How were the resettled Jews treated?

[bombsaway]

As preparation for my 'Best case for the Holocaust' essay, which I'm finally ready to put some time into, I want to ask revisionists here a few things

First up is this.

During the interwar period and the rise of Nazi Germany, die Juden faced escalating restrictions, surveillance, and violence. Internment and labor camps in Germany, Latvia, and elsewhere reflected wartime policies and perceived threats, but the severity, intent, and human cost in each case varied dramatically.

At places like Kaiserwald, the reality was horrific. Forced labor often involved extracting shale oil in freezing temperatures — conditions that would exhaust even the strongest adults. Most of us become frustrated when the power goes out for an hour; imagine enduring such brutal work, day after day, with inadequate food, clothing, and shelter. The cold, hunger, and constant fear were unrelenting.

This is where my concern truly lies. While population anomalies and statistical trends can be interesting to study, my focus is always on the lived experience: the suffering, endurance, and resilience of die Juden in places like Kaiserwald.

Here we have Nazgul apparently showing a lot of empathy for the humans involved.

We have some idea about how Jews in the labor system were treated. If we don't want to say they were treated unfairly, at the very least we can assess super high death rates. That's objective, though some would say totally the fault of the allies. When it comes to Jews in the ghettos, large swathes of the population were dying every month due to famine and disease.

Decisions were made to restrict or completely cut off food for non-working Jews. This is detailed on page 200 of the HC Blog white paper. Hans Frank said:

The feeding of a Jewish population component, estimated heretofore at 1.6 million, drops off to an estimated total of 300,000 Jews, who still work for German interests as craftsmen or otherwise. For these the Jewish rations, including certain special allotments which have proved necessary for the maintenance of working capacity, will be retained. The other Jews, a total of 1.2 million, will no longer be provided with foodstuffs.

Confirmation of this decision can be found in the revealing reports of a representative of the Party Chancellery attached to a manpower comb-out commission that was touring the Generalgouvernement at this time. “It is planned from 1 January to give the Jews no more food at all and to reduce the rations for Poles considerably, and no longer to allot any
increases for armaments workers.”

There's obviously no documents or witness testimony giving us any idea about how the resettled Jews fared in Occupied USSR, but is it fair to presume that the revisionist position is that conditions were brutal, and in terms of percentage many or more died in Nazi internment than of civilians in the surrounding areas? these civilians would have had access to food from many sources, whereas the interned Jews could only have received it from government channels.

We also have the case of Soviet POWs in Nazi custody. It is estimated that half died in German custody. Were the non-working Jews treated better than this?

From here https://holocaustcontroversies.blogspot ... uated.html (see 'The "evacuated" Jewish People' section) it's clear that the majority of Jews in German control and even greater percentage of those "resettled" were non-working. Jews incapable of work were especially filtered out before going to the Reinhardt camps, Chelmno, and at Auschwitz (where many revisionists believe Jews were diverted to the East from).

[Nazgul]

There's obviously no documents or witness testimony giving us any idea about how the resettled Jews fared in Occupied USSR, but is it fair to presume that the revisionist position is that conditions were brutal, and in terms of percentage many or more died in Nazi internment than of civilians in the surrounding areas? these civilians would have had access to food from many sources, whereas the interned Jews could only have received it from government channels.

My principal research focus concerns the oil-shale labour camps in the Kaiserwald region, where conditions were severe and where even civilian workers endured extreme hardship. A second, closely related area of study is the system of Zwangarbeitslager für Juden (forced labour camps for Jews). Two such camps existed at Treblinka—one for men and one for women—operating separately from the better-known extermination facility.

A particularly important personal testimony is that of Peter Lantos, a Hungarian Jewish boy deported with his parents on one of three transports from Hungary. Notably, those on these transports paid for their own fares. According to Lantos’s memoir Parallel Lines, the transport was diverted westward rather than sent directly to Birkenau; only a single train from this group went there.

The transport carrying Lantos and his parents stopped at a labour camp in Austria, where conditions—while still those of captivity—were comparatively humane. Lantos recounts that guards behaved in a friendly manner and regularly gave him chocolate. This period stands in sharp contrast to later stages of his captivity and is described in his own words rather than inferred retrospectively.

Subsequently, the family was transferred to another camp run by the SS. Here, conditions worsened: food was rationed but initially adequate, and while the SS guards were less personable than the Austrian camp staff, Lantos does not describe them as overtly brutal during this phase. Tragedy nevertheless followed. His father, a heavy smoker, exchanged portions of his food ration for cigarettes and ultimately died of malnutrition. Lantos records this sequence himself. Other secondary sources have later claimed that his father was deliberately starved by the Germans; however, this interpretation goes beyond Lantos’s own account and illustrates the tension that can arise between survivor testimony and later explanatory narratives.

As the war drew to a close, conditions deteriorated rapidly. Food rations became negligible, and prisoners were placed on a transport whose locomotive halted inexplicably in a remote area. The prisoners disembarked and were eventually encountered by American troops. These troops handed them over to Soviet forces, who detained them with the intention of transporting them east into the Soviet Union.

Lantos and his mother managed to escape Soviet captivity by hiding aboard a coal train, ultimately securing their freedom. Their survival, as recorded in Parallel Lines, underscores both the contingency of individual fate and the danger of imposing simplified explanations on complex and shifting wartime realities.

Late-war German policy operated under extreme resource scarcity, and priority was inevitably given to the front and to those deemed economically essential. This explains the deterioration of conditions across many forms of custody, though it does not erase the fact that some groups were structurally placed at the bottom of the ration hierarchy long before resources collapsed.

[bombsaway]

This explains the deterioration of conditions across many forms of custody, though it does not erase the fact that some groups were structurally placed at the bottom of the ration hierarchy long before resources collapsed.

You didn't really answer the question. Were non-employable Jews lower on the totem pole than Soviet POWs? Please go easier on the AI btw, it doesn't really add much.

[Nazgul]

You didn't really answer the question. Were non-employable Jews lower on the totem pole than Soviet POWs? Please go easier on the AI btw, it doesn't really add much.

I don’t know, and the AI comment isn’t relevant—let’s stay on topic.

[bombsaway]

You didn't really answer the question. Were non-employable Jews lower on the totem pole than Soviet POWs? Please go easier on the AI btw, it doesn't really add much.

I don’t know, and the AI comment isn’t relevant—let’s stay on topic.

The question is what you think, or would reasonably expect, not what was, since you're right we can't say in any evidence backed way what happened to them.

[Nazgul]

The question is what you think, or would reasonably expect, not what was, since you're right we can't say in any evidence backed way what happened to them.

Considering the mass killings of Soviet prisoners, it’s astonishing that Олександр Аронович Печерський (Oleksandr Aronovich Pechersky), a Red Army lieutenant and clearly a dangerous officer, was allowed to live in an alleged extermination camp. He should have been considered high-risk even before the Sobibor uprising, which he orchestrated—an event that cost the lives not only of SS officers but also of escaping prisoners. This raises serious questions about SS competence, and whether the treatment of Soviet prisoners was uniformly as brutal as often claimed, given that someone like Pechersky survived under their watch.

[bombsaway]

The question is what you think, or would reasonably expect, not what was, since you're right we can't say in any evidence backed way what happened to them.

Considering the mass killings of Soviet prisoners, it’s astonishing that Олександр Аронович Печерський (Oleksandr Aronovich Pechersky), a Red Army lieutenant and clearly a dangerous officer, was allowed to live in an alleged extermination camp. He should have been considered high-risk even before the Sobibor uprising, which he orchestrated—an event that cost the lives not only of SS officers but also of escaping prisoners. This raises serious questions about SS competence, and whether the treatment of Soviet prisoners was uniformly as brutal as often claimed, given that someone like Pechersky survived under their watch.

I think there's no evidence they let so many POWs die (the commisar order is something separate, commisars were only a small percentage) because they were security risks, rather that they did not value their lives very much at the time.

Himmler:

The Russian Army was herded together in great pockets, ground down, taken prisoner. At the time, we did not value the mass of humanity as we value it today: as raw material, as labor. The fact that prisoners died of exhaustion and hunger in tens and hundreds of thousands is by no means regrettable from the standpoint of lost generations but is deplorable now for reasons of lost labor.

https://ghdi.ghi-dc.org/sub_document.cf ... nt_id=1513

[Archie]

As preparation for my 'Best case for the Holocaust' essay, which I'm finally ready to put some time into, ...

Glad to hear it. I didn't think we were going to get anymore submissions.

We have some idea about how Jews in the labor system were treated. If we don't want to say they were treated unfairly, at the very least we can assess super high death rates. ...

I won't comment on all of this at length right now, but it seems you're going for a choose-your-own-adventure Holocaust. I would caution against that. It's ultimately not a good approach for your side. The standard history is that around six million Jews died and that the vast majority of these deaths were from mass executions, principally gassings and shootings. That's the story. That's what's under dispute. To me, trying to shift to more general claims of "suffering" is pure motte-and-bailey.