No Sources, No History

[SanityCheck]

I have literally just started perusing these documents individually and the very first one I click on to expand and read in more detail fascinates me:

1944-01-05 Letter from Globocnik to Himmler on Operation Reinhard (Aktion Reinhard): “the documents of all other works in this matter have already been destroyed”
Introduction

In a letter dated January 5, 1944, the Higher SS and Police Leader Odilo Globocnik, addressed Reichsführer-SS Heinrich Himmler regarding the economic settlement of Operation Reinhardt (Aktion Reinhard). The letter was submitted in response to Himmler’s order from September 22, 1943, which requested its completion by December 31, 1943. He outlined the two-part structure of the accounting of the “economic part of Operation Reinhardt… a) accounting and delivery of confiscated valuables and b) accounting of values generated from labor”. Globocnik also stressed that “With the entire accounting of Reinhardt, it must also be noted that their documents must be destroyed as soon as possible since the documents of all other works in this matter have already been destroyed.”

Do you know why this document fascinates me? It is because it serves as a documented proof of the extent that documents regarding this economic operation (explicitly written here in an economic context) were destroyed as a general practice.

This highlights the absurdity of the 'where did they go?' position and argument so often put forth by exterminationists about Jews transited via AR camps. "Where did they go?" is a very silly question when we know where the documents tracking their destinations went: directly into a furnace.

Germany destroyed their records, as often did the Soviets, just as we have every reason to believe was also done by other Allied powers (of 'inconvenient' German records). And with this massive inferno of documentation taking place, 'exterminationists' (who still control the archives) have the audacity to tell Revisionists (who are largely prohibited from the archives) they must document 'where Jews went', else they were 'gassed'.

I'm replying to this here as it raises a problem of comprehension of how history is conventionally written, one that has been serially misinterpreted and misrepresented by several generations of 'revisionists'.

The thread title 'no sources, no history' is a riff on the classic Langlois-Seignobos adage 'no documents, no history', in their method manual of over 120 years ago in French, rapidly translated to English. Robert Faurisson took a narrow definition of documents to misrepresent this adage, when reading the actual Langlois-Seignobos text found that they were frequently discussing testimonial-type sources, hearsay and indirect accounts of the kinds which are quite typical for ancient and medieval history.

To write history and make historical claims, one needs sources. If these are few and far between, as for many eras of ancient and medieval history, there is greater room for speculation because of the innumerable gaps in the record. Time is an information-destroying process, observed one philosopher of pre-history. But the sparseness of the ancient and early medieval record is why it's also a playground for pseudohistorians and pseudoarchaeologists, who have an even bigger field day with pre-history before the advent of writing. The hallmark of pseudohistory is excessive speculation and the pyramiding (pun intended) of possibility into probability and eventually certainty. It thrives on mystery-mongering and requires its credulous readers and writers to overlook how rapidly they transformed a possibility into absolute certainty in their mindss.

The type of sources used to write history is entirely dependent on what has survived. Whichever sources have survived of whatever kind = the historical record. Events in history can be likened to stones thrown into a pond and leave ripples in time and space. Historians prefer sources closest to the events in time and space, but this does not privilege a newspaper article written on the basis of no direct reporting several thousand miles away over a direct eyewitness leaving a testimony years later.

Both have to be evaluated critically - the eyewitness could be seeking fame and attention (and maybe fortune) by claiming to have been the second gunman on the Grassy Knoll, for example. One cannot rule out entire categories of sources a priori on the basis of prejudice. Philosophers deem that to be 'epistemic injustice' - it has been enshrined in legal systems devaluing the eyewitness testimony of women, slaves and minorities over men. The simple fact is that the greater part of historical evidence is intentional - in ultimately testimonial form or a personal account. This also tends to be far more vivid and interesting than dull business records, but when one can combine testimonies, contemporary sources of all kinds and receipts and invoices, one can have a very powerful combination.

Faurisson and other 'revisionists' like Mattogno cued off the post-Nuremberg emphasis on captured German documents to reframe 'documents' to mean exclusively German documents. From the perspective of conventional historians of the modern era as a whole, this is pure nonsense. 'Documents' in this sense would conventionally mean contemporary records from all perspectives and provenances. One must distinguish between official/business records and contemporary unofficial documents such as diaries and letters. The latter are also considered personal accounts or ego documents, but they remain contemporary sources.

Several generations on from Nuremberg, contemporary non-German documents are a standard feature of writing the history of WWII in Europe. It can hardly be otherwise: one cannot a priori deny the relevance of such sources with a sweeping handwave about 'propaganda' when many were confidential and 'official' or representative of organisations. This goes as much for contemporary Jewish sources as contemporary Polish, Soviet, Dutch, French, Swiss, Swedish and Vatican sources, or contemporary Romanian, Hungarian, Italian, Slovakian and Croatian sources. Axis and neutral sources complement sources from occupied nations as well as the allies, alongside the German sources.

The 'triangulation' one can do with this - more like a multi-cam effort - helps one overcome gaps and silences in the other perspective's records, but very often also simply expands the range of sources and volume of evidence, onto which one can then add later testimonies, physical-forensic investigations and the like.

German and Italian confidential sources - often diplomatic reports but also intelligence records - record mass killings by Axis allies such as the independent state of Croatia (especially the ethnic cleansings of Serbs, Roma and Jews in 1941) and Romania (eg an Abwehr report on the Odesa massacre at the end of October 1941).

This is not in principle different to the extensive documentation of the Armenian genocide in the records of the Central Powers of Germany and the Habsburg Monarchy which has been used to complement the extant but limited (restricted, destroyed) Ottoman records and those of neutrals, NGOs/relief organisations and Armenian survivors.

Perpetrators of mass atrocities as well as ongoing repression have a propensity to engage in cover-ups of various kinds; they refrain from documenting everything, sometimes use euphemisms when they do document things, leave paper trails incomplete, and they destroy records. This is known from the end of apartheid in South Africa (most police records were destroyed, increasing the significance of subsequent testimonies whether to the TRC or oral historians today), from the end of the war in the Pacific when most Japanese military records were apparently destroyed, and indeed from the widespread but incomplete destruction of German records in 1944-45.

In the case of Japanese atrocities, a famous attempt to seek evidence to deny the Nanjing massacre of late 1937 backfired rather spectacularly when an appeal for soldiers' diaries and letters in the early 1980s brought forward a variety of diaries documenting the killings in gruesome detail. The dearth of official Japanese reports that survived past 1945 did not prevent unofficial Japanese personal accounts from surviving, nor could it prevent the diaries of bystanders/neutrals like John Rabe from surviving.

The German case is much less forbidding than the Japanese example since so many institutions, agencies and units were operating in the same regions as each other. Thus, the Wehrmacht records of the military commander in the Government-General were recognised by the 1960s as a valuable supplementary source for chronicling the Final Solution in Poland. As Jewish policy was not their main task, there were variations in how subordinate commands reported on this, and limits to their knowledge, but the military's reports and war diaries still noted the effects of deportation actions and also famously noted that Ortskommandantur Ostrow "informs that the Jews in Treblinka are not adequately buried and that, as a result, an unbearable body stench befouls the air."
https://phdn.org/archives/holocaust-his ... ka-graves/

There are many German agencies whose direct records were severely reduced by deliberate destruction and which have been reconstructed from surviving circulars, letters and cc-ed reports found in the files of other agencies. This applies to SSPF Lublin's Aktion Reinhardt operation in particular. There are a range of surviving files from SSPF Lublin and its subordinate branches, but most documents referencing Belzec, Sobibor and Treblinka were found in other agencies' files or were preserved serendipitously, as with the train timetables, waybills and other railway records saved by Franciszek Zabecki. Further documents on transports to the three camps have been found in
- files of the Haupteisenbahndirektion Mitte, archived in Minsk
- files of the Vienna city police
- files of the Slovakian Jewish council and Slovak government
- files of Police Battalion 133 stationed in Eastern Galicia
- the papers of Personalstab Reichsfuehrer-SS (eg the Wolff-Ganzenmueller exchange)
- a Romanian file regarding transport planning conference

These records are manifestly incomplete. However, there are no direct sources from the sites regarding 'onward transit' out of the Government-General from the Reinhard camps: no survivor accounts, no eyewitnesses describing onward transit, no eyewitnesses regarding arrivals of transports from the Reinhard camps anywhere else, no reports and no official or unofficial documents from regions outside the GG which confirm onward transit.

Records for both the GG and the occupied Soviet territories exist from diverse agencies - military, civil administration, economic, SS/Police - at multiple levels of the chain of command, alongside Berlin ministries and agencies receiving reports on developments in the 'east' or preserving inspection reports and visits. Thus one can find records at
- Berlin-central level
- regional level (GG, Ostland, RK Ukraine, army groups)
- provincial level (Lublin district, Generalkommissariate like Litauen, Weissruthenien)
- district level (Kreise and Gebietskommissare) and municipal level (Stadtkreise and Stadkommisssare) down to even more local levels (Soviet raiony) in some cases

These include for example monthly reports from the Reichskommissariat Ukraine preserved within caches of documents captured in Ukraine and now archived in Kyiv, which far outnumber the 55 files of the Reichskommissariat Ukraine archived in Berlin (R 94). That figure can be compared with the 317 files of the armaments inspectorates for the Ostland and Ukraine in Freiburg (RW 30). The RK Ukraine files do include however a complete run of reports for the Brest-Litovsk district, at the westernmost edge of the region, which document the existence of the ghetto there and its destruction in October 1942 with explicit language. Provincial archives in Belarus further yield name lists for the Brest ghetto as well as the neighbouring Pinsk ghetto.

Gaps in this mesh of records certainly exist, but one cannot adopt a god-of-the-gaps strategy of merely hypothesising or inferring that something existed in these gaps without other direct evidence. The refrain of pointing to known destructions of records doesn't magically transform speculations into proof.

The claim 'absence of evidence is not evidence of absence' is often heard in relation to only one type or category of evidence, or one particular perspective or institution.

But that is a reminder that other types of evidence may not be absent, nor may there be an absence of reporting from other perspectives.

The most superabundant form of evidence for the WWII era is testimony; there were numerous opportunities for people who lived through this era to record their experiences or be interviewed, not just within war crimes investigations and not solely within one state or one side of the Iron Curtain. Examples would include
- the Ostdokumentation, with 30,000 accounts, some of which relate to the GG and occupied Soviet territories
- the Harvard Project on the Soviet Social System, with many interviews with emigres/refugees from Soviet Ukraine who experienced Soviet rule and the wartime occupation, but who landed in the west
- the statements of 30,000 Poles and some Polish Jews who were exiled in 1940-41 and allowed out via Iran, recorded by the Anders Army and Polish government-in-exile

While the latter would be irrelevant to the Nazi occupation of the Soviet Union in 1941-44, the size of the effort is a good example of the piles that were accumulated regarding the war. The other examples certainly do include accounts of the occupation, and ones which are independent of a Soviet perspective.

On top of these, there is quite the range of diaries and memoirs from Germans who served in the 'east', travelling to and from the Eastern Front or being stationed well behind it, as well as other caches, such as interrogation reports of German servicemen who deserted to Switzerland. Collections of field post letters are numerous in Germany, and again include letters from those stationed well behind the front. More will be forthcoming from attics and garages over time, as families sort through the personal papers of great-grandparents and grandparents, while archives hold many more unpublished examples of diaries, letters and postwar manuscripts/memoirs.

Thus, one can say with considerable confidence that there is currently no evidence of 'resettlement' of Jews in the occupied Soviet territories which has hitherto come to light, whether from the surviving official German records, unofficial and personal German sources, the contemporary reports and documents of non-German observers (Soviet intelligence, partisans, Polish underground, neutral diplomats, Axis allies, the Vatican, etc), or eyewitness accounts of non-Jews, much less any Jewish survivor testimonies.

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.

All that is left are the indirect sources, i.e. hearsay reports which would be conventionally evaluated as rumours, deceptions, and conflations and confabulations, such as sources from Kaunas adding French Jews to a list of German, Austrian and Czech Jews deported to Lithuania in November 1941 and reported as killed there. Since Jews were not deported from France until March 1942 and then to be registered 100% in Auschwitz, the addition of French Jews to the list is premature and clearly false.

For Polish Jews, sources from the departure end within Poland record claims of destinations in the occupied Soviet territories, but unless there is evidence from the occupied Soviet territories, these must be evaluated as records of German deceptions or as rumours. The reason for this is simple: the same categories of sources also record knowledge of deportations to the Reinhard camps, Chelmno and Auschwitz, and often identify the earlier reports as false, either right there and then or later on when new information appeared. A number of such reports within Poland pointed to destinations which are either seamlessly documented or where 'actions' followed shortly afterwards, making the claims even more implausible (Pinsk, Baranovichi, Grodno)

Thus, the indirect and indistinct reports evaporate on closer inspection and emerge as rumours or their functional equivalent. They are thus on a par with the well-documented rumour of the Nazis turning corpses into soap, which is documented in contemporary sources from both Slovakia and Poland. The lack of direct eyewitness testimony to this practice is one means of distinguishing between 'genuine contemporary false belief' and 'genuine contemporary true belief'. This applies a simple rule of thumb.

The more significant rule of thumbs are 1) preferring the account with direct evidence, and 2) preferring the account with more evidence, direct and indirect (the 'ripple effect').

So one can currently write a history of 'resettlement' as rumour and deception, and fill a whole book on this theme, but the centre of gravity would be in western Europe and only secondarily in central Poland. This would not be a history of actual 'resettlement', which remains an impossibility since there are currently no direct sources to confirm this, and not even sufficient hearsay to start hypothesising on the supposed destinations. Thus, 'resettlement' is not a historical possibility at present: it cannot be written up as history.

By contrast, the history of deportations of Jews in Poland from late 1941 to 1944 can be and has been written up extensively in connection with multiple death camps as well as the histories of a range of labour camps into which a minority were sent or selected, as well as histories of life in hiding in urban and rural environments and the dangers thereof ('Judenjagden'), and in parallel to the history of the destruction of Jewish communities an Ort und Stelle through mass shootings especially in eastern Poland, but also in rare cases through pogroms (eg Jedwabne).

[bombsaway]

As I see it Callafangers and other revisionists have 3 options

1) stop making positive claims (eg like most of the deported Jews were resettled, or even survived)

2) make arguments their sources actually do directly evidence their positive claims

3) make convincing arguments that direct evidence isn't necessary to make positive claims

[Callafangers]

From SanityCheck, I see lots of words, far more than necessary to make the intended point (2,500 in this case, not including quotes).

At this point, I'm inclined to go directly to creating an AI summary of his posts whenever I see them, before even attempting to respond. With that said:

Summary Outline of Key Points from SanityCheck's (Nick Terry's) Forum Post Critiquing Revisionist Approaches

Misrepresentation of Historical Methodology by Revisionists
The historical method "no sources, no history" is based on the Langlois-Seignobos principle and requires that historical claims be backed by sources. Revisionists such as Robert Faurisson have manipulated this principle by restricting the definition of "sources".
Langlois-Seignobos accepts testimonial and indirect sources, which are often essential in ancient and medieval history. Revisionists misrepresent these to discredit established historical methods.

Hmm... on this point above, let me depart from the AI summary for a moment to quote 'SanityCheck' directly:

To write history and make historical claims, one needs sources. If these are few and far between, as for many eras of ancient and medieval history, there is greater room for speculation because of the innumerable gaps in the record. Time is an information-destroying process [...]

Do you know what else is an information-destroying process, Dr. Terry? Liars.

Do you know what is even more of an information-destroying process? Liars with power.

And what is even more so than that? Liars with power who have a particularly extensive pattern of lying.

It is fascinating that you admit "time" is enough to warrant speculation, but not the archives of the world (and especially Poland, Germany, USSR, etc.) being in the hands of known liars who have had an axe to grind against the subject(s) of the lies.

Notice that I haven't even needed to mention the Jewish global media conglomerates (and other global Jewish power) to make my point. Yet, it too, is there and quite relevant. Where in your 2,500 words did you factor all of this into your equation?

You seem to think that 'sources' all carry some inherent value. You disregard that certain sources actually have negative value given that their purpose is to manipulate the historical record rather than preserve it. Thus, before deciding what sources "matter", we have to first make some attempt to identify a degree of impartiality and integrity of the source. If either is lacking, this affects the quality interpretation of the source, proportionally.

Importance of Sources in Historical Writing
Constructing history requires the existence of historical sources. It's common for ancient history to have gaps, but speculation is not a substitute for actual evidence in these cases. Excessive speculation can lead to pseudohistory and unfounded certainty.

Yes, constructing history does indeed require the existence of historical sources. Do you suppose the Jews and Soviets who seized German archives were not aware of this fact? Do you suppose it was in their best interests to carefully preserve any and all document exonerating Germany for the crimes that Jews and Soviets (and Allies, etc.) had been levying against them for years by that time? Do you suppose that, in a crazy world, if these victors of war had indeed manipulated the historical record, that they would not accuse those acknowledging this as a probability of engaging in "excessive speculation"?

Indeed, if we remove all context and evident conflicts of interest, your position stands firm: history should not require so much speculation. But in reality, Dr. Terry, the context remains relevant, and the conflicts of interest are undeniable. The chain of custody is almost universally broken with regard to 'Holocaust evidence' and these conflicted interests, thus requiring a much higher degree of scrutiny and careful evaluation of any documents presented, especially those deemed favorable to your position.

This is the most common form of common-sense. No amount of conjecture about 'norms and standards' in academia can overwrite fundamental logic about human behavior and the necessary conclusions which follow.

Broad Definition of Historical Sources
In historical research, sources can include a wide range of evidence – including official documents, personal testimonies, diaries, and letters – from all parties involved in the events. No single source type should be disregarded based on pre-existing biases.

Let me put this simply: a pattern of lies (or rumor, etc.) can justify a pattern of dismissal.

Is there a pattern of lies (etc.), when it comes to these types of documents you present? This is quite a broad question and we'd agree in the necessity for a case-by-case evaluation but, unfortunately, my friends and I here in the revisionist camp do not enjoy the same 9-to-5 hours and academic resources which you do, which enable you (and many thousands of other Holocaust 'historians' and hobbyists) to dedicate countless hours to providing your own commentary on each of these documents, ensuring that the revisionist view (even if more sound and compelling, overall) is vastly limited in its level of exposure, ensuring an unnatural 'tilting' of the debate table.

I state that last point very often (the 'table tilting'). This is because it is one which cannot be overstated. Revisionism is an effort which is told to fight with both arms tied behind its back, and then clowns like yourself take cheap shots for its relative lack of productivity. Yet despite this condition, there are still many areas of the debate which 'nobodies' (revisionists) run circles around you and the others doing your dirty work.

Critique of Faurisson’s and Mattogno's Selective Use of Sources
Revisionists such as Faurisson and Mattogno focused solely on captured German documents, neglecting other significant sources. However, historians use multiple sources – German, Jewish, Soviet, Polish, etc. – to gain a comprehensive understanding of historical events.

Captured German documents (i.e. documents Germany was keeping for its own records, internally) are the closest thing we are ever going to find to an impartial documentary record, regarding the operations of Germany, including with regard to any 'Holocaust' or lack thereof.

It is more than obvious why these documents would be focused on, primarily. Other non-German sources are often dubious, at best, given a pattern of lies which is very well-established through open and honest review of all available evidence.

Can you name a government more famous for its lies than the Soviet Union? Can you name national organizations more famous for their lies than the CIA (and its predecessors) and Mossad? Can you name a people more famous for their lies than Jews?

Nick, this is not going so well for you. You picked the wrong topic to lean into.

The Importance of "Triangulation" in History
Cross-referencing different points of view (e.g., Axis, neutral, Allied sources) strengthens historical analysis, filling gaps left by incomplete records or intentional cover-ups.

Yes, let's triangulate. But as mentioned before, can we be sure to weigh some valid estimate of impartiality into the equation for 'triangulation'? If so, please explain your approach in-detail.

Deliberate Destruction of Records
Historically, some regimes have destroyed documents evidence of atrocities (e.g., Nazi Germany, apartheid South Africa, and Imperial Japan). However, even in these cases, personal accounts, diaries, and other unofficial records often emerge, providing critical evidence.

Yes, in most cases, we can expect that some documentation should survive for major events expected to produce things like personal accounts, diaries, and other unofficial records. However, is the same true behind a world-first "Iron Curtain" (erected by the show-trial extraordinaires, the Soviets)? Is the same true as the world has just been thoroughly conquered by proven, serial liars? Should we necessarily expect 'x' amount of evidence under unique conditions like these?:

- the largest document destruction event in world history (counting Nazi destruction, alone)
- that Allied/victorious powers had free reign over any/all remaining documentation
- that absence of evidence isn't evidence of absence
- that there were many Jewish labor camps still presumed operational by the latter years of the war
- that data reporting and gathering was minimal and unreliable near the end of the war
- that there were many vast, exceptionally-isolated, and densely-forested areas throughout the Eastern territories
- that populations of operational "black sites" (whether one or many) tend to not contribute to demographic/recorded totals
- that mortality will have been extremely high at any such sites, due to conditions of war (disease, famine), keeping populations low
- that the train journeys, alone (considering anecdotes reported from Soviet and German deportations), could lead to deaths of some 30-50% of passengers
- that many if not most German staff at any such sites likely fought and died in the war
- that such staff would be disincentivized from admitting involvement with such sites, for fear for war crimes charges (given high mortality)
- that all facilities and populations in question came under the tightest, most secretive, most corrupt regime of all-time
- that this same [Soviet] regime is known for persecuting Jews before, during, and after the war
- that these persons went "missing" in the most violent warzone in history
- that disease, scarcity, exposure were extraordinary threats throughout the war and at its end
- that the "missing persons" ended up in some 60+ nations post-war in the largest dispersion event in human history
- that this group (Jews) is notorious for their coordinated deception and powerful organizations
- that this same group has reaped major benefits from the war and been subverting global superpowers ever since
- that deceptive propaganda (e.g. Hollywood, Spielberg, Irene Zisblatt) and lying, scheming 'survivors' has become the norm for this narrative
- that all of the victorious powers showed an interest in fabricating this sort of false narrative
- that nobody sought 'survivor stories' (other than Jews at major camps like Birkenau) for many years, usually decades
- that censorship and persecution of those who disagree doesn't really scream "valid/true"
- that censorship and persecution leads to a warped impression of how much truth and validity there actually is on either side of a debate

Reinhard Camps and the Limits of Documentation
Though records from the Aktion Reinhardt camps (e.g., Treblinka) are lacking due to deliberate destruction, enough evidence from diverse sources exists to enable a solid understanding of the historical events that transpired.

You do not care about 'diverse sources', Nick. Or, if you do, you wave your hand and facts which are inconvenient to you.

"A huge pattern of liars and their lies? No big deal! There's enough semi-believable shit mixed-in for me to still be certain Jews were gassed in chlori-- I mean, steam chamb-- I mean gas chambers."

Between information like that of PrudentRegret's excellent analysis on the primary function/role of Aktion Reinhardt (i.e. this operation clearly named after Fritz Reinhardt, and zero documentation for a massive/daily shunting operation), and tools like the Holocaust Encyclopedia finally compiling just a significant fraction of the outrageous contradictions, impossibilities, and obvious lies about these camps, your position that we should 'trust the witnesses' wholeheartedly despite a gaping lack of physical evidence will look increasingly retarded in the years to come.

Refuting the 'Onward Transit' Claims
There is no supporting evidence for the "resettlement" of Jews into Soviet territories from the Reinhard camps. Revisionist attempts to suggest otherwise lack any survivor accounts, records, or eyewitness testimonies.

"There is no evidence behind the Iron Curtain."

Wow, such a profound finding, Nick. Who would have thought that evidence for a given narrative might be suppressed behind something as trivial and transparent as an "Iron Curtain"?

And nevermind the following (some repetition from earlier):

Records deliberately destroyed by the Germans near the end of the war
-- Nobody denies there was a mass campaign by the Germans to destroy records, including those related to Jewish evacuations.
Records maintained in the East kept secret, destroyed, or lost due to Soviet practices
-- The Soviet Union regularly falsified or fabricated historical narratives whenever it suited them to do so.
Records lost in the chaos and destruction of the war, generally
-- Even if not destroyed intentionally, regular bombardment, fires, and general chaos of the war led to many records lost.
Records not maintained due to the complex post-war geopolitical upheaval in the Soviet Union (including Cold War factors)
-- The overall chaos, displacement of populations, shift in priorities, etc., influences post-war administrative organization and collection, maintenance, preservation of particular records.
Silence of Jewish "survivors" due to trauma, fear of retribution/antisemitism, desire to "move on", compliance with Jewish law (Halakah), personal and financial incentives, ideological ambitions (Zionism)
-- Jews less motivated to tell stories which could negatively impact Jews, Jewish security and power, etc. Motives to "stay silent" are generally acknowledged as a reason many survivors did not "come forward" until the 80s-90s.
Disruption of family memory (families torn apart, loss of shared personal and oral histories)
-- Details of precise timelines and paths traveled are lost and/or less memorable, given family separation.
Jews changing their identities, assimilating into new communities, losing Jewish identity (difficult to track)
-- Name changes were extremely common post-war, suggesting a strong collective desire for Jews to assimilate entirely post-war.
Lack of interest or awareness among historians/researchers or the broader public about the fate of these individuals
-- Interest in AR camps was minimal until at least the 70s, remained low throughout the 20th century.
Lack of preservation, decoding or awareness of records actually produced
-- Limited means and access by critics (e.g. Revisionists) to locate and expose type or quantity of records which may indeed exist.
Language and cultural barriers limiting documentation of experiences
-- Jews displaced are navigating foreign cultures and languages, limiting the opportunity for records to be created.
Limited literacy and access to education preventing the documentation of experiences
-- Although Jews in general had decent literacy in the pre-war years, this would be impacted by the war itself and displacement post-war (especially for youth)
Short life expectancy of Jews in these areas due to overall conditions throughout the postwar years
-- Stress, scarcity, limited opportunities, harsh conditions, etc., would serve to impact life expectancy.
Lack of social and institutional support or recognition of Jewish experiences to encourage recording
-- Little or no infrastructure to locate and record "survivor" testimonies nor encourage them to be told was in-place

While the above are all significant, they are greatly overshadowed by the one, simple fact already stated: the Allies (i.e. the serial liars, defamers, propagandists) won the war. They acquired all of the documents and resources along with it.

The Fallacy of "Absence of Evidence"
The conventional revisionist mantra that "absence of proof is not proof of absence" is refuted. SanityCheck argues that history should not be built on speculation when there is an absence of direct evidence.

Indeed, SanityCheck does argue this. SanityCheck apparently cares little for 'sanity', it seems. See earlier comments, above.

Testimony as the Most Abundant WWII Evidence
Evidence from the WWII era is abundant with testimonies, including diaries, memoirs, and interviews, often from multiple sources such as Jewish survivors, Germans, the Polish underground, and Soviet partisans.

And surely you expect there would be countless THOUSANDS of Ukrainians, Belarusians, etc. reporting on one extra German train (out of dozens-hundreds daily carrying war supplies) rolling through town or deep into a forest, where Jews were secretly unloaded at a top-secret and maximum security black site. Yes, I am quite sure the Germans chose a publicly-visible route and area for Jewish quarantine sites, as appropriate. This makes perfect sense.

If transit and resettlement happened at all, the only rational approach was to secure these sites to the extreme. Given the lack of evidence and coherence for 'extermination', and given the copious evidence of literal evacuation and resettlement as the official and widely-documented policy (plus lack of evidence demonstrating any actual or intended shift away from this policy), the evidence is overwhelming that Jews were resettled into the East.

Given permanent resettlement was not on the menu during wartime (for security reasons, among others), secured quarantine sites (supported by Goebbels' language in his diary) were necessarily the approach taken. Details are scant due to a deliberate and international postwar effort toward "denazification", exaggeration of 'Jewish victimhood', and maximum defamation toward National Socialism and its policies. Motives included securing power objectives, outcomes related to Palestine, revenge, and seeking reparations, among others.

Differentiating between Rumors and Evidence in History
SanityCheck highlights the need to differentiate between rumors and reliable evidence. For example, false reports of Jews being resettled in the East were eventually debunked upon closer examination.

Vague reports do not necessarily indicate their being false. Whereas we would seemingly agree that a pattern of clearly-false reports invalidates the trustworthiness of the source, I note that you do not apply this standard to Jewish testimony, for example.

Your expectation for 'x' amount of evidence for Jews sent East derived from the Soviet Union is not justified by the circumstances, in any case. The evidence shows Jews were sent East. It does not show they were gassed in mystery-chambers after being shunted down to a clothing sort depot.

Oh, and it sure as hell doesn't show they were the Guinness World Records holders for the most efficient (and impossible) lumberjacking enterprise of all-time, on multiple counts:

https://holocaustencyclopedia.com/techn ... mberjacks/

Writing History Based on Evidence, Not Speculation
The historian underlines that history should only be constructed based on existing evidence. The revisionist claims of "resettlement" are dismissed due to a lack of evidence. On the contrary, the deportation and mass killing of Jews in Poland during the Holocaust are evidenced and shored up by historical research.

Total nonsense. Your entire argument amounts to a laughable 'victory dance' for the victors of WW2, basically saying:

"If we fake the history effectively, it becomes the truth!"

Only by a total disregard and blindfold for any concept of liars, conflicted interests, global conquest and propaganda campaigns, Jewish behavior, Allied/Soviet show trials, etc., etc., does one begin to have any chance at taking your rambling seriously.

Do us a favor and run your next reply through an AI-summary generator before you post it here. This was much more enjoyable than yawning my way through your complete X,000-word post, per usual.

[bombsaway]

the evidence is overwhelming that Jews were resettled into the East.

I don't think this is your main argument, but is any of this evidence direct? Post so we can evaluate.

Otherwise, it would seem your argument is direct evidence is unnecessary due to presence of a conspiracy to fabricate a mass event. Yet this is a positive claim as well, so in a historical sense you also need direct evidence. By assuming its existence you are "begging the question", such a conspiracy constitutes a mass event in and of itself which also needs to be directly evidenced, or perhaps it doesn't.

[Callafangers]

the evidence is overwhelming that Jews were resettled into the East.

I don't think this is your main argument, but is any of this evidence direct? Post so we can evaluate.

Otherwise, it would seem your argument is direct evidence is unnecessary due to presence of a conspiracy to fabricate a mass event. Yet this is a positive claim as well, so in a historical sense you also need direct evidence. By assuming its existence you are "begging the question", such a conspiracy constitutes a mass event in and of itself which also needs to be directly evidenced, or perhaps it doesn't.

Yes, there are German policies galore which serve as direct evidence that the policy was, indeed, one of expulsion/evacuation. Beyond this, direct evidence is lacking for the reasons I have explained in-detail in my previous post.

FYI, bombsaway, you're not honest and so I am very much averse to debating with you. I'll chime in occasionally on an interesting or especially objectionable point from you but that's going to be the extent of my engagement, for the most part. I don't have as much free time on my hands lately and I have seen how you operate. I'm not interested.

Others here have also addressed your call for 'direct evidence'.

[Archie]

The Allies overtook Poland and Germany relatively soon after "the Holocaust" supposedly happened. Hence it is reasonable to expect a high baseline of proof. If the German government had a formal policy of exterminating the Jewish race and largely succeeded in the territories they controlled, then this should be apparent in their documents. If it isn't, you have some explaining to do. I would also expect abundant physical proof. Now, if Hitler had somehow negotiated a peace or something and had maintained control over most of Central Europe for many years, in that case there would be a lower baseline expectation of evidence.

The Holocaust histories rely on testimonies for the most crucial and disputed parts of the story. And they do not even do a good job of making use of the testimonial evidence. They do not ever try to justify the claims from first principles. They assume the story is true and from there it's an exercise in trying to harmonize bad sources into something roughly consistent with preexistent legends and making very selective concessions on inessential points when this is not possible.

I have spent a fair bit of time studying the material on war-time reports/knowledge and I have a vastly different interpretation of it.

1) For one thing, you (Sanity Check) talk as though the reports are accurate when they really aren't. Take a look at Arad's chapter on this. None of the reports are accurate. And it's not just minors errors. The stories are laughable. There were mobile gas chambers that took people to the mass graves. They partially gassed them so that the victims would have just enough strength to stumble to the graves. Gas chambers with trap doors. The steam chamber report is the most accurate one! And in that case the fact that they managed to compile a lot of accurate intel about Treblinka makes things worse not better because it is not possible for an honest report to have that particular mix of "correct" and incorrect information, especially given the extravagant detail.

1a) You are also overcomplicating the concept of "propaganda." The main idea is that it's material that is slanted because the people putting it out have some agenda. It is undeniable that many of the Holocaust stories exhibit common features of atrocity propaganda. Much of it is written from the perspective of a third person omniscient narrator and often the "scenes" described could not possibly be eyewitness testimony (e.g., describing a gassing from inside the gas chamber, elaborate dialogues, etc). I would turn it around and say it is the anti-revisionist side that is sloppy here because you invoke "hearsay" in as a cure-all. This is done is because you can't admit people are making stuff up, lying, etc.

2) As I just said the other day in another thread, the reporting on the "death camps" is not clean at all. There are false positives like the 840,000 killed at Sachsenhausen. I would count Majdanek as a false positive. Arguably Mauthausen. Off the top of my head, I know I've seen claims of gassings and exterminations at Trawniki. And there are probably a bunch of other random ones like that.

3) There are also false negatives. In particular, it seems an awful lot of people failed to notice that Auschwitz was a mass murder factory, and this includes people writing propaganda pamphlets calling a "camp of death." Michael Fleming struggles mightily in his book to try to explain this and fails.

4) In the literature on war-time knowledge, most of these books, to varying degrees, castigate the Allies etc for failing to react to the Holocaust. If we assume the Holocaust was real, indeed is does seem as though the behavior was scandalous. But when we look at the substance of the stories (often ridiculous) and look at the contemporaneous reactions, the much more natural explanation is that people simply didn't take Rabbi Wise's stories about soap factories and air bubble injections and the like very seriously.

What is disturbing is the apparent readiness of the new Colonial Secretary to take Jewish Agency ‘sob-stuff’ at its face value. As a political maneouvre this will establish a good precedent which the Agency will no doubt exploit. (Gilbert, Auschwitz and the Allies, pg. 99)

And what is even more damning is that when we look into what "convinced" people that the atrocities stories were true (in some vague sense), it's stuff like Majdanek (hoax) or Hoess.

[bombsaway]

the evidence is overwhelming that Jews were resettled into the East.

I don't think this is your main argument, but is any of this evidence direct? Post so we can evaluate.

Otherwise, it would seem your argument is direct evidence is unnecessary due to presence of a conspiracy to fabricate a mass event. Yet this is a positive claim as well, so in a historical sense you also need direct evidence. By assuming its existence you are "begging the question", such a conspiracy constitutes a mass event in and of itself which also needs to be directly evidenced, or perhaps it doesn't.

Yes, there are German policies galore which serve as direct evidence that the policy was, indeed, one of expulsion/evacuation. Beyond this, direct evidence is lacking for the reasons I have explained in-detail in my previous post.

FYI, bombsaway, you're not honest and so I am very much averse to debating with you. I'll chime in occasionally on an interesting or especially objectionable point from you but that's going to be the extent of my engagement, for the most part. I don't have as much free time on my hands lately and I have seen how you operate. I'm not interested.

Others here have also addressed your call for 'direct evidence'.

I haven't seen any direct evidence yet so I would appreciate being given something to look at. The "resettlement" policy of 41 with German Jews, and prior policies to 1942, isn't what I would call direct evidence of Reinhardt resettlement. This was a different group of Jews + different time period. To me it would be like saying mass killing at Chelmno directly evidences mass killing at Auschwitz. This is circumstantial evidence, not enough to make positive claims.

[SanityCheck]

The Allies overtook Poland and Germany relatively soon after "the Holocaust" supposedly happened. Hence it is reasonable to expect a high baseline of proof. If the German government had a formal policy of exterminating the Jewish race and largely succeeded in the territories they controlled, then this should be apparent in their documents. If it isn't, you have some explaining to do. I would also expect abundant physical proof. Now, if Hitler had somehow negotiated a peace or something and had maintained control over most of Central Europe for many years, in that case there would be a lower baseline expectation of evidence.

The formal policy of exterminating Jews extended across the whole of Eastern Europe - since Jews from elsewhere in Europe were deported there - and also involved shootings. The shootings left copious written evidence as well as a variety of mass graves exhumed with bodies (as well as more which had been exhumed and the bodies cremated, but often associated with a documented organisation named Sonderkommando 1005). Mass shootings typified much of eastern Poland and the pre-1939 Soviet Union but were not unknown or unrecorded in western and central Poland.

Moreover, a formal policy was decreed for the Government-General in October 1941 specifying the death penalty for Jews found outside their 'residential districts'. The so-called Schiessbefehl was certainly carried out in the winter of 1941-2 as is evident from German documents and Polish plus Jewish sources. It also set up the formal policy of threatening Jews and Poles with death for non-compliance, evasion or helping and sheltering evaders during the deportations, with further evidence that this policy was carried out in German documents as well as non-German sources. Additionally, there are German documents noting the execution of Jews often due to sickness or immobility prior to deportations, such as the police report on the Kolomea-Belzec deportation of September 1942.

Clearly, conventional observers since 1945 have regarded the higher level paper trail as indicating a policy of annihilation/extermination, especially since Hans Frank, the head of the Government-General, referred to a policy of annihilation (Vernichtung) on multiple occasions, alongside Himmler doing the same in secret speeches over 1943-44.

The real 'baselines' are
1. documentation for the presence of Jews and their numbers under German occupation in Poland and the Soviet Union, combining town, county and regional statistics with name lists and contrasts to prewar censuses and population registrations (very recent for the USSR, even more recent for annexed Lithuania, etc), these statistics also showing significant declines in various regions, which are easily filled with sources explaining these declines as the result of mass killings.
2. documentation for mass and smaller scale shootings across Poland and the expanded Soviet Union
3. documentation for deportations in Poland especially (1939 borders), as deportations were not as much of a phenomenon in the pre-1939 USSR, some of which also overlaps with the documentation for shootings.
4. the higher level policy record, referencing the annihilation (Vernichtung) of the Jews

In IMT terms, some key sources would include Hans Frank's diary, Himmler's Posen speech, the two Stahlecker reports, the Stroop report and the Katzmann report. More key sources were brought to light in other 1940s trials and publications - Korherr, Meldung 51, the Einsatzgruppen reports, the Wannsee protocol, etc. These have expanded with historical research - the Hoefle telegram being one further example. It wasn't until the late 1950s that one of the few German documents quantifying the gassing of Jews was uncovered, the Just memo referencing gas vans at K - clearly Kulmhof - and the 'processing' of 97,000 there. But this document fits very well with the other documents from the Warthegau (such as Greiser's letter to Himmler of May 1942) and the reconstruction of deportations in this region, including from the very well documented Lodz ghetto.

The German documentation survived in uneven quantities region by region and camp by camp, but there is really no shortage for Auschwitz, the Warthegau/Chelmno and the occupied Soviet territories. The Government-General and the Reinhard camps have fewer collections like the ZBL Auschwitz archive, the Gettoverwaltung Litzmannstadt records or the Einsatzgruppen reports, but there are still numerous documents which point to extermination as the policy, even without the explicit references to gassing one can find for Auschwitz, Chelmno and gas vans elsewhere. This includes obviously the transfer of personnel involved in another gassing operation, T4, to Aktion Reinhardt.

Non-German sources, both contemporary and postwar, as well as unofficial German sources, fit together with this German paper trail. A good example is the naming of police captain Wirth in a Polish underground report on Belzec in April 1942 as well as Wirth being named in Kurt Gerstein's reports in 1945. Wirth's presence in the Lublin region is noted in surviving German documents including his personnel file, also for his role in Einsatz Reinhardt and serving eventually as 'inspector'. The non-German and non-official sources came first, and they were independent as far as can be determined. It would require a lot to overcome this corroboration.

This is an example of the point by point confirmation of details which one needs to do with postwar testimonies. Survivors of the Reinhard camps name the right SS men, so this is a sign they were there, as this is also a pattern observable with other camp survivors, especially from Auschwitz.

Indeed, the largest collection of surviving German records are personnel files, originally housed in the Berlin Document Center after the war, including SS officer files and many other collections from the NSDAP, SS enlisted and RuSHA papers, which together with the Wehrmachtauskunftsstelle records of casualties and personnel transfers, made it possible to identify who served where. The personnel dimension of all of this is beyond reasonable doubt, which is unsurprisingly why 'revisionists' typically ignore it. But it confirms a number of testimonies in one crucial aspect, and in turn the absence of knowledge of the personnel helps rule out a few fanciful testimonies, as knowledge of a site where someone spent a prolonged period of time should include some knowledge of the personnel.

More later.

[Callafangers]

The formal policy of exterminating Jews extended across the whole of Eastern Europe - since Jews from elsewhere in Europe were deported there - and also involved shootings. The shootings left copious written evidence as well as a variety of mass graves exhumed with bodies (as well as more which had been exhumed and the bodies cremated, but often associated with a documented organisation named Sonderkommando 1005). Mass shootings typified much of eastern Poland and the pre-1939 Soviet Union but were not unknown or unrecorded in western and central Poland.

It “extended across the whole of Europe” (Source: TrustMeBro).
Some shootings = all Jews gassed and shot, period (Source: WhoKnows)

Moreover, a formal policy was decreed for the Government-General in October 1941 specifying the death penalty for Jews found outside their 'residential districts'. The so-called Schiessbefehl was certainly carried out in the winter of 1941-2 as is evident from German documents and Polish plus Jewish sources. It also set up the formal policy of threatening Jews and Poles with death for non-compliance, evasion or helping and sheltering evaders during the deportations, with further evidence that this policy was carried out in German documents as well as non-German sources. Additionally, there are German documents noting the execution of Jews often due to sickness or immobility prior to deportations, such as the police report on the Kolomea-Belzec deportation of September 1942.

It’s interesting that you frame the “Schiessbefehl” as having some relation to your bizarre ‘extermination’ theory, given that other sources don’t seem to treat it the same way:

In Bodzentyn and all the districts of the General Government, Jews over ten were required to wear a white armband with a blue Star of David on it. In the latter part of 1941, the introduction of the death penalty, or Schiessbefehl, for anyone caught leaving the ghetto was decreed to deter smuggling and escape.
https://www.bodzentyn.net/history/the-d ... -community

Moving on...

Clearly, conventional observers since 1945 have regarded the higher level paper trail as indicating a policy of annihilation/extermination, especially since Hans Frank, the head of the Government-General, referred to a policy of annihilation (Vernichtung) on multiple occasions, alongside Himmler doing the same in secret speeches over 1943-44.

Except strangely, Himmler’s speeches are all on the topic of partisan activity when speaking of Jewish executions (e.g. at Sonthofen; and he never mentions ‘gassings’ despite, according to you, speaking openly with his audiences; also, these audiences would often have had no business being in-the-know about 'extermination', if true), except perhaps the Posen speech which is clearly talking about expulsion – not ‘extermination’ – as I have shown at RODOH and will likely re-post here at some point.
As for ‘annihilation’, this does not mean ‘to kill’, and you know this. Annihilation is more closely associated to concepts of defeat, or otherwise making vanish the subject in question. Much like Himmler’s phrases of “wipe them from the face of the Earth”, any valid interpretation must be within the context of deportation and other geographical references, which means they can only mean one thing: expulsion, i.e. [literal] evacuation.

The real 'baselines' are
1. documentation for the presence of Jews and their numbers under German occupation in Poland and the Soviet Union, combining town, county and regional statistics with name lists and contrasts to prewar censuses and population registrations (very recent for the USSR, even more recent for annexed Lithuania, etc), these statistics also showing significant declines in various regions, which are easily filled with sources explaining these declines as the result of mass killings.
2. documentation for mass and smaller scale shootings across Poland and the expanded Soviet Union
3. documentation for deportations in Poland especially (1939 borders), as deportations were not as much of a phenomenon in the pre-1939 USSR, some of which also overlaps with the documentation for shootings.
4. the higher level policy record, referencing the annihilation (Vernichtung) of the Jews

To recap, you reference:

• Not-so-recent population data for Poland
• Semi-recent population data in USSR
• Very recent data for Lithuania

And with this, amid known population shifts at mass scale, you couple any/all ‘significant declines’ with ‘sources explaining these declines’ and *poof*, gassed/murdered Jews? This is an interesting way of circumventing physical evidence (and a lack thereof), for starters, but I am curious as to your estimate of just what percentage of the reports from the regions in question may have been lying. Would you estimate…

• 10% - Very rare lies. Despite the war obviously using narrative and propaganda as a weapon, these [mostly-Jewish] witnesses had little interest in falsifying records of any kind.
• 25% - Rare lies. Jews and other witnesses had some interest in inflating anti-German sentiments, so lies were not unheard of, but the truth still largely prevailed.
• 50% - Some lies. Witnesses telling the truth were competing against those telling lies, but those telling the truth were just as active in recording their narratives as those pushing lies.
• 75% - Common lies. Those telling lies clearly outweighed those telling only truth. There is a clear recognition that narrative and propaganda were foremost tools in fighting this war.
• 90% - Very common lies. The liars are very active, possibly even well-organized. Those in German areas are encouraged to sow atrocity narratives portraying Germany in a most negative light, which would become useful both during and post war.

Once you have chosen a % estimate, let’s ask: how many of those ‘sources explaining these declines [in population]’ you mentioned earlier could have come from within the estimate you chose (rather than from the truthful portion)?

In IMT terms, some key sources would include Hans Frank's diary, Himmler's Posen speech, the two Stahlecker reports, the Stroop report and the Katzmann report. More key sources were brought to light in other 1940s trials and publications - Korherr, Meldung 51, the Einsatzgruppen reports, the Wannsee protocol, etc. These have expanded with historical research - the Hoefle telegram being one further example. It wasn't until the late 1950s that one of the few German documents quantifying the gassing of Jews was uncovered, the Just memo referencing gas vans at K - clearly Kulmhof - and the 'processing' of 97,000 there. But this document fits very well with the other documents from the Warthegau (such as Greiser's letter to Himmler of May 1942) and the reconstruction of deportations in this region, including from the very well documented Lodz ghetto.

• You cite Frank’s diary as a source, so which entries are you referring to? His 16 December 1941 entry/statement refers back to Hitler’s ‘prophecy’ which, as myself and others have shown elsewhere, is 100% about a global awakening of all nations to rid themselves internally of Jewish power (and presumably, of Jews themselves) -- it definitively has nothing whatsoever to do with 'extermination'. Moreover, Frank explicitly states in this same speech/entry that Jews could not be categorically shot nor poisoned, here.
  Thereafter, he repeatedly and explicitly (in his own diary, like Goebbels) uses terms indicating literal evacuation, deportation, etc. Is he lying to himself in his own diary, as you’d suggest, just like Goebbels?
• Himmler’s Posen speech has been thoroughly debunked as a document of the ‘Holocaust’, as already mentioned.
• Korherr’s report shows that people were moved, not killed.
• The EG reports clearly pertain to partisan combat and related actions.
• Wannsee, likewise, has nothing to do with killing all Jews.
• Hoefle telegram has numbers associated to single-letter abbreviations, and doesn’t even mention Jews. This isn’t to say one shouldn’t concede it most likely does pertain to Jews, but more than half of those numbers in the figures provided should be buried under Treblinka… and how many have you (or anyone) confirmed there, exactly, despite multiple excavations?
• That you would even still cite the Just memo is outrageous (see juxtaposition with the Becker letter, here: https://holocaustencyclopedia.com/witne ... ugust/393/ )

All of this aside, your Gish galloping is duly noted.

The German documentation survived in uneven quantities region by region and camp by camp, but there is really no shortage for Auschwitz, the Warthegau/Chelmno and the occupied Soviet territories. The Government-General and the Reinhard camps have fewer collections like the ZBL Auschwitz archive, the Gettoverwaltung Litzmannstadt records or the Einsatzgruppen reports, but there are still numerous documents which point to extermination as the policy, even without the explicit references to gassing one can find for Auschwitz, Chelmno and gas vans elsewhere. This includes obviously the transfer of personnel involved in another gassing operation, T4, to Aktion Reinhardt.

• ‘No shortage’ of what, exactly? We all know you don’t mean veritable, documented evidence of any actual ‘gassing’, so what are you even talking about?
• Then you point to archives… no specific point to make, just “there are archives”.
• A transfer of T-4 personnel (for which a lot of transferring was happening, anyway, i.e. to the front) between a place with complex or unusual circumstances requiring discretion (euthanasia), to yet another place with complex or unusual circumstances also requiring discretion (dispossession/reclamation effort at AR camps)...
  Does anyone deny that a massive heist of Jewish property would necessarily require discretion? Does anyone doubt that medical facilities were present to some extent at AR camps? With the closure of the T-4 program indisputably occurring at this time regardless, were there any groups or individuals more suitable to be transferred to these new locations? And if we take your view: exactly what medical expertise is needed to gas thousands of Jews at a time with a submarine engine?

Moving on...

Non-German sources, both contemporary and postwar, as well as unofficial German sources, fit together with this German paper trail. A good example is the naming of police captain Wirth in a Polish underground report on Belzec in April 1942 as well as Wirth being named in Kurt Gerstein's reports in 1945. Wirth's presence in the Lublin region is noted in surviving German documents including his personnel file, also for his role in Einsatz Reinhardt and serving eventually as 'inspector'. The non-German and non-official sources came first, and they were independent as far as can be determined. It would require a lot to overcome this corroboration.

- As PrudentRegret has shown elsewhere recently, “[c]lothing was deloused [at Treblinka] and sent to the Airfield camp in Lublin, the chief Headquarters of the SS Clothing Works which came under the command of Christian Wirth.”
- Various reports name-dropping key or hated officials to later be woven into a ‘gassing’ narrative is not surprising among those who recognize deception and propaganda as a powerful weapon of war (and see their part in it, as it’s sources on-the-ground).

This is an example of the point by point confirmation of details which one needs to do with postwar testimonies. Survivors of the Reinhard camps name the right SS men, so this is a sign they were there, as this is also a pattern observable with other camp survivors, especially from Auschwitz.

- Even if we assume actual presence on-site, being in a place and seeing certain people does not mean you are telling the truth about what happened.
- Do not talk about ‘observable patterns’ when you omit those having anything to do remotely with anti-German or Jewish deception.

Indeed, the largest collection of surviving German records are personnel files, originally housed in the Berlin Document Center after the war, including SS officer files and many other collections from the NSDAP, SS enlisted and RuSHA papers, which together with the Wehrmachtauskunftsstelle records of casualties and personnel transfers, made it possible to identify who served where. The personnel dimension of all of this is beyond reasonable doubt, which is unsurprisingly why 'revisionists' typically ignore it. But it confirms a number of testimonies in one crucial aspect, and in turn the absence of knowledge of the personnel helps rule out a few fanciful testimonies, as knowledge of a site where someone spent a prolonged period of time should include some knowledge of the personnel.

Do revisionists actually ignore this, Nick? Or is it hardly relevant? Are Jews lying about Auschwitz going to say it was Britney Spears who beat them and turned them into lightswitches? Or is it more believable if they say Irma Grese did it?

[SanityCheck]

Rather poor fisking from you, Callafangers. Indeed, fisking like this is a sign that you might not be able to sum up a proper response, in a more classic format, especially as you contradicted yourself, complaining about unsourced assertions ('trust me bro') then accusing me of a Gish Gallop when I was merely reminding people of some of the well known exhibits at IMT. If I had elaborated on the evidence for mass shooting then this would have prompted sneering about long-windedness, if I kept things short and conversational then evidently I'm expecting people to remember too much, no matter how basic the facts.

All of which is fine, since the main point of this thread is that one cannot write history without sources, which means you're currently unable to write anything approximating to history about the supposed 'real story' of Nazi policies towards Jews across Europe in WWII. No wonder you resort to bluster, nitpicking and fisking to distract from this.

To remind you, I was responding to this remark from Archie

If the German government had a formal policy of exterminating the Jewish race and largely succeeded in the territories they controlled, then this should be apparent in their documents.

This is apparent in their documents in the ways I pointed out:

1. An extensive series of public and confidential statements about annihilation (Vernichtung), extirpation (Ausrottung), liquidation (Liquidierung) as well as a wide range of uses of the decoded euphemism special treatment (Sonderbehandlung), with many examples where these phrases are explained in terms of death and killing. Alongside these trails, more confidential statements about policy referencing the eventual disappearence of the Jews and similar remarks coming very close to the explicit statements like "The question is, of course you had to kill the adult Jews, I understand that, but how could you do the same to the women and children?" (Himmler, Sonthofen, 21.6.1944) The Wannsee protocol is a good example of a class-B statement since the common-sense reading of the key lines and 'correspondingly treated' is that this meant killing the remnant of able bodied survivors eventually. Something supported by the surrounding litany of Vernichtung, Ausrottung, Liquidierung and the many documents about shootings being filed at the exact same time.

These public and confidential statements are conventionally written up in narrative-chronological form, showing the radicalisation of Nazi antisemitic thinking and practical policies, thus including the foreshadowings in some prewar statements, and the elaborations from 1939 onwards at all levels from ordinary German soldiers through Hans Frank, Heinrich Himmler, Josef Goebbels and Hitler himself, across all regions and by now, extending far beyond the few examples submitted as exhibits at IMT in Nuremberg in 1945-46.

Good luck trying to deal with all of them (a minimum threshold is whatever has already appeared in print) in proper order and without spending far too long trying to defuse them by 'recontextualising' them in long-winded and likely unconvincing fashions. But fine if you want to keep repeating your mantras to yourself to ward off cognitive dissonance. The acid test is can you write history, and mantra-repetition isn't that.

2. Extensive German documentation of mass shootings of Jews, not just in the occupied Soviet territories but also in Serbia as well as sources about this for central Poland (the GG). As Archie also expected 'abundant physical proof', I noted that there were also numerous mass graves discovered which had not been exhumed and cremated by Aktion 1005. The standard and specialist works on the Holocaust in the Soviet Union, as well as reference websites like Yad Vashem's Untold Stories, and the USHMM Encyclopedia of Camps and Ghettos vol II, provide more than enough examples to back up my statements about both the German documentation and the postwar location of mass graves.

Chronologically, the escalation of such mass shootings preceded the onset of deportations (with some of the first deportations being shot on arrival, as with Reich Jews at Kaunas and Riga) and reports of gassings. They also continued in parallel to deportations and gassings, and indeed in some regions like Eastern Galicia, shootings were used to carry out teh final liquidations of ghettos in 1943, after Belzec had closed at the end of 1942 to new transports. In narrative terms as well as analytically, the shootings cannot be divorced from deportations-and-gassings. This also applies statistically if one is wondering about the eventual 5-6 million death toll (which also requires paying attention to the recorded deaths in ghettos and camps by non-gassing causes).

The documentation of smaller scale shootings such as the Schiessbefehl executions and the executions of Jews caught in hiding also matter, especially as the onset of the Schiessbefehl also saw officials in the GG in October 1941 state bluntly, "There are only two ways. We sentence the Jews in the ghetto to death by hunger or we shoot them." There was a third way - gassing - but these officials did not know about that option yet. The reports of hunting down fugitive Jews across Poland and executing them, or executing Jews found in forest camps, confirm the bluntness of the decrees, either the Schiessbefehl or the subsequent placards issued during deportation actions. Those Jews were to be killed as a matter of policy. This also extended in the documentation to reports of shooting train-jumpers and transport escorts expending their entire ammunition supply shooting at Jews breaking out of deportation trains, and other reports noting bodies of Jews shot down when trying to break out littering railway tracks in 1942. An example of the latter type of report was cited as long ago as Hilberg's first edition in 1961.

The point about policy vs documenting examples is pretty standard in historical method. Medievalists might only have a royal decree prohibiting xyz practice, and there can be fierce debates as to whether this meant the practice had become common therefore was now being prohibited, or was anticipating an imaginary problem that had not in fact emerged. If one has any examples confirming the policy was enacted by way of court sentences or reported responses, as with the Schiessbefehl, then such debates are moot. The uneven survival of documentation from one perspective (in this case the German records) means that it only takes a few such documents, and sources from other perspectives are corroborated. This is reinforced by observing the same patterns with decrees and orders about other policies, such as forced labour, rationing, 'Aryanisation' and concentrations of populations such as ghettoisation and further transfers, which again are confirmed in German and non-German sources.

3. Documenting the presence and numbers of Jews in particular towns, counties (Kreise), districts, regions before and after deportations or shooting actions. Prewar censuses and registrations set baselines, because of large-scale refugee flight in 1939 the wartime registrations under German occupation are the crucial ones. By 1942, about 25% of the Jews in the Lublin and Radom districts were refugees from further west, after planned expulsions and organic refugee flight. This is known from a variety of contemporary documents, including those of the German administration, Jewish councils and the Jewish welfare association the JSS - as the latter were under German control and had to report to the German administrations, such sources are functionally "German" or "official" and not "underground" or "unofficial".

Wilno-Vilnius took in numerous refugees in 1939-40, then the entire Jewish population was counted in January 1941 under Soviet rule in a confidential population register, some were deported in June 1941 (with good transport data, so exaggerated claims are not feasible here), the Germans invaded and promptly overestimated 80,000 Jews in Wilno. The ensuing massacres from July to November 1941 are documented more roughly for July, but more precisely thereafter, along with some official headcounts, concluding with an initial estimate of 'about 15,000' Jews remaining by December 1941, corrected by more precise headcounts in German documentation thereafter. Historians are not relying on either the prewar population census or the initial German overestimate to support the figures they derive from German reports of mass shootings over July to November 1941. They are by contrast making use of further German, Lithuanian, Polish and Jewish sources to corroborate the course of events, along with photographs from Ponary, the killing site outside Wilno-Vilnius, postwar interrogations and reports, plus the sources which discuss the exhumation and cremation of victims at Ponary, these following earlier collaborator documents noting the existence of mass graves at Ponary.

The Warsaw ghetto Jewish council filed monthly reports with the commissar for the Jewish residential district (by 1941 Auerswald) and the district administration so the same data appears in the Judenrat reports and the reports of the Gouverneur des Distrikts Warschau, with further copies of the material and data in Auerswald's papers. These include snapshots of the overall population confirming the documented expulsions of provincial ghettos into the big ghetto in 1941-2, the deaths of 80,000 Jews from hunger and disease, and a growing number noted as dying from gunshot wounds in 1942, corresponding with the local enforcement of the Schiessbefehl as well as random acts of terror recorded in other sources. For the Great Deportation, the Jewish council reports, GDW report and the Ringelblum archive report all coincide in agreeing on the overall scale, differentiating between regular deportees and those sent to a transit camp inside the ghetto (who were sent to labour camps), and those shot or dying during the operation. The number remaining *officially* after the action is also recorded. A variety of German (Wolff-Ganzenmueller), Polish and Polish Jewish sources point to the destination for the 250,000 main body of deportees being Treblinka.

The Jews of Eastern Galicia, in German terms Distrikt Galizien, were recorded in multiple ways. There are town and county level statistics and name lists including for the big Lwow-Lemberg-Lviv ghetto, plus region-wide surveys broken down by county. One for summer 1942 indicated 278,000 Jews broken down by county, after the onset of deportations and while they were still going on westwards to Belzec, alongside local mass shootings. The Korherr report records 161,000 Jews in Galicia for the end of 1942, out of 297,000 across the whole of the Government-General. There was a census for the whole of the GG in March 1943 which counted 203,000 Jews, of which 144,000 were located in Galicia. Critical analysis of the breakdowns that survive might lower that to 130-135,000. Lemberg-Lwow still registered 19.592 Jews (all this from Dieter Pohl, Nationalsozialistisce Judenverfolgung in Ostgalizien, p.253 and passim). At the end of June 1943, the SSPF for Galicia, Katzmann, reported only 21,000 remaining in labour camps, which might have not included some, but the drop in population over the first half of 1943 is still conspicuous.

Historians such as Dieter Pohl researching a region like Eastern Galicia do not rely on such statistical snapshots but fill in the details county by county and town by town. This involves German documents where available, but does not rule out using Polish and Polish Jewish or other sources, giving priority to contemporary sources, and also considering the results of 1944 war crimes investigations and exhumations, especially as 1005 only operated in Lemberg-Lwow and Stanislawow, leaving all graves in provincial counties basically intact. There are many contemporary diaries as well as repeated underground reports, thus at least five underground reports note the cremations at Janowska in late 1943-44.

So there are several phases between German documented-counted snapshots of the Jewish population in Distrikt Galizien; the drop from 278,000 to 161,000 between summer 1942 and the end of 1942 includes deportations westward to Belzec, including the well-known Kolomea-Belzec transport described and counted in a police report, then the drop from 161,000 to 21,000 in the first half of 1943 is detailed using all available sources, and did not involve significant deportations out of the district (a few transports to Sobibor seems to be it, versus all provincial counties being hit with local mass shootings).

Eastern Galicia is problematic for 'revisionists' because deportations in 1942 from the 58 ghettos went westwards, which is contrary to the supposed 'resettlement to the east' hypothesis, and were slowed in any case by the rail line through Lemberg-Lwow being one of the main supply arteries for the southern sector of the Eastern Front, then Belzec was shut down and received no more transports from anywhere from the end of 1942, then the surviving 161,000 Jews of Galicia were reported as being overwhelmingly shot on the spot, as also happened to the 21,000 survivors in mid-1943 by the end of the year, with only a handful of exceptions (mainly, the 'armaments workers' of the Drohobych-Boryslaw oilfields, some of whom survived into 1944 to be sent to Plaszow).

The westwards direction of deportations from this region has long been noted and has not been exactly solved in nearly twenty years of Mattogno and others being reminded of this. I've certainly never seen a sourced credible solution to this conundrum. Good luck...

The Germans also surveyed and counted 160,000 Jews in the Bialystok district as of March 1942, following various massacres and pogroms in the summer of 1941. This sets a firm ceiling for the reconstruction of another set of westwards deportations from November 1942 to August 1943, to Treblinka and Auschwitz.

4. Documenting deportations - already discussed somewhat above for Warsaw, this is where the overview reports and figures given in the Korherr report and Hoefle telegram are broken down by region, county, town, with a mix of German documents, Polish underground reports, Polish Jewish sources, and postwar testimonies, especially 1940s accounts. There were clearly hundreds of departure points and these add up across all source types to a large number of sources, even where the 'official' German records turn out to be fragmentary. The region-level reporting, and other big reports, such as Korherr counting only 297,000 Jews remaining in the GG versus 1.274 million deported (which Hoefle spells out as to the Reinhard camps in well known figures), mean that one cannot simply dismiss the non-German sourcing as entirely invented. There is too much corroboration at district, county and town level.

German records as well as official Judenrat records used by the Germans for the GG do note shootings at departure ends, as for example with the Kolomea-Belzec report and the reports from the Warsaw deportation of July-September 1942. There are even more such reports in contemporary Polish and Polish-Jewish sources, with the usual corroboration and exploration in post-liberation investigations (testimonies and identifying the burial sites).

These sources also indicate who was held back or sent earlier or later to labour camps such as Skarzysko-Kamienna. So while the data crunching is a little more complex than the registered vs unregistered statistics for Auschwitz, it's in principle not much different, especially if one pays attention to regions (GG, Warthegau), districts (Lublin, Radom, Warschau, Krakau, Galizien, Bialystok), counties (Kreise) and municipalities, towns and camps.

The sources for deportations also include some documents which dovetail with category #2 of policy-level documents, indicating a general awareness that Jews are being deported, they must be deported for various reasons (secuity worries, combating disease and black markets, food supply issues), and that their deportations cause problems both for the labour market and for security since the reactions included attempts to evade and escape.

Conclusion

Sources in categories 1-4 above include many counting Jews as shot and executed, in totals which rise above localised reprisal decision-making, and which relate to regions then declared judenfrei or where there are no more sources noting the survival of Jews 'legally' ie in labour camps.

The sources also include many pointing to the camps, as for example with documents noting the deportation of Jews from Kolomea and other adjacent towns westwards from Galicia to Belzec, or contemporary non-German sources noting deportations from xyz town to one of BST. Those are sources which can be included in the 'expanded' circle of sources about the extermination camps. Any source of whatever provenance mentioning one of the Reinhard camps, Auschwitz, Chelmno, Majdanek can be considered part of this expanded source base. And indeed, these are the sources used to illustrate the deportations to the key camps in conventional overviews. They can be easily overlooked if one only focuses on the barbed wire perimeters of the camps.

The fact that there is documentation of the destruction of documents about Aktion Reinhardt is why the German-documents-only routine has been ignored ever since the 1940s, when examining the camps themselves. For Auschwitz and the Warthegau, there are much larger record groups such as the ZBL Auschwitz archive as well as the Gettoverwaltung Litzmannstadt records, which together with documents in other files have documented smaller details as well as yielded German documents about gassing - the ones that are either declared to be forgeries or are agonisingly 'reinterpreted' in unconvincing ways. This classic pretend-only-German-documents-exist strategy doesn't work for a variety of reasons, as the non-German sources have to be factored in and properly explained with something more convincing than 'propaganda!', but mainly because if the German-documents-only strategy is consistently applied, then we're left with a historical record showing the arrival of very large numbers of Jews at a few camps with documents referencing gassing, special treatment etc, in regions where the authorities refer to the annihilation of Jews a lot, carried out by the SS whose head talks about killing Jewish women and children, and no evidence of survival for the deportees who cannot be accounted for in e.g. the registered inmate selections at Auschwitz, nor any evidence of arrival anywhere else.

No sources, no history means what it says. If there are no sources, one cannot write history. Dog-ate-my-homework doesn't get out of this problem. You might as well congratulate the postwar world for having miraculously covered up a history you'd like to think happened, much like UFOlogists want alien craft to have crashed at Roswell despite no convincing evidence for this. Assuming you're in the United States, you can go on believing this and arguing for it, and because so many of your fellow citizens and others worldwide are also keen to promote things that aren't thought by others to have happened, maybe nobody will notice. But that won't help you write history; you're left with pseudohistory and conspiracy theories only.