only read a few of your posts just now so I am not aware of the extent you are familiar with revisionist ideas but a good place to start is obviously the Holocaust Encyclopedia, which was intended to capture succinct summaries of myriad key topics in revisionist literature to-date:

https://holocaustencyclopedia.com/

This is its first edition so there will be much fine-tuning in the years to come (a second edition is reportedly underway). But for anyone trying to navigate this complex debate, this book can answer most of the fundamental questions. More specialized questions may be found elsewhere in revisionist literature or may even require some original investigation.

One thing that can be said with confidence is that the justifications for censorship in this debate have fallen completely flat. Censorship of the 'Holocaust' variety is not just about 'bleeping' naughty words and the like; it is about preventing 'problematic' research, across all disciplines, as it pertains to the sacrosanct 'extermination' narrative. It is about keeping individuals like myself and other revisionist thinkers out of the archives and universities and always on-the-run. This is despite that 'Nazism' as an ideology was not likely a motivator for even a single one of us. All of us sought to understand the truth and history, and for this, our jobs/careers are now always threatened, our social and mental well-being impacted, and perhaps even our actual freedom at-stake (depending on which country we are living in).

Would this be at all necessary, if the narrative was so completely true and spoke for itself? Is a claim of 'dangerous hate' really a legitimate reason for censoring scholars?

As you continue your journey, I will once again emphasize the importance of quality versus quantity. There is no question that exterminationists are far ahead in terms of quantity of material (this is by design -- incentives matter and SanityCheck [aka Dr. Nick Terry] is paid to do what he does). But the truth is not determined by quantity of investigations, statements, and interpretations thereof -- it is determined by the soundness (accuracy, validity, coherence, cohesion) of all forms of evidence, understood in their proper context.

If you have challenges for either side of the debate, please bring them here for discussion. Best of luck.

[Stubble]

Hello Stubble, welcome to the forum.

Do take the time to review the sources he has referenced, for good measure, but ensure you recognize the wartime and postwar political/power dynamics, the patterns of behavior of the various players throughout and postwar, and above all the quality of evidence presented on either side.

Best of luck.

Well, thank ya.

Grabbed a plate and a fork and started to dig in. This is mainline orthodox narrative stuff in multiple volumes composed of tens of thousands of pages.

Here is to hoping it is well sourced and I can vett the contents and my eyes don't bleed.

I think you might be right, the OP's goal may simply be to 'flood the zone'. I'm persistent though, and I'll winnow it down and get to whatever meat there is to it.

It would have been kind of him to break down the contents a bit and provide some of the locations of the information he was pointing to directly.

As an aside, earlier 'The Destruction of the European Jew' was mentioned. Have you ever read the section on Treblinka and checked sources? I'm expecting to find a lot of stuff similar to that in these 6,000,000 pages (it's ok guys, I rounded).