One might argue that the deportation of hundreds of thousands of Jews would not have gone unnoticed. However, among the more than one million Chechens, Kalmyks, Crimean Tartars, Greeks, Latvians, Lithuanians, Estonians and other nationalities deported by the Stalin regime between 1944 and 1949, and among the even greater number of people (among them many Jews) returning during the same period to their homes in the western parts of the Soviet Union from the Russian interior and Siberia or Central Asia, to where they had escaped or been evacuated by the Red Army at the beginning of the war, the fly-by-night deportation of foreign Jews would have been only one incident of forced or voluntary population transfer among many.
There is also another, even more crucial reason to how this operation could have gone unnoticed: while the targets of the other forced Soviet population transfers were Soviet citizens, were registered in public records and their absence obvious to all in the local societies of which they had been part, the foreign German-deported Jews were not merely foreign transients and "displaced persons," the vast majority of whom no doubt could not communicate in Russian, but in fact, to borrow a term from Orwell, they were "unpersons," which in "Oldspeak (or standard English)" meant "non-existent persons."
This very much applies to the deported Jews in question: they were unpersons because the world considered them to be dead and because Stalin decided to consolidate this fraudulent report for his own ends. The Jews sent to Siberia or elsewhere were "living ghosts," unpersons whose disappearance was likely to go unnoticed by any significant number of people. In contrast, the forced transfers of other ethnic groups in the post-war Soviet Union were not kept secret, in fact official explanations for the transfers were often given, such as them targeting "banditism," "Kulaks" or as being punishment for (real or alleged) collaboration with the Germans during the war.
The above quoted news articles show that some people did in fact notice the deportations. Why, then, is it that the stream of reports appears to have ceased by the time of Stalin's death in 1953? The most likely explanation would seem to be that by then detailed news began to reach the West again from the Soviet-Jewish communities. The fact that the local Soviet Jews would have had nothing to tell of deportations affecting their communities - of which the deportees had (most likely) never been a part - would needless to say reinforce the skeptic opinion that the reports had been based upon mere rumors triggered by the measures taken against leading Zionist Jews during the last years of Stalin's regime.
By the early 1950s the orthodox holocaust story had been firmly cemented by the IMT and NMT trials, and it was unlikely that anyone besides isolated individuals would even have considered the possibility that the deportations had in fact taken place, but targeted another category of Jews, a group of displaced Jewish unpersons.
That none of the people involved in carrying out the operation have ever spoken of it - at least to our knowledge - following the fall of the Soviet Union could be explained by actual ignorance caused by the use of a need-to-know policy (possibly amounting to the misinformation of involved personnel) and the language barrier between the deportees and their guards, but also by 1) the possibility that some of these individuals were themselves purged as carriers of state secrets; 2) the likelihood that any involved who were still alive in the 1990s and considered speaking of their experiences would keep silent either because they lacked an outlet which would take them seriously or due to the possibility of facing official or unofficial repercussions.
Most likely the Jewish deportees were not sent to the ordinary GULag camps and "special settlements," but to special ad-hoc camps for Jews. Romanov's assertion that such a deportation can be excluded because we have available statistics on ethnicity for the prisoners of the GULag camps and "special settlements" is thus rendered moot.
Like it says in the posting guidelines, if you are "collegial and not overly disruptive" you can post here.bombsaway wrote: ↑Sun Oct 27, 2024 5:21 pm Btw Archie if you and other posters don't want me to post here anymore, and are convinced I have some duplicitous purpose beyond trying to understand you guys and see if it is possible to change your mind, I won't post here in any form. I think you know what my "approach" is, which is largely a sympathetic one, so you won't see any more of this.
I presume it is someone taking their first college WW2 history course, thinking they had a 'gotcha' moment and thought they'd swing by to dish out the ol' 1-2 punch. Unfortunately for this individual, the burden of proof is theirs.
Well I think the better analogy here is if you kidnap someone and it's been established that you kidnapped someone, and the person you kidnapped is missing, that you murdered them is a reasonable inference. This appears to have precedence in case law as well. According to Matthew Cockerill:Callafangers wrote: ↑Mon Oct 28, 2024 2:26 amI presume it is someone taking their first college WW2 history course, thinking they had a 'gotcha' moment and thought they'd swing by to dish out the ol' 1-2 punch. Unfortunately for this individual, the burden of proof is theirs.
"If my neighbor Larry didn't kill my grandma, then where did she go???"
Is the above enough to throw Larry behind bars? Or might we need some forensic evidence, namely a corpse and a murder weapon?
https://www.unz.com/article/the-evidenc ... holocaust/American courts adjudicating homicide cases recognize that the disappearance of people is circumstantial evidence for their deaths. For example, in 1982, the court in the murder case Epperly v. Commonwealth held that the disappearance of a person was “circumstantial evidence entitled to the same weight as bloodstains and concealment of evidence.” If the disappearance of one person is probative evidence, what to make of the disappearance of millions of people? Or, more specifically, what to make of the disappearance of millions of Jews from Nazi custody in the camp system—enclosed spaces from which they could not leave under penalty of death?
Legally kidnapped is an emotional term; they were interned as unwanted people, especially as they declared economic war on the Reich in the early 30s. When the real bullets started flying they had to be removed as potential 5th columnists. No different to Germans interned by MI5 in the UK.fireofice wrote: ↑Mon Oct 28, 2024 4:23 am
In the Nazi case, it is clear that many Jews were legally "kidnapped" by the Nazi state and thus their disappearance, in a vacuum, could be circumstantial evidence that they killed them. Now I think it's not a vacuum and that there are other decent reasons not to accept the extermination claims, I just wanted to correct what I saw as some flaws in your analogy.
If we are going to add more context, we will need to go even further:fireofice wrote: ↑Mon Oct 28, 2024 4:23 amWell I think the better analogy here is if you kidnap someone and it's been established that you kidnapped someone, and the person you kidnapped is missing, that you murdered them is a reasonable inference. This appears to have precedence in case law as well. According to Matthew Cockerill:Callafangers wrote: ↑Mon Oct 28, 2024 2:26 amI presume it is someone taking their first college WW2 history course, thinking they had a 'gotcha' moment and thought they'd swing by to dish out the ol' 1-2 punch. Unfortunately for this individual, the burden of proof is theirs.
"If my neighbor Larry didn't kill my grandma, then where did she go???"
Is the above enough to throw Larry behind bars? Or might we need some forensic evidence, namely a corpse and a murder weapon?
https://www.unz.com/article/the-evidenc ... holocaust/American courts adjudicating homicide cases recognize that the disappearance of people is circumstantial evidence for their deaths. For example, in 1982, the court in the murder case Epperly v. Commonwealth held that the disappearance of a person was “circumstantial evidence entitled to the same weight as bloodstains and concealment of evidence.” If the disappearance of one person is probative evidence, what to make of the disappearance of millions of people? Or, more specifically, what to make of the disappearance of millions of Jews from Nazi custody in the camp system—enclosed spaces from which they could not leave under penalty of death?
The case he cited:
https://casetext.com/case/epperly-v-commonwealth
In the Nazi case, it is clear that many Jews were legally "kidnapped" by the Nazi state and thus their disappearance, in a vacuum, could be circumstantial evidence that they killed them. Now I think it's not a vacuum and that there are other decent reasons not to accept the extermination claims, I just wanted to correct what I saw as some flaws in your analogy.
That parable should be easy to digest for most people.Callafangers wrote: ↑Mon Oct 28, 2024 5:28 pmDo you believe me (and my family)?
- My family and Larry's family have been in an extreme, violent, back-and-forth feud with one another for years.
- Larry's family gains some power for a few years and they keep my family locked up behind bars during that time.
- Recently, my family gained absolute power and control over the entire town, its police department, archives, and everything in-between.
- Nobody denies my family wanted revenge on Larry's family, and we indeed carried out violent acts against them, but there were limitations on what we could "get away with" in the broader public eye.
- Winning over the "public eye" was extremely important for us, in order to maintain power and to keep Larry's family permanently in-check.
- During the earlier feud, Larry's family had reportedly transported my grandma to an undisclosed area -- one which my family now controls, 100%.
- My family and I promise that we never found my grandma there, once we took over, and we swear that Larry's family tortured her to death with hot pokers and battery acid... but we offer no verifiable/forensic evidence of any kind to support our claims.