"Direct" vs "indirect" arguments and evidence

[Archie]

Bombsaway: "To make assertions at a minimum you must have direct evidence (debate me about this point if you disagree)..."

Bombsaway keeps talking about "direct" evidence all the time. So I think it might make sense to start a side thread to figure out what the heck he means by this.

I myself have on occasion talked about direct vs indirect arguments and evidence. The way I have used it is usually in the context of the where-did-they-go gambit. And the point is that it's strange that this is the #1 go-to argument since this is a very roundabout and indirect way to try to prove the Holocaust. It suggests to me that they aren't that confident in arguing their position in a more straightforward way.

Here is a general form of "indirect" argument

Either A or B
Not B
Therefore A

As stated, this is not a "fallacy." It is a logically valid. But in practice when people resort to this, they are usually arguing for something very questionable. Not 100% of the time, but usually in my experience. There are a few reasons why these arguments tend to be problematic. 1) There isn't always a well-defined menu of possibilities, 2) people eliminate possibilities too eagerly and cavalierly. (Depending on how the argument is made, you could run into various classic "fallacies" like false dichotomy, argument from ignorance, straw man fallacy, or circular reasoning). Here is an example of a problematic process-of-elimination style argument.

This artifact from ancient Egypt was either made by the Egyptians or it was aliens
The Egyptians did not have the technology to make it
Therefore it was aliens

The major problem here is that it's actually really hard to prove the second part. Thus we can see here how this sort of argument can be used to try force a far-fetched conclusion. The where-did-they-go argument has an identical structure.

The Jews were either holocausted or they were resettled
They were not resettled
Therefore they were holocausted

I do not object to someone arguing that the specific evidence for resettlement is lacking as a point in their overall case. But I don't see that point as dispositive and I find it suspicious when it's seemingly used to make up for an otherwise weak case.

Now to return to this part. "To make assertions at a minimum you must have direct evidence"

If stated as an absolute like this, I would disagree. It is indeed sometimes possible to prove things by implication or deduce something from other known facts.

Say a document surfaces related Abraham Lincoln or some other historical figure. Then suppose it is shown to be inauthentic (say by forensics or some anachronism in the text). Then we know that it's fake. We may or may not be able to figure out who forged it or how. But by implication we know that somebody must have forged it.

Or consider something fairly complicated like the question of which order the four Gospels were written in. There's no "direct" evidence on this point in the sense that we do not have dated original manuscripts or anything like that. But most scholars are convinced for example that Mark was written first based on analysis of the texts. And they are probably right. In that case you have a conclusion that is supported by evidence and reasoning, but it's mostly inferential.

Witness testimony is a quite "direct" form of evidence. Witness says A. Therefore A. That's pretty direct, but not necessarily strong.

[bombsaway]

It's not about 'where did they go', it's about the idea of making claims without direct evidence.

"To make assertions at a minimum you must have direct evidence"

If stated as an absolute like this, I would disagree. It is indeed sometimes possible to prove things by implication or deduce something from other known facts.

Say a document surfaces related Abraham Lincoln or some other historical figure. Then suppose it is shown to be inauthentic (say by forensics or some anachronism in the text). Then we know that it's fake. We may or may not be able to figure out who forged it or how. But by implication we know that somebody must have forged it.

Isn't the direct evidence the document itself in that case?

Witness testimony is a quite "direct" form of evidence. Witness says A. Therefore A. That's pretty direct, but not necessarily strong.

You're correct that witness testimony is a direct but unreliable kind of evidence. So if you're relying on witness testimony, it needs to be heavily corroborated.

You're familiar with history I take it. If what you're saying is true, 'direct evidence' not that important, find me an accepted assertion in the modern era (say last 200 years) where a mass event (say something involving more than a hundred people) is believed to have happened on the basis of no direct evidence. I think this is fair for comparative purposes.

[SanityCheck]

Archie, in syllogistic terms what is being objected to is the reverse claim in one of your syllogisms

The Jews were either holocausted or they were resettled
They were not holocausted
Therefore they were resettled

This does not follow, since nowhere has the volume of evidence been introduced. The evidence must be direct, and this is what is being compared.

-There are claims that Jews deported to the Reinhard camps were resettled rather than exterminated
-The volume of direct evidence (testimonies, contemporary sources and physical traces) for extermination is greater than the volume of direct evidence (testimonies, contemporary sources and physical traces) for resettlement
-Therefore extermination remains more probable

This is comparing two explanations, sometimes known as inference to the best explanation. The current best explanation is extermination because there is insufficient evidence for the alternative, resettlement. That mirrors the broad global consensus in the public sphere, academia, etc, in support of the Holocaust as a historical fact and against the 'revisionist' thesis, even after stripping away the toxic elements (antisemitism and right-wing politics vs shunning, repression and sometimes criminalisation).

Finding more direct evidence for 'resettlement' would necessarily change the balance of probabilities.

There seems to be a widespread belief or unspoken assumption among some 'revisionists' that they can just attack the direct evidence for extermination and reduce this to a notional zero, usually through well-poisoning or wholesale dismissals of entire categories of evidence, so once this is done, either the subject has been erased from history and nobody will ever enquire further, or this clears the field for Graham Hancock style homeopathic quantities of evidence to propagate the unsourced claim for 'resettlement', or simply make shit up.

But unsourced made up shit would not be history, nor is guesswork or speculation. Speculation is a research hypothesis at best, but that does not guarantee finding anything.

This doesn't rule out eliminating some apparent pieces of direct evidence, since this has already happened. Martin Gray confabulated a stay in Treblinka in his memoir of the Warsaw ghetto and WWII in Poland, then admitted he made it up; he is accordingly not regarded as direct evidence for Treblinka.

Where to place the emphasis might seem to depend on the chosen research strategy, since one can spend a lot of time on the direct evidence for the extermination camps, especially with Auschwitz, or one can spend a lot of time searching elsewhere for evidence of survival.

Historians have already done a lot of the spadework, however, since conventional history is interested in every area right up to the farthest reaches of the Eastern Front in 1942, so there is a great deal of familiarity with the available sources and surviving evidence for all the occupied regions, and their peculiarities, including their economic geography, urban-rural balance, the presence of camps for different categories of prisoners and labourers, the locations and size, the rail lines, and so on.

This also goes for the immediate surroundings of the key camps as well as adjacent and interlinked sites and camps. These are now much better researched than was the case 30 years ago, with a key example being the attention to grave-robbing, generating several books in English and German directly discussing this phenomenon at Treblinka (Jan Gross's Golden Harvest) and at Belzec and Sobibor (Pawel Reska's Schuerfplaetze, originally 2019 in Polish and 2022 in German). There are also now studies of the immediate surroundings of several camps and the interactions of the local population, plus the geographical-cartographical studies of Treblinka's two camps, and a range of publications about the environmental histories of camp sites (especially for Chelmno) and more archaeological studies, none of which existed 30 years ago.

These studies provided more direct evidence for largescale death, the churning of human remains and cremation. Arad did not have access in 1987 to the photos of the 'Treblinka gold rush' with grave robbers posing in front of rows of skulls and bones. Arad also overlooked the report from Ortskommandantur Ostrow in autumn 1942 noting that ""the Jews in Treblinka are not adequately buried and that, as a result, an unbearable body stench befouls the air." He did however cite some but not all of the underground reports noting the onset of mass cremation at Treblinka in between this report and the postwar photos of grave-robbing uncovering skulls and bones. The new sources on their own indicate very large scale deaths at Treblinka otherwise there would have beeen no stench to be reported in 1942, or skulls and human remains found after 1944. They also fit with the underground reports and testimonies about cremation at Treblinka.

One can quibble about the interpretation of this direct evidence, but it remains direct evidence for something, just as the Hoefle telegram is easily decodable direct evidence for deportations to Treblinka (and Belzec, Sobibor and Majdanek), which Arad also had no access to in 1987, and just as the Niemann album from Sobibor adds to our sources for the latter camp.

The contrast with evidence supporting the 'resettlement' hypothesis is quite stark: there is no real research effort underway for this. Thomas Kues was the main protagonist involved and he dropped out of 'revisionism' in 2013, over a decade ago. This alone makes the claim a 'degenerating research program' in the terms used by Imre Lakatos to describe the life cycles of knowledge claims. There could well be a revival, but in the meantime conventional research has progressed and expanded its direct evidence for the extermination camps, whereas 'revisionism' has not progressed and expanded its direct evidence for 'resettlement'.

[borjastick]

I see the believers are using the 'consensus' method now. Lots of people say that they were holocausted and because that's lots more people than say they weren't then they must have been. Even Albert Einstein argued against it.

Lots of people claim that man made global warming is very bad for us all and we can change things. Pfff.

Here's another way the zionists wriggle, cheat and twist things.

'You hate jews'
'No I don't'
'You hate jews because you criticise israel. If you criticise israel it's because you hate jews.'

For me hearsay, claims by people that something maybe, definitely, possibly happened because they heard it while in a camp somewhere is not direct it is irrelevant rubbish.

Direct evidence is hard, factual, observable and verifiable. Very few of the holocaust claims reach any of those positions.

[Nazgul]

I see the believers are using the 'consensus' method now. Lots of people say that they were holocausted and because that's lots more people than say they weren't then they must have been. Even Albert Einstein argued against it.

Propaganda is a numbers game. Suppose there were 30 witnesses to an ambiguous event, say steam coming out of a shower block. 10 might say that is "evidence" for steaming (steam is a gas, water vapour is not), 10 disagreed with the investigators and dragged out in the night by the NKVD, 10 say "I saw noffin". That is how the Soviet NKVD method of investigations worked back then. All evidence that might disconfirm the propaganda is erased with only the supporting evidence miraculously surviving. This is how it is with much of the evidence.

[fireofice]

On Terry's "evidence":

Treblinka gold rush has no pictures with the amount of bones confirming mass extermination.

The Ostrow reference is hearsay and rumor from a war diary, that's all.

[Archie]

It's not about 'where did they go', it's about the idea of making claims without direct evidence.

"To make assertions at a minimum you must have direct evidence"

If stated as an absolute like this, I would disagree. It is indeed sometimes possible to prove things by implication or deduce something from other known facts.

Say a document surfaces related Abraham Lincoln or some other historical figure. Then suppose it is shown to be inauthentic (say by forensics or some anachronism in the text). Then we know that it's fake. We may or may not be able to figure out who forged it or how. But by implication we know that somebody must have forged it.

Isn't the direct evidence the document itself in that case?

Witness testimony is a quite "direct" form of evidence. Witness says A. Therefore A. That's pretty direct, but not necessarily strong.

You're correct that witness testimony is a direct but unreliable kind of evidence. So if you're relying on witness testimony, it needs to be heavily corroborated.

You're familiar with history I take it. If what you're saying is true, 'direct evidence' not that important, find me an accepted assertion in the modern era (say last 200 years) where a mass event (say something involving more than a hundred people) is believed to have happened on the basis of no direct evidence. I think this is fair for comparative purposes.

This reminds me of that one time where you asked for examples of gas chamber testimonies in the Western camps and we gave you quite a few names and then you said they didn't count because they weren't "mass" enough or something.

You are asking for examples of things that are not documented but that we know about. That is kind of inherently difficult. But off the top of my head, the British ULTRA project at Bletchley Park was kept secret for about 30 years. That's a pretty major thing that probably a good number of people knew about. Yet they kept really tight lid on it.

There are tons of things that are true that can't be proved. Recently with genetics, lots of stuff has been proved (including mass events like migrations) that before were either speculative (based on things like archaeology and linguistics) or not known at all.

I also think Jews present unique challenges because they are a highly mobile diaspora population and they are chameleon-like to some extent, blending in to other populations (going "crypto") as it suits them.

[bombsaway]

You are asking for examples of things that are not documented but that we know about. That is kind of inherently difficult. But off the top of my head, the British ULTRA project at Bletchley Park was kept secret for about 30 years. That's a pretty major thing that probably a good number of people knew about. Yet they kept really tight lid on it.

There are tons of things that are true that can't be proved. Recently with genetics, lots of stuff has been proved (including mass events like migrations) that before were either speculative (based on things like archaeology and linguistics) or not known at all.

The mistake you are making here is pretty obvious. You are conflating "possibility" with "probability" or "this happened".

There are suspected cover ups yes, unproven or speculative theories, some of which end up being true. But this ("being true") follows the disclosure of direct evidence. Until you have that direct evidence, it's unwarranted to move beyond the speculative stage. This is the bare minimum that revisionism does not meet.

From SanityCheck in the other thread:

This is a defeasible statement; evidence can always surface to contradict such an observation. This is true of theoretically anything in history but is especially true for modern history. But the mere possibility that such evidence might be forthcoming is not enough to make any assertion made in the absence of evidence to support it 'historical'. One cannot write the history of something that has no direct historical sources.

[SanityCheck]

On Terry's "evidence":

Treblinka gold rush has no pictures with the amount of bones confirming mass extermination.

The Ostrow reference is hearsay and rumor from a war diary, that's all.

No, Ortskommandantur Ostrow did not pass on a rumour, it is not stated to be a rumour but is the summary of an evidently official report through military reporting channels which landed in the war diary of the quartermaster officer for the Wehrmachtbefehlshaber im Generalgouvernement. This is an official document, an official source.

OK Ostrow was responsible in 1942 for the Malkinia-Treblinka area, this was within its zone of supervisory responsibility for the military forces in the GG. So it does not mean as sometimes has been argued that the stench of the buried corpses decomposing reached all the way from Treblinka to Ostrow Mazowiecki. But it does mean that someone had complained about the stench.

From the report, one cannot say exactly how many Jews had been inadequately buried, but this was clearly a large number. Therefore there must have been mass graves at Treblinka. It sets a minimum threshold and refutes the 'no mass graves' handwaving we see very often from some 'revisionists'.

The Treblinka gold rush photo is one of many from the site in 1944-45 and soon after; there are photos with the official Lukaskiewicz investigation also showing bones, ash/cremains, confirming the 1945 report's claim of large areas with ash brought to the surface. The crucial dimensions in the 1945 report are several hectares on the surface and having dug to a depth of 7 metres still finding human remains. The post-liberation photos as a set confirm human remains had been brought to the surface in what was evidently now a bit of a moonscape from the grave-robbing.

https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File ... 945_02.jpg
https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File ... 945_01.jpg
http://www.deathcamps.org/treblinka/pic/bigp39.jpg
http://www.deathcamps.org/treblinka/pic/bigp40.jpg
http://www.deathcamps.org/treblinka/pic/bigp41.jpg
http://www.deathcamps.org/treblinka/pic/bigp42.jpg
http://www.deathcamps.org/treblinka/pic/bigp43.jpg
http://www.deathcamps.org/treblinka/pic/bigp49.jpg
http://www.deathcamps.org/treblinka/pic/bigp51.jpg

A mix of close-ups and standoff photos showing multiple disturbances and frequently with visible bones, some blurry (the last two), the 39-43 sequence being taken by J. Byk as part of the 1945 investigation. The range of locations shown indicates a larger area, making the claim of many hectares in the 1945 report very credible.

One can argue about the scale, but these sources taken together mean one cannot claim either 'no mass graves' (otherwise no report of a body stench in autumn 1942) or 'no cremation' (otherwise no photos of human bones after the war).

The month after OK Ostrow complained about the stench from inadequately buried Jews at Treblinka, the Polish underground reported: 'Treblinka. In the Jewish camp, a huge bonfire is burning day and night, in which the corpses of Jews who were murdered by the Germans continuously burn.' (“Treblinka... W obozie zydowskim dzien i noc płonie olbrzymie ognisko, w ktorym spala sie zwłoki Zydow, mordowanych bez przerwy przez Niemcow.”) - Aneks Nr 42 za czas od 1-30.XI.1942 r, AAN 1325/202/III/8 t.2, p.147.

This fits with other reports of early cremation attempts, especially as the next reports on this are from February 1943 (at least two), with further contemporary reports of cremation at Treblinka in April 1943, May 13, 1943, July 15, 1943 and August 26, 1943. This compares with at least five contemporary Polish underground reports of cremations at Janowska in Lwow-Lviv-Lemberg from September 1943 to January 1944, and many others on different smaller sites, or the Lublin camps after 'Harvest Festival', and so on.

[SanityCheck]

I see the believers are using the 'consensus' method now. Lots of people say that they were holocausted and because that's lots more people than say they weren't then they must have been.

No, that's not the argument here and in the other thread.

Evidence for any event or development consists of direct evidence - direct witnessing, official reporting, contemporary sources, photos, investigations - and indirect evidence showing how knowledge has rippled out from an event. This can be compared with the splash of a pebble into a pond sending out ripples for the spread of indirect knowledge.

Rumours have no direct splash or direct evidence but merely consist of rumblings and ripples as a false report spreads, or a true report is distorted. The distortion can be entirely deliberate albeit anonymous, as we saw with rumours and false claims prior to the summer 2024 riots in Britain. A real event was rumoured in a distorted fashion and then exploited.

The events in question here concern forced migrations and deportations, to specific sites, with considerable numbers of direct sources on killings there, supported by all kinds of sources showing there were camps, there had been burials and mass cremations, for Chelmno and Auschwitz there had been gassings. These sit alongside direct evidence of extensive killings on the spot without longer-range deportation but instead being taken a short distance out of a town to a forest where the victims were shot en masse. These overlap with the deportation targets, especially in Eastern Galicia.

687 ghettos in Poland is the key number to remember, several hundred 'liquidated' by mass shootings. Six key extermination camps.

57 ghettos were in the Warthegau and went directly or indirectly to one camp, Chelmno.

289 ghettos were in regions which saw deportations to Treblinka, but some regions also saw deportations to Auschwitz, Belzec, Sobibor, Majdanek and many of the 289 ghettos were concentrated in a prior collection ghetto or collection camp before deportation.

Up to 252 ghettos were in regions where the final destruction of a ghetto was generally carried out by mass shootings, with a few exceptions (Lida in Weissruthenien was liquidated by a transport to Sobibor, following earlier shooting actions, Wilno was liquidated in several directions). 58 of these ghettos were in Eastern Galicia, which had seen westward deportations to Belzec in 1942, but the 1943 final destructions were almost all carried out 'on the spot'.

Currently there are some indirect sources on deportations which amount at best to either rumours or deceptions, claims that the deportations were going further east for some form of resettlement or work. These sources from within Poland at the departure end are not in their own right evidence of arrival, by contrast the much larger volume of evidence for deportation within Poland is confirmed by a smaller volume of reporting from the arrival destinations at the six key camps.

In the absence of direct evidence confirming arrival, then a claim that the Jews deported from Poland were resettled further east or put to work in labour camps either en route to the final destinations or after them cannot be historical.

Discovering sources which confirm arrival of the deportations further east or just elsewhere than the six key camps would really start to alter the balance of probabilities here. Some might alter our perception of these events so we realised 10-20% or more were in fact 'transited' from the Reinhard camps, as opposed to the current knowledge of small numbers for Sobibor and Treblinka being selected for local or at best regional work camps, and none for Belzec. Some might impeach claims of extermination of specific transports or from specific regions. At a certain point the counter-evidence would raise doubts about the sources reporting mass extermination.

But this might produce oddities, such as none of the evidence for mass shootings across hundreds of ghettos in Poland being challenged or countered with sources showing transfers.

The accepted conventional history isn't only about 6 extermination camps in Poland - the figure of 687 ghettos for the 1939 borders of Poland before the war goes with totals of 2.7-3 million Polish Jews thought to have been murdered, up to a third being murdered or dying largely on the spot without being sent to one of the six camps. This figure of 687 ghettos is derived from the USHMM Encyclopedia of Camps and Ghettos Volume II, and is not too different to other encyclopedias or directories, having identified a few more smaller ones, but everyone agreeing on the bigger and mid-sized ones, which in turn left a lot of sources.

Currently there is not even a hypothesis to show how the 687 ghettos were sent through the prism of six camps (or not at all) and landed in other destinations, or how many 'resettlement' or 'work' destinations there might have been. From the perspective of history and geography as disciplines, 'resettlement' or 'work' are not credible explanations if they can't be geolocated and chronicled even vaguely.

This doesn't rule out someone finding sources to begin the process of locating the hypothesised arrival destinations. But it does make the claim of definite resettlement of part of Polish Jewry (while overlooking the mass slaughter of another part on the spot through mass shootings) currently entirely unhistorical.

[Archie]

Archie, in syllogistic terms what is being objected to is the reverse claim in one of your syllogisms

The Jews were either holocausted or they were resettled
They were not holocausted
Therefore they were resettled

It's not symmetric, imo.

Search Domain

There is the familiar adage "you can't prove a negative." This adage is incorrect, but the intuition behind it is not totally off base. It is true that open-ended propositions with a wide search domain are often very difficult to verify. In history, this actually comes up all the time. Say the earliest document referring to X is dated 1827. More precisely that is the earliest that I am aware of. To be safe, I would hedge by saying something like "the earliest known document" etc. Maybe someone else is already aware of an earlier example. Maybe an earlier example will be discovered. The point being is that it's hard to make an absolute statement "this is the earliest" or "there is no document X" because we are usually dealing with a wide search domain (all potentially relevant written records). If I can't check everything I can't conclusively rule out there being an example from prior to 1827.

On the other hand, it is easy to "prove a negative" if the search domain is narrow and well-defined.

"There isn't an elephant in my backyard." This is easy to prove because the domain is limited.

"There are no elephants in New Hampshire." Harder because the domain is much wider. You'd probably have to start calling some zoos. And could there be a privately owned elephant somewhere? If that is not legal, could someone have an illegal elephant? You can see how this gets difficult.

"There are no [insert some small, hyper-specific, non-native species] in Australia." Potentially very hard to disprove. Elephants are hard to hide and so you can make very reasonable assumptions to cut down the search domain. But if we're talking about a subspecies of rat or something, it becomes a lot harder to prove that there are in fact zero of them in Australia.

In the case of the Holocaust, I think the search domain is much more limited for the Holocaust than for resettlement (or more precisely survival). The extermination areas of TII, Belzec, and Sobibor are not very large. Only some tens of thousands of square meters. If the story is true, I say the proof would be right there in the ground, and it's not going anywhere. And I'm convinced it's not there (realizing of course that this is a hotly contested point). The German documents are a somewhat wide domain (it is for one person) but they are reasonably well searched by now (much more so on the pro-Holocaust side) and since the extermination program is BIG, we should find some proof without too much trouble. It's not quite "elephant in the backyard" but surely it's much closer to that than "rats in Australia." And I think "resettlement" is closer toward the latter. You all seem to view it the opposite way (like resettlement is an elephant in the backyard, but I totally disagree with that).

Who Controls the Evidence?

"The evidence" doesn't exist in a vacuum. Especially with something like testimonies, most of the ones that are available exist because somebody collected them for a purpose. Understanding that context and selection bias is essential and this point is never addressed on your side. At all. The effort that went into the Nuremberg prosecution and other trials is huge and it dwarfs the cumulative efforts and resources of revisionists many times over. And since then I think it's fair to say that by the time a revisionist gets to see something, an army of Jewish scholars etc have probably picked it over several times. There has possibly been some suppression of documents. The Germans could have destroyed some documents and obviously would done so selectively. And the Allies might have had some incentive to suppress or at the very least not publicize inconvenient documents.

Hypotheses, Hunches, etc

It is common with a complex and wide-ranging topic to have some gaps. Both sides have some gaps, imo. Often the way research works is that you SUSPECT something, then you look, then you might either confirm or disconfirm it or it remains inclusive. Criminal investigations work like this as well. I would argue that it is not only okay to have hutches, this is ESSENTIAL. It's fine as long as you offer the appropriate caveats and don't overstate your case.

"Resettlement"

Like I mentioned, I don't like either/or set-ups. You are correct that there are implications of the revisionist thesis. And I suppose if the implications were totally absurd, then, sure, we would need to reassess some things. But in its simplest form the main implication (or alternative hypothesis) is that they survived (or a lot of them did). And I don't see that as an inherently crazy proposition.

Proving "no resettlement"

If you want to do the "no resettlement, therefore holocaust" argument (to be fair, this doesn't apply as much to you since you are not a johnny-one-note like some anti-revisionists), I would recommend trying to prove the negative. It's usually phrased as a demand for proof of resettlement from revisionists. If it were me, I would go further and try to argue that they could not have survived. That seems way, way harder than just looking at the killing sites, etc. And I don't think it would ever be conclusive (just as I don't think the Sanning style approach on the revisionist side can ever be conclusive). But if someone wants to present that case thoroughly, I would take it seriously.

[fireofice]

No, Ortskommandantur Ostrow did not pass on a rumour, it is not stated to be a rumour but is the summary of an evidently official report through military reporting channels which landed in the war diary of the quartermaster officer for the Wehrmachtbefehlshaber im Generalgouvernement. This is an official document, an official source.

Well lets see what it actually says:

OK Ostrow reports that the Jews in Treblinka are not adequately buried and as a result an unbearable smell of cadavers pollutes the air.

You're that confident it's an "official report" based on that? "X reports" does not necessarily mean "I have seen an official report from X". It just means that X reported something. It can be as unofficial as making a quip. This quip may or may not have happened and turned into a rumor. It could be an official report, I'll grant it's ambiguous. But your confident assertion seems unwarranted.

[SanityCheck]

Archie, in syllogistic terms what is being objected to is the reverse claim in one of your syllogisms

The Jews were either holocausted or they were resettled
They were not holocausted
Therefore they were resettled

It's not symmetric, imo.

Search Domain

There is the familiar adage "you can't prove a negative." This adage is incorrect, but the intuition behind it is not totally off base. It is true that open-ended propositions with a wide search domain are often very difficult to verify. In history, this actually comes up all the time. Say the earliest document referring to X is dated 1827. More precisely that is the earliest that I am aware of. To be safe, I would hedge by saying something like "the earliest known document" etc. Maybe someone else is already aware of an earlier example. Maybe an earlier example will be discovered. The point being is that it's hard to make an absolute statement "this is the earliest" or "there is no document X" because we are usually dealing with a wide search domain (all potentially relevant written records). If I can't check everything I can't conclusively rule out there being an example from prior to 1827.

On the other hand, it is easy to "prove a negative" if the search domain is narrow and well-defined.

"There isn't an elephant in my backyard." This is easy to prove because the domain is limited.

"There are no elephants in New Hampshire." Harder because the domain is much wider. You'd probably have to start calling some zoos. And could there be a privately owned elephant somewhere? If that is not legal, could someone have an illegal elephant? You can see how this gets difficult.

"There are no [insert some small, hyper-specific, non-native species] in Australia." Potentially very hard to disprove. Elephants are hard to hide and so you can make very reasonable assumptions to cut down the search domain. But if we're talking about a subspecies of rat or something, it becomes a lot harder to prove that there are in fact zero of them in Australia.

In the case of the Holocaust, I think the search domain is much more limited for the Holocaust than for resettlement (or more precisely survival). The extermination areas of TII, Belzec, and Sobibor are not very large. Only some tens of thousands of square meters. If the story is true, I say the proof would be right there in the ground, and it's not going anywhere. And I'm convinced it's not there (realizing of course that this is a hotly contested point). The German documents are a somewhat wide domain (it is for one person) but they are reasonably well searched by now (much more so on the pro-Holocaust side) and since the extermination program is BIG, we should find some proof without too much trouble. It's not quite "elephant in the backyard" but surely it's much closer to that than "rats in Australia." And I think "resettlement" is closer toward the latter. You all seem to view it the opposite way (like resettlement is an elephant in the backyard, but I totally disagree with that).

One problem here is the discussion especially from the 'revisionist' side keeps slipping to the Reinhard camps only, as in your post above which mentioned BST and did not mention Auschwitz, Chelmno, the other KZs, T4 or the mass shootings. The Reinhard camps appear to be the weak spot, one reason being because there aren't clear-cut documents referencing gassing as there are for Auschwitz and Chelmno, but they're bracketed by the other camps and the wider east with numerous mass shootings through to the Caucasus, and tied in to the rest of the history in various ways. Key sources and witnesses from Korherr to Hoess, Blobel, Eichmann and others tie in the Reinhard camps with the rest.

Geography is more decisive since it would be truly anomalous if the Jews of annexed western Poland had been exterminated by gas (going by the prima facie documents) and the Jews of eastern Poland and further east into the Soviet Union were slaughtered in mass shootings, but we somehow decide to engage in mystery-mongering about the Jews of central Poland.

Like it or not, the parts therefore provide indirect corroboration for each other. This does not work as well in the opposite direction, since sooner or later one runs into a very well documented aspect, or one that has even more source types. Birkenau isn't after all just about Hoess, it's also about the Sonderkommando manuscripts, photos, a detailed set of files on the construction of the crematoria, the ZBL photos, and the Auschwitz album photos, just naming a few examples, little of which has any equivalents for Treblinka

However: I have pointed out just in the past day that research has not stood still on the Reinhard camps any more than it's stood still on Auschwitz, Chelmno, other KZs, T4 or the mass shootings. The example of the Treblinka gold rush photo is a good one: on its own it is not 'decisive', but it emerged at a time when deathcamps.org had published many but not all of the 1945 photographs of the investigation of Treblinka. Those photos were not in Hilberg, who has no photos whatsoever, and were not really included in Arad.

There were no museums and researchers working on the Reinhard camps until 20-25 years ago, now these exist for all three camps in Poland, while interest has grown elsewhere, e.g. in Russia because of the Sobibor revolt, the state archives published various sources, and this paralleled editions on Treblinka and Majdanek; there's also now a developing Russian archives website on the Warsaw ghetto uprising. Compared even to 2011, there is just a lot more material available.

This also applies to the range of archaeological studies *across* Poland as well as studies of the environment or local society surrounding these camps; the Poles especially are going beyond just the key camps and that needs to be factored in here as well, but they're also underlining facts about the Reinhard camps which should be front and centre of the discussions. For sure, it is now impossible to claim that there were no cremations and no mass graves at these camps, and that has realistically been the case ever since the Kola investigations of Belzec. So I think non-'revisionists' are entitled to dismiss 'revisonists' who keep on insisting there were "no mass graves" and who fail to acknowledge there clearly were cremations.

The proportion, size, extent is what should be discussed, not the all-or-nothing bollocks or goalpost moving that has cluttered a few parts of the internet for the past two decades. As I have definitely observed recently, but also repeatedly over the years, the question of scale matters immensely.

I might have a slight bias in pointing to Chelmno but not without good reason: the scale is into six figures, there are documents about gassing and cremation, there were archaeological digs, it was terribly situated if someone wants to claim it was a 'transit camp' for real, and separated from its property sorting depot at Pabianice (so Prudent Regret cannot really make one of his hobby-horse arguments about it), the 1945 investigation was much more extensive and the 'camp' integrated into the local area more directly. Even an issue like the supply of firewood is nonexistent for Chelmno as Heinrich May's testimony indicates he was tasked with supplying the camp with firewood. Plus the cremations were observed in diary like notes recorded by a villager. And the Germans demonstrably lied and contradicted themselves about where the deportees from Lodz were actually being sent.

It's obvious that Chelmno is significantly better sourced and fewer objections can be raised to it, so it's unsurprising it has received much less attention from 'revisionists'. While it was a little obscure 30 years ago, the 2000s totally changed that especially considering German research.

But the issues raised by Chelmno do help point to what to look for with the Reinhard camps. I do have for example a testimony noting the supply of firewood to Treblinka brought locally by horse and cart, which was likely one of many sources for keeping things fuelled. I have just pointed to seven contemporary Polish underground sources which reference mass cremations beginning and ongoing at Treblinka, and there are likely more. The same with the other Reinhard camps; studies of Belzec have noted that a CO bottle was found onsite at Belzec, which also happened with Majdanek, as pointed out recently, with a blatant T4 connection.

The Ortskommandantur Ostrow report mentioning that "the Jews in Treblinka are not adequately buried and that, as a result, an unbearable body stench befouls the air" was first known in the 1960s in West German research, and was certainly used from at the latest 2000 with Browning's report for Irving vs Lipstadt. The phrasing becomes significant when compared with a document about Chelmno: "From a reliable source, the Forschungststelle has now learned that the police guards there later re-exhumed the Jews buried in a little wood near Kulmhof and had to burn them in specially constructed furnaces."

The fact of burial can be determined from the shape of mass graves that can be detected archaeologically today, it is obviously testified to extensively and was reported by contemporary sources as well. So it's not very likely that these German documents noting burials of Jews in two of the four pure extermination camps/sites were retrospectively forged, especially as nobody made a fuss about the Chelmno document until I blogged about it in 2017. +

Who Controls the Evidence?

"The evidence" doesn't exist in a vacuum. Especially with something like testimonies, most of the ones that are available exist because somebody collected them for a purpose. Understanding that context and selection bias is essential and this point is never addressed on your side. At all. The effort that went into the Nuremberg prosecution and other trials is huge and it dwarfs the cumulative efforts and resources of revisionists many times over. And since then I think it's fair to say that by the time a revisionist gets to see something, an army of Jewish scholars etc have probably picked it over several times. There has possibly been some suppression of documents. The Germans could have destroyed some documents and obviously would done so selectively. And the Allies might have had some incentive to suppress or at the very least not publicize inconvenient documents.

On the contrary, conventional historiography, especially German scholarship, *has* to address the selection bias issue when introductions survey source collections and observe what has and has not survived from the official/business type documentation, and the different collections of testimonies and personal accounts. This is a core part of conventional historical methodology. The Germans may be better at this than the Anglo-Americans whose books tend to have some of the wissenschaftlich parts lopped off, but the discussions are certainly there.

The point about suppression of documents by the Allies does not convince me, since the more striking feature is the dispersal of the captured document collections across much of the length and breadth of Europe, as well as the very many regional, local and business archives within Germany/Austria - neither the Americans nor the Soviets hauled off absolutely everything to Washington, DC or Moscow. US microfilming was also sometimes more selective than appears to be the case at first glance, so considerable numbers of files within particular collections then only got noticed in their German cataloguing.

The unspoken presumption that 1940s investigators or archivists knew what to suppress is also not convincing, since I don't detect a relentless obsession with the Holocaust from US, Soviet, Polish investigators in the 1940s, as their investigations were far more broad front. There are many examples of initial confusions or overconfident certainties which were chipped away and reduced by subsequent historical research showing that the surviving paper trail indicated a lesser figure. I don't get the impression that 1940s investigators would have known what to weed out, or indeed that there wouldn't have been intermediate positions. Certainly any hint that more had survived would have been greeted with joy by Jewish organisations, especially if the survivors also emerged.

Exploring the history of postwar document processing and the chain of custody, one soon comes across the fact that much of the Luftwaffe records as well as the Wilhelmine Army records of WWI went up in smoke in a RAF raid on Potsdam in 1945, while one ship bringing captured German documents to the US sank. The patterns of destruction seem to fit firstly German efforts, with the surviving caches sometimes being an obvious small sliver of what must have once existed, and secondly the effects of war or accidents, as with the above examples.

The general pattern with 'incriminating' documents that have sometimes been labelled as forgeries by 'revisonists' is that there are further examples which remained in the archives to be discovered much later on by historians.


I also need to remind you of past discussions of testimony collections, especially 1940s historical commissions, but also the function of subsequent archives. This applies both to Jewish accounts and any other accounts from WWII. Basically, this is what archives are for. The Imperial War Museum put out a book with edited highlights from WWII-era British diaries, and a blurb noted it possessed over a thousand such diaries from WWII. Just diaries, not unpublished memoirs or oral histories or letters, which the IWM also has in abundance for both world wars and other conflicts involving Britain. There are similar museums and archives around the world which collect letters, diaries, manuscript memoirs and so on. This is true for Poles leaving manuscripts about their war experiences as for Polish Jews who might have given their MSes to the Jewish Historical Institute in Warsaw, to Yad Vashem, to USHMM or YIVO, or German Jews who donated their MSes to the Leo Baeck Institute. The same practices existed and exist in Ukraine, Russia and other countries. It's quite apparent that a lot of material for WWII and the Holocaust has come tumbling out of attics in recent decades, once great-grandparents and grandparents pass away, and the war generation disappears.

This material has to be sifted and worked through, but that's also true for the surprise caches and collections of extra material which keep coming to light because of research. The bugged conversations in British and US POW camps for German prisoners of war are one example. Another are the interrogation protocols of German deserters who fled to Switzerland. So these can be woven together alongside diaries, field post letters, and postwar memoirs, with all of these categories seeing a major surge of publications in the past two decades, again, as the veterans reached the end of their lives or their families decided to publish the letters etc. A non-negligible number record hearing about or witnessing killings of Jews and other target groups, with the longest Swiss military interrogation, of a SD officer, not only conveying knowledge of the Einsatzgruppen, Auschwitz and gas vans, but also insider details about Nebe's role in helping instigate them - independent evidence, which remained stuck in a Swiss archive for decades.

The days when the IMT-NMT documentation and witnesses were 'it' are long over; even Hilberg in 1961 was drawing on other archival collections, and the balance has definitely flipped since then.

I'd also say that going through 1940s investigations/trials, then the 1960s cases, both in West Germany as well as the DDR, Austria, Soviet Union, then later cases (e.g. denaturalisation proceedings), one sees a considerable expansion of knowledge and use of sources, which is then overtaken with the 1990s-era opening-of-East-European-archives research. By the 2000s, conventional attention shifted a little towards contemporary non-German and unofficial German personal accounts, or rather the volume of such contemporary sources reached a critical mass. This alongside factoring in the 1940s historical commissions, etc.

As there were numerous opportunities for German and other non-Jewish historical witnesses to record or deposit their experiences and potentially take a contrarian stance in safety, as well as numerous opportunities to do so when grilled in 1960s investigations, then the absence of accounts pointing towards anything different is significant. The excuses about living in fear and potential threats of prosecution make zero sense when the far right press, NPD and other groups were actively denying the extermination of the Jews in West Germany. But for some reason these interested parties with their own 'selection bias' failed to present counter-evidence, otherwise we would have heard about it long, long ago. While one could save the delusion by claiming that the far right of 1960s West Germany was a 'controlled opposition', this tips over into cloud cuckoo land. Not everyone on the far right could have been a Bundesverfassungschutz informer, nor was every former Nazi even living in West Germany through the postwar era.

Hypotheses, Hunches, etc

It is common with a complex and wide-ranging topic to have some gaps. Both sides have some gaps, imo. Often the way research works is that you SUSPECT something, then you look, then you might either confirm or disconfirm it or it remains inclusive. Criminal investigations work like this as well. I would argue that it is not only okay to have hutches, this is ESSENTIAL. It's fine as long as you offer the appropriate caveats and don't overstate your case.

Those should really be ongoing research hypotheses. Really, any researcher should know the hunches and hypotheses and keep an eye out for how sources could fit in with them. Having read the 'revisionist' oeuvre in the mid-2000s after my PhD and having done a lot more research since then, I have certainly kept an eye out for anything that might support 'revisionist' claims, as much as seeing how conventional claims are reinforced by considering expanded ranges of sources.

"Resettlement"

Like I mentioned, I don't like either/or set-ups. You are correct that there are implications of the revisionist thesis. And I suppose if the implications were totally absurd, then, sure, we would need to reassess some things. But in its simplest form the main implication (or alternative hypothesis) is that they survived (or a lot of them did). And I don't see that as an inherently crazy proposition.

Proving "no resettlement"

If you want to do the "no resettlement, therefore holocaust" argument (to be fair, this doesn't apply as much to you since you are not a johnny-one-note like some anti-revisionists), I would recommend trying to prove the negative. It's usually phrased as a demand for proof of resettlement from revisionists. If it were me, I would go further and try to argue that they could not have survived. That seems way, way harder than just looking at the killing sites, etc. And I don't think it would ever be conclusive (just as I don't think the Sanning style approach on the revisionist side can ever be conclusive). But if someone wants to present that case thoroughly, I would take it seriously.

Conventional history doesn't make a 'no resettlement, therefore holocaust' argument. The overviews cover both Poland and the Soviet Union, the wider literature includes numerous studies of occupations of countries and regions. These add up to an implicit refutation of 'resettlement' claims because none of the occupation studies further east have uncovered any evidence for it. Historians can't include a discussion of something for which there are no sources, they do discuss the known transfers and labour deportations (eg the Warsaw-Bobruisk deportations in 1942, which bypassed Treblinka entirely).

'Revisionism' in recent decades has been overwhelmingly focused on the key extermination camps, and research into 'resettlement' has stagnated since Thomas Kues vanished in 2013. But the not-Holocaust core claim relies on keeping resettlement/transit as a get out of jail free card, which amounts to dumping problems onto a large vague space called 'the east' which few have any intention of ever researching or reading about. Mattogno wrote a big book on 'the Einsatzgruppen' originally 7-8 years ago (2016-2017 in Italian) and nobody has really advanced this theme further. But that book basically ignores the 'resettlement' claims Mattogno makes in other books when he needs to move deported Jews or registered Auschwitz prisoners rapidly away from selections and gas chambers.

From my perspective, having explored German occupation policy and themes such as food, forced labour and forced evacuations, then the 'resettlement' claim, which is certainly present from at least Butz onwards, and arguably in Rassinier, is quite bemusing, since the counterfactual of deporting the well documented numbers of Jews onwards would have resulted at the very least in a Transnistria type scenario, more likely something like the Armenian genocide, and over 1942 to mid 1944 could very easily have caused the total extinction of all of the 'resettlers'. The Nazis definitely *had* contemplated this scenario and were still clinging to parts of the vision into early 1942.

Neither the Polish underground nor the Soviets had any reason not to report broadly accurately on this scenario, if that is what had happened. The Poles didn't, because it wasn't in the end the policy the Germans adopted, starting with the Warthegau and Chelmno. That is what they reported on. That much should be clear from any narrative history of the Holocaust structured largely chronologically (Gilbert, Friedlander, Cesarani in particular).

From this basic narrative history perspective, by the time one gets to July-September 1942 and the Great Deportation from the Warsaw ghetto to Treblinka, and the acceleration of Aktion Reinhardt, one is also dealing with the acceleration of extermination by shooting in western Ukraine and Belarusian Polesie, right next door to the Lublin and Galicia districts. It so happens this phase also coincides with the battles of Stalingrad and the Rzhev salient, intensitified partisan warfare in Belarus and Russia, and so on. This would have been a very curious time to shift large populations, especially as Goering was demanding increased food requisitioning *everywhere* for the new harvest year. That is why Hans Frank chaired a meeting on 24 August 1942 at which it was noted that the feeding of 1.2 million non-working Jews in the GG would soon cease, and 300,000 working Jews would be kept alive - figures very similar to the final Korherr numbers as it happens.

One possible implied argument from 'revisionists' which used to be much more widely heard from Germans is the assumption that the Germans were too moral to contemplate genocide or mass death. That seems ludicrous when they were casually accepting the potential deaths from starvation and exhaustion of up to 30 million Soviet city-dwellers and noted the deaths of millions of Soviet POWs over the winter of 1941-2 (Goebbels and Rosenberg both had things to say about this).

So, either the evidence for callous indifference through to deliberate planned starvation is all faked *as well*, or it forces the question why the Jews would be treated any differently. Thus 'revisionism' only goes out of the frying pan of Treblinka into the fire of mass starvation and massive deaths in expulsion operations.

From a German POV, killing unwanted populations of Jews was neater, more hygienic, less likely to trigger epidemics as the movement of Soviet POWs had, and was going to expose fewer Aryans to the grimness of watching large populations be malnourished or starve, whatever the intensity. No fuss about finding spaces to hold Jews in, whether ghettos, camps or reservations, to guard them or anything.

In principle, the killing could have been done by shooting at various destinations, and this was in fact done in Riga and Estonia (Raasiku) with a few transports in the summer of 1942, clearly squeezed in to tight railway schedules. Shooting was also used in combination with gas vans for the May-October 1942 deportations to Minsk-Maly Trostenets. The Germans also had a shooting gallery for local train deportations in the Polesie at Bronnaia Gora.

All of that was happening alongside waves of mass shootings locally in the east, as well as decimatory shootings at departure ends for deportations to the Reinhard camps, and the 'Judenjagden' hunting down fugitive Jews or rousting them from hiding places, while also mowing down train jumpers. Or indeed machine-gunning transports arriving at Treblinka, as recounted in some testimonies from the breakdown there.

I don't know if this is 'not resettlement therefore holocaust' as much as it's a bad habit of mine to try to put myself in 'revisionist' shoes and imagine the counterfactuals, what-ifs and alternatives, which alas I do find ridiculous.

Approaching this conventionally means not narrowing to only some aspects of the key camps, but thinking regionally and describing many trends unfolding in parallel. And yes, one could revisit the narrative histories (Gilbert, Friedlander, Cesarani) to thicken up the evidence and forestall various objections. That also goes for the wider issue of mass graves and cremation - bearing in mind the most extensive study of this runs to 1400 pages and still didn't use all the evidence available.

[SanityCheck]

No, Ortskommandantur Ostrow did not pass on a rumour, it is not stated to be a rumour but is the summary of an evidently official report through military reporting channels which landed in the war diary of the quartermaster officer for the Wehrmachtbefehlshaber im Generalgouvernement. This is an official document, an official source.

Well lets see what it actually says:

OK Ostrow reports that the Jews in Treblinka are not adequately buried and as a result an unbearable smell of cadavers pollutes the air.

You're that confident it's an "official report" based on that? "X reports" does not necessarily mean "I have seen an official report from X". It just means that X reported something. It can be as unofficial as making a quip. This quip may or may not have happened and turned into a rumor. It could be an official report, I'll grant it's ambiguous. But your confident assertion seems unwarranted.

Having read more war diaries than most, this is a classic formulation - a report came in from a subordinate unit, the route is unspecified, whether a written letter or phone call is not stated. It was through *channels* and that applies whether a written communication was involved or a phone call, and once recorded in a war diary or activity report, becomes an official report, as opposed to an unofficial diary, field post letter or chit-chat with a wife back in Germany.

It certainly isn't a rumour or quip, sorry, that doesn't follow at all. That is not how historians treat typed out or handwritten remarks in Kriegstagebuecher (and this is a typed KTB). The coulda-woulda-shouldas and maybes you offer are just copes.

[fireofice]

The coulda-woulda-shouldas and maybes you offer are just copes.

I can assure you these are not "copes". Your explanation that stench could have been smelled from the camp itself was sufficient for me to dismiss this as not proving anything. This was just one more thing that didn't convince me, but I'll take your word for it that every time someone refers to a "report" in these diaries that it necessarily refers to an official report.