No Sources, No History

[Stubble]

'History is pretty straight forward, an event is evidenced to have happened, or it is not. The evidence for Nazi death camps where people were gassed and mass shootings, started to be gathered by the Polish during the war, on account of many of the deaths happened in what had been Poland, since it had such a huge Jewish population.'

I'd posit that 'usually' history is pretty straightforward. I'd also argue that actual evidence for 'extermination centers' is rather scant. I'll argue that in the past I've been told that said evidence is simultaneously abundant and irrefutable, but also, wholly destroyed by evil 'nazis' upon request for said evidence.

'From the start, the deaths in the camps were inside chambers, but initially there was some confusion and unknowns as to exactly how people died inside the chambers. As more reliable evidence came to light, it was proven that either exhaust fumes or Zyklon B was used. That evidenced narrative has remained fixed since 1945. No evidence has been traced to prove mass resettlement.'

How is this different from my earlier assertion that 'they knew that everyone died, they just didn't know how they died'.

Much of what you are calling reliable evidence is unironically black propaganda from the Polish Government in Exile and it is pretty uniform initially about 'gas vans', 'steam chambers', 'electrified floors' and various other fables.

So far as it being unchanging since 1945, that's simply not true. Men were hung by their neck until they were dead for steaming over 1,000,000 people to death at treblinka at Nuremberg for example.

'Much of that propaganda has come from those who seek to deny, or diminish what happened. I regularly catch revisionists out, as they lie and misrepresent evidence, to pretend that it is lacking for mass gassings, as they ignore it is seriously lacking for the millions of Jews still alive in 1944.'

Most of that propaganda has come from the mainstream over the course of, my entire life. From fiction presented as fact, to fact used to construct fiction, much of what I have been told, shown and instructed has been inverted, distorted or misrepresented. My experience with the other side of the coin has been that the inconsistencies cited and the information presented has been well sourced and after investigation, while not readily accessible from your preferred sources, none the less true. When I actually find many of the quotes from your preferred sources, there are ellipsis at the very point of a quote that I want to cite, and getting to original source is sometimes beyond my ability to google fu out of the various search engines.

Well, when I'm told that 6,000,000 jews died, and that is false information, and stating that the number is lower is 'denial' of or 'diminishing' of what happened, that puts me in a rather restrictive position from the jump, doesn't it?

The point about the missing jews, to me, seems no more pressing than my point about the coke.

'the deeper you dig, the more you find it is revisionists, who cannot produce an evidenced chronological history of the Jews in Nazi captivity during WWII.'

I'll get my shovel.

'Questioning and being suspicious of what you have been told, it not a fallacy. Be suspicious and question revisionist claims, as much as you do for historians. You will see revisionists are all over the place and make many illogical, spurious, dishonest claims.'

I ain't planning on getting hoodwinked by nobody. Had the first shot that came my way in the form of a lie been from people that I instantly and fully gave my trust to, I would not be as sceptical as I am.

With that said, I have no intention to simply take my brain out and set it on the shelf for either side of this conversation.

'I have critically examined the evidence for mass gassings and revisionist arguments that they did not happen. The evidenced history stands up to scrutiny way better than revisionist arguments.'

Well, I'm going to have to walk that path myself. From the ground I'm standing on right now, I don't see myself walking back over to a side that lied to me in my youth and continues to try to lie to me in my adulthood. 1,100,000 cremated with a hand full of coke? Another 2,000,000 gassed with 'a motor', buried, dug up, burned, smashed with hammers and scattered to the wind? With, wood from, someplace?

'Please do examine the evidence. You will find that there is no evidence to support revisionist claims that;

1) the A-B Kremas were used as delousing chambers, showers, corpse stores and/or bomb shelters (except latterly Krema I) and never for gassings.
2) the AR camps were used as transit camps, hygiene stations, customs stops and for property sorting and never for gassings.
3) those places sent millions of Jews east to be resettled
4) in 1944, millions of Jews were alive in camps and in 1945, millions of Jews were liberated.

An event like that, if it happened, would leave a lot of evidence. There would also be no reason for the Nazis to cover resettlement up, especially when they knew they were being accused of killing millions.'

This is sound advice. I'm going to take this advice.

'List of documents from A-B, pertaining to the construction of gas chambers and ovens here;

https://holocaustcontroversies.blogspot ... ce-on.html

Testimony from the Topf & Sons engineers about the construction and functioning of the gas chambers and ovens here;

https://forum.axishistory.com/viewtopic.php?t=61650

Topf & Sons history website;

https://www.topfundsoehne.de/ts/en/exhi ... 28724.html '

Again, thank you. I'll dig into these and post back later.

It looks like for you, ultimately, this situation boils down to where are the live bodies, not, where are the dead ones. If I am to lut this in the absolute, simplest and most condensed terms possible.

It's a fair argument.

At this point on my path, I'd point to the census for the jews in the jewish encyclopedia, pre and post war, and say, places. You would not be convinced by that though any more than I am convinced you can burn 5,000 bodies on some railroad tracks propped up on cinder blocks with a cord or two of green pine.

[Nessie]

'History is pretty straight forward, an event is evidenced to have happened, or it is not. The evidence for Nazi death camps where people were gassed and mass shootings, started to be gathered by the Polish during the war, on account of many of the deaths happened in what had been Poland, since it had such a huge Jewish population.'

I'd posit that 'usually' history is pretty straightforward. I'd also argue that actual evidence for 'extermination centers' is rather scant. I'll argue that in the past I've been told that said evidence is simultaneously abundant and irrefutable, but also, wholly destroyed by evil 'nazis' upon request for said evidence.

There was a wholesale destruction of evidence for the extermination centres, resulting in a relative lack of obvious evidence that no one would try to dispute, such as the graves found at Katyn. But it is impossible to hide that the ground was now full of cremated remains. Revisionists minimise and lie about what has been found at the camps, creating the false impression there is hardly anything there.

Remember, revisionists have no evidence at all, from any source, of millions of Jews in camps in 1945 and liberated in 1945. Their tactic of attacking the evidence historians have, is because they cannot evidence what happened instead. They fail at history and cannot produce a chronological, evidenced narrative. That greatly weakens their claims.

'From the start, the deaths in the camps were inside chambers, but initially there was some confusion and unknowns as to exactly how people died inside the chambers. As more reliable evidence came to light, it was proven that either exhaust fumes or Zyklon B was used. That evidenced narrative has remained fixed since 1945. No evidence has been traced to prove mass resettlement.'

How is this different from my earlier assertion that 'they knew that everyone died, they just didn't know how they died'.

Much of what you are calling reliable evidence is unironically black propaganda from the Polish Government in Exile and it is pretty uniform initially about 'gas vans', 'steam chambers', 'electrified floors' and various other fables.

It is easy to assess what was hearsay rumour and what was eyewitness, and so more reliable evidence, from the Poles. Once the Nazis themselves confirmed the killings and the method, the claim is now proven.

So far as it being unchanging since 1945, that's simply not true. Men were hung by their neck until they were dead for steaming over 1,000,000 people to death at treblinka at Nuremberg for example.

I am going to dispute that as a false claim. Please name the person hung, after a Nuremberg trial, where the charge was that they were responsible for steaming over a million people to death at TII. There were TII trials in West Germany in the 1960s, and no one was hung.

'Much of that propaganda has come from those who seek to deny, or diminish what happened. I regularly catch revisionists out, as they lie and misrepresent evidence, to pretend that it is lacking for mass gassings, as they ignore it is seriously lacking for the millions of Jews still alive in 1944.'

Most of that propaganda has come from the mainstream over the course of, my entire life. From fiction presented as fact, to fact used to construct fiction, much of what I have been told, shown and instructed has been inverted, distorted or misrepresented. My experience with the other side of the coin has been that the inconsistencies cited and the information presented has been well sourced and after investigation, while not readily accessible from your preferred sources, none the less true. When I actually find many of the quotes from your preferred sources, there are ellipsis at the very point of a quote that I want to cite, and getting to original source is sometimes beyond my ability to google fu out of the various search engines.

Please critically examine revisionist methods, to the same extent that you examine the history of the Holocaust. You will see revisionists rely on argument, rather than evidence. They lie about and minimise the evidence of mass killings as they apply illogical arguments, to reinforce their incredulity, as if their disbelief is the equivalent to evidence.

Well, when I'm told that 6,000,000 jews died, and that is false information, and stating that the number is lower is 'denial' of or 'diminishing' of what happened, that puts me in a rather restrictive position from the jump, doesn't it?

Most historians put the figure as less than 6 million. That figure is just the top end of a range as it has become the most commonly used, recognised death toll. No historian has been accused of denial for revising death tolls down, because they produce evidence. Revisionists fall foul, because they do not produce evidence. They merely dispute and claim unbelievability.

The point about the missing jews, to me, seems no more pressing than my point about the coke.

Not knowing about coke deliveries does not harm the evidence for the running of mass cremation ovens. Not being able to locate millions of Jews, still alive in 1944 and liberated in 1945, destroys the revisionist claim they were not killed.

'the deeper you dig, the more you find it is revisionists, who cannot produce an evidenced chronological history of the Jews in Nazi captivity during WWII.'

I'll get my shovel.

'Questioning and being suspicious of what you have been told, it not a fallacy. Be suspicious and question revisionist claims, as much as you do for historians. You will see revisionists are all over the place and make many illogical, spurious, dishonest claims.'

I ain't planning on getting hoodwinked by nobody. Had the first shot that came my way in the form of a lie been from people that I instantly and fully gave my trust to, I would not be as sceptical as I am.

With that said, I have no intention to simply take my brain out and set it on the shelf for either side of this conversation.

'I have critically examined the evidence for mass gassings and revisionist arguments that they did not happen. The evidenced history stands up to scrutiny way better than revisionist arguments.'

Well, I'm going to have to walk that path myself. From the ground I'm standing on right now, I don't see myself walking back over to a side that lied to me in my youth and continues to try to lie to me in my adulthood. 1,100,000 cremated with a hand full of coke? Another 2,000,000 gassed with 'a motor', buried, dug up, burned, smashed with hammers and scattered to the wind? With, wood from, someplace?

'Please do examine the evidence. You will find that there is no evidence to support revisionist claims that;

1) the A-B Kremas were used as delousing chambers, showers, corpse stores and/or bomb shelters (except latterly Krema I) and never for gassings.
2) the AR camps were used as transit camps, hygiene stations, customs stops and for property sorting and never for gassings.
3) those places sent millions of Jews east to be resettled
4) in 1944, millions of Jews were alive in camps and in 1945, millions of Jews were liberated.

An event like that, if it happened, would leave a lot of evidence. There would also be no reason for the Nazis to cover resettlement up, especially when they knew they were being accused of killing millions.'

This is sound advice. I'm going to take this advice.

'List of documents from A-B, pertaining to the construction of gas chambers and ovens here;

https://holocaustcontroversies.blogspot ... ce-on.html

Testimony from the Topf & Sons engineers about the construction and functioning of the gas chambers and ovens here;

https://forum.axishistory.com/viewtopic.php?t=61650

Topf & Sons history website;

https://www.topfundsoehne.de/ts/en/exhi ... 28724.html '

Again, thank you. I'll dig into these and post back later.

It looks like for you, ultimately, this situation boils down to where are the live bodies, not, where are the dead ones. If I am to lut this in the absolute, simplest and most condensed terms possible.

It's a fair argument.

At this point on my path, I'd point to the census for the jews in the jewish encyclopedia, pre and post war, and say, places. You would not be convinced by that though any more than I am convinced you can burn 5,000 bodies on some railroad tracks propped up on cinder blocks with a cord or two of green pine.

Please just be led by the evidence and note, revisionists cannot produce an evidenced history of the Jews under Nazi occupation during WWII.

[Stubble]

So far as it being unchanging since 1945, that's simply not true. Men were hung by their neck until they were dead for steaming over 1,000,000 people to death at treblinka at Nuremberg for example.

I am going to dispute that as a false claim. Please name the person hung, after a Nuremberg trial, where the charge was that they were responsible for steaming over a million people to death at TII. There were TII trials in West Germany in the 1960s, and no one was hung.

I'll dig. I'll concede that I did not throughly investigate this claim before I made it. I based it on assumption.

Seeing as there was testimony and evidence submitted by the United States about steam chambers at treblinka, I had assumed it meant that people were hung in relation to treblinka.

They could have been hung for something else.

I'll cite source when I provide a more thorough rebuttal.

No, I'll cite it now;

http://hhp.atspace.org/documents/19451205Treblinka.html

DOCUMENT 3311-PS

IMT XXXII [p. 153 - 158]

Going to the 'evidence' from Nuremberg, and its credibility,

Nuremberg Trial Proceedings Volume 3


TWENTIETH DAY
Friday, 14 December 1945

Morning Session

This Tribunal sits under a Charter which recognized the impossibility of covering a decade of time, a continent of space, a million acts, by ordinary rules of proof, and at the same time finishing this case within the lives of living men. We do not want to have a trial here that, like the trial of Warren Hastings, lasted 7 years. Therefore the Charter sets up only two standards by which any evidence, I submit, may be rejected. The first is that evidence must be relevant to the issue. The second is it must have some probative value. That was made mandatory upon this Tribunal in Article 19 because of the difficulty of ever trying this case if we used the technical rules of Common Law proof.

One of the reasons this was a military tribunal, instead of an ordinary court of law, was in order to avoid the precedent-creating erect of what is done here on our own law and the precedent control which would exist if this were an ordinary judicial body.

Article 19 provides that the Tribunal shall not be bound by technical rules of evidence. It shall adopt and apply to the greatest possible extent expeditious and non-technical procedure and shall admit any evidence which it deems to have probative value. That was made mandatory, that it shall admit any evidence which it deepens to have probative value. The purpose of that provision, Your Honors, I may say, was this: That the whole controversy in this case-and we have no doubt that there is room for controversy- should be centered upon the value of evidence and not on its admissibility.

https://avalon.law.yale.edu/imt/12-14-45.asp

[Hektor]

.....
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?

Khrushchev's Speech did TMK deal with peace time dead. Not with 'war time dead'.

Well, there is plenty of documentation on the Jewish Policy of Axis Countries during WW2. It should be possible to take them and then construct a supportable narrative from this. You'd probably mention the extermination and gas chamber allegations, but given that this doesn't really match with the rest of the documentation, there is no reason to take this too serious.

[SanityCheck]

.....
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?

Khrushchev's Speech did TMK deal with peace time dead. Not with 'war time dead'.

Reviewing the text of the speech itself it put figures on neither.
https://archive.org/details/TheCrimesOf ... ovietUnion.

Khrushchev supposedly admitted to 20 million wartime dead in 1961, a good illustration of how one can collapse separate sources into one from memory (which was mistaken here)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_War ... 46_to_1987

Well, there is plenty of documentation on the Jewish Policy of Axis Countries during WW2. It should be possible to take them and then construct a supportable narrative from this. You'd probably mention the extermination and gas chamber allegations, but given that this doesn't really match with the rest of the documentation, there is no reason to take this too serious.

I asked for a comparable big event affecting millions which could be summed up with a single or a few sources. One might find this in the Soviet rehabilitation commission investigation records, which compiled statistics on executions, deaths in the GULag and imprisonments, but those were sources after the fact, not contemporary sources compiled by the Stalin regime. One would have to piece together more sources from 1929-1953 for this, although the Soviets were quite good at producing big survey reports.

The Holocaust does have quite a few big reports covering much of the picture in concise form
- Wannsee protocol
- Korherr reports
- Hoefle telegram
- Meldung 51
- Stahlecker reports and below this, the Jaeger report
- Just memo plus Greiser-Himmler meshing to quantify gassing at Chelmno
- Franke-Gricksch reports
- Himmler speeches
- Veesenmeyer telegrams re Hungary

Further supporting sources confirming extermination by shooting are copious, for gassing fewer, but the Just memo puts a number on this for Chelmno up to June 1942, which is why revisionists insist it must be a forgery.

There are likely a hundred higher and mid level reiterations of Vernichtung, Liquidierung and other phrases in conjunction with talk of death, to the point where attempts to claim this language did not refer to killing look like gaslighting, and not very good gaslighting at that. Several hundred or more uses of Sonderbehandlung again in ways that really can't be 'reinterpreted' much as Mattogno would like to pretend otherwise. And the attempts to reinterpret the gassing references i the ZBL Auschwitz records are painful contortions which are entirely unconvincing. Soz.

[Hektor]

.....
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?

Khrushchev's Speech did TMK deal with peace time dead. Not with 'war time dead'.

Reviewing the text of the speech itself it put figures on neither.
https://archive.org/details/TheCrimesOf ... ovietUnion.

Khrushchev supposedly admitted to 20 million wartime dead in 1961, a good illustration of how one can collapse separate sources into one from memory (which was mistaken here)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_War ... 46_to_1987
....

Link doesn't show, but I guess content is identical with the following:
https://archive.org/details/TheCrimesOf ... gressOfThe

I recall the documents, but I don't think this is really evidence for 'the Holocaust' for the documents either don't mention an extermination program or they are dubious themselves. The soc. Wannsee protocol is a classic example of this. The Korherr Report and Hoeffle telegram don't indicate anything in terms of 'extermination'.... Don't get me wrong on this. I assume that there were increased mortality figures during WW2 and that economic hardship, epidemics as well as execution were part of the causes for this.

But I don't any credible evidence that compels me to believe that there was a genocidal extermination program against Jews. To the contrary there is evidence that there was none. And well, there were mean, motive and opportunities to push such a narrative, which we already have documented on the forum. So when I say that the Holocaust was/is an atrocity propaganda swindle then I do so, because it's the best explanation for the overall evidence at hand.

The interpretation of documents that demonstrate deportation as evidence for extermination can be considered a semantic fraud and it is actually fundamental to the Holocaust Myth itself.

[SanityCheck]

Link doesn't show, but I guess content is identical with the following:
https://archive.org/details/TheCrimesOf ... gressOfThe

Yes.

I recall the documents, but I don't think this is really evidence for 'the Holocaust' for the documents either don't mention an extermination program or they are dubious themselves. The soc. Wannsee protocol is a classic example of this. The Korherr Report and Hoeffle telegram don't indicate anything in terms of 'extermination'.... Don't get me wrong on this. I assume that there were increased mortality figures during WW2 and that economic hardship, epidemics as well as execution were part of the causes for this.

But I don't any credible evidence that compels me to believe that there was a genocidal extermination program against Jews. To the contrary there is evidence that there was none. And well, there were mean, motive and opportunities to push such a narrative, which we already have documented on the forum. So when I say that the Holocaust was/is an atrocity propaganda swindle then I do so, because it's the best explanation for the overall evidence at hand.

The interpretation of documents that demonstrate deportation as evidence for extermination can be considered a semantic fraud and it is actually fundamental to the Holocaust Myth itself.

Interpreting the statistical documents out of context of other documents is the real fraud perpetrated by revisionists over several generations. Making a particular document bear all the evidential weight and pretending other documents don't exist which cast light on the bigger reports is not a viable strategy for serious history-writing.

You overlooked how the very incomplete list of big reports included documents speaking to a policy of extermination as a whole, like the Himmler speeches (especially the second Posen speech and Sonthofen speech where he openly discusses his decision to order the killing of women and children to prevent a future generation of Jews taking revenge).

There are many more, using Vernichtung, Ausrottung and Liquidierung interchangeably and in close alignment to utterances indicating a murderous intent or a desired outcome of death. Thus, when Goebbels recorded in his diary Hitler restating his 'prophecy' of the 'destruction of the Jewish race in Europe' now being fulfilled and to be enacted on 12 December 1941, he notes that because the Jews had brought about the world war and Germany had lost so many dead, the Jews would now 'pay for it with their lives'.

Documents recording largescale shootings abound, and confirm that this talk was not metaphorical but literal. Several were indicated in the short list, such as the Stahlecker reports supported by the Jaeger report, and Meldung 51, with body counts running to six figures per document, and when added up well into seven figures, so a high proportion of the circa 2 million shooting deaths are fully documented (it would be unreasonable to expect all to be, given patterns with repressive regimes destroying evidence or failing to record their mass murders).

The deportation documents are not interpreted on their own. Nor can they be. Again, I noted the Just memo casually mentioning the processing of 97,000 at K - from the context, clearly Chelmno, from the document as a whole, clearly about gas vans. This was recorded not long after Greiser wrote to Himmler on 1 May 1942 noting the prior authorisation of the special treatment of 100,000 Jews unfit for work by Sonderkommando Bothmann, otherwise documented as on-site in Chelmno. The two sources confirm that the original wording of the Korherr report referencing special treatment in the Warthegau (145,000 counted) was to killing. As do other documents, like a note on a medal award proposal for a SS-Sonderkommando Kulmhof member saying he was involved in the 'destruction' (Vernichtung) of 'Reich enemies' (Reichsfeinde). The many other contemporary non-German sources cannot be excluded from consideration, except as a mental exercise, but that mental exercise shows that German documents alone indicate mass gassing at Chelmno. They also record mass cremation there, completing the picture.

Talking in vague generalised terms as you have often done over the years may well help you maintain your beliefs, but it doesn't really help address the specific documents, evidence and camps.

In the above case, Chelmno was the very first site using serial mass gassing to murder Jews, and accordingly is usually discussed first in a narrative-chronological history of the Holocaust, such as Martin Gilbert's The Holocaust (1986), Saul Friedlander's The Years of Extermination (2007) and David Cesarani's Final Solution (2016). Specialist studies of Chelmno and the Warthegau add more detail to these relatively bare bones overviews, which are not signalling HERE IS A GERMAN DOCUMENT in some hysterical way, even when they cite the German documents.

The same overviews and specialist studies also cite the contemporary non-German (and some unofficial German) sources which you dismiss as an 'atrocity propaganda swindle'. Considering Chelmno was the first-reported death camp then here surely would be ground zero for proving the 'swindle'. But there's still no explanation why the Polish and Polish Jewish undergrounds would have decided to transform a resettlement/expulsion scheme into a story about mass murder, and at the start of 1942 in particular.

Until there's such an account - which would need to go back to the T4 euthanasia program and mass shootings and forward to more mass shootings, violent deportations and the other extermination camps - there's no need to take 'revisionism' at all seriously. It would help if there was also convincing evidence of what happened instead, but I'm not choosy - explain and evidence the hoax/swindle/whatever or explain what happened, one of these would change how revisionism is seen quite dramatically.

[Hektor]

Link doesn't show, but I guess content is identical with the following:
https://archive.org/details/TheCrimesOf ... gressOfThe

Yes.

I recall the documents, but I don't think this is really evidence for 'the Holocaust' for the documents either don't mention an extermination program or they are dubious themselves. The soc. Wannsee protocol is a classic example of this. The Korherr Report and Hoeffle telegram don't indicate anything in terms of 'extermination'.... Don't get me wrong on this. I assume that there were increased mortality figures during WW2 and that economic hardship, epidemics as well as execution were part of the causes for this.

But I don't any credible evidence that compels me to believe that there was a genocidal extermination program against Jews. To the contrary there is evidence that there was none. And well, there were mean, motive and opportunities to push such a narrative, which we already have documented on the forum. So when I say that the Holocaust was/is an atrocity propaganda swindle then I do so, because it's the best explanation for the overall evidence at hand.

The interpretation of documents that demonstrate deportation as evidence for extermination can be considered a semantic fraud and it is actually fundamental to the Holocaust Myth itself.

Interpreting the statistical documents out of context of other documents is the real fraud perpetrated by revisionists over several generations. Making a particular document bear all the evidential weight and pretending other documents don't exist which cast light on the bigger reports is not a viable strategy for serious history-writing.
....

Sorry, but that's not what's done. Actually it's the opposite that's true, it's the Exterminationists that ignore context, count on ignorance and then insist that those documents have some meaning they actually don't.
If somebody tells me that 'the Hoeffle Telegram proves that 1.5 million Jews were gassed' then he is simply lying. Because the document doesn't say that nor are their other documents in this context that would anyhow affirm that.

Also, it's the exterminationists that put all the weight on a tiny number of documents to bear the evidential weight for them. Something that physical evidence apparantly can't do for them.... as it actually should....

Revisionists aren't the ones that pretend that 'other documents don't exist'... What they state is that the presented documents in total don't support the Holocaust Thesis. In fact on summary the documentation does even contradict it....

[TlsMS93]

If documents are enough, then they exterminated 25 million people in Operation Reinhardt according to the Gerstein Report, which is considered the best evidence of the Holocaust. Now, who supports this number? Apart from other technical oddities?

Many of these memoranda and action reports were found in Berlin, therefore they were Soviet responsibility, and we know how capable they were of creating disinformation.

If a report says that German foreign policy for the Jewish question is deportation to the East, this is figurative for extermination, but if there are reports talking about hundreds of thousands of executions, it is real, even though the words executed and evacuated in German are almost identical, a matter of letters, like that report from Himmler to Hitler mentioning 300 thousand Jews “executed”.

[SanityCheck]

Sorry, but that's not what's done. Actually it's the opposite that's true, it's the Exterminationists that ignore context, count on ignorance and then insist that those documents have some meaning they actually don't.
If somebody tells me that 'the Hoeffle Telegram proves that 1.5 million Jews were gassed' then he is simply lying. Because the document doesn't say that nor are their other documents in this context that would anyhow affirm that.

Also, it's the exterminationists that put all the weight on a tiny number of documents to bear the evidential weight for them. Something that physical evidence apparantly can't do for them.... as it actually should....

Revisionists aren't the ones that pretend that 'other documents don't exist'... What they state is that the presented documents in total don't support the Holocaust Thesis. In fact on summary the documentation does even contradict it....

Someone saying 'the Hoefle telegram proves that 1.27 million Jews were gassed in 1942 at the Reinhard camps' would indeed be lying if they thought this was the case all by itself.

But claiming this is what non-revisionists say is a total misrepresentation.

By the time the Hoefle telegram is introduced in modern overviews, other sources have been presented for the Reinhard camps, but also for Chelmno, the second sweep of mass shootings in 1942 and for Auschwitz. The significance of Hoefle is that the headline figure matches the one for the Generalgouvernement given in the Korherr report, so *every* source from the GG in 1942 is in fact germane for interpreting it, and *every* source for 1941-2 is germane for interpreting the whole of the Korherr report, with many directly relevant along the lines of the Hoefle telegram.

This is also where the Wannsee protocol with its reduction in population statistics for the Baltic states to reflect the killings of 1941 comes back in, And where because Himmler connected the urgency of killing women and children in the Final Solution to clearing out the Warsaw ghetto, we have a later source referring to the same region as the Hoefle telegram figures do. Quite aside from repeated references to the annihilation of Jews by Hans Frank.

Conventional histories don't fetishise German documents the way many revisionist authors have, seeking to interpret them in isolation from contemporary non-German sources or later witness accounts, whether from Germans, Poles or Jews. But the mental exercise of stripping the paper trail down to German documents only does not go as revisionists would like it to.

[Stubble]

I asked for a comparable big event affecting millions which could be summed up with a single or a few sources. One might find this in the Soviet rehabilitation commission investigation records, which compiled statistics on executions, deaths in the GULag and imprisonments, but those were sources after the fact, not contemporary sources compiled by the Stalin regime. One would have to piece together more sources from 1929-1953 for this, although the Soviets were quite good at producing big survey reports.

The Holocaust does have quite a few big reports covering much of the picture in concise form
- Wannsee protocol
- Korherr reports
- Hoefle telegram
- Meldung 51
- Stahlecker reports and below this, the Jaeger report
- Just memo plus Greiser-Himmler meshing to quantify gassing at Chelmno
- Franke-Gricksch reports
- Himmler speeches
- Veesenmeyer telegrams re Hungary

This much more condensed set of reading material seems to point me in the direction I asked about earlier. I will be devoting my attention instead to them as opposed to the 10's of thousands of pages from multiple volumes and editions of encyclopedia from the USHMM.

I did get further in the encyclopedias than I wanted to.

It all reads like pravda, and stereo instructions. Because, it's a reference material, an encyclopedia.

[SanityCheck]

If documents are enough, then they exterminated 25 million people in Operation Reinhardt according to the Gerstein Report, which is considered the best evidence of the Holocaust. Now, who supports this number? Apart from other technical oddities?

Gerstein's report would not be considered an official German document; it is an eyewitness account that is near-contemporary (drafted at the end of the war).

Many of these memoranda and action reports were found in Berlin, therefore they were Soviet responsibility, and we know how capable they were of creating disinformation.

Actually the majority were captured by the western Allies - with those captured by the Soviets or in Poland or elsewhere in Europe meshing well with the core caches of Foreign Office records (captured by the British) and other German military and SS/Police records.

The location of capture as well as when a document first came to anyone's attention preclude this kind of lazy insinuation of an unsourced conspiracy theory.

If a report says that German foreign policy for the Jewish question is deportation to the East, this is figurative for extermination, but if there are reports talking about hundreds of thousands of executions, it is real, even though the words executed and evacuated in German are almost identical, a matter of letters, like that report from Himmler to Hitler mentioning 300 thousand Jews “executed”.

Meldung 51 was finally digitised by the Bundesarchiv in a colour scan last week, although Hans Metzner published a colour digital camera photo of it in 2019. No sign of this being edited and indeed there is a version in normal type as well as one in large 'Fuehrer type'.
https://holocaustcontroversies.blogspot ... .html#more

There are several reports from below within the regions in question referencing the execution and shooting of Jews in e.g. the Brest and Pinsk ghetto actions, and more referencing special treatment alongside executions for Volhynia.

The range of reports referencing executions as well as shootings is such that your theory cannot account for them all, whether from 1941, 1942 or 1943.

Reports referencing deportation or resettlement to the east that do not provide an actual destination reflect the division of labour and need to know in the bureaucracy in many cases; certainly for western Europe and Berlin. The 'east' from these POVs could mean anything from the annexed western territories of former Poland eastwards, so including Lodz and Auschwitz. A great many reports from the west, Reich and southeast then mention a more precise destination: overwhelmingly Auschwitz.

In Poland, documents refer repeatedly to generic evacuations or resettlements or outsettlements while failing to specify a clear destination. Then other documents reference the Reinhard camps as destinations.

Resettlement was also used fully euphemistically to describe mass shooting actions, such as at Slutsk in February 1943, when the 'resettlement place' (Umsiedlungsplatz) involved pits (Gruben) and a roster of SS who were to be aided by handers-out of ammunition (Patronenausgeber). I think even Germar Rudolf has coughed and conceded that here, resettlement was a clear euphemism.

Another report from Minsk by the Security Police commander there, Strauch, described a March 1942 action in Minsk: "On 1 March 1942 an action was to take place against the Russian ghetto in Minsk. The Generalkommissar received prior notification. In order to disguise the action the Council of Elders was to be informed that 5,000 Jews from the Minsk ghetto were to be resettled." (report of 25 July 1943 compiling many previous file notes, NO-2662 and BArch NS 19/1770). This action was noted in Ereignismeldung Nr 178 as an execution: "During an action against the Jews, carried out on March 2 and 3, 3,412 Jews were executed in Minsk"
https://www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/op ... ssr-no-178

A further example is a police company report on a deportation action from Kolomea to Belzec in 1942. This was entitled 'Judenumsiedlung' but described 1) shooting about 1000 Jews before the transport, 2) the deaths of a quarter - 2000 - of the 8000 deportees on arrival, either from suffocation or from being shot trying to break out of the train, 3) a deportation from Eastern Galicia westwards to Belzec.

So when 'resettlement' is encountered after the onset of the Final Solution, one looks for the following. Firstly, was the reference intended for the outer circle of those without need to know or when reiterating the general cover story? Secondly, does the reference lose any concrete reference to a destination? Thirdly, is this from ultra-insiders (like Strauch, or Katzmann, or the author of the Kolomea-Belzec report) who prefer to use this and then who also use special treatment (as they usually do) and then default back to other terms, as with Kolomea-Belzec, which documents the deaths of 3000 Jews mainly by shooting all by itself without even getting to the 6000 survivors deposited at Belzec.

The contrast with actual resettlements in 1939-41 of Poles and Jews, and other evacuations and resettlements of non-Jews in 1942-44, is the really striking thing. One can document destinations in great detail for these, but other than the documents referencing Auschwitz, the Reinhard camps or shooting sites not for the Final Solution 'resettlements'.

Which term was appearing in inverted commas in Polish and Polish Jewish contemporary sources already by the first months of 1942, i.e. the locals were seeing the bullshit for what it was from the get-go. But they hadn't in 1939-41 with earlier expulsions and didn't with resettlements of Poles, or labour transfers of Jews or concentrations from one ghetto to another.

I invite you to consider the first half of 1942 and the first deportations to explain why all of a sudden the Polish and Polish Jewish undergrounds would both conclude the deportations were going to Chelmno, Belzec and Sobibor and no further, and why they took the risk of being refuted by the Germans pointing to even just a Potemkin resettlement in the actual east. How could they predict the total PR ineptitude of the Nazi regime?

No revisionist seems willing to answer this question for some reason.

[Hektor]

Sorry, but that's not what's done. Actually it's the opposite that's true, it's the Exterminationists that ignore context, count on ignorance and then insist that those documents have some meaning they actually don't.
If somebody tells me that 'the Hoeffle Telegram proves that 1.5 million Jews were gassed' then he is simply lying. Because the document doesn't say that nor are their other documents in this context that would anyhow affirm that.

Also, it's the exterminationists that put all the weight on a tiny number of documents to bear the evidential weight for them. Something that physical evidence apparantly can't do for them.... as it actually should....

Revisionists aren't the ones that pretend that 'other documents don't exist'... What they state is that the presented documents in total don't support the Holocaust Thesis. In fact on summary the documentation does even contradict it....

Someone saying 'the Hoefle telegram proves that 1.27 million Jews were gassed in 1942 at the Reinhard camps' would indeed be lying if they thought this was the case all by itself.

But claiming this is what non-revisionists say is a total misrepresentation.
....

Exterminationists don't saying something directly, they love using innuendo. And I've seen the Hoefle Telegram being used to suggest that this somehow proves that those camps were actually extermination camps.

[SanityCheck]

Exterminationists don't saying something directly, they love using innuendo. And I've seen the Hoefle Telegram being used to suggest that this somehow proves that those camps were actually extermination camps.

I'm sure you have, but engage with the opponents actually in front of you rather than the ones in your memory or your imagination.

On its own, the Hoefle telegram does not support transit, since the document simply refers to 'intake' (Zugang) not 'throughput' (Durchgang). That is additional evidence to corroborate the proper interpretation of the Korherr report as deceptively edited, with the original specifying special treatment (Sonderbehandlung), a proven euphemism for killing in the Nazi paper trail as a whole.

So the Hoefle telegram is already not a neutral document even without specifying killing or gassing. It's even less neutral in its proper conjunction with the Korherr report and the Himmler letter ordering the editing of the report, which is already just three documents.

Several hundred sources are going to be woven together to provide a robust account of these events, and they can be woven together into a coherent narrative (including of burials, exhumations and mass cremations), just like other historical events.

Whereas the revisionist strategy seems to be isolate each source, ignore trying to compose a narrative or explanation, and spend inordinate lengths of time waffling around each source as if it exists on its own. Far too longwinded.

Just to remind you, most overviews would have cited Stangl's interviews with Gitta Sereny, Gerstein's report, Wiernik and assorted other survivors of Belzec, Sobibor and Treblinka, plus varying numbers of German SS staff, alongside diaries, contemporary reports and memoirs/testimonies of the ghetto actions, all while doing the same for Chelmno, Auschwitz and the ongoing mass shootings. The literature cited would throw out a further net over hundreds more sources for all these camps and killing sites, for both 1942 and 1943, as well as the surrounding regions and higher-level policy (such as Himmler's speech tour in 1943-44).

Critical engagement with overview literature expects a follow-on engagement with the specialist literature cited. Students are expected to synthesise results from multiple secondary sources and then to progress to incorporating primary sources. If they leave something crucial out, someone can say 'you forgot this' and they cannot necessarily whine they weren't spoonfed everything by a single master explainer (that's called 'overrelying on a single source' in marking rubrics). Those are the rules of informed evidence-based discussion. Those rules also don't allow for baselessly throwing out entire categories of evidence; they do allow for a critical discussion. So either a revisionist handwaves and throws out everything a priori, usually without any evidence of having even read all the sources they're dismissing, or they go on at excessive length slogging through everything they can find, and often in series rather than in parallel (as would be more concise and indeed, more usual). Neither is particularly coherent.

More to the point of this thread, when a revisionist author dares advance a positive claim the evidence presented for this is either nonexistent (pulled out off their ass, bare assertion, inferred and not supported directly) or typically was composed on the other side of the Atlantic in a wartime newspaper. All the many attacks of the cooties and abuse of the sources for the explanation the revisionist doesn't like and won't accept don't in fact constitute evidence in favour of the desired explanation. So now we're at the stage where even asking for something to support the previously claimed explanation is treated as grossly offensive, which is basically bluster from you guys. You've got nothing.

[Hektor]

Exterminationists don't saying something directly, they love using innuendo. And I've seen the Hoefle Telegram being used to suggest that this somehow proves that those camps were actually extermination camps.

I'm sure you have, but engage with the opponents actually in front of you rather than the ones in your memory or your imagination.

On its own, the Hoefle telegram does not support transit, since the document simply refers to 'intake' (Zugang) not 'throughput' (Durchgang). That is additional evidence to corroborate the proper interpretation of the Korherr report as deceptively edited, with the original specifying special treatment (Sonderbehandlung), a proven euphemism for killing in the Nazi paper trail as a whole.

So the Hoefle telegram is already not a neutral document even without specifying killing or gassing. It's even less neutral in its proper conjunction with the Korherr report and the Himmler letter ordering the editing of the report, which is already just three documents. ...

Of course it is Zugang and 'Durchgang; isn't mentioned. Because registering Zugang/addition is what is done, simply because it has a punctual nature. One really shouldn't try to interpret official documents, if one is clueless about how administration operates. Then one could come up with something serious in the process and won't have to resort to this kind of eisegesis. If there was no "Abgang" (people leaving), there would have been physical evidence for their remains still being there. While there are - as expected by the revisionist position -some remains to be found in that area (as by the why in any previous war zone), there is nothing of that kind one would expect if the Exterminationist position would be true.

The Hoefle Telegram is exactly what one would expect, if those were transit camps... Adding anything else demonstrates malicious intent. Which I noticed in abundance on the Exterminationist side.