Revisionist arguments about the shootings are "essentially numerical"?

[SanityCheck]

Orthodoxy strongly favor the 26,200 figure, per Terry, and 'corroborated' by a Wehrmacht officer post-war:

Pretty much every conventional secondary source notes the ambiguity, e.g. the USHMM Encyclopedia entry for Pinsk, originally published in 2012.
https://muse.jhu.edu/document/3209

Ditto in Longerich, Holocaust, p.350, which appeared several years after the May 2006 blog post I wrote at HC.

It's been well over a decade that I eventually rejected the 26,200 interpretation - nowhere is this total stated as a total - precisely because of the Pinsk ghetto population registration materials, as well as David Glebjman's testimony to ChGK in 1944 which displayed knowledge of the ghetto population statistics (VEJ 8/209, pp.488-491, esp. p.490).

Von den anfänglichen 27 000 Juden beim Einmarsch der Deutschen waren vor der endgültigen Vernichtung laut Brotkarten nur noch 17 913 Menschen im Getto geblieben. Die Übrigen waren bereits 1941 umgekommen oder [später] verhungert.

The introduction to VEJ 8, which was published in 2016, repeats the 16.2 vs 26.2 K interpretation, citing Gerlach from 1999, but reproduced two statements from Pinsk survivors, one going for more than 20,000, Glejbman for the ghetto statistics.

Feuchtinger's recorded conversation is explicit hearsay, since he heard about the event a year later.

The 25,000 figure is however the most probable total for 1941 plus 1942 in Pinsk; the 1941 action by the SS Cavalry Brigade saw the perpetrating regiment lose count in their several telexes sent through the main day of the action, so a total of up to 9,000 as reported in Soviet and Jewish sources for 1941 is quite possible.

I used the Saur report in a special subject seminar on the 'second sweep' in 1942, alongside Kube's report to Lohse about Weissruthenien, the Hermann Graebe affidavits and at various times also the Katzmann report, from the 2019/2020 academic year onwards (and we saw through the whole curriculum before the pandemic shut teaching down that year). Discussing the document with students repeatedly (with nine classes) made the correct interpretation even clearer - it was a good opportunity simply to ask them what they made of the ambiguity, most of the time they went with the lower number, a close reading helped, and being told about the ghetto statistics confirmed it for them. Some then wrote source essays on Pinsk or Wolhynien in 1942, where they could be critical of past historians for not resolving the ambiguity, without hyperventilating.

I consider this a past puzzle and loose end which is now closed.

[bombsaway]

Orthodoxy strongly favor the 26,200 figure, per Terry, and 'corroborated' by a Wehrmacht officer post-war:

I don't think this is true, eg Holocaust Encyclopedia of camps states

"Captain Saur reports that nearly 10,000 Jews were killed on that first day, but his numbers are ambiguous and can be read as referring to either 16,200 or 26,200 victims. Given the list of residents dated January 1942, a total death toll of 20,000 people by November 1 appears probable."

I don't know how material this point is to your argument so I think we can move on.

That's an interesting reference, since it appears to show that at a meeting as of 28 to 31 August 1942 (months before the mass execution of Pinsk ghetto Jews in October-November), there is planning of resettlement actions which is ordered to reflect those same actions already completed at Pinsk. This means the comparison cannot refer to executions, and that the Jews in question would necessarily still be alive after the [resettlement] actions are completed!

I have no idea what you're getting at here, the resettlement had not yet taken place, we have zero confirmation any actual Pinsk resettlement taking place, so they definitely could have just been shot instead of resettled.

Germany did not say, "let's interrogate every Jew to find the specific individuals who are responsible for partisan attacks!" -- there were no resources for such a nuanced approach in wartime, nor did Germany think in individualistic terms (rather than collectivist terms; neither did Jews). The only sure option was to eradicate the risk/threat which, sadly, meant anyone within X area at Y time, especially Jews (due to extreme-disproportionate partisan involvement), were in the crosshairs.

I think the question is more about security re the resettlement camps. Were the resettlement camps secure, like the labor camps set up across the Poland and the USSR? We don't hear about partisans and such drawing support from these camps. If the resettlement camps were secure, which I think they need to be for your thesis, then there would be no reason to kill tens of thousands of Jews, wipe out entire cities, because you could just put them all in secure place.

And this opens up a broader point. We see partisan activity across the region in the map you posted, so by your logic all Jews should have been targeted and killed for the association. The resettlement operation spoken of by the SS police would then be a mass killing action of a dangerous group of people

I should remind you of Mattogno's words about resettlements sometimes clearly denoting executions in documents. One has to then look at context to be able to ascertain the meaning. The context here is this: I had AI go through every extant ghetto in August of 1942 to determine what happened to it. All roads lead to mass killing in the Autumn of 1942 in the region, with a few Jews (far less than were killed) being retained for hard labor, nothing pointing to actual resettlement

AI analysis using only documentary and witness evidence (Soviet investigations omitted)

Classifying each of the 114 August 1942 entries once by its principal recorded fate gives four categories: (1) 99—shootings in the town or its vicinity, including removal directly to nearby forests, cemeteries, quarries or prepared graves; this category includes both single massacres and successive killings of reduced ghettos or retained workers. (2) 13—transfer to another town or regional killing centre, followed by shooting: Bereżce, Bereżnica, Brześć, Dąbrowica, Derazne, Gorodok, Klesów, Krasilov, Kupel’, Mikhalpol’, Rokitno, Snitkov and Stepan. Several also experienced killings during roundup, transport or subsequent searches. (3) 1—shooting recorded, but the location disputed: Moroczna, whose inhabitants were reportedly either murdered locally or transferred to Lubieszów and killed there. (4) 1—murder recorded without an explicit killing method in the checked entry: Czetwiertnia. Thus, 113 of 114 entries record shootings as part of their destruction, while one records murder without specifying the method. Temporary retention for labor, resistance, fires, escape and subsequent recapture were additional, overlapping circumstances rather than separate exclusive outcomes. The nine entries with uncertain August membership and 11 that had ended locally before August remain outside this 114-entry breakdown. These figures categorize the recorded histories; the strength of the identified non-Soviet evidence varies as described previously.

[Callafangers]

I consider this a past puzzle and loose end which is now closed.

Welcome back, Dr. Terry.

Fair point, and nice that you were able to close it in university classrooms well-funded by nations politically enriched by the atrocity-narratives you affirm (but especially 'gassing', diabolical doctors and the like).

At Pinsk, a gang headquarters was shot down (and all of its inhabitants) in an effort to stifle partisan terror from the chief logistical outpost of what was arguably the "hottest" area for partisan activity in all of Europe.

None of us like to hear that women and children were shot, but Germany saw Jews just as Jews saw Germany: "us or them, and we owe them nothing." There was little or no mercy toward Germans (or any non-Jews) from Jews, not even in peacetime; Germany simply reciprocated during this war (explicitly noting in the early years that this war would be different, and that Jews would not again be mere beneficiaries of it, but would shed blood as well).

The obvious propaganda play for Jews (and the Allies) is then to inflate and exaggerate an already-brutal posture and reframe the harsh necessities of total war, recruiting the moral outrage of as many nations as possible, bringing their wallets and enlistees.

Of course, it isn't fair to compare just sixteen or twenty-six thousand or six million Jews (or their innocents) to a notion of a ruthless and cold German juggernaut callously slaughtering an 'inferior race'. There is another column to that table which shows German losses, and it's a column that is seldom ever discussed -- let alone highlighted, for purposes of empathy -- in conversations about WW2 losses. That is, the Germans who fell victim to yet another war by merely resisting parasitic control over their lives, only to be slaughtered endlessly via bombings, starvation-marches, fire bombings, then infinite rape. Men, women, children. It's likely not more than, say, ~5% or so of your university students have ever spent 1% of their time feeling empathy for Germans as they have for Jews (other than, "look what Hitler did to them"), in the context of WW2. This was always the intent of the propaganda / judicial historiography, as its exactly what shapes the post-war world (favoring Allied / Jewish power, in perpetuity).

I spent a large portion of my life feeling the highest possible sympathy and sorrow for the plight of Jews. And to Germans, I thought, "they had it coming." I didn't think about the women, the children, etc; that was all "Hitler's fault, he caused it." Except that he didn't, and its not.

The thing is, if Hitler really didn't want the war, or if he even gave a reasonable 'out' to the nations that ultimately escalated their posture and belligerence, then it's a lot harder to blame him for any 'Holocaust', even if it were true. This is because the question of Jewish global power (hence, "world Jewry") and their abuses is no longer a real question. Anyone smart enough to circumvent LLM guardrails or to spend a few dozen hours in a well-reasoned 'rabbit hole' can verify this thoroughly, and see that it extends far back in time. This means Germany was not just against "innocent Jewish individuals", as we once thought -- they were fighting a powerful adversary that subverts whole nations for its own tribal purposes. This only adds further to the reasons why I have never much questioned the potential motive of Germany to even do something as horrific as what the 'Holocaust' claims. The motive was there for all sides, for all sorts of things. The question is only what really happened. And combining motive + means + opportunity + patterns of behavior only points one direction (it isn't toward a 'Holocaust' narrative).

This is all a bit off-topic but under-stating these aspects is, I think, a big part of what perpetuates 'Holocaust faith'. So many people just know the Germans were aggressors and never victims, "so why would I even bother to ask [critical] questions, here?"

Whatever questions are being asked in universities about the 'Holocaust', one thing is certain: they aren't critical. I might not be surprised to find that in the Nick Fuentes era some channels for more critical investigation have indeed opened up, but this is a brand-new development, even if so. For decades (near-century), this was not at all the case. You went to Holocaust class, kept your head down, and thanked your 'preacher' for blessing you with more sympathy for the sacred Jewish victims. That's it. No further questions, your honor.

Back to Pinsk: thousands of Germans and Axis personnel were slaughtered by partisans already at the time of the late-1942 ghetto executions, and far more deaths were caused indirectly by partisan actions/disruptions to supply lines, etc., by this time. The question of whether German action here was "disproportionate" depends entirely on how you slice up the context, timeline, geography, and various categories (e.g. direct or indirect deaths/consequences). Jews and Germans both were big picture, hive-minded collectivists; they would accept local losses with big digits, so long as the long-horizon outcome belonged to them. Every framing of their morality (on either side) must be approached through this lens.