Core Arguments For and Against the Mainstream Account

[Churchill]

Genocide does not equate to 100% extermination. The original definition by Lemkin was broader and more indirect, the UN convention on genocide explicitly includes 'in whole or in part'. If we expect 100% extermination before using the term genocide, then there never has been a genocide in modern history, as there are always survivors of some kind, and many who are subjected to forced labour, kidnapping/transfer and other phenomena short of killing.

I don't think however this really addresses the apparent contradiction between statements 1.) and 2.). I don't think the legalistic vs ordinary language usage of the term genocide is what I was asking about. You seem here to be describing profoundly contradictory behaviour regarding German policy towards Jews. Its something like reading a history claiming that German policy from 1941 was to defeat the USSR until 1944 they suddenly switched to attempting to join the USSR while in the middle of fighting a war against them.

Was German policy to kill only a portion of Jews in Eastern Europe with a definite point of stopping; or was the policy to kill all Jews - the change being unplanned?

Selection and keeping some Jewish forced labourers alive was thus standard policy in Poland and in Auschwitz. It was also enacted in Lithuania and Latvia, whereas Belarus, Ukraine and Russia were subjected to total extermination (barring a tiny number sent west from Minsk, but none whatsoever from the Reichskommissariat Ukraine).

This is clear from the Wannsee protocol which is conspicuously silent about the fate of the unfit but discusses the use of able-bodied Jews as workers.

I see, you are saying the policy was to murder a certain fraction (the unfit), in certain Locations but not others?
This being the case, and I do not believe you have answered yet: why stop the murder in 1944? When you say in statement 1.) that the genocide had already happened, did you mean that all unfit Jews in specified Locations in Eastern Europe were dead?


[I note you did not include in your quote above; as this is the point of thread - would you add other core arguments for or against the mainstream account? You appear very knowledgeable on this subject so I'm sure it would be interesting, thanks in advance!]

[SanityCheck]

I see, you are saying the policy was to murder a certain fraction (the unfit), in certain Locations but not others?
This being the case, and I do not believe you have answered yet: why stop the murder in 1944? When you say in statement 1.) that the genocide had already happened, did you mean that all unfit Jews in specified Locations in Eastern Europe were dead?

Yes, obviously. Himmler's tour of speeches from October 1943 to mid-1944 in which he initiated or reminded NSDAP and military leaders that the Jews had been exterminated referred to this as largely a done deal. At the time he first spoke, only one out of the four pure extermination camps was operational, Sobibor, and this became inoperational due to a revolt within a fortnight of the two Posen speeches. That in turn triggered Operation 'Harvest Festival' which eliminated 43,000 Jews in labour camps and Majdanek for 'security reasons', and because they were doing less war-critical work.

Himmler complained in these speeches about 'armaments interests' blocking the final elimination of ghettos, but despite his complaints these were significant enough to have left a fraction of the 3-3.5 million Jews of Poland alive as of late 1943. If Jews were to be left alive as workers, then better under direct SS control. So a variety of labour camps and ghettos were taken over in autumn 1943/early 1944, which also fuelled the expansion of the SS run KZ system. The Wilno ghetto was liquidated in September 1943 and the able-bodied transfered to Konzentrationslager Vaivara in Estonia, under direct SS control. This was pre-war Poland. Vaivara's complex worked mainly in the oil shale fields so this was high value war work. There were labour camps for Jews in the oil fields of Eastern Galicia as well, in Drohobycz and Boryslaw, which were the biggest camps to persist and survive into 1944, all other camps for road construction and other forms of work had been liquidated in 1943 along with their inmates.

Other ghettos in Lithuania and Latvia also became KZs - Kovno aka KL Kauen and Riga > KL Kaiserwald. The work ghettos there were the survivors of the mass shootings of 1941, in Lithuania the civil administration permitted relatives to be kept alive, but when the SS took over, the remaining children were targeted at various times.

The Lodz ghetto was thus the only ghetto left in Poland after September 1943. Every other ghetto had been liquidated or converted into a forced labour camp or sub-camp of a Konzentrationslager. The SS wanted this workforce to be moved to Lublin in mid-1943 but the civil administration would not give up the ghetto. Then they argued it was unprofitable so forced agreement to have the ghetto reduced then transferred to SS control, i.e. to the KZ system, which happened in August 1944 (also with selections and killings).

The nadir and lowpoint of Jewish forced labour was therefore November 1943. Probably 300,000 Jews remained alive in Auschwitz, the Lodz ghetto, the Baltic KZs and other labour camps in Poland (Plaszow, Skarzysko-Kamienna, Blizyn, Radom, Czestochowa, Kielce, Budzyn).

The strategic picture for the Germans continued to worsen in the first half of 1944, and this forced a U-turn in Nazi Jewish policy. In 1942 and 1943, Jews in the KZs in Germany as well as Jews working in armaments and forced labour camps in Germany were all transferred to Auschwitz (and the 'factory action' also involved selections and killings). This made the Reich more or less judenfrei other than Jews in mixed marriages and Mischlinge, and Theresienstadt.

The constant logic of Nazi Judenpolitik from 1933 onwards was to create a 'world without Jews' by forcing them to leave provincial towns for the cities, to leave Germany for emigration, to be deported to territories outside the Greater German Reich and not to come back, from 1941 to be deprived of citizenship, property and ultimately of life itself.

Counter-factors were ties to the German people through marriage or mixed race status, or service as WWI veterans, or being especially elderly, justifying Theresienstadt (where most died rather rapidly, a la care homes in the 2020 pandemic), plus labour/economic concerns. In 1942-3 the supply of non-Jewish foreign workers seemed infinite, so Jews working in Berlin armaments factories were replaced with Poles and Ostarbeiter.

This was no longer the case in 1944, and the Sauckel actions were starting to fail, provoking mass flight underground and stimulating the development of resistance in France, Italy, Poland, and so on.

The U-turn came with the invasion of Hungary and the decision to deport Hungarian Jews via Auschwitz and select a substantial proportion - around 25% - for forced labour in the KZ system across Germany, Austria and even in Poland and Latvia. That meant a reversal of the 1942-3 policy of making the Greater German Reich judenfrei.

So the main reason why May 1944-May 1945 was different was this changed labour market situation forcing a massive reversal in existing policy due to wartime exigiencies. Himmler's fond hopes of overcoming economic barriers to eliminating Jews entirely were dashed, much to his frustration. Himmler, Pohl and Kammler saw it as more critical in the spring/early summer of 1944 to make available the KZ system to support new emergency measures such as the Fighter Staff overseeing aviation production and further underground factories or installations. The first such underground factory for V-weapons at Mittelbau-Dora used non-Jewish inmates until well into 1944. But the new sub-camps from May 1944 onwards housed Jews, first from Hungary, then from the Lodz ghetto and final autumn 1944 Theresienstadt actions, and also from other transfers as Auschwitz and the camps in Poland and Baltic states were evacuated or reduced in size in the summer of 1944.

This is how the Kaufering complex of camps, made semi-famous by the 'Band of Brothers' episode 'Why We Fight', contained Lithuanian Jews evacuated from KL Kauen in Kovno-Kaunas via Stutthof to the Dachau complex, all in the summer of 1944.

By the summer and autumn of 1944, the Germans had lost even more territory and thus had even fewer options for recruiting or impressing non-Jewish foreign labour. They had taken millions more military casualties and needed replacements. So the value of Jewish forced labour increased over the course of 1944.

Meanwhile, publicity over the liberation of Majdanek and other sites meant that it was also in SS interests to consider using Jews as bargaining chips, to cover up what had hitherto happened, and try to tidy up like teenagers after a kegger before the adults return and pretend nothing had happened.

The last 12 months of the war therefore represented a significantly new phase. They still saw the killing of well over 400,000 Jews in Auschwitz and the deaths of 1-200,000 Jews in a variety of sites (Klooga, reactivated Chelmno, Palmicken, Lieberose, Belsen, other KZs). But 1-200,000 Jews survived the camps and ghettos (30,000 liberated at Theresienstadt after this became a magnet for evacuations).

Quite a few historians have noted this shift, and have argued that the main phase of the Final Solution came to an end in November 1943 with the ending of Aktion Reinhardt. Between then and May 1944, Auschwitz operated at a rather lower pace and it was also difficult to round up Jews in Italy, western Europe, etc who had gone to ground. The Hungarian Action has been called a 'Holocaust after the Holocaust'.

Historians of the concentration camp system can scarcely avoid noticing the shifts when the KZs went from 220,000 inmates in August 1943 to 700,000 inmates in January 1945. Most were non-Jewish inmates, thus 60,000 Poles from the 1944 Warsaw Uprising were sent to KZs in the summer of 1944, arrests and deportations of French, Italian and other political prisoners massively increased in 1943-44. The mixing of Jews and non-Jews in the KZ system by late 1944 was such that this entangled the histories, entwined the fates and substantiated the universalising version of the Holocaust influenced by the liberation of the camps in spring 1945. But that common fate in May 1944-May 1945 differed significantly from the Final Solution in Poland and the Soviet Union in 1941-1943.

[I note you did not include in your quote above; as this is the point of thread - would you add other core arguments for or against the mainstream account? You appear very knowledgeable on this subject so I'm sure it would be interesting, thanks in advance!]

I think the simplest argument for the mainstream account is that it is an account: it can produce historical narratives from a variety of perspectives and levels, with much broader coverage geographically and thematically, based on sources. Revisionism is hardly ever presented in narrative form, and cannot provide a sourced alternative explanation for its often vague copes and claims.

Archie's summary of mainstream claims echoed this by ordering them relatively chronologically, which is the honest thing to do. By contrast Butz and Rudolf managed to discuss the Einsatzgruppen dead last after Auschwitz and other extermination camps, even though the Einsatzgruppen shootings in 1941 clearly precede the camps, while other large-scale waves of shootings accompanied and even followed the closure of some camps. 'Not a lot of people know that', to quote Peter Sellers impersonating Michael Caine.

Jumping ahead to 1945 or singling out one camp while ignoring others might be polemically effective or even persuasive to some, but it doesn't produce an actual history.

[HansHill]

I think the simplest argument for the mainstream account is that it is an account: it can produce historical narratives from a variety of perspectives and levels, with much broader coverage geographically and thematically, based on sources. Revisionism is hardly ever presented in narrative form, and cannot provide a sourced alternative explanation for its often vague copes and claims.

The obvious flaw in your reasoning here Mr Check, is that Narrative Presentation > Forensic Evidence.

Since the gas chambers are not forensically demonstrated, that is very dangerous ground.

[SanityCheck]

The obvious flaw in your reasoning here Mr Check, is that Narrative Presentation > Forensic Evidence.

Since the gas chambers are not forensically demonstrated, that is very dangerous ground.

"Since resettlement camps/reservations/whatever are not forensically or archaeologically demonstrated, that is very dangerous ground" - back at ya. But even more so since there's also no photographic, documentary (German or otherwise) or testimonial evidence for them.

There's extensive forensic and archaeological evidence (from the 1940s as well as recent archaeological work) for the extermination of the Jews by shootings and in the key camps, plus the same for German killings of non-Jews (in euthanasia centres, other KZs, other killing sites). This then extends to photographs of some of the killings and includes more of the aftermaths.

Arguing over this evidence and how it should be interpreted becomes pointless and tedious if not accompanied by reconstructing events. Revisionist interpretations of the evidence (or in some past cases flat denials, like Krege claiming there were no ground disturbances whatsoever at Treblinka, a claim which was so ridiculous it has been silently dropped in the past twenty years) do not form the basis for reconstructing what happened. For that you need to pull your heads out of the anus mundi and look elsewhere.

"Forensics" is not a panacea, for several reasons. Firstly, most aspects of any history of violence will not be accessible by any kind of 'forensics'. Decision-making, forming groups, the aftermath - all very extensive for the Holocaust - just won't leave such traces. Thus the narrowing to killing sites means revisionism is simply not touching everything else, and to the extent that it has tried to address the origins, context, aftermath, it is woefully deficient.

Secondly, the extent to which mass killings in the modern era have been 'forensically investigated' is highly uneven and tends to be inadequate. This is even more true for really large scale waves in history. There is no wave of historical mass violence dating back to the 1960s or earlier with six or more figures of victims whose numbers were determined by 'forensics', or with a 'complete' investigation. Cambodia in the mid-1970s might be the earliest. Smaller waves and more recent ones might be well covered, but for every Srebrenica there are several Darfurs and Congos. Older waves don't get reexamined systematically as there is little benefit for societies to do so compared to conducting other forms of historical research. Smaller mass grave sites might be accidentally uncovered (this also happens with Holocaust graves, since the shooting sites are also part of the Holocaust), but the prominent ones are treated as cemeteries and memorials, rather than being dug up every year to satisfy first year archaeology or forensic science students.

So insisting on 'forensics' rapidly boomerangs back onto the negationist since it's highly likely their gored oxes weren't subjected to the same level of scrutiny as they demand for the crimes they want to wish away. That includes Stalinism, since Katyn and Vinnytsia were hardly the only mass graves left by Stalinist violence, and the other prominent sites have either been investigated using similar methods to Holocaust archaeology - indeed Kola's team did bore probes in Kharkiv and Bykivnia - or have never been properly investigated at all (the Sandormorkh bone field near St Petersburg, Butovo in Moscow left as a cemetery and turned into an Orthodox shrine, Kurapaty outside Minsk after only initial probes, etc).


This does highlight another core argument for the conventional account: it exists in a web of comparisons, not just in genocide studies but with other forms of mass violence, whereas revisionism has so narrowed its focus as to have lost sight of the baselines. This on top of the inadequate attention to the more dispersed HALF of the Holocaust which did not take place in the death camps.

[borjastick]

Gotta love the loons like Sanity Check who after 80 years of failing to prove the holocaust happened still try to prove the holocaust happened. God loves a trier.

Sanning's book sorts out clearly what happened to the hungarian jews, or more accurately what didn't happen to them.

When the Russians took Auschwitz if what SC claims had occurred there had actually been fact they would have had one hell of a mess to clear up and document for the world, to prove what inhumane animals them Germans were. After all the 'evidence' of holocaust had one purpose only, to show the world why the west had to remove Hitler and his regime. That the Russians could only show pictures of healthy children and adults is difficult to explain really.

As we are now seeing in modern circumstances with the fake jews of ashkenazi inbred variety slaughtering all before them, Hitler. Was. Right.

One of my sons went to University of Exeter and luckily avoided idiots like SC.

[HansHill]

"Since resettlement camps/reservations/whatever are not forensically or archaeologically demonstrated, that is very dangerous ground" - back at ya. But even more so since there's also no photographic, documentary (German or otherwise) or testimonial evidence for them.

This isn't the slam dunk you think it is, you're making a positive claim about continental-wide genocide.

"Forensics" is not a panacea, for several reasons. Firstly, most aspects of any history of violence will not be accessible by any kind of 'forensics'. Decision-making, forming groups, the aftermath - all very extensive for the Holocaust - just won't leave such traces. Thus the narrowing to killing sites means revisionism is simply not touching everything else, and to the extent that it has tried to address the origins, context, aftermath, it is woefully deficient.

Except your claims of homicidal gas chambers would have left traces, you just can't demonstrate them.

Secondly, the extent to which mass killings in the modern era have been 'forensically investigated' is highly uneven and tends to be inadequate. This is even more true for really large scale waves in history. There is no wave of historical mass violence dating back to the 1960s or earlier with six or more figures of victims whose numbers were determined by 'forensics', or with a 'complete' investigation. Cambodia in the mid-1970s might be the earliest. Smaller waves and more recent ones might be well covered, but for every Srebrenica there are several Darfurs and Congos. Older waves don't get reexamined systematically as there is little benefit for societies to do so compared to conducting other forms of historical research. Smaller mass grave sites might be accidentally uncovered (this also happens with Holocaust graves, since the shooting sites are also part of the Holocaust), but the prominent ones are treated as cemeteries and memorials, rather than being dug up every year to satisfy first year archaeology or forensic science students.

Whataboutism. The Killing Fields, Nanking and the Holodomor for example, have absolutely no bearing on your inability to evidence homicidal gassings. The only other comparible genocide (really a massacre) that has any bearing on the Holocaust conversation is Katyn, and only because it demonstrates that forensic evidence can absolutely be produced during wartime. Not looking good for you!

So insisting on 'forensics' rapidly boomerangs back onto the negationist since it's highly likely their gored oxes weren't subjected to the same level of scrutiny as they demand for the crimes they want to wish away. That includes Stalinism, since Katyn and Vinnytsia were hardly the only mass graves left by Stalinist violence, and the other prominent sites have either been investigated using similar methods to Holocaust archaeology - indeed Kola's team did bore probes in Kharkiv and Bykivnia - or have never been properly investigated at all (the Sandormorkh bone field near St Petersburg, Butovo in Moscow left as a cemetery and turned into an Orthodox shrine, Kurapaty outside Minsk after only initial probes, etc).

Ridiculous comparison. We know that guns exist and are lethal under the conditions claimed. There isn't an existential discussion to be had about whether the murder weapon was feasible. There is for the gas chambers, hence the need for your side to evidence something.

This does highlight another core argument for the conventional account: it exists in a web of comparisons, not just in genocide studies but with other forms of mass violence, whereas revisionism has so narrowed its focus as to have lost sight of the baselines. This on top of the inadequate attention to the more dispersed HALF of the Holocaust which did not take place in the death camps.

I actually agree with the first half here - Holocaust Revisionism (especially in the modern iteration) has tended to focus like a laserbeam on the key central premises, whereas Orthodoxy has had the luxury to derail itself into sheer fanfiction of the Hollywood variety, and as I've taught you before, given itself permission to become self-referential and circular. All of which gives the impression of a huge arsenal of material but is actually a house of cards.

[TlsMS93]

Interestingly, the existence of gas chambers in their literature was to avoid the psychological shock that the mass murders were causing to the soldiers on the Eastern Front, but even so it continued, 1.4 million were said to have been shot, what was the need for gas chambers then, they could very well have shot another 2 million from the General Government.

[HansHill]

Interestingly, the existence of gas chambers in their literature was to avoid the psychological shock that the mass murders were causing to the soldiers on the Eastern Front, but even so it continued, 1.4 million were said to have been shot, what was the need for gas chambers then, they could very well have shot another 2 million from the General Government.

Absolutely. They'll tell you this wasn't cost effective, despite us knowing exactly the kinds of $$$ the SS was spending on the various camp facilities. To just swap the expenditure line items from "constructing hospitals" to "extra bullets" really would have been the preferred method.

But of course, that doesn't make for scary atrocity propaganda!

[goyim terror alarm]

Absolutely. They'll tell you this wasn't cost effective, despite us knowing exactly the kinds of $$$ the SS was spending on the various camp facilities. To just swap the expenditure line items from "constructing hospitals" to "extra bullets" really would have been the preferred method.

But of course, that doesn't make for scary atrocity propaganda!

With the "cost effective" argument, you just reminded me of this ridiculous content farm channel's videos. Putting it here for a good laugh youtu.be/_p5Yvl2PbBU?t=294
They really claimed that gas vans were "cheaper and more effective" than shooting them and if the germans were to shoot civillians "they would feel bad"... ignoring every other genocide ever
Even though this is so outlandish even orthodox historians would reject it, it's still entering the public's minds considering this video has 6.4M views.

[Churchill]

I see, you are saying the policy was to murder a certain fraction (the unfit), in certain Locations but not others?
This being the case, and I do not believe you have answered yet: why stop the murder in 1944? When you say in statement 1.) that the genocide had already happened, did you mean that all unfit Jews in specified Locations in Eastern Europe were dead?

So the main reason why May 1944-May 1945 was different was this changed labour market situation forcing a massive reversal in existing policy due to wartime exigiencies.

I don’t think an economic argument is a coherent explanation here for what you say was a dramatic change in policy. Indeed the policy contradicted what went before.
A comprehensive extermination programme like this is necessarily undertaken due to profound hatred for the targeted population. This is particularly evident in this case as Germany was simultaneously in a life and death struggle with the USSR, so its clear exterminating Jews is of utmost priority given the extremity of the circumstances.

Given that level of murderous intent - indeed the violence was escalating in your account - it is not explicable given your above explanation why such intent would suddenly reverse. The murderous intent, given its scale in your narrative, was overriding questions of efficiency and wartime exigency from the very beginning. Do we have definitive internal German documentation that allows us to follow explicit orders from 1941 for when and where to kill Jews, and acknowledgement of this policy by lower ranks? It would take very explicit orders on extraordinary matters like this. This is especially the case as the narrative you tell is extremely complex, with contradictory policies depending on the date, and not uniform across occupied territory.

Consider a defence lawyer stating their serial killer client had indeed engaged in ever more bold and extreme murders, moreover it was agreed that his client was, by orders of magnitude, the most prolific serial killer in history. However, at the very height of the killings (their client still had defenceless victims in his basement at this point) their client’s prospects at his day job turned for the worse, forcing him to focus on his career. Due to this rapid reprioritisation, he was quickly able to resist the overwhelming temptations to indulge in murder again. Indeed he kept his remaining defenceless victims alive, even providing them medical treatment, until his arrest.
Would you have (many) questions over the accuracy of this narrative?

[Churchill]

I think the simplest argument for the mainstream account is that it is an account: it can produce historical narratives from a variety of perspectives and levels, with much broader coverage geographically and thematically, based on sources. Revisionism is hardly ever presented in narrative form, and cannot provide a sourced alternative explanation for its often vague copes and claims.

Thanks for that.

I don’t know all revisionist literature so I cannot say how much of it is narrative history.
I don’t follow what the contention is here. The definitive mainstream account of Auschwitz as extermination camp surely is Van Pelt’s The Case for Auschwitz. The book is not a narrative history. Pressac’s books on Auschwitz are the other most detailed accounts and they are not narrative histories.

On “broader geography and themes”, we can consider a history like, Europe since Napoleon by David Thomson** A great history, first published in the 1950s, it is a massive narrative of Europe from the French Revolution up until the early 1960s - in the revised version. The book discusses the expulsion and legal discrimination against Jews and street violence in the 1930s. While later summing up German policy over occupied territories generally, after narrating the collapse in 1945, it relegates what we now call the Holocaust to one passing sentence about “systematic persecution and annihilation” of Jews. There is zero discussion or even mention of the unprecedented crimes of gas vans, gas chambers and extermination camps. No mention of 5-6 million dead. No mention of the where, when and how of the crime.
Surely the Holocaust is the most singular event in recent European history. The fact that it is relegated to one vague sentence is very telling: this sentence on the holocaust could be removed from the text and none of the book’s history of events in Europe is altered.

This book and other mainstream texts like it from the time period now read like revisionist histories of the 1930s and 1940s. The holocaust tends to be either implicitly denied in the immediate post-war by historians via omission or relegated to vague statements as above. Do we not then already have narrative revisionist histories right in front of us, written by mainstream historians?


** https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Thomson_(historian)

[SanityCheck]

I see, you are saying the policy was to murder a certain fraction (the unfit), in certain Locations but not others?
This being the case, and I do not believe you have answered yet: why stop the murder in 1944? When you say in statement 1.) that the genocide had already happened, did you mean that all unfit Jews in specified Locations in Eastern Europe were dead?

So the main reason why May 1944-May 1945 was different was this changed labour market situation forcing a massive reversal in existing policy due to wartime exigiencies.

I don’t think an economic argument is a coherent explanation here for what you say was a dramatic change in policy. Indeed the policy contradicted what went before.
A comprehensive extermination programme like this is necessarily undertaken due to profound hatred for the targeted population. This is particularly evident in this case as Germany was simultaneously in a life and death struggle with the USSR, so its clear exterminating Jews is of utmost priority given the extremity of the circumstances.

Given that level of murderous intent - indeed the violence was escalating in your account - it is not explicable given your above explanation why such intent would suddenly reverse. The murderous intent, given its scale in your narrative, was overriding questions of efficiency and wartime exigency from the very beginning. Do we have definitive internal German documentation that allows us to follow explicit orders from 1941 for when and where to kill Jews, and acknowledgement of this policy by lower ranks? It would take very explicit orders on extraordinary matters like this. This is especially the case as the narrative you tell is extremely complex, with contradictory policies depending on the date, and not uniform across occupied territory.

Consider a defence lawyer stating their serial killer client had indeed engaged in ever more bold and extreme murders, moreover it was agreed that his client was, by orders of magnitude, the most prolific serial killer in history. However, at the very height of the killings (their client still had defenceless victims in his basement at this point) their client’s prospects at his day job turned for the worse, forcing him to focus on his career. Due to this rapid reprioritisation, he was quickly able to resist the overwhelming temptations to indulge in murder again. Indeed he kept his remaining defenceless victims alive, even providing them medical treatment, until his arrest.
Would you have (many) questions over the accuracy of this narrative?

I'd suggest you read Christian Gerlach's The Extermination of the European Jews (2016), especially the chapters on food and labour. The 'food factor' was another consideration which generated direct contradictions between food imperatives and labour, but also harmonised with ideology and 'rationalised' it for mid-level officialdom, back in 1941-1943. Ideology was also cast in security terms, which is a constant refrain as well in the peak years.

The Germans were unable to persuade most of their Axis allies to hand over Jews, and were seriously rebuffed in autumn 1942 almost everywhere, with even previously willing allies like Slovakia getting cold feet and slowing things down. The trade-offs were obvious: diplomatic and military alliances, key raw materials like oil from Romania. So when several of these allies tried to switch sides or threatened to, or revolted - Italy, Hungary, Slovakia - the Germans went in with the gloves off, also in previously Italian occupied territories from the south of France to southern Greece, and carried out razzias. But this shows how the Germans could balance their murderous intent with recognising diplomatic realities. The paper trail of encouragements to the Axis allies to hand over highly dangerous Jews confirms the ideological intent.

Polish Jews were the most numerous in absolute and relative terms, and across the 13 occupation regions of Poland, the 3-3.5 million Jews present in 1939 were reduced to less than 300,000. Some had escaped east but the realistic death tolls are 2.7-3 million. This was expressed in terms of striking a blow at the biological reserves of world Jewry, as was stated in March 1944 at a conference: “the physical elimination of Eastern Jewry deprives Jewry of its biological reserves” (Die physische Beseitigung des Ostjudentums entziehe dem Judentum die biologischen Reserven; from Auswartiges Amt Inf. XIV Antijiidische Auslandsaktion, Betreff: Arbeitstagung der Judenreferenten und Arisierungsberater, 4. Marz 1944, 3319-PS, IMT XXXII, p.166)

The patterns in Poland show clear interactions between ideology, security, food and labour, with labour requirements leaving some Jews alive in some regions, especially where there was more substantive war-work. By the start of 1944 there were no Polish Jews in 1) Danzig-Westpreussen, 2) Bialystok, 3) Zichenau, 4) Litauen (the Wilno region - the Wilno ghetto workers were sent to Estonia in September 1943 while others were killed), 5) Wolhynien-Podolien (the Polesie and Volhynia), or 6) the Warsaw district - KL Warschau imported several thousand non-Polish Jews from Auschwitz to work on the dismantling of the ghetto area. There were a few Jews left in labour camps in the 7) Lublin and 8) Galicia districts, working for high priority war work such as the Heinkel plant in Budzyn, and the Drohobycz-Boryslaw oil fields. There were some labour camps in the 9) Krakow district, famously including Plaszow. More existed in the industrial towns of the 10) Radom district, while in 11) Silesia the Schmelt camp network was converted to sub-camps of Auschwitz and Gross-Rosen, including the large oil plant at Blechhammer. The Lodz ghetto still had substantial war orders in the 12) Warthegau, but all other labour camps had been liquidated and their inmates sent to Auschwitz. There were a couple of surviving labour camps in western Belarus, aka 13) Weissruthenien, mainly at Koldychevo near Baranovichi. But compared to previous numbers this wasn't significant.

Competing interests from the Wehrmacht, economics agencies and civil administrations caused the survival of any Jewish forced labour at all, since regional labour markets varied. In Lithuania, a shortage of Soviet POWs meant the preservation of work ghettos at the end of 1941. In the Warthegau, Gauleiter Greiser and the Gettoverwaltung Litzmannstadt retained control of the entire process until 1944, the SS were in a subordinate role here. Elsewhere the SS agitated to reduce Jewish forced labourers to a minimum and the local authorities could find replacements from Polish workers, as with the Bialystok ghetto, a big textiles centre but the final liquidation of the ghetto caused no major disruptions once replacements were brought in. That was not the case in the Radom district. There were some advantages to using Jews over non-Jews, as they could be corralled more easily in camps, fed less, and subjected to harsher discipline and selections, which would have caused much greater unrest among Poles, Ukrainians, Belarusians and Lithuanians (all within the territory of pre-1939 Poland).

The SS additionally had an interest in boosting its KZ labour force, especially in the Auschwitz complex. Jews selected for work had died in their tens of thousands building the camp and there were still enough left over to work in factories, factory construction and coal mines. In 1943, Himmler ordered the transfer of various labour camps and work ghettos in the Warthegau and Silesia to Auschwitz, with the usual selections, and this boosted the Auschwitz complex camp population and workforce. The idea of harmonising the Final Solution with SS labour requirements dated back to January 1942, just after Wannsee. It was there all along. Murder and forced labour coexisted throughout.

The interplay between food, labour and security is also why the revisionist 'resettlement' thesis is so ludicrous from a conventional perspective. Jews were subjected to labour selections either at the departure ends (before deportation to Chelmno, Belzec, Sobibor and Treblinka or during local mass shootings) or at the arrival end (at Auschwitz, and also in Lublin for Majdanek vs Sobibor at various times in 1942). This is the general rule, there were exceptions, such as workers in Lithuania being allowed to keep a relative alive in 1941 (but many were killed in 1943-44). But it meant that the deportees to BCST and those not selected for work at Auschwitz were disproportionately unfit for work. Not all - since the food factor and stricter requirements about the types of employment meant able bodied men and women were also deported or not selected for work at Auschwitz.

But the deportations were not a major labour transfer to the occupied Soviet territories, while the occupied Soviet territories also had to give up food quotas, experienced greater shortages, and could less easily support a non-working population. If corralled in reservations, ghettos or camps then there would have been a repetition of the mass starvation of Soviet POWs in 1941-2 or of Belsen in 1945. They were NOT used as workers - any Jews surviving as forced labourers in these regions had not been deported via ABCST in 1942-3 (able bodied Hungarian Jews were sent after selection to KL Kaiserwald in Riga in 1944). But there were enough adults to pose a serious security problem, if they could escape whatever spaces of confinement they were held in. Despite fond wishes from revisionists and cherrypicked examples (often of a few labour transports that did not go via ABCST), the exact locations of Unicornville are completely unknown, cannot be reconstructed, and are not historical. If the Germans had resorted to an Armenian genocide style expulsion to reservations/camps, then the end result would have been the same, total extinction due to not being able to feed the deportees in their millions in 1942-3, since there's also no hint of them in any food/agricultural or economic records/reports. So one wonders why the Soviets and Poles would have delayed propaganda gratification by not publicising these lethal expulsions, which is what everyone 'expected' and believed until reports of the extermination camps emerged, and covering them up. Make it make sense.

In 1944, the same issue repeated itself with the 75% of Hungarian Jews deported to Auschwitz who were not selected for work. By then most of the 'east' had been lost, while the remaining territories (the Ostland) were affected by partisan warfare and being mobilised either for work or for armed collaboration. There is no evidence the unfit Hungarian Jews were sent east, or sent west. The only exception were 15,000 sent as families not via Auschwitz to Vienna to be 'kept on ice' in the event that the trucks for Jews deal came through, i.e. they were exempt from the usual rule because they were bargaining chips for informal diplomacy.


An economic argument certainly is a coherent explanation for why there were always some forced labourers, and why when the strategic situation changed, there was a U-turn regarding *where* Jewish forced labour might be used, i.e. in KZs in Germany and Austria, in the final twelve months of the war.

Moreover, the established policy of selection (for gas chambers in 1944) continued through to the end of October 1944, so that 75% of Hungarian Jews deported to Auschwitz in May-July 1944 were murdered. The able-bodied Hungarian and other Jews who had been transferred westwards were also subjected to a number of 'return transports' to Auschwitz if they became weakened, up to October 1944.

Noting the existence of change over time and even U-turns doesn't contradict earlier phases.

[SanityCheck]

I think the simplest argument for the mainstream account is that it is an account: it can produce historical narratives from a variety of perspectives and levels, with much broader coverage geographically and thematically, based on sources. Revisionism is hardly ever presented in narrative form, and cannot provide a sourced alternative explanation for its often vague copes and claims.

Thanks for that.

I don’t know all revisionist literature so I cannot say how much of it is narrative history.
I don’t follow what the contention is here. The definitive mainstream account of Auschwitz as extermination camp surely is Van Pelt’s The Case for Auschwitz. The book is not a narrative history. Pressac’s books on Auschwitz are the other most detailed accounts and they are not narrative histories.

Actually Pressac's book very much does narrate the planning and construction of the crematoria and gas chambers, but this is a narrative within the narrative of Auschwitz, for which one looks to Auschwitz 1940-45 5 vols and the Auschwitz Chronicle. Van Pelt wrote a narrative history of Auschwitz town earlier, In turn, Auschwitz is only one part of a pan-European narrative from 1939 to 1945 which has been narrated repeatedly in conventional overviews.

Revisionist works, even when purporting to be overviews (like Butz, Dalton, various Rudolf books, and shorter books by Mattogno, Graf, plus other intros and primers), have not been written up in a conventional 1939-1945 narrative form the way that biographies of Hitler are, or overviews of the Holocaust.

The issue is not whether all histories should be written in a certain way, rather that the apparent inability to write narrative history and preference for other genres like polemics against historians or hyper-source criticism while neglecting other formats is conspicuous.

On “broader geography and themes”,

Broader geography for the Holocaust would be considering regions and countries: histories of the persecution and murder of Jews in the Warthegau, not just histories of Chelmno; histories of the Holocaust in Lithuania, and so on. But also histories of the concentration camp system such as Nikolaus Wachsmann's KL, since the KZs overlapped with the Holocaust. Themes include collective responses (Jewish councils, resistance, self-rescue), bystander responses (often to join in the plunder and killing, other times to help rescue), perpetrator motivation, expropriation and 'Aryanisation', propaganda and ideological antisemitism, among many others. Oh, and Jewish forced labour, of course. Focusing on life as well as destruction, survival as well as murder and death, therefore.

Narrating all of these together is what one finds in standard overviews such as Saul Friedlander's The Years of Extermination 1939-1945 (2007). There is accordingly less on each theme, including the treatment of the extermination camps, but that is the challenge in summing up any era of history.

we can consider a history like, Europe since Napoleon by David Thomson...

This tells us nothing, since it's generally accepted that the Holocaust did not move into greater prominence within the Anglo-American mainstream until the 1970s or even later; it wasn't being called the Holocaust so much until the 1970s, and there were delayed reactions in terms of significance. The US "mainstreamed" the Holocaust earlier than was the case in Britain, while France had its own rhythm, with changes from the Marrus/Paxton controversy of the early 1970s and a willingness to reexamine Vichy setting up greater interest through the 1970s. West Germany had greater reason to react to the Holocaust but did so mainly from 1960 onwards, with lags - nonetheless early key works, as flawed as they were, ended up in English fairly rapidly (especially Anatomy of the SS State). The Eichmann trial was also from the early 1960s and definitely also stimulated indirect and direct engagement with the subject.

Vatican II, which called for greater ecumenicism and rejected theological antisemitism, did not happen until 1962-1965. There was a much vaguer foundation in the US of 'Judeo-Christianity' from WWII onwards, practical ecumenicism, but not until after Vatican II was there much soul-searching or exploration of Jewish-Christian relations with the Holocaust in mind. There were of course additional controversies - Hochhuth's play The Deputy stimulated the publication of Vatican documents about WWII, and generated an extensive polemic literature on the Catholic Church during the Holocaust, with pro and contra voices. So one of the other early sources for 'mainstreaming' the Holocaust in the US was precisely this ecumenical, interfaith dialogue, as is obvious from seeing many uses of the term Holocaust in the NYT from the early 1970s.

The Holocaust was obviously of much greater interest to Jews, who wrote much more about it from 1945-1975 than anyone else, as one would expect. It was fundamentally a Jewish history; mainstream discussion tended to submerge it into the Nazi regime as a whole or the KZs.


David Thomson's book in its revised 1966 edition came at a time when social history was taking off, when women's history was about to be established, and when there was the beginnings of more detailed study of the totalitarian and authoritarian regimes of the first half of the 20th Century. Pretty much none of that is especially conspicuous in his bibliography, which relies on Deutscher for Stalin and Bullock for Hitler. I don't see where he referenced E.P. Thompson's The Making of the English Working Class (1963) in the revised edition, and he did not use any of the existing overviews on the Holocaust at all (Poliakov 1951, Reitlinger 1956, Hilberg 1961).

The overall emphasis is on classic political history, with more attention to the purges of Bolshevik leaders, which get a few more lines, than the 1932 famine, which gets a couple of allusions to famine without a date. The book doesn't mention the Armenian genocide at all, even though there is coverage of European colonial empires and WWI, and manages a few references to Armenians as minorities in Russia and Turkey. Israel shows up with a reference to the 1948 war that doesn't mention the flight or expulsion of Palestinians. There are two references to pogrom, both to Kristallnacht, and two to pogroms, referring to the 19th Century, with one appearing in a single paragraph on Jews in the Russian empire. Not a huge amount of attention, just acknowledged. 41 hits for Jews and 22 for Jewish in 1000 pages, versus 88 for Belgian and 67 for Dutch - bear in mind Belgium contained fewer people than there were Jews in Europe through to the 1940s. So acknowledging the annihilation of the Jews in WWII without providing further details is very consistent with the approach to comparable topics.

The book was outdated as hell even when I encountered it at school in the 1980s, and was clearly inferior to the country-specific studies I needed just to revise for school exams. So it wasn't a textbook or used as such. It was entirely absent from reading lists by the time I got to university, before the end of the Cold War.

[SanityCheck]

"Since resettlement camps/reservations/whatever are not forensically or archaeologically demonstrated, that is very dangerous ground" - back at ya. But even more so since there's also no photographic, documentary (German or otherwise) or testimonial evidence for them.

This isn't the slam dunk you think it is, you're making a positive claim about continental-wide genocide.

So are you, and so are revisionists. Your positive claims must meet the same standard as conventional positive claims. Your constant negations and denials and 'there were no's aren't history.

"Forensics" is not a panacea, for several reasons. Firstly, most aspects of any history of violence will not be accessible by any kind of 'forensics'. Decision-making, forming groups, the aftermath - all very extensive for the Holocaust - just won't leave such traces. Thus the narrowing to killing sites means revisionism is simply not touching everything else, and to the extent that it has tried to address the origins, context, aftermath, it is woefully deficient.

Except your claims of homicidal gas chambers would have left traces, you just can't demonstrate them.

Not responsive to what I wrote. There's a remark which revisionists have occasionally wheeled out from Van Pelt about how nearly everything in history does not leave a physical trace or physical evidence. This is what narrowing to physical evidence misses - decision making does not leave physical evidence, it leaves traces in written records and testimonies.

Implementation might leave physical evidence, but that is to hand, both for the mass shootings (which your gas chamber fixation consistently ignores) and for the camps, especially for Auschwitz.

Whataboutism. The Killing Fields, Nanking and the Holodomor for example, have absolutely no bearing on your inability to evidence homicidal gassings. The only other comparible genocide (really a massacre) that has any bearing on the Holocaust conversation is Katyn, and only because it demonstrates that forensic evidence can absolutely be produced during wartime. Not looking good for you!

Not whataboutism. Your emphasis on forensics just isn't seen across histories of mass violence and genocide in general, which means there's a whiff of special pleading to your 'argument'. The Holocaust has been subjected to more physical and forensic examination than many other cases, placing all of them on a continuum from 'exhaustively investigated physically' to 'never investigated at all'.

Evidencing homicidal gassings, like evidencing other mass killings, is not reducible to physical evidence anyway.

So insisting on 'forensics' rapidly boomerangs back onto the negationist since it's highly likely their gored oxes weren't subjected to the same level of scrutiny as they demand for the crimes they want to wish away. That includes Stalinism, since Katyn and Vinnytsia were hardly the only mass graves left by Stalinist violence, and the other prominent sites have either been investigated using similar methods to Holocaust archaeology - indeed Kola's team did bore probes in Kharkiv and Bykivnia - or have never been properly investigated at all (the Sandormorkh bone field near St Petersburg, Butovo in Moscow left as a cemetery and turned into an Orthodox shrine, Kurapaty outside Minsk after only initial probes, etc).

Ridiculous comparison. We know that guns exist and are lethal under the conditions claimed. There isn't an existential discussion to be had about whether the murder weapon was feasible. There is for the gas chambers, hence the need for your side to evidence something.

There's also no existential discussion about using HCN and carbon monoxide to kill human beings, so you have no point here. Guns might exist but we rarely have the receipts for how much ammunition was issued prior to a massacre, and as noted already, only a fraction of the millions of corpses buried after being killed out of hand in massacres were ever exhumed or autopsied.

Written records and testimonies are the default standard with ALL instances of mass violence, because they are more telling, more readily available and less time-consuming to work with. Archaeology and forensics form a useful supplementary set of sources, but since they do not exist for most cases or would be more expensive and time-consuming to carry out, the 'physical evidence' gambit fails to apply even-handed standards.

Let's consider a micro-example first. Historian encounters a written report from a European colonial army about carrying out a reprisal execution during a revolt in a colony. Historian does not have time or money to travel to Jamaica to try and locate a mass grave that may never have been marked; if there is a cemetery/memorial then they will not have permission to exhume the cemetery to satisfy their curiosity. Historian is limited therefore to relying on the written report. The killing is still historical, and any apologist for empire who wished to deny the reprisal can go swivel.

Historian encounters written sources on German killings of non-Jews in similar circumstances. This time there is a much higher chance that somebody inspected the site or did clean-up after liberation. A memorial marker might exist, as they do for hundreds of villages burned in WWII which were never repopulated.

A German patrol in a forest finds a bunker of fugitive Jews and kills them, recording this in a war diary. Historian might choose to visit the forest for other reasons but there will be no physical evidence beyond memorial markers in towns, not in the forest itself. Historian has to trust the candour of the war diary admitting to the killing. No different to the British colonial reprisal in Jamaica in the Morant Bay rebellion.

Historian encounters written sources on much larger-scale massacres of Jews near bigger towns, not in the forest. Historian can consult Soviet Extraordinary Commission or Polish Main Commission records locating the killing sites, often with sketches, and describing the inspection of the mass grave. Historian could go to Poland or Ukraine and either find a memorial marker or none at all. There may or may not be readily accessible photographs of the exhumation. Enough such corroboration can be found to satisfy all but the most ridiculous demands for chapter and verse, which if made standard would erase most other massacres from the historical record.

Historian encounters written sources on the extermination camps. They consult Soviet and Polish site inspection reports, examine 1945 photographs, and consult 1990s-2010s archaeological surveys, also using aerial photos from the 1940s and subsequently, and unofficial photographs of skulls and remains at Treblinka and so on. More written sources emerge to cover the aftermath, the reporting of the site condition before memorials are erected - 20 years on for Treblinka - and more photos appear of visitors finding bone fragments through to the 21st Century. Historian visits Auschwitz-Birkenau and can view the Birkenau crematoria ruins, the 1945 photographs, the forensic tests done then as well as in the 1980s/1990s, and copious other evidence, and concludes that revisionists are full of shit.

I actually agree with the first half here - Holocaust Revisionism (especially in the modern iteration) has tended to focus like a laserbeam on the key central premises, whereas Orthodoxy has had the luxury to derail itself into sheer fanfiction of the Hollywood variety, and as I've taught you before, given itself permission to become self-referential and circular. All of which gives the impression of a huge arsenal of material but is actually a house of cards.

If enquiring into the 'presumed extermination of the Jews', to quote Butz's subtitle, then one should really look into every site where Jews died or were murdered during the Second World War. More than half of the victims did not die in the extermination camps. These sites existed alongside sites where millions of non-Jews died or were killed, or they were shared - political prisoners were executed in Ponary outside Wilno and at Babyn Yar in Kyiv, after the completion of the massacres of Jews there, for example.

This is not a 'self-referential' or 'circular' conventional position. Quite the opposite. Instead of staying fixated on Belzec, the surrounding regions and ghettos in the Krakow, Galicia, Lublin and Radom districts are also examined, and have been since 1944, since they generated extensive investigations, accounts to historical commissions, trials in postwar Poland, the BRD, DDR and Austria, memorial books, and also saw clean-ups, reinterments of victims immediately after the war, relocation of cemeteries (a frequent killing site), mass graves and much else. As Belzec closed at the end of 1942, over 100,000 Jews in eastern Galicia to the west of Belzec were no longer deported but taken out to nearby woods and grave sites and shot. The Soviets investigated, exhumed, photographed this, the eradication of the Jews of this region had begun in 1941 before any camps existed and continued in 1943 without camps.

As there were 657 ghettos in occupied Poland, many in regions where there were no deportations to camps, and many also in regions which deported 400,000 or so Jews westwards not eastwards, the ratio of local studies to camp studies should logically be quite high. Which is exactly what we see, with the immediate surrounding context quite necessary to understand the six camps in Poland. It would be very odd if the different ghettos, camps, counties and regions weren't examined, it should also not be a surprise that this research often yields more sources on the extermination camps, since they were connected.

The microhistorical approach is now beginning to extend things beyond towns in Poland to examine fugitive Jews in the countryside, forests and other hiding places, where they were also targeted for killing by the Germans (as well as by Poles, Ukrainians and others). The same is also happening to put the camps into their local environments and consider how local Poles related to them, sometimes profiteering, other times being horrified and stunk out of their homes by the open air cremations, sometimes helping fugitives.

Meanwhile, every single region further east is researched by Russian, Belarusian, Ukrainian, Baltic and western historians for the occupation in 1941-44, so conventional history has ever more knowledge of the occupation, who was where at what time, what economic facilities existed, the size of towns and populations, the violence between communists and nationalists or between the Germans and the partisans, and so on. This steadily accumulating body of work has no place for the fantasy resettlement to Unicornville which revisionism has claimed but cannot substantiate. There ought to be multiple revisionist researchers trying to learn about these regions, but after Thomas Kues dropped out of the scene, there is no one who has even cracked open the books to figure out the basics.

Those regions further east were also the sites of the extermination of the Jews, so there's a whole other history waiting for revisionists. Again, Kues was scratching the surface (but no more than that), while Mattogno blew it with his Einsatzgruppen book.

The situation with the rest of Europe, deportations and the Axis states is even more lopsided. Other than Butz spinning up a yarn about Hungary that even Mattogno, Graf and Crowell had to reject in 2000, there's simply nothing which revisionism is contesting, with not even much said on cases where Axis states or Germans killed Jews en masse, as in Yugoslavia, Hungary and Romania.

The KZ system of main concentration camps and subcamps, as well as death marches, is another area where revisionists have nothing except out-dated copes and their fixation on gas chambers. But we can also throw in the T4 centres, psychiatric hospitals using other methods, and other forms of violence inside Germany and the Greater German Reich (forced abortions of foreign workers, labour reeducation camps, Gestapo prisons and many other sites of execution), all adding up to a comprehensive picture which can't be easily budged. Except if one pretends that only gassing matters, which is not the conventional position. Even focusing on gassing, the coverage is hopeless - where is the revisionist book on T4? That is close to 100,000 people gassed by the Nazis, including 14 f 13 and the transfers from KZs. It preceded the extermination of the Jews and is connected to it in various ways.

[HansHill]

So are you, and so are revisionists. Your positive claims must meet the same standard as conventional positive claims. Your constant negations and denials and 'there were no's aren't history.

Yet you still can't evidence the gas chambers. Are you arguing for a stalemate here?

Implementation might leave physical evidence, but that is to hand....... for the camps, especially for Auschwitz.

Physical evidence across three categories has been left in a very poor state by Orthodoxy. I'll re-iterate them here for completeness:

- No holes
- No HcN residues
- No Kula columns

While its possible any of the above absences could be accounted for, Orthodoxy is extremely poor in doing so. I will steelman the HcN point, as an example. The HcN residues are absent because a) they never formed in the first place, or b) they formed but disintegrated over time due to, for example the overly-carbonated rainwater disintegrating the residues, this seems to be Avi Bitterman's rationale). As B is clearly ridiculous given everything we know about the stability of Prussian Blue, i assume you will want to go with A. Then you must account for why the residues never formed in the first place. If Prof Green cannot do this, i'm not sure you personally can either (no offence).

Likewise with the holes and columns. Their absence could be explained away, eg Van Pelt saying they were cemented over. But that merely kicks the can down the road to, well show us the cement!

(which your gas chamber fixation consistently ignores)

I know i shouldn't take the bait, but I'll bite!

Quips like this bely your confidence in the gas chamber story. I understand it's a bit more terra firma for you to concentrate on the Holocaust Of Bullets for obvious reasons, but I'm not letting you off the hook that easily! You have chosen to shoulder the burden of this ridiculous gas chamber story, and while I do sympathise with just how increasingly impossible this is becoming for you to shoulder, as long as you opt-in to believing it, you must accept that Revisionists (and laymen like myself) will focus on this area relentlessly!

a whiff of special pleading to your 'argument'. The Holocaust has been subjected to more physical and forensic examination than many other cases, placing all of them on a continuum from 'exhaustively investigated physically' to 'never investigated at all'.

Again I'll bite!

There is something to this, however it's not what you think! I do agree that there is a certain element of "singling out" or you might say "picking on" the Holocaust, and again i sympathise with the Sisyphus nature of your task in defending it. But you must understand that Orthodoxy has brought this on all by itself. Between the rather unique extermination methods claimed, the fanatical hysteria of the fanfiction, the over-politicisation, the badgering and haranguing of Holocaust inc, and the unrelenting cultural mythos that everything Nazi-Adjacent has become in the modern world, really how can you expect anything else?

This is all to be expected, and Orthodoxy collapsing under the attention-seeking that it has generated for itself is absolutely hilarious, if not perfectly justified.

There's also no existential discussion about using HCN and carbon monoxide to kill human beings, so you have no point here.

Technically true, but your literal interpretation of what I'm saying is taken in poor faith i feel, to score slamdunks. I don't deny HcN is toxic in and of itself, but rather the conditions claimed is not supported. There is a difference. HcN perfeclty sealed within its tin is about as lethal as a bullet resting in its chamber. The murder weapon isn't the HcN per se, its the HcN + Introduction Hole + Kula column complex, much like the murder weapon of a shooting is the bullet + chamber + gun powder complex.

Written records and testimonies are the default standard with ALL instances of mass violence, because they are more telling, more readily available and less time-consuming to work with. Archaeology and forensics form a useful supplementary set of sources, but since they do not exist for most cases or would be more expensive and time-consuming to carry out, the 'physical evidence' gambit fails to apply even-handed standards.

This goes back to my point above about sympathising with your position, really I do. However, nothing you have said here exonerates Orthodoxy from explaining why the methods described are not supported by the physical record.

Let's consider a micro-example first. Historian encounters a written report from a European colonial army about carrying out a reprisal execution during a revolt in a colony. Historian does not have time or money to travel to Jamaica to try and locate a mass grave that may never have been marked; if there is a cemetery/memorial then they will not have permission to exhume the cemetery to satisfy their curiosity. Historian is limited therefore to relying on the written report. The killing is still historical, and any apologist for empire who wished to deny the reprisal can go swivel.

I'm asking you to please be consistent, so I'm trusting you will. You've been very respectful so far: If the method of killing wasn't claimed as being done by era-appropriate rifles, and instead a myth of this local tribe had evolved to something involving rather exotic and unexpected murder weapons like, take your pick between space lasers, lightsabers, boxing-glove-on-a-spring... You would fully expect a Revisionist approach to emerge eventually, especially if that particular massacre had been used for political reasons akin to the Holocaust.

This shouldn't be surprising?

Historian encounters written sources on German killings of non-Jews in similar circumstances. This time there is a much higher chance that somebody inspected the site or did clean-up after liberation. A memorial marker might exist, as they do for hundreds of villages burned in WWII which were never repopulated.

Emphasis mine. The circumstances are wholly unique and you know that.

A German patrol in a forest finds a bunker of fugitive Jews and kills them, recording this in a war diary. Historian might choose to visit the forest for other reasons but there will be no physical evidence beyond memorial markers in towns, not in the forest itself. Historian has to trust the candour of the war diary admitting to the killing. No different to the British colonial reprisal in Jamaica in the Morant Bay rebellion.

The discussion here would be were the jews murdered (shot) for being jews or murdered as part of a military operation. But what if the claim was they were poisoned in a gas chamber with tins of Zyklon in the forest?

Historian encounters written sources on much larger-scale massacres of Jews near bigger towns, not in the forest. Historian can consult Soviet Extraordinary Commission or Polish Main Commission records locating the killing sites, often with sketches, and describing the inspection of the mass grave. Historian could go to Poland or Ukraine and either find a memorial marker or none at all. There may or may not be readily accessible photographs of the exhumation. Enough such corroboration can be found to satisfy all but the most ridiculous demands for chapter and verse, which if made standard would erase most other massacres from the historical record.

Historian encounters written sources on the extermination camps. They consult Soviet and Polish site inspection reports, examine 1945 photographs, and consult 1990s-2010s archaeological surveys, also using aerial photos from the 1940s and subsequently, and unofficial photographs of skulls and remains at Treblinka and so on. More written sources emerge to cover the aftermath, the reporting of the site condition before memorials are erected - 20 years on for Treblinka - and more photos appear of visitors finding bone fragments through to the 21st Century. Historian visits Auschwitz-Birkenau and can view the Birkenau crematoria ruins, the 1945 photographs, the forensic tests done then as well as in the 1980s/1990s, and copious other evidence, and concludes that revisionists are full of shit.

But still can't find a gas chamber

If enquiring into the 'presumed extermination of the Jews', to quote Butz's subtitle, then one should really look into every site where Jews died or were murdered during the Second World War.

Yes. Now what would happen to the Holocaust By Bullets narrative if the Holocaust By Poison Gas narrative collapsed?

The KZ system of main concentration camps and subcamps, as well as death marches, is another area where revisionists have nothing except out-dated copes and their fixation on gas chambers.

Again you bely your confidence in the gas chamber story. Of course it's to be focused on for the reasons explained.

"But we can also throw in the:

- T4 centres - not an extermination, and besides was the wrong target demographic
- psychiatric hospitals using other methods - not an extermination
- and other forms of violence inside Germany and the Greater German Reich - Not an extermination
- forced abortions of foreign workers - arguably could be categorised as "genocide", but for a different thread!
- labour reeducation camps - not an extermination
- Gestapo prisons - Not an extermination
- and many other sites of execution - unless you substantiate this in some meaningful way, then no, not an extermination
- all adding up to a comprehensive picture which can't be easily budged - A comprehensive picture of what, the 1930s being a violent era of history? All of the above to a point could be leveled at any of the Allies, and does nothing to prove your Holocaust

Where is the revisionist book on T4? That is close to 100,000 people gassed by the Nazis, including 14 f 13 and the transfers from KZs. It preceded the extermination of the Jews and is connected to it in various ways.

I agree that things like Euthanaisa and Eugenics were regrettable, however those were a feature of the 1930s, and not a feature of Germany. You do realise that the German eugenics policy was almost entirely an American export, yes? Similarly Euthanaisa has regretably had a much longer shelf life and foot print than National Socialst Germany, so no, you don't have a slam dunk here either. I'm sure there are many books written about the distaste modernity has evolved for Eugenics and Euthanasia across both developed and developing nations, i don't see why you put this at the feet of Revisionists?