Why "the hoax" would necessitate a conspiracy involving hundreds of thousands

[bombsaway]

Yes I would expect them to remember leaving the ghetto and being sent to a resettlement camp or camps staffed by Germans in Russia, being held there for years until liberation by the Soviets.

The proportion of Soviet gulag survivor testimonies we have are miniscule. There are only 16 known published/formal memoirs on the gulag system and only a few hundred interviews in total (from academics/organizations seeking out former prisoners). Rounding to 400, that's:

400 / 16000000 = 0.0025% of gulag survivors having actually recorded their experiences (mostly due to academic outreach)

99.9975% of gulag survivors did NOT record their experiences.

Granted, they were suppressed from "speaking out" in the Soviet Union, but so perhaps were Jews who remained there. In any case, the same issue of limited research interest in unique travels and timelines has persisted both for gulag and 'Holocaust' survivors.

Here's an AI fact check (with sources)

No. Virtually every quantitative claim in Callafangers’ 12 May post is off by at least one order of magnitude.

“There are only 16 known published/formal memoirs on the Gulag system.”
• Russia’s Memorial Society had already catalogued more than 700 separate Gulag memoirs in Russian by 2003. See the Memorial bibliography:
https://memo.ru/ru-ru/library/lib6/
• Anne Applebaum’s reference bibliography for Gulag: A History (2003) lists about 250 memoirs in Western languages, in addition to hundreds in Russian. (Appendix, pp. 579-613.) Book info:
https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/book ... applebaum/
• The anthology Gulag Voices: An Anthology (Indiana Univ. Press, 2011) includes sixteen memoirs in one volume, drawn from a far larger corpus:
https://iupress.org/9780253223481/gulag-voices/

“Only a few hundred interviews in total … rounding to 400.”
• The oral-history project run by Orlando Figes and Memorial collected thousands of interviews with former prisoners and their families. Project overview:
https://orlandofiges.info/works/memory/ ... et_memory/
• Gulag Voices: Oral Histories of Soviet Detention and Exile (Palgrave, 2011) grew out of an archive that already held over 1,000 recorded interviews at the time. Book info:
https://link.springer.com/book/10.1057/9780230113730

Ratio math
Callafangers divides an invented numerator (400) by an inflated denominator (“16 million survivors”) to produce 0.0025 %. Replace his 400 with 700+ memoirs and several-thousand interviews and the proportion jumps two orders of magnitude. Even if 18 million passed through the camps, the recorded testimony is counted in the thousands, not the hundreds.

Timing
Survivor accounts began appearing soon after Stalin’s death—e.g., Yevgenia Ginzburg’s Journey into the Whirlwind (English ed. 1968) and Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn’s One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich (1962). Western and émigré presses issued many more during the 1970s–80s, and the glasnost years unleashed a flood of new publications.

Holocaust testimony (brief comparison)
Claims that “nobody was writing survivor tales for 30-40 years” ignore Primo Levi (1947), Filip Müller (1947/1965), Miklós Nyiszli (1946), and thousands of Yad Vashem witness questionnaires from the 1950s. Today the USC Shoah Foundation holds roughly 52,000 filmed testimonies:
https://sfi.usc.edu/collections/holocaust

Bottom line: The corpus of Gulag survivor narratives numbers in the thousands, not “16 memoirs and 400 interviews.” Callafangers’ figures are therefore factually incorrect, and the same pattern of understatement extends to his comments on Holocaust testimony.

The 52,000 filmed Holocaust testimonies speaks to a characteristic of Jews to talk about their persecution. Assuming they were kept in resettlement camps, conditions here were no doubt going to be pretty poor so they would have testified about them just like they testified about the ghettos and the labor camps.

You need a mechanism of suppression, and one that extends to places like Israel where it's estimated 1.3 million Jews emigrated to from Soviet states or former Soviet states, starting in the 70s.

[Callafangers]

The 52,000 filmed Holocaust testimonies speaks to a characteristic of Jews to talk about their persecution. Assuming they were kept in resettlement camps, conditions here were no doubt going to be pretty poor so they would have testified about them just like they testified about the ghettos and the labor camps.

Your AI 'fact-check' brought you up at most a single order of magnitude (i.e. now in the ballpark of a whopping 0.01-0.02% of gulag survivors) but doesn't adequately account for overlap (more accessible survivors with multiple interviewers in some cases) and still accounts for near-zero testimonies, overall, relative to the total number of people who could have given them.

The point stands: there is no organic drive for 'survivors' to come out and share their stories. And for Jewish organizations largely coordinating any/all survivor interviews, selective outreach, lines of questioning, editing, or even just limiting historical access by requiring on-site campus visits to view testimony (prohibitive to revisionists), cannot be ruled out.

You need a mechanism of suppression, and one that extends to places like Israel where it's estimated 1.3 million Jews emigrated to from Soviet states or former Soviet states, starting in the 70s.

You assume there was a drive by any party to 'let the truth be known'. For decades, nobody asked. This was also true of many gulag survivors, many of whom expressed great surprise or shock when the interviewers reached out to them (as for decades, no one had asked them anything).

Moreover, there were incentives for omission (for 'Holocaust' survivors), such as the State of Israel, a shared ideological narrative, collective self-preservation, and even revenge motives -- cumulatively, the most important incentives in all of Judaism.

Jews in Israel are even more subjected to recognizing and aligning with these collective aims.

[Archie]

There were, according to the mainstream, a good 2-3M Jews in the Soviet Union after the war. Among a larger population in the hundreds of millions. The argument here seems to presuppose there were no Jews in Eastern Europe after the war and that if someone had seen one they would have published a memoir about it. That's too binary. The question is not whether there were Jews. We know that there at the very least a few million. The question is how many. And there are other territories in play.

[Archie]

The point stands: there is no organic drive for 'survivors' to come out and share their stories. And for Jewish organizations largely coordinating any/all survivor interviews, selective outreach, lines of questioning, editing, or even just limiting historical access by requiring on-site campus visits to view testimony (prohibitive to revisionists), cannot be ruled out

If someone had the patience to actually sit through all those orals histories, there probably would be a lot of incongruous and problematic ones. There are a few funny clips going around and that's probably just scratching the surface. The amount of records that revisionists have searched and had access to is a tiny fraction of what the establishment side has done.

If I were to post a problematic testimony that clashed with the legend, the Holocaust Industry would just IGNORE it. And bombsaway would make up some reason why it didn't count.

[bombsaway]

The point stands: there is no organic drive for 'survivors' to come out and share their stories. And for Jewish organizations largely coordinating any/all survivor interviews, selective outreach, lines of questioning, editing, or even just limiting historical access by requiring on-site campus visits to view testimony (prohibitive to revisionists), cannot be ruled out

If someone had the patience to actually sit through all those orals histories, there probably would be a lot of incongruous and problematic ones. There are a few funny clips going around and that's probably just scratching the surface. The amount of records that revisionists have searched and had access to is a tiny fraction of what the establishment side has done.

If I were to post a problematic testimony that clashed with the legend, the Holocaust Industry would just IGNORE it. And bombsaway would make up some reason why it didn't count.

Count for what? If you had evidence of a conspiracy to systematically fabricate a mass event I would accept that. If you had evidence of resettlement I would accept it happened at least on a limited scale.

[Nessie]

"Germany has taken commendable steps to confront its role as the perpetrator of the Holocaust and to ensure that Holocaust victims and their heirs receive restitution and/or compensation."

"As of mid-2019, approximately 25,000 Holocaust survivors worldwide still received a monthly pension for “damage to health” provided under the BEG."

"As of July 2019, more than 521,500 Jewish victims of Nazi persecution had received a one-time payment from the Hardship Fund."

If millions of Jews had survived, it needs millions to have played dead, not claim compensation and to be part of the hoax.

[bombsaway]

If we examine the Holocaust surviving portion of Jews within the revisionist frame, probably 25-50% were resettled and survived. Of those who were in German custody that number probably goes up to 75% or higher since we roughly know how many Jews were in Germany proper by wars end (a few hundred thousand). Of those 52,000 testimonies collected, we would expect most of them to relate to resettlement camps completely unknown to mainstream history.

So you could conceivably walk around Israel and talk to white looking Jews, and if you talked to hundred, you could reasonably expect at least a handful to be the children or grandchildren of Jews held in German resettlement camps.

If someone had the patience to actually sit through all those orals histories, there probably would be a lot of incongruous and problematic ones. There are a few funny clips going around and that's probably just scratching the surface. The amount of records that revisionists have searched and had access to is a tiny fraction of what the establishment side has done.

I think here you say there might be evidence of these camps. Have historians ignored them? Do historians who've looked into this know the whole thing is a hoax? When I first got into the resettlement subject it seemed possible to me there were a few settlements in Russia, at least camps that housed workers and their families and were eventually liberated by Soviets. This wouldn't disprove gassings or the rest of the Holocaust, far from it. How are historians or Jews supposed to know not speak of these things? esp when they would have been so common, if revisionists are correct

The only possibility is conspiracy:

Historians and archivists are hiding the material. Soviet record-keepers, Polish statistical clerks, UNRRA case-officers, the Joint Distribution Committee, Yad Vashem, the Central Zionist Archives, and now Russian NGOs are all coordinating suppression for eight decades—a conspiracy larger and more international than the one revisionists claim invented gas chambers.

[Callafangers]

The only possibility is conspiracy:

Historians and archivists are hiding the material. Soviet record-keepers, Polish statistical clerks, UNRRA case-officers, the Joint Distribution Committee, Yad Vashem, the Central Zionist Archives, and now Russian NGOs are all coordinating suppression for eight decades—a conspiracy larger and more international than the one revisionists claim invented gas chambers.

Didn't you say earlier per the title of this thread that the 'revisionist conspiracy' would require "hundreds of thousands"? Your list of organizations above seems to dial that down significantly.

Also, those organizations seem to share a common thread of opposing 'antisemites' and their ideas, and most of those are either historically Jewish-run (or at least disproportionately influenced by Jews and their interests), or are straight-up Soviet (and no one needs to explain why every claim or 'evidence' produced by the Soviets requires independent corroboration).

The conspiracy is fact with regard to the Soviets, and to anyone properly 'noticing', this is also true of Jews and their networks. Rudolf and others have also confirmed this same bias was overwhelmingly in place for the Poles and Allies in general.

Your incredulity is noted, no less.

[csuperman97]

I think the root cause is political pressure. Through the use of political pressure, you can get people to believe in irrational things. I witnessed this during the COVID crisis, where political pressure was used to discourage dissenting viewpoints.

Through the use of political pressure, you can manipulate entire nations of people.

For those that believe in the story, such as BombsAway and Nessie, you certainly are aware of the overwhelming political pressure being exerted to sustain the Holocaust narrative. That fact in itself should make you suspicious. Maybe there is something there that they are trying to hide, and political powers feel threatened by it.

[bombsaway]

Didn't you say earlier per the title of this thread that the 'revisionist conspiracy' would require "hundreds of thousands"? Your list of organizations above seems to dial that down significantly.

I think this is just the beginning actually, if there are no coercive measures being exerted on the hundreds of thousands of direct and indirect witnesses to resettlement.

You need for example people monitoring publishers, newspapers, media outlets, to prevent anyone from publishing, going to the press, being interviewed. Not only that these people have to not only be monitoring but have executive control, enough to kill stories if they arise. Speak in detail as to how the hoaxers managed to pull off this aspect for many decades.

AI analysis of this thread so far, I fully endorse all qualitative comments.

Below is how the “containment net” would have to work once you move beyond archives and into the public-facing world of newspapers, trade presses, radio, TV and (later) social media. It shows why the head-count climbs back into the six-figure range even before you add a single eyewitness.

A. Continuous surveillance across every medium

Publishers’ acquisitions departments
• Every major house—Random House, Harper, Macmillan, Suhrkamp, Gallimard, etc.—receives hundreds of unsolicited memoirs a year.
• Two in-house readers plus one senior editor normally screen each manuscript.
• To spot and spike a “resettlement camp” memoir you need either a trusted reader inside each imprint or an external reviewer who can flag the danger.
• Over 80 years and staff turnover that is c ≈ 30 imprints × 3 readers × 7 staff-cycles ≈ 630 individuals.

Periodical press (news wires, national dailies, weeklies)
• Foreign desks alone at Reuters, AP, AFP, TASS, the New York Times, Times (London), Der Spiegel employ roughly 200 commissioning editors and senior reporters per decade.
• Each decade you replace ~60 % through retirement or moves: 200 × 8 cycles × 0.6 ≈ 960 people who must know when to bin a story.

Broadcast media
• Current-affairs TV shows and public-radio features rely on commissioning editors (≈ 50 active at any given time across BBC, ZDF, ARD, CBC, NBC, IBA, PBS). Six staff-cycles → another 300 insiders.

Documentary & film streamers
• HBO, Arte, Netflix, Amazon, Apple TV, plus European cultural channels add about 40 gatekeepers since the 1990s.

Academic journals and reference presses
• Holocaust or East-European history journals field 15–20 editors/referees per issue; rotate them every five years: 20 × 16 cycles ≈ 320 scholars who must silently bounce anomalous manuscripts.

Literary agencies & prize juries
• 25 influential agencies + prize committees (National Jewish Book Awards, Yad Vashem prizes, etc.): 25 × 8 cycles ≈ 200 people shutting doors.

Platform moderation (1995-2025)
• Wikipedia ArbCom, early web-forum sysops, then Meta/Twitter/YouTube TOS teams.
• Around 150 senior moderators per era; two eras → 300 staff who must recognise and delete “rogue” resettlement claims.

Subtotal media monitors: ≈ 2 800 people

B. Coercive power to spike or bury stories

Monitoring is useless without executive control. For every blocked memoir or pulled news item you need:

• Legal departments prepared to cite libel, “unsubstantiated” claims, or national-security law – 1 solicitor + 1 paralegal per major outlet per decade → +600 people.
• State censors or broadcast-standards boards (Soviet Glavlit, Polish Main Office of Control, UK D-Notice, German Rundfunkräte) able to withdraw print runs or pull a scheduled segment – ≈ 500 rotating officers.
• Financial leverage – advertisers or board members who threaten to cut funding if a story is not killed. Estimate 2 high-level fixers per conglomerate across 25 media groups → 50–100 power-brokers per generation ≈ 400 over the whole period.

Additional executives with veto power: ≈ 1 500 people

C. Running total of non-witness conspirators

Document-level suppressors (archives, reparation files, Shoah testimony) … 35 000

Media monitors/kill-switch operators ………………………………………… 2 800

Legal/censorship/financial enforcers ……………………………………… 1 500

Grand total (still excluding eyewitnesses): ≈ 39 000 people

Why even this pared-down network is implausible

Staff turnover guarantees leaks. Forty thousand insiders, many hostile to each other’s politics, would yield some whistle-blower with photocopies or a death-bed memoir. None exist.

Cross-bloc coordination. Soviet Glavlit and US publishers never shared a control room; yet the blackout would have to be identically enforced in Moscow, Warsaw, London, New York and Jerusalem.

Economic noise. Spiking best-seller potential or award-winning exclusives costs money and reputation. No publisher has complained of mysterious lost profits tied to an east-resettlement exposé.

Digital era. After 1995 a single PDF on a server in Iceland can circulate globally in minutes. A conspiracy that functioned under analogue conditions would have collapsed once samizdat met the internet.

Until proponents of the resettlement thesis can produce documentary evidence that any one of these thousands of gatekeepers actually executed a kill order on a verifiable testimony or transport record, the “silent-media” angle remains another unsubstantiated layer of an already unworkable hypothesis.

[bombsaway]

Assuming no suppression, the amount of information produced for Jews living in ghettos gives us some kind of a rough baseline for how much we could expect about resettlement. Most of those ghettoized Jews went into the USSR btw,

AI describe the corpus

1. First-person print memoirs and diaries

• [] About 1 500 published memoirs that deal primarily with ghetto life. (See Yad Vashem Bibliographic Service catalogue, search “Holocaust ghettos memoir” – https://yvng.yadvashem.org)
  [] About 120 ghetto diaries. The largest set is the Oyneg Shabes / Ringelblum Archive, Jewish Historical Institute, Warsaw – https://www.jhi.pl/en/blog/2020-12-11-t ... um-archive

2. Written testimonies and questionnaires

• [] 6 967 witness files collected 1944-49 by the Central Jewish Historical Commission, Warsaw – https://portal.ehri-project.eu/units/il-002743?lang=en
  [] Around 150 000 Pages of Testimony at Yad Vashem that mention a ghetto – Names Recovery Project overview: https://www.yadvashem.org/remembrance/names.html
• Roughly 40 000 UNRRA / IRO DP questionnaires (Series P.5, Arolsen Archives) list a ghetto under “places of internment” – https://collections.arolsen-archives.or ... -5-24_127/

Subtotal written witness records ≈ 193 000

3. Audio / video oral-history recordings

• [] 55 000 testimonies in the USC Shoah Foundation Visual History Archive; tag search “Ghetto” returns about 28 000 – https://sfi.usc.edu/collections/holocaust
  [] 4 400 testimonies in the Fortunoff Video Archive (Yale) – https://library.yale.edu/fortunoff-archive
  [] About 10 000 interviews in the USHMM Oral-History Collection flagged “ghetto” – https://collections.ushmm.org/search/
  [] ~9 000 audio interviews at Beit Lohamei Ha-Getaot (Ghetto Fighters’ Museum) – https://www.gfh.org.il/eng/

Subtotal oral histories ≈ 50 000

4. Photographs, film clips, ephemera

• [] Over 400 000 photos in the Yad Vashem Photo & Film Archive, c 55 000 tagged to ghettos – https://photos.yadvashem.org
  [] ~200 film clips shot inside or at the gates of ghettos – searchable via USHMM Film Catalogue – https://collections.ushmm.org/search/?f ... 5D=ghettos
• About 12 000 items of ghetto ephemera (ration coupons, armbands, permits) in Yad Vashem and USHMM databases.

5. Secondary scholarship and documentary media

• [] Roughly 450 monographs devoted mainly to one or more ghettos (WorldCat subject “Holocaust—ghettos”) – https://www.worldcat.org
  [] About 2 000 peer-reviewed articles on ghetto administration or daily life (JSTOR keyword “ghetto” AND “Holocaust”) – https://www.jstor.org
• Around 250 feature documentaries or broadcast series centred on ghettos (see USHMM Film & Video listings plus IMDb advanced search) – https://www.imdb.com

Grand totals of unique items

• [] Memoirs & diaries – ≈ 1 620
  [] Written testimonies / questionnaires – ≈ 193 000
  [] Oral-history recordings – ≈ 50 000
  [] Photos / film / artefacts – ≈ 67 000
• Scholarly & documentary works – ≈ 2 700

≈ 315 000 separate pieces of media or archival evidence documenting Jewish ghetto experience.

In contrast to this there is 0 info about the resettled Jews, a population of comparable though lesser size. One might conservatively expect 50% of the amount of evidence to be generated, but there is actually zero.

The observed 0 % is diagnostic: either a flawless, global, multi-generational suppression regime (for which no meta-evidence exists), or—far more simply—there were no large German-run Jewish resettlement camps in the USSR to leave traces in the first place.

[TlsMS93]

The chance of a functional protein arising spontaneously is greater than the entropy of the Universe, and biologists care about this statistical implausibility? Why, with the Holocaust, would the lack of precise demographic data or reports to the contrary be so decisive for the validity of an event?

Someone mentioned the Covid pandemic, and to this day many are afraid to talk about it openly, both the pandemic and the vaccine. The media 80, 70, 60 years ago were in the Stone Age compared to today. In 30 years, an entire generation either died or has already overcome all that, and no one will spend their lives regretting it, especially in the USSR, where there were more serious problems occurring.

[bombsaway]

The chance of a functional protein arising spontaneously is greater than the entropy of the Universe, and biologists care about this statistical implausibility? Why, with the Holocaust, would the lack of precise demographic data or reports to the contrary be so decisive for the validity of an event?

It's not decisive in any positive way. What it shows is that you guys implicitly believe in a vast and completely non evidenced conspiracy, and that is deeply silly and hypocritical.

[Stubble]

To bring this thread back to reality a little bit, there were literal armies of propagandists employed to 'set the narrative'. Literal armies.

[bombsaway]

To bring this thread back to reality a little bit, there were literal armies of propagandists employed to 'set the narrative'. Literal armies.

It's not demonstrated at all that there was a systematic effort to manufacture a genocide that didn't happen. What you see is exaggeration of German atrocities of all kinds, and a separately manufactured atrocity (Katyn) that has nothing to do with Jews. As I've shown, the conspiracy has to extend far beyond the USSR anyway.