The Question of Conspiracy

[Archie]

I meant statement in a broad sense, not necessarily an affidavit. Documents from 1943 would probably be in the form of a memo, letter, diary, whatever.

The point is that the context of the postwar statements has to be considered. They had just lost the war and were under military occupation and denazification and were being threatened with execution for war crimes. If you're a guy like Hoettl, for example, you tell the Allies what they want to hear.

But this is where you're assuming the consequent. How do we know the Allies wanted to hear about the extermination of the Jews? They were busily interrogating thousands of captured German officials and military personnel, who were telling their interrogators about all kinds of things.

Uh, the WJC was pushing the extermination claim in 1942. Morgenthau's WRB endorsed exterminations at Auschwitz in Nov 1944. The Soviets had gone all in on this stuff with Madjanek in summer of 1944 and published their Auschwitz report in May 1945. All of that is before the trials. By the time you get to the Belsen trial (one of the earliest ones) the story on Auschwitz was already pretty much formed. Come on, professor, this is just basic chronology, the most basic concept in history. We can see the influence of the Soviet reports on Auschwitz in the Belsen witnesses since some of them repeat the 4 million figure.

At Nuremberg, the WJC had the ear or Jackson already in the summer of 1945 and they assisted in preparing Jackson's opening statement and Dodd's summary of crimes against the Jews.

Jacob Robinson of the WJC says the following in a document dated Dec 6, 1945 (it was on the Truman Library site but the link I have not longer works).

Col. Brookardt, a good American criminal lawyer, is conducting Wisliczeny’s interrogation. It was impossible for me, a civilian without status, to get the permit necessary to interrogate him. So the following procedure was adopted: I would prepare the questions, Col. Brookart would go to see Wisliczeny and put these questions to him, get his replies, and bring them to me. I would write these answers up and Brookart would take them back to Wisliczeny for his approval, etc.

Here we see the WJC was directly managing the interrogation behind the scenes.

Hoettl's interrogation was right around this same time. He had an incentive to be "cooperative." Hoettl's story about overhearing the six million number is hogwash. There is no evidence the Germans had prepared such statistics that late in the war. The CIA dossier on Hoettl says something to the effect that he was dishonest and unreliable.

In a lot of other cases, Jews were directly doing the interrogations. Partly this was because Jews were the ones who cared the most, but it was also partly for linguistic reasons since the Jews who left Germany in the 1930s were some of only German speakers the US had.

[SanityCheck]

I think you missed the point regarding Allied interrogations. They were much wider than a focus on the extermination of the Jews, while many German officials and officers were extremely happy to talk. Speer's interrogations by the Strategic Bombing Survey is one example.

Hoettl is another excellent example, since he wrote up very extensive reports and was very forthcoming on a wide range of issues, including Kaltenbrunner's stance to peace feelers and the Austrian bid for independence in 1944-45 (planned, rather than real). Lots and lots of detail, to be taken with the usual caution and cross referenced extensively. But he absolutely knew Kaltenbrunner, Eichmann, and many other key players in the RSHA, and had a good general overview of intelligence activities across Europe from working with RSHA Amt VI. Hoettl was a gold mine for all kinds of topics, by 1945 standards, and knew he had nothing to fear since he hadn't been in a police role, and was being exceedingly cooperative.

In the summer of 1945, Hoettl was churning out reports for 3rd US Army. Kaltenbrunner was being interrogated in late June 1945 by 12th US Army Group. There were half a dozen Allied armies, several army groups, and forces in Norway plus interrogations conducted in Britain. Lots and lots of subordinate agencies out of the reach of the World Jewish Congress. At IMT, the prosecution had in any case much more to deal with than the persecution and extermination of the Jews.

Before long, both the British and Americans began trials, especially of those who had killed Allied POWs and airmen, but also many general cases regarding Gestapo prisons, ordinary KZs and the like. Quite a few Auschwitz SS were interrogated about their service in other camps in 1944-45 and eventually convicted for crimes in the KZs in Germany, e.g. Otto Moll. He was confronted with Hoess at Nuremberg behind the scenes after being sentenced to death for crimes at Dachau. The transcript does not read like some weird Kabuki theatre play with Hoess singing some foreign hymn sheet or lines fed to him. The two men argue with each other and Hoess corrects Moll, stopping him from wriggling out of responsibility.

Quite a few Germans wrote up accounts, reports or apologiae. Sometimes with someone recording them, sometimes on their own. Eduard Wirths, the chief medical officer of Auschwitz, was one who wrote up a self-justification that is totally inexplicable from your 'tell the Allies what they want to hear' perspective. He argued he was saving lives with selections, noted his efforts to improve sanitation (which was true) and disputed the 4M death toll saying the crematoria had a capacity of 5000/day, similar to the '4756' cremation capacity document.

This was an example of pushback: not simply swallowing the prevailing views. So why did literally no one push back further and explain what actually happened? This should have been general knowledge within the SS. Hoettl, Kaltenbrunner, Wisliceny and others should have been able to explain what happened. But none did, and instead they admitted knowledge of mass extermination.

Before too long, plenty of SS were headed down the ratlines to Latin America; others settled in West Germany. Some were definitely out of reach of the former Allies, there was also surely much more room for pushback after the Federal Republic was established. There were no anti-denial laws under Adenauer; laws against antisemitism would only be triggered if someone said something obviously antisemitic. Once later trials were under way, defendants and their lawyers could and did try full negationist routines without consequences. It did not happen often, but the fact that happened at all highlights the greater room for maneuver these men had, over and above denying knowledge/involvement.

Of course, this is where Eichmann screwed the pooch with his interviews with Willem Sassen in Argentina. The point about such 'non-coerced' interviews is that they cast doubt on the fervent dogma that other interrogations were coerced. I've pointed above to how Germans in 1945 were writing down accounts on their own, including about the Holocaust, and how their interrogations ranged more broadly. You guys are the ones who have to prove coercion or telepathic 'knowing what the Allies want to hear'.

[bombsaway]

It seems like the revisionists here are so convinced about the existence of a conspiracy to fake a genocide (and specifically fake the parts of it that are currently upheld, such as mass gassings at Reinahrdt and the Extermination centers) they cannot even imagine a world where this did not happen.

But I see no reason to believe in a conspiracy, mostly due to the lack of direct evidence. For you to demonstrate the existence of something without direct evidence, there has to be incredibly strong circumstantial evidence, eg no other viable explanation for certain phenomenon, other than conspiracy.

My reading of revisionism is that there are very very many kinds of these arguments, but they are all kind of weak. Revisionists probably take comfort in the sheer quantity of these arguments, but to quote Callafangers, quantity is not enough.

We can get a gauge on the level of the arguments by revisionists presented in this thread so far:

AI:

1. The Auschwitz museum "reconstructed" the Krema I gas chamber after the war in a deceptive manner, with incorrect placement of Zyklon B introduction holes. PrudentRegret argued this amounts to a conspiracy to misrepresent the site as an original gas chamber.
2. Similarly, at Majdanek, the museum connected the Bath and Disinfection complex to the alleged gas chambers in a manner inconsistent with original layouts. PrudentRegret contended this is also a conspiracy to mislead.
3. Wartime images show makeshift Zyklon B introduction holes at Majdanek in a room no longer claimed to have been a homicidal gas chamber. PrudentRegret suggested that if revisionists are correct that Soviets added these holes after capturing the camp, it would clearly prove a conspiracy.
4. Prudent Regret argued that the Soviet "investigation" of Majdanek in 1944, which produced an early widely publicized claim of homicidal gassings, involved a conspiracy to fabricate evidence, as demonstrated by a famous photo of a Soviet soldier in front of a non-functional Zyklon B introduction chimney.

Do revisionists think these arguments are representative? Are there better ones we should delve into?

[PrudentRegret]

The "conspiracy" vs "non-conspiracy" dilemma overlooks the fact that there are other methods of indirect coordination than conspiracy. Stigmergy for example:

Stigmergy is a form of self-organization. It produces complex, seemingly intelligent structures, without need for any planning, control, or even direct communication between the agents. As such it supports efficient collaboration between extremely simple agents, who may lack memory or individual awareness of each other.

Think: an ant releases a pheromone, and other ants respond to the pheromone systematically. There's no "conspiracy" but there's social coordination organized by environmental stimuli.

I keep going back to Ryan Faulk's "Russians in England" video because it's such an excellent case study in this concept. Large numbers of people claimed to witness thousands of Russians being transported through England towards the Western Front in WWI. They even identified specific details like the beards of the Russians:

• "It was said last Friday that 80,000 Russians passed through here, No-one was allowed to see them. But for several days, only one passenger train was running, and the railway would not send luggage in advance."
• "There were no lights in the carriages, but by the light of the cigars and cigarettes they were smoking, the black beards of the Russians could be seen."
• "Only that day I heard from my dentist that a hundred thousand Russians had landed in England; 'a whole trainful of them,' I reported, 'is said to have passed through Stoke, so that is why the Staffordshire people are so whise.' But when I returned to Buxton I learnt that a similar contingent had been seen in Manchester, and for a few days the astonishing ubiquitousness of the invisible Russians formed a topic of absorbing interest at every tea-table throughout the country.
• "In letters from various friends I had heard many rumors of the presence of vast hordes of Russian troops in England on their way to the battlefields of France, but I could not bring myself to believe in the story... But I received on September 3rd a letter from a very old friend, Commander Gerald Digby, who had retired many years ago but was now working at the Admiralty, telling me as a fact that 80,000 Russian troops were embarking at Southampton, truly a marvel."
• "All roads lead to Rome, and the railroad from Archangel led everywhere. The Cossacks were seen - though the blinds were always down - at Peckham, at Evesham, at Peterborough. A grey cloud of fierce, whiskered men went rolling down to Cheltenham, at Euston their passing closed the station for 36 hours; at Rugby they drank great draughts of coffee. In the East End children playing by the railway embankment were gladded with showers of Russian money thrown to them from a passing train. Cossacks swarmed at Southampton, and a London milkman, clattering his cans to salute the dawn, saw the myriads of the north march past him in the silent awful streets."

One of the Newspapers of record wrote of this story:

Whatever be the unvarnished truth about the Russian forces in the West, so extraordinary has been the ubiquity of the rumors in question, that they are almost more amazing if they are false than if they are true. Either a baseless rumor had obtained a currency and credence perhaps unprecedented in history, or, incredible as it may appear, it is a fact that Russian troops, whatever the number may be, have been disembarked and passed through this country...

When finally it was confirmed that there were never any Russians in England, one reporter wrote:

London is depressed today... The Press Bureau has issued an absolute denial of the rumor so widely credited a few days ago that an immense force of Russians had reached the Western Front through this country. Like everybody else, I kept the ball a-rolling... Indeed, looking back on the rumor now, the wonder is how it ever came to be believed in. Why, it not only invited suspicion but shouted for it. The story of railway porters at Edinburgh having had to sweep the snow out of the carriages of the trains conveying the Russians ought to have been sufficient to damn the rumour."

There are many parallels with this story and the Holocaust. There's the reliance on cross-pollinated rumors that motivated a large number of individually unreliable witness testimony. With most admitting they didn't see anything themselves, but they heard rumors, while there are a smaller portion of witnesses who claimed to observe precise details. Like the beards, or coins, or the milk man who saw them march right past him. There's also the RAILWAY PORTERS being involved in the rumor, which apparently featured the Porters cleaning the wagons out of snow (!) brought from Russia.

If you have a large pool of individually-unreliable witnesses you don't have great evidence. The reason for that is not conspiracy. Indeed it's impossible that all these witnesses of the Russians in England were wrong independently. Totally impossible. They were either right, or they were all wrong due to underlying mechanisms of social coordination that go far beyond what is implied by the word "conspiracy." And in this case, it was the latter in remarkable fashion. It's very notable that the Holocaust, like the story of 800,000 people being shunted to the Treblinka Sorting Camp, relies on the same dynamics that carried this story.

And it should be noted that the "Russians in England" story did have a conspiracy component, the number of actual conspirators was very tiny but all the witness testimony that emerged to bring the story to life was not acquired through conspiracy but through other methods of social coordination.

And likewise there are undeniable elements of conspiracy in the Holocaust, the Soviet "Reconstruction" of the Auschwitz Gas Chamber being one example. But you don't need "conspiracy" to explain the transformation of wartime propaganda rumors into unreliable witness testimony.

Bombsaway, if you're going to continue to abuse LLMs how about you include this point too in your prompt since you seem unable to engage with it. Let the LLM summarize it for you. You are fundamentally and dishonestly presenting a false dichotomy.

[Nessie]

.....

Before too long, plenty of SS were headed down the ratlines to Latin America; others settled in West Germany. Some were definitely out of reach of the former Allies, there was also surely much more room for pushback after the Federal Republic was established. There were no anti-denial laws under Adenauer; laws against antisemitism would only be triggered if someone said something obviously antisemitic. Once later trials were under way, defendants and their lawyers could and did try full negationist routines without consequences. It did not happen often, but the fact that happened at all highlights the greater room for maneuver these men had, over and above denying knowledge/involvement.

Of course, this is where Eichmann screwed the pooch with his interviews with Willem Sassen in Argentina. The point about such 'non-coerced' interviews is that they cast doubt on the fervent dogma that other interrogations were coerced. I've pointed above to how Germans in 1945 were writing down accounts on their own, including about the Holocaust, and how their interrogations ranged more broadly. You guys are the ones who have to prove coercion or telepathic 'knowing what the Allies want to hear'.

Revisionists will ignore that the ex German Nazis had a lot of opportunities to defend themselves, by stating what really happened. None of them, whether in court during a trial, in a personal private memoir, during an interview, or safe in South America, produced testimony that the AR camps were transit camps, or property sorting centres, or hygiene stations, or that the Birkenau Kremas were used for showering, or delousing, or as bomb shelters.

That also applies to Ukrainians, Latvians and many others whose countrymen assisted the Nazis, often directly with the mass killings, by gassing and shooting. No one has ever come forward to blow, or accidentally blown, the hoax, despite it being in their national interests to produce evidence it was a hoax and they were not guilty of their part in a genocide.

[fireofice]

So why did literally no one push back further and explain what actually happened? This should have been general knowledge within the SS. Hoettl, Kaltenbrunner, Wisliceny and others should have been able to explain what happened. But none did, and instead they admitted knowledge of mass extermination.
...
Once later trials were under way, defendants and their lawyers could and did try full negationist routines without consequences. It did not happen often, but the fact that happened at all highlights the greater room for maneuver these men had, over and above denying knowledge/involvement.

This is completely contradictory. I'm going to have to ask you to make your arguments consistent before they can be addressed.

[bombsaway]

Bombsaway, if you're going to continue to abuse LLMs how about you include this point too in your prompt since you seem unable to engage with it. Let the LLM summarize it for you. You are fundamentally and dishonestly presenting a false dichotomy.

PR, I was listing evidence of a conspiracy to fabricate a mass event, specifically the Holocaust. You brought up a case from WW1 that I don't understand the relevance of to be honest. Are you trying to argue that mass events can be reported without the need for a conspiracy and therefore there need be no conspiratorial element to the Holocaust? Yet you say in your post "the 'Russians in England' story did have a conspiracy component" (I don't think it did btw, or there's no evidence of that)

Even so, it's clearly off topic from my list. Ftr, I am in my own mind always being honest or reasonably so (politeness could be considered to be dishonest). I think it would be better for you to call me delusional, that makes more sense from your perspective tbh

[SanityCheck]

So why did literally no one push back further and explain what actually happened? This should have been general knowledge within the SS. Hoettl, Kaltenbrunner, Wisliceny and others should have been able to explain what happened. But none did, and instead they admitted knowledge of mass extermination.
...
Once later trials were under way, defendants and their lawyers could and did try full negationist routines without consequences. It did not happen often, but the fact that happened at all highlights the greater room for maneuver these men had, over and above denying knowledge/involvement.

This is completely contradictory. I'm going to have to ask you to make your arguments consistent before they can be addressed.

what actually happened = a positive claim (like 'transit'), what happened
full negationist = a negative claim, denial, there were no, didn't happen

no contradiction.

[Archie]

Bombsaway, if you're going to continue to abuse LLMs how about you include this point too in your prompt since you seem unable to engage with it. Let the LLM summarize it for you. You are fundamentally and dishonestly presenting a false dichotomy.

Have you interacted much with bombsaway before? He was posting all last year but I can't remember if you interacted with him much.

He likes to ask very poorly formed questions and then says we aren't answering right. He likes to demand lots of examples from everyone else and then when you give him what he asked for he makes up reasons why they don't count. He also does this thing where if he doesn't have a real response he plays dumb and misunderstands the argument on purpose.

[bombsaway]

Bombsaway, if you're going to continue to abuse LLMs how about you include this point too in your prompt since you seem unable to engage with it. Let the LLM summarize it for you. You are fundamentally and dishonestly presenting a false dichotomy.

Have you interacted much with bombsaway before? He was posting all last year but I can't remember if you interacted with him much.

He likes to ask very poorly formed questions and then says we aren't answering right. He likes to demand lots of examples from everyone else and then when you give him what he asked for he makes up reasons why they don't count. He also does this thing where if he doesn't have a real response he plays dumb and misunderstands the argument on purpose.

Listen you have to give me examples when you accuse me of "playing dumb". I believe your issue is that you've never challenged me here or talked to me about why you think this, so to me this is just a post-hoc assumption. The thing you don't seem to understand about me is I have very little interest in "winning", it's more of a research project and joy of history sort of thing, so being dishonest makes zero sense. But I ask unconventional questions that may seem dumb, I'll give you that.

Still no answer in this thread to my question, 'If no conspiracy, then would that make you question revisionism?' It's a yes or no question, simple as pie, I don't understand where this poorly formed thing is coming from. I understand that you're convinced there was a conspiracy to the point where you see it as an indisputable fact, but the point of hypotheticals is to imagine.

[Nessie]

... Once later trials were under way, defendants and their lawyers could and did try full negationist routines without consequences...

Could you please provide an example of what you mean by "full negationist"?

[SanityCheck]

... Once later trials were under way, defendants and their lawyers could and did try full negationist routines without consequences...

Could you please provide an example of what you mean by "full negationist"?

denial of knowledge
denial of involvement (it wasn't me, I didn't do it)
denial of a one off occurrence (I never hit that person)
denial of the claimed extent (we only used our whips/pistols occasionally)
denial that something happened, ever = full negationist (there were no homicidal gas chambers, nobody was ever gassed)
pointing out something else happened = positive claim (with its own burden of proof)

There are other defenses, such as arguing something wasn't illegal or the act was justified or happened in self-defense. Minimisations and recategorisations of an act to something consensual, harmless or otherwise not punishable. Those are more like deflections, but some might spill over into forms of denial.

So disputing the existence of gas chambers or that there was a specific killing action would be full negationist. And there were a few times when defense lawyers and defendants in West German trials seemed to try this on, e.g. one defense lawyer at the Duesseldorf Majdanek trial. The witness-badgering that accompanied this alienated the judges and was thought to be counterproductive, so the lawyer stepped down. There were no further consequences for the lawyer.

In many trials, the accused might have accepted that the camp in question or the unit they were with had carried out mass killings using gas or shootings, but then disputed individual killings. Trawnikis did this regarding the shootings at the 'Lazarett' in Treblinka in Soviet 1960s trials, Kurt Franz certainly disputed and denied many of the individual killings he was charged with. Legally, the individual killings were more significant as they could be considered crimes of excess in West German law and thus murder (Mord), whereas collective actions would be judged at the accomplice level (Beihilfe zum Mord).

[Archie]

Bombsaway, if you're going to continue to abuse LLMs how about you include this point too in your prompt since you seem unable to engage with it. Let the LLM summarize it for you. You are fundamentally and dishonestly presenting a false dichotomy.

Have you interacted much with bombsaway before? He was posting all last year but I can't remember if you interacted with him much.

He likes to ask very poorly formed questions and then says we aren't answering right. He likes to demand lots of examples from everyone else and then when you give him what he asked for he makes up reasons why they don't count. He also does this thing where if he doesn't have a real response he plays dumb and misunderstands the argument on purpose.

Listen you have to give me examples when you accuse me of "playing dumb". I believe your issue is that you've never challenged me here or talked to me about why you think this, so to me this is just a post-hoc assumption. The thing you don't seem to understand about me is I have very little interest in "winning", it's more of a research project and joy of history sort of thing, so being dishonest makes zero sense. But I ask unconventional questions that may seem dumb, I'll give you that.

Still no answer in this thread to my question, 'If no conspiracy, then would that make you question revisionism?' It's a yes or no question, simple as pie, I don't understand where this poorly formed thing is coming from. I understand that you're convinced there was a conspiracy to the point where you see it as an indisputable fact, but the point of hypotheticals is to imagine.

Joy of history, lol. I don't buy that for a second. I think you are obviously very invested in the Holocaust. But no matter.

You aren't getting the answers you want because your question does not make sense.

You gave your view:

...there was no "control of evidence", that no one was suppressing documents and witnesses, that perpetrators who confessed did so under no extrajudicial pressure (the trials were conducted "fairly" in terms of how law conventionally operated in liberal democracies), that individual witnesses were not instructed or incentivized to lie, that documents weren't fabricated, that the archeologists who studied the sites weren't told to lie*, etc?

We think the above is ridiculous and obviously wrong. So you're basically saying: Pretend like you agree with me, then would you change your mind? Hmm, well, I guess if I were as naive as you (or as afflicted with motivated reasoning), yeah, I probably would believe in the Holocaust. Are you happy? Is that the answer you were fishing for?

To me, when you try to say that e.g. the Majdanek commission did a good job, you totally lose me.

[Archie]

I think you missed the point regarding Allied interrogations. They were much wider than a focus on the extermination of the Jews, while many German officials and officers were extremely happy to talk. Speer's interrogations by the Strategic Bombing Survey is one example.

Hoettl is another excellent example, since he wrote up very extensive reports and was very forthcoming on a wide range of issues, including Kaltenbrunner's stance to peace feelers and the Austrian bid for independence in 1944-45 (planned, rather than real). Lots and lots of detail, to be taken with the usual caution and cross referenced extensively. But he absolutely knew Kaltenbrunner, Eichmann, and many other key players in the RSHA, and had a good general overview of intelligence activities across Europe from working with RSHA Amt VI. Hoettl was a gold mine for all kinds of topics, by 1945 standards, and knew he had nothing to fear since he hadn't been in a police role, and was being exceedingly cooperative.
[...]

No one is suggesting that every statement is 100% made up. Even the most fanciful of the survivor memoirs usually have a lot of correct factual information. The major disputed points like the gas chambers are what we care about. The idea is that the statements are systematically distorted on those points.

It's a little surprising to me that you are defending Hoettl's credibility. For a reminder, this is what was in his statement (PS-2638, quick Google translate)

According to my knowledge, Eichmann was at that time the head of the department in the IV (Gestapo) of the Reich Security Main Office and had also been commissioned by Himmler to register Jews in all European countries and transport them to Germany. Eichmann was strongly influenced by Romania's withdrawal from the war at that time. That was why he had come to me to find out about the military situation, which I received daily from the Hungarian Honved (War) Ministry and the commander of the Waffen SS in Hungary. He expressed his conviction that the war was now lost for Germany and that he personally had no further chance. He knew that he was considered one of the main war criminals by the United Nations because he was responsible for the deaths of millions of Jews. I asked him how many that was, to which he replied that the number was a great secret of the Reich, but that he would tell me because I, as a historian, must also be interested in it and he would probably not return from his mission to Romania. He had just prepared a report for Himmler because he wanted to know the exact number of Jews killed. Based on his information, he came to the following conclusion:

About four million Jews were killed in the various extermination camps, while another two million died in other ways, the majority of whom were killed by shooting by the Security Police during the campaign against Russia.

Himmler was not satisfied with the report because, in his opinion, the number of Jews killed must be greater than 6 million. Himmler had declared that he would send a man from his statistical office to Eichmann so that he could write a new report based on Eichmann's material, in which the exact number would be worked out.

This is making some very specific claims. It says Eichmann prepared a report for Himmler that found that 6M had been killed, along with the 4M + 2M breakdown. Eichmann then told Hoettl about this.

Where is this report? And where is the follow-up report that Himmler ordered from his own statistical office? The only thing like this that I am aware of is the Korherr report which was prepared much earlier in the war.

The line about Himmler being disappointed because six million just wasn't enough Jews killed is a rather absurd caricature.

Regarding Hoettl's reputation, see Weber. https://ihr.org/journal/v20n5p25_weber-html

In their report, the two U.S. government researchers write: “Hoettl’s name file is approximately 600 pages, one of the largest of those released to the public so far. The size of the file owes to Hoettl’s postwar career as a peddler of intelligence, good and bad, to anyone who would pay him. Reports link Hoettl to twelve different intelligence services, including the U.S., Yugoslav, Austrian, Israeli, Romanian, Vatican, Swiss, French, West German, Russian, Hungarian and British.”

In June 1949 one U.S. intelligence official cautioned against using Höttl for any reason, calling him “a man of such low character and poor political record that his use for intelligence activities, regardless of how profitable they may be, is a short-sighted policy by the U.S.” In August 1950, CIA messages referred to Höttl as a “notorious fabricator [of] intelligence.” A U.S. Army CIC report in early 1952 deemed his information useless, noting that Höttl “is involved in extensive intelligence activities for almost anyone who is willing to purchase his findings.” In April 1952 his reports were called “worthless and possibly inflated or fabricated.”

Interestingly, numerous U.S. intelligence reports identify connections between Höttl and Simon Wiesenthal, the well-known “Nazi hunter.” One U.S. Army CIC document described Wiesenthal as the “Chief Austrian Agent of the Israeli Intelligence Bureau.” A U.S. Army CIC report in January 1950 noted that for the last three or four months Wiesenthal had “recruited the services of Wilhelm Höttl,” and had hired him to gather information for reports by the “Nazi hunter.”

In July 1952, when U.S. Army intelligence finally broke completely with Höttl, a letter on U.S. Army stationery warned: “Dr. Höttl has long been known to this headquarters and other allied military organizations in Austria as a fabricator of intelligence information. His reports normally consist of a fine cobweb of fact, heavily padded with lies, deceit, conjecture and other false types of information. This organization will have absolutely nothing to do with Dr. Höttl or any members of his present entourage. He is persona non grata to the American, French and British elements in Austria.”

In their report on his postwar career, U.S. government historical researchers Kleiman and Skwirot conclude: “The voluminous materials in Wilhelm Höttl’s personality file … trace the activities of a notorious intelligence peddler and fabricator, who successfully convinced one intelligence service after another of his value, and then proceeded to lose such support.”

Yeah, I'm not going to accept as a source for the six million a second-hand recollection of a report that doesn't exist coming from some spook who was known to be unreliable.

[bombsaway]

We think the above is ridiculous and obviously wrong. So you're basically saying: Pretend like you agree with me, then would you change your mind? Hmm, well, I guess if I were as naive as you (or as afflicted with motivated reasoning), yeah, I probably would believe in the Holocaust. Are you happy? Is that the answer you were fishing for?

It's a legitimate question because some revisionist might believe the evidence for the Holocaust just isn't very good, a few documents were forged by individual actors with anti-Nazi bias, the Jewish witnesses made up fake stories out of revenge, the "perps" gave false confessions under conventional judicial pressure (in trials sentences are stricter if the defendant pleads not guilty). The Germans destroyed evidence of resettlement. The archeologists were biased and employed shoddy methodology, etc etc

No doubt you believe some of this is true, the question is what role does the conspiracy play? If there was no conspiracy, would these factors be enough to explain things like the archeology reports, the lack of evidence for resettlement, the hundreds of witnesses attesting to "extermination"? Would you still believe in revisionism? Imagine your faculties are unaffected by motivated reasoning, outside of seeing "no conspiracy".

You answered the question, but not in a satisfying way to me, because (Ha!) you were literally playing dumb.

Concerning Soviet reports, I think one thing you're missing or not understanding is that reports are not the same as direct evidence. These are secondary sources basically, and historians treat them as such. If you're doing proper history, you go to the source. The Soviet reports are irrelevant except for if they imply that the primary source data has been tampered with, eg forging and suppressing documents or coercing witnesses. This is what I haven't seen evidence of.

So I'll give you an example looking at this report
https://www.jewishgen.org/forgottencamp ... rt.html#13

AI analysis

Looking at the report carefully, they don't actually provide clear justification for the figure of "about one million five hundred thousand persons."

After detailing various crimes and methods of killing throughout the report, they simply state this number in their conclusions with no direct explanation of how they calculated it:

"The Polish-Soviet Extraordinary Commission finds that during the four years the Majdanek Extermination Camp was in existence the Hitlerite butchers, on thc direct orders of their criminal government, exterminated by means of wholesale shooting and wholesale asphyxiation in gas chambers of about one million five hundred thousand persons..."

The only breakdown of numbers they provide is for cremations:
- Crematorium: "over six hundred thousand bodies"
- Krembecki Woods bonfires: "over three hundred thousand corpses"
- Two old furnaces: "over eighty thousand corpses"
- Camp bonfires near crematorium: "no less than four hundred thousand corpses"

This would total approximately 1.38 million, but they don't explain how they calculated any of these component figures either. The only concrete number from a senior German official in the report (Lt. General Moser) estimated around 100,000 deaths.

So the short answer is: they don't actually justify or explain their calculation of the 1.5 million figure in the report. They simply state it as a finding without showing their methodology or evidence for arriving at that specific number.

This is notable because good historical documentation typically explains how death tolls and other significant figures are calculated, showing the evidence and methodology used to reach such conclusions.

So here it is again, conclusions not supported by evidence.

This is different than drawing from primary sources, like the one I quoted about Treblinka on the first page

Lukaszkiewicz Maciejewski on Treblinka, 1945

In the northwestern section of the area, the surface is covered for about 2 hectares by a mixture of ashes and sand. In this mixture, one finds countless human bones, often still covered with tissue remains, which are in a condition of decomposition. During the inspection, which I made with the assistance of an expert in forensic medicine, it was determined that the ashes are without any doubt of human origin (remains of cremated human bones). The examination of human skulls could discover no trace of« wounding. At a distance of some 100 m, there is now an unpleasant odor of burning and decay.