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

[Stubble]

This is a strange point to focus on. It's been 80 years, with victorious powers (including Jews) controlling the libraries, books, and bullhorns. The burden of proof is not on revisionists to show "where Jews went" -- any Jews. Every major representative group that has spoon-fed the world 'evidence' of the so-called 'Holocaust' has an outstanding reputation for deceiving the masses. This being the case, it is known that:

You aren't wrong 'Fangers, at all. I keep finding Hungarian jews and it is rewarding. At this point, I endeavor to hunt down and identify every jew in this cohort.

The quest is mine however, and ultimately, it will not prove or disprove 'the holocaust'.

Perhaps I am tilting at windmills, but, at this point, it is a bit of an obsession. I have a real drive to identify and resolve each of these missing persons to the finest degree possible.

For the record, if I didn't keep finding them, this wouldn't be so rewarding.

It's also a change from looking at names of pets in the Yad Vashim database.

[curioussoul]

Yeah, revisionists have been reviewing and commenting on some of these studies for quite some time, noting the seeming incompatibility of transferring Hungarian Jews to labor sites all over the Reich, with the Holocaust hypothesis of them all being gassed and cremated in Birkenau. Revisionists were notably able to demonstrate decades ago, contrary to the orthodox stance at that time, that the Hungarian Jews who at first were allegedly all massacred wholesale, did in fact survive Auschwitz in significant numbers but it is not entirely clear how or when they ended up in such disperate locations.

What 'Holocaust hypothesis'? You're creating a strawman here by ignoring the differences in conventional interpretations and the range of sources. The 'orthodox' side was acknowledging the large-scale selections of Hungarian Jews already in the 1940s and 1950s, well before revisionism even existed.

That's a funny way of saying that obscure sources might have hinted at the reality of the number of "non-gassed" Jews from Hungary, but Holocaust scholars and Holocaust academia held the view that the Jews from Hungary were, for the most part, entirely gassed upon arrival. Obviously, no one is denying that selections were alleged from the very beginning, but the number is supposed to have been relatively inconsequential. This is an imputation on Holocaust studies as a whole. The fact that an utterly ficticious version of history was ever able to take root is pretty damning, but then again so are most of the details of the Holocaust to this very day. Let us not forget that Danuta Czech lied about the Hungarian transports for decades, and none of her colleagues bothered to correct her blatantly false claims, at least not in a way that was adopted by colleagues in the field. This is supposedly the most studied event in human history and historians still have no idea when or if an extermination order was ever issued, and their main sources all contradict each other in fundamental ways. In this regard, Mattogno's contributions in the 80's were invaluable to our current understanding of the Hungarian Operation and was the main reason Czech amended her Chronicle in this regard in the 2nd edition.

[SanityCheck]

Yeah, revisionists have been reviewing and commenting on some of these studies for quite some time, noting the seeming incompatibility of transferring Hungarian Jews to labor sites all over the Reich, with the Holocaust hypothesis of them all being gassed and cremated in Birkenau. Revisionists were notably able to demonstrate decades ago, contrary to the orthodox stance at that time, that the Hungarian Jews who at first were allegedly all massacred wholesale, did in fact survive Auschwitz in significant numbers but it is not entirely clear how or when they ended up in such disperate locations.

What 'Holocaust hypothesis'? You're creating a strawman here by ignoring the differences in conventional interpretations and the range of sources. The 'orthodox' side was acknowledging the large-scale selections of Hungarian Jews already in the 1940s and 1950s, well before revisionism even existed.

That's a funny way of saying that obscure sources might have hinted at the reality of the number of "non-gassed" Jews from Hungary, but Holocaust scholars and Holocaust academia held the view that the Jews from Hungary were, for the most part, entirely gassed upon arrival. Obviously, no one is denying that selections were alleged from the very beginning, but the number is supposed to have been relatively inconsequential. This is an imputation on Holocaust studies as a whole. The fact that an utterly ficticious version of history was ever able to take root is pretty damning, but then again so are most of the details of the Holocaust to this very day. Let us not forget that Danuta Czech lied about the Hungarian transports for decades, and none of her colleagues bothered to correct her blatantly false claims, at least not in a way that was adopted by colleagues in the field. This is supposedly the most studied event in human history and historians still have no idea when or if an extermination order was ever issued, and their main sources all contradict each other in fundamental ways. In this regard, Mattogno's contributions in the 80's were invaluable to our current understanding of the Hungarian Operation and was the main reason Czech amended her Chronicle in this regard in the 2nd edition.

It'd probably help if you canned the caricatures of 'Holocaust academia' when discussing the 1980s or earlier; the international networks were only just forming (eg with 1970s Yad Vashem-hosted conferences) and there were still quite strong national or camp-specific biases.

'Holocaust studies' did not exist until the 1980s, and then as an interdisciplinary umbrella beyond historians, and emerged precisely to include qualitative, literary and other approaches, so it's kind of hilarious to see it invoked as a critique of historians working in the 1960s-1980s, or subsequently. Blaming people in English, philosophy, theology and other humanities departments for not being concerned with numbers is like expecting your cat to recite the Fibonacci sequence.

Historians and social scientists were certainly concerned with numbers to a greater extent, but considering they could do little more than estimate the numbers for Stalinist violence until after the collapse of communism, the huffing and puffing about what was possible in the Cold War, at a time when there were genuinely fewer researchers at work, is also fairly hilarious. Quite separate research traditions in Poland, the US, Israel, West Germany and elsewhere took time to be fully integrated, and that did not happen until after 1990. Again, considering that historians of Stalinism could not even begin to specify accurate or documentable numbers until the 1990s, and the end of the Cold War further highlighted less well known mass casualty events from the 1940s which were equally difficult to document earlier on, you're just making me shrug and go 'so what?'

The Auschwitz Museum as a research centre quite obviously learned as it went; the 1960s Kalendarium was less extensive than the 1989 Kalendarium, which helped set up Piper's revisions a year or two later. But things did not stop there for the museum researchers; Andrzej Strzelecki's book on the final phase of Auschwitz, published in German in 1995, so thirty years ago, identified many more outgoing transports in 1944 than appeared in Czech's 1989 Kalendarium. The Polish original went back to 1982, but it would seem reasonable to expect that Strzelecki had absorbed further sources. Strzelecki went on to produce a study of the Lodz ghetto action in 2004 which similarly identified the outgoing transports of 'depot', unregistered deportees.

Randolph Braham was mainly focused on events in Hungary and did not follow the deportations past Auschwitz. He has more detail on the non-Auschwitz deportations to Strasshof and the forced marches out of Budapest, and the Budapest ghetto; there's not an overview of what happened to the Hungarian Jews deported to Auschwitz. That was first done in Gerlach/Aly in 2002.

Other KZ museums and researchers working on the other KZs, plus the now visible internal ITS Arolsen efforts to track transports, registration numbers and more, were accumulating data all through this era, some of which were absorbed early on by the Auschwitz Museum, and some of which evidently weren't.

The 'depot' transfers also match an ever growing number of survivor memoirs. In a likely incomplete sample of 240 Hungarian Auschwitz survivor memoirs, 25 were published from 1945-1975, including several written by 'depot' prisoners, such as Reska Weiss, transferred to KL Kaiserwald in Riga, whose memoir was published in English in 1961. It'd be fair to say that most of the 'obvious' memoirs from this phase were by registered inmates who stayed for longer in Auschwitz, though. 99 more memoirs were published from 1976-2000, with even more from 'depot' prisoners, such as Ana Novac, transferred at first to Plaszow, memoir in French in 1982. Another 117 memoirs have been published from 2001-2023, with again even more from 'depot' prisoners.

By the 21st Century, the DEGOB affidavits were digitised and put online by the second half of the 2000s, and there were even more KZ research centres, chronicles and transport lists, all confirming what Gerlach and Aly found using literature up to 2002 and the entirely separate collection of Jewish Agency Bucharest affidavits from 1945. Which is 23 years ago now.

Reitlinger back in 1953 was right all along, when there was no 1960s Kalendarium, when Randolph Braham hadn't begun publishing, and before there were many histories or detailed lists for the individual KZs in Germany and Austria.

Meanwhile, the contributions of 'revisionism' were: Butz denying there had been mass deportations to the extent documented in the Veesenmeyer telegrams, causing a hilarious dispute in 2000 between Butz, Graf, Crowell and Mattogno. Mattogno after this seemed still reluctant to accept all transports noted in the Ferenczy reports and lists had in fact gone to Auschwitz. I don't see where in his 1980s writings he came up with anything that moved the needle in any direction whatsoever.

[Nessie]

...The burden of proof is not on revisionists to show "where Jews went" -- any Jews.

In that case, revisionists are deniers, not revisionists. If you fail to revise history to show what happened and instead, you deny what happened, you cannot call yourself a revisionist.

The reason why you dodge the burden of proof, is because you know there is no evidence to prove millions of Jews still alive in camps and ghettos in 1944.

Every major representative group that has spoon-fed the world 'evidence' of the so-called 'Holocaust' has an outstanding reputation for deceiving the masses. This being the case, it is known that:

- Motive
- Means
- Opportunity
- Behavior patterns

...all point to manipulation of records, freely, by these powers.

The first "group" to produce evidence of the Holocaust, was the Polish, and its government in exile in London. What is its history of deceiving the masses? Subsequently, every country aligned to or occupied by the Nazis, from Norway to Greece, has admitted its role. What is their history of deceiving the masses?

What motive does Romania have, for admitting to the mass murder of its Jewish citizens, with little encouragement or assistance by the Nazis?

What motive do Latvia and Lithuania have, for admitting to joining with the Nazis, and mass murdering their Jewish citizens?

Had they some shred of verifiable evidence which could not have been manipulated or fabricated postwar -- anything at all -- we might not be here, debating this topic at all. But they have not. All of their 'evidence' -- all of it -- aligns better with an understanding of postwar manipulation after wartime propaganda and rumor-milling. We repeatedly see that anything testable among their claims shows up empty-handed. This is why the ban the testing. This makes their claims 'unfalsifiable', which is one of the core signs of an unscientific (or deceptive) viewpoint.

Post-war manipulation by whom, of whom? If it was the Soviets doing the manipulation, how did they manipulate the Dutch, into admitting to the high level of assistance they gave the Nazis, in identifying and registered Jews, resulting in one of the highest death rates?

It is possible to falsify the Holocaust. Just find evidence of millions of Jews alive in camps and ghettos in 1944 and liberated in 1945.

Go ahead and search for 'missing Hungarian Jews' but, so that our readers here understand, this is not the benchmark by which to evaluate whether any 'Holocaust happened'. It is misguided for anyone to claim or imply otherwise.

But, if you found those Hungarian Jews, you have disproved the Holocaust.

[Stubble]

Nessie, the first thing the Polish produced was, propaganda. I remind you steam chambers are in the IMT.

Then again, so is an atomic bomb. Used on the jews of course, not the allies.

[Nazgul]

Nessie, the first thing the Polish produced was, propaganda. I remind you steam chambers are in the IMT.

Then again, so is an atomic bomb. Used on the jews of course, not the allies.

The poster named Nessie was well aware of this about 7 years ago on the last incarnation of your new forum. He makes rabbit holes, repeating the same nonsense to new victims. In 7 years or so he has said nothing new.

[Stubble]

Fiar, but are you sure the poster Nessie has the faculties necessary to remember something said less than a month ago, what's less 7 years.

Apparently the propaganda aspect of reports from the Polish Government in Exile bears repeating, if not for you or I than for the benefit of new readers with fresh eyes.

[Nessie]

Nessie, the first thing the Polish produced was, propaganda. I remind you steam chambers are in the IMT.

Then again, so is an atomic bomb. Used on the jews of course, not the allies.

The conspiracy started with the Polish. They had to be in on it, lying about death camps. Why do the Poles still lie about the huge number of its citizens, killed, in death camps, on its territory?

[Stubble]

Because such is the line that must be towed. At this point, it is so engrained with culture (the lie) I am certain it is second nature.

They repeat it, because they believe it.

Why do children regale me with tales of Santa and the Easter bunny Nessie?

[Nessie]

Because such is the line that must be towed. At this point, it is so engrained with culture (the lie) I am certain it is second nature.

They repeat it, because they believe it.

Or, it is because it happened and they know it, because of all the evidence. You have no evidence of a culture all across Europe, to just accept mass killings took place, with no evidence of it happening.

Why do children regale me with tales of Santa and the Easter bunny Nessie?

Because they are children who do not understand evidencing.

[Stubble]

Nessie, always;

[curioussoul]

What 'Holocaust hypothesis'? You're creating a strawman here by ignoring the differences in conventional interpretations and the range of sources. The 'orthodox' side was acknowledging the large-scale selections of Hungarian Jews already in the 1940s and 1950s, well before revisionism even existed.

That's a funny way of saying that obscure sources might have hinted at the reality of the number of "non-gassed" Jews from Hungary, but Holocaust scholars and Holocaust academia held the view that the Jews from Hungary were, for the most part, entirely gassed upon arrival. Obviously, no one is denying that selections were alleged from the very beginning, but the number is supposed to have been relatively inconsequential. This is an imputation on Holocaust studies as a whole. The fact that an utterly ficticious version of history was ever able to take root is pretty damning, but then again so are most of the details of the Holocaust to this very day. Let us not forget that Danuta Czech lied about the Hungarian transports for decades, and none of her colleagues bothered to correct her blatantly false claims, at least not in a way that was adopted by colleagues in the field. This is supposedly the most studied event in human history and historians still have no idea when or if an extermination order was ever issued, and their main sources all contradict each other in fundamental ways. In this regard, Mattogno's contributions in the 80's were invaluable to our current understanding of the Hungarian Operation and was the main reason Czech amended her Chronicle in this regard in the 2nd edition.

It'd probably help if you canned the caricatures of 'Holocaust academia' when discussing the 1980s or earlier; the international networks were only just forming (eg with 1970s Yad Vashem-hosted conferences) and there were still quite strong national or camp-specific biases.

'Holocaust studies' did not exist until the 1980s, and then as an interdisciplinary umbrella beyond historians, and emerged precisely to include qualitative, literary and other approaches, so it's kind of hilarious to see it invoked as a critique of historians working in the 1960s-1980s, or subsequently. Blaming people in English, philosophy, theology and other humanities departments for not being concerned with numbers is like expecting your cat to recite the Fibonacci sequence.

Historians and social scientists were certainly concerned with numbers to a greater extent, but considering they could do little more than estimate the numbers for Stalinist violence until after the collapse of communism, the huffing and puffing about what was possible in the Cold War, at a time when there were genuinely fewer researchers at work, is also fairly hilarious. Quite separate research traditions in Poland, the US, Israel, West Germany and elsewhere took time to be fully integrated, and that did not happen until after 1990. Again, considering that historians of Stalinism could not even begin to specify accurate or documentable numbers until the 1990s, and the end of the Cold War further highlighted less well known mass casualty events from the 1940s which were equally difficult to document earlier on, you're just making me shrug and go 'so what?'

The Auschwitz Museum as a research centre quite obviously learned as it went; the 1960s Kalendarium was less extensive than the 1989 Kalendarium, which helped set up Piper's revisions a year or two later. But things did not stop there for the museum researchers; Andrzej Strzelecki's book on the final phase of Auschwitz, published in German in 1995, so thirty years ago, identified many more outgoing transports in 1944 than appeared in Czech's 1989 Kalendarium. The Polish original went back to 1982, but it would seem reasonable to expect that Strzelecki had absorbed further sources. Strzelecki went on to produce a study of the Lodz ghetto action in 2004 which similarly identified the outgoing transports of 'depot', unregistered deportees.

Randolph Braham was mainly focused on events in Hungary and did not follow the deportations past Auschwitz. He has more detail on the non-Auschwitz deportations to Strasshof and the forced marches out of Budapest, and the Budapest ghetto; there's not an overview of what happened to the Hungarian Jews deported to Auschwitz. That was first done in Gerlach/Aly in 2002.

Other KZ museums and researchers working on the other KZs, plus the now visible internal ITS Arolsen efforts to track transports, registration numbers and more, were accumulating data all through this era, some of which were absorbed early on by the Auschwitz Museum, and some of which evidently weren't.

The 'depot' transfers also match an ever growing number of survivor memoirs. In a likely incomplete sample of 240 Hungarian Auschwitz survivor memoirs, 25 were published from 1945-1975, including several written by 'depot' prisoners, such as Reska Weiss, transferred to KL Kaiserwald in Riga, whose memoir was published in English in 1961. It'd be fair to say that most of the 'obvious' memoirs from this phase were by registered inmates who stayed for longer in Auschwitz, though. 99 more memoirs were published from 1976-2000, with even more from 'depot' prisoners, such as Ana Novac, transferred at first to Plaszow, memoir in French in 1982. Another 117 memoirs have been published from 2001-2023, with again even more from 'depot' prisoners.

By the 21st Century, the DEGOB affidavits were digitised and put online by the second half of the 2000s, and there were even more KZ research centres, chronicles and transport lists, all confirming what Gerlach and Aly found using literature up to 2002 and the entirely separate collection of Jewish Agency Bucharest affidavits from 1945. Which is 23 years ago now.

Reitlinger back in 1953 was right all along, when there was no 1960s Kalendarium, when Randolph Braham hadn't begun publishing, and before there were many histories or detailed lists for the individual KZs in Germany and Austria.

Meanwhile, the contributions of 'revisionism' were: Butz denying there had been mass deportations to the extent documented in the Veesenmeyer telegrams, causing a hilarious dispute in 2000 between Butz, Graf, Crowell and Mattogno. Mattogno after this seemed still reluctant to accept all transports noted in the Ferenczy reports and lists had in fact gone to Auschwitz. I don't see where in his 1980s writings he came up with anything that moved the needle in any direction whatsoever.

Not a caricature, just reality. As for your claim that Mattogno "didn't move the needle in any direction whatsoever", he had questioned the relevant institutions as early as 1986, and published his findings in 1987. Following his revelations, Czech (and the Auschwitz Museum) was ultimately forced to revise her position on the Hungarian deportation trains in the updated edition of the Kalendarium published a few years later. As with a lot of things 'Holocaust', the information was out there for any diligent historian to uncover, it just so happened that a revisionist had to do the job for them. I shouldn't be surprised you still have the gall to attempt such flimsy subterfuge as to claim that supposed "research traditions" was the reason orthodox Holocaust historians repeated blatantly false Soviet atrocity propaganda up until the early 90's, when Holocaust studies actual took off as a more or less serious technical field thanks to Jean-Claude Pressac, another non-historians who had to do the jobs that salaried Holocaust academicians refused to do. It was only a few years earlier that the director of the Auschwitz Museum's history department was still lying about the available knowledge on the actual death toll in that camp, and just a decade before that he was repeating the 4 million lie.

You have never been a serious field of history. Revisionism is just course correction.

[SanityCheck]

Not a caricature, just reality. As for your claim that Mattogno "didn't move the needle in any direction whatsoever", he had questioned the relevant institutions as early as 1986, and published his findings in 1987. Following his revelations, Czech (and the Auschwitz Museum) was ultimately forced to revise her position on the Hungarian deportation trains in the updated edition of the Kalendarium published a few years later. As with a lot of things 'Holocaust', the information was out there for any diligent historian to uncover, it just so happened that a revisionist had to do the job for them. I shouldn't be surprised you still have the gall to attempt such flimsy subterfuge as to claim that supposed "research traditions" was the reason orthodox Holocaust historians repeated blatantly false Soviet atrocity propaganda up until the early 90's, when Holocaust studies actual took off as a more or less serious technical field thanks to Jean-Claude Pressac, another non-historians who had to do the jobs that salaried Holocaust academicians refused to do. It was only a few years earlier that the director of the Auschwitz Museum's history department was still lying about the available knowledge on the actual death toll in that camp, and just a decade before that he was repeating the 4 million lie.

You have never been a serious field of history. Revisionism is just course correction.

It is nigh on impossible to have a totally integrated 'field of history' for a multinational topic, such as modern European history, and within that themes like the two world wars in Europe (and how they relate to the wars beyond Europe), or the Holocaust. Language and access to archives naturally creates national research traditions. Familiarity with foreign languages and how much is translated further channels and distorts the spread of knowledge. This was quite acute for all aspects of the 1930s-1940s upheavals in Europe: Third Reich, Stalinism, Spanish Civil War, the Second World War and its aftermath, including the Heimatvertreibungen, and the many smaller civil wars and conflicts which accompanied the big clashes. It arguably still is.

Moreover: when does a 'field of history' become possible? Contemporary history emerged after 1945 as a response to the recent catastrophes, and a reaction to traditional historians cutting off their work at earlier dates. That necessitated integrating non-traditional sources, as seem with the IfZ's Dokumentation der Vertreibung der Deutschen aus Ost-Mitteleuropa project, which relied very largely on eyewitness accounts. They had no access to East Bloc official records. The 'official' West German goverrnment calculations of population losses and death tolls were repeatedly revised, only the rounded 2 million deaths in the expulsions became canonical despite doubts cast by internal investigations that the number was much less.

In the postwar era, official historians could write histories with privileged access to still-classified government and military documents from WWII. If these were available. The US archives only opened up in the latter part of the 1960s after the first FOIA act, the British archives for the entire war were only more accessible from 1975 under the Thirty Year Rule (cut down from a fifty year rule).

So a 'field of history' in the academic sense could not even emerge fully for Britain in WWII and its aftermath until the latter part of the 1970s. All of the earlier books - official and privileged histories, memoirs and works by protagonists, books by journalists and pioneering academics - have to be rechecked, and for popular works which may even have quoted or paraphrased actual documents, traceable references given, to meet academic standards.

By extension we see that there could not be a singular official history of the Holocaust either immediately after the war or later on, because it unfolded over the territory of many nation-states. Only some national level official histories might fit the bill, such as Louis de Jong's 12 volumes on the Netherlands in WWII, but there weren't equivalent ventures for either Belgium or France that were as comprehensive. The official history multi-volume model doesn't really fit Poland since the research centres were dispersed (Jewish Historical Institute, Auschwitz Museum, Majdanek Museum, other institutes and the universities) with nobody aiming to produce the definitive official history like de Jong, or the different multi-volume Soviet histories of the Great Patriotic War, or the US and British multi-volume official histories.


Going into hysterics about Cold War era distortions is still basically hilarious. Do you know the story of how the battle of Prokhorovka got revised? This key clash in the battle of Kursk in 1943 was spun by Soviet wartime propaganda and postwar myth-making, in many published histories, as a major defeat for the SS-Panzerkorps, leaving hundreds of German tanks destroyed. The destruction of a Soviet tank army was glossed over in silence. Western accounts, almost all written by non-academics, but also some by university historians like John Erickson, largely adopted the Soviet claims.

It wasn't until the 1990s that German and American historians started pointing out consistently that the archival records, which had been available since the 1960s in NARA and in Freiburg, pointed to the loss of at most 41 tanks, and not the 400 sometimes claimed. This shocked audiences in post-Soviet Russia when Karl-Heinz Frieser from the MGFA lectured on this in Moscow. Since then there are quite a few Russian military historians who've added detail from both sides on this battle. Earlier Waffen-SS divisional histories as well as the 1960s study by Ernst Klink (himself a Waffen-SS veteran) may have told a different story, but any hints at lower losses at Prokhorovka were not absorbed properly, until other historians reviewed the microfilms and paper files in the archives.

The revsion doesn't change the overall outcome - the enormous losses inflicted by the Germans on Soviet forces at Kursk did not translate into an operational breakthrough, much less a strategic shift in the initiative, which the Soviets seized permanently shortly afterwards.

Soviet losses on the battlefield in WWII were hardly revealed until the 1990s any more than the precise details of the GULag and Great Terror were. The military casualties were subsequently subjected to dispute by various Russian historians, the losses from Stalinist terror are generally considered to have checked out and been broken down. They simply couldn't be for decades.

It took the Bundeswehr's MGFA thirty years to produce the 13 volume history of WWII, Das Deutsche Reich und der Zweite Weltkrieg, between 1979 and 2008. The MGFA was located during the Cold War right next to the military archives in Freiburg but couldn't produce a single volume for the better part of two decades after the files were restituted.


So when Reitlinger, Hilberg and others who were either not academics or not in history departments arrived at prescient conclusions, this is a better track record than we can see for many Sovietologists, academic or otherwise. Robert Conquest significantly overestimated losses in the terror and GULag, his doctorate from Oxford and research fellowship at the Hoover Institution was no guarantee of accuracy. But he deserved a lot of credit for shaping recognition and memory of the Great Terror (as well as later on what became known as the Holodomor), working with incomplete sources. Reitlinger and Hilberg also didn't have access to all the sources when they first published.


Military history as well as the history of the Holocaust and other aspects of the 1930s-1940s are still not the exclusive preserve of academics, nor will they ever be.

There are for sure more significant unaffiliated, amateur or 'untrained' historians of the Holocaust who've made important contributions - H.G. Adler, Jean-Claude Pressac and Stephen Tyas spring to mind - than there have been 'serious revisionists'. Since the number of 'serious revisionists' in retrospect is basically a sample of one, Carlo Mattogno.

[Callafangers]

Not a caricature, just reality. As for your claim that Mattogno "didn't move the needle in any direction whatsoever", he had questioned the relevant institutions as early as 1986, and published his findings in 1987. Following his revelations, Czech (and the Auschwitz Museum) was ultimately forced to revise her position on the Hungarian deportation trains in the updated edition of the Kalendarium published a few years later. As with a lot of things 'Holocaust', the information was out there for any diligent historian to uncover, it just so happened that a revisionist had to do the job for them. I shouldn't be surprised you still have the gall to attempt such flimsy subterfuge as to claim that supposed "research traditions" was the reason orthodox Holocaust historians repeated blatantly false Soviet atrocity propaganda up until the early 90's, when Holocaust studies actual took off as a more or less serious technical field thanks to Jean-Claude Pressac, another non-historians who had to do the jobs that salaried Holocaust academicians refused to do. It was only a few years earlier that the director of the Auschwitz Museum's history department was still lying about the available knowledge on the actual death toll in that camp, and just a decade before that he was repeating the 4 million lie.

You have never been a serious field of history. Revisionism is just course correction.

It is nigh on impossible to have a totally integrated 'field of history' for a multinational topic, such as modern European history, and within that themes like the two world wars in Europe (and how they relate to the wars beyond Europe), or the Holocaust. Language and access to archives naturally creates national research traditions. Familiarity with foreign languages and how much is translated further channels and distorts the spread of knowledge. This was quite acute for all aspects of the 1930s-1940s upheavals in Europe: Third Reich, Stalinism, Spanish Civil War, the Second World War and its aftermath, including the Heimatvertreibungen, and the many smaller civil wars and conflicts which accompanied the big clashes. It arguably still is.

Moreover: when does a 'field of history' become possible? Contemporary history emerged after 1945 as a response to the recent catastrophes, and a reaction to traditional historians cutting off their work at earlier dates. That necessitated integrating non-traditional sources, as seem with the IfZ's Dokumentation der Vertreibung der Deutschen aus Ost-Mitteleuropa project, which relied very largely on eyewitness accounts. They had no access to East Bloc official records. The 'official' West German goverrnment calculations of population losses and death tolls were repeatedly revised, only the rounded 2 million deaths in the expulsions became canonical despite doubts cast by internal investigations that the number was much less.

In the postwar era, official historians could write histories with privileged access to still-classified government and military documents from WWII. If these were available. The US archives only opened up in the latter part of the 1960s after the first FOIA act, the British archives for the entire war were only more accessible from 1975 under the Thirty Year Rule (cut down from a fifty year rule).

So a 'field of history' in the academic sense could not even emerge fully for Britain in WWII and its aftermath until the latter part of the 1970s. All of the earlier books - official and privileged histories, memoirs and works by protagonists, books by journalists and pioneering academics - have to be rechecked, and for popular works which may even have quoted or paraphrased actual documents, traceable references given, to meet academic standards.

By extension we see that there could not be a singular official history of the Holocaust either immediately after the war or later on, because it unfolded over the territory of many nation-states. Only some national level official histories might fit the bill, such as Louis de Jong's 12 volumes on the Netherlands in WWII, but there weren't equivalent ventures for either Belgium or France that were as comprehensive. The official history multi-volume model doesn't really fit Poland since the research centres were dispersed (Jewish Historical Institute, Auschwitz Museum, Majdanek Museum, other institutes and the universities) with nobody aiming to produce the definitive official history like de Jong, or the different multi-volume Soviet histories of the Great Patriotic War, or the US and British multi-volume official histories.

All of the above is a very verbose way of saying: "it's okay that our information has been utterly false at numerous instances which were never formally acknowledged as such (as in, allowing revisionism a stronger platform) -- history takes awhile to calibrate when crossing national borders!"

Your interpretation relies on assumption that sincerity has remained a constant in historical investigation and inquiry. It hasn't. We know it hasn't; to give one example is Bernard Mark, former director of the Jewish Historical Institute in Warsaw, known for having falsified multiple documents, and thereafter retaining his position at the Institute until his death. Just how many 'Bernard Marks' are/were out there? Has there been any serious auditing or efforts to control actors like these, within the broader field of Holocaust historiography? No -- much like a lack of cross-examination on 'Holocaust' testimony in general, those physically holding the history (archives, etc.) and those writing it have had basically free reign to produce, omit, or even manipulate anything and everything they saw fit. Whether Soviet communists or embittered Jews, to manipulate records was unpunished and seemingly encouraged, so long as it assisted the 'denazification' effort and victors' postwar socio-political schemes.

It's funny to me that those in your camp can embrace concepts like "work towards the Fuhrer" (Ian Kershaw's hypothesis of German administrative structure) as explaining any of the gaps in documentation you find, yet you cannot fathom something as simple as the various anti-German actors postwar converging as to "work against the Fuhrer".

Weird.

Going into hysterics about Cold War era distortions is still basically hilarious. Do you know the story of how the battle of Prokhorovka got revised? This key clash in the battle of Kursk in 1943 was spun by Soviet wartime propaganda and postwar myth-making, in many published histories, as a major defeat for the SS-Panzerkorps, leaving hundreds of German tanks destroyed. The destruction of a Soviet tank army was glossed over in silence. Western accounts, almost all written by non-academics, but also some by university historians like John Erickson, largely adopted the Soviet claims.

It wasn't until the 1990s that German and American historians started pointing out consistently that the archival records, which had been available since the 1960s in NARA and in Freiburg, pointed to the loss of at most 41 tanks, and not the 400 sometimes claimed. This shocked audiences in post-Soviet Russia when Karl-Heinz Frieser from the MGFA lectured on this in Moscow. Since then there are quite a few Russian military historians who've added detail from both sides on this battle. Earlier Waffen-SS divisional histories as well as the 1960s study by Ernst Klink (himself a Waffen-SS veteran) may have told a different story, but any hints at lower losses at Prokhorovka were not absorbed properly, until other historians reviewed the microfilms and paper files in the archives.

The revsion doesn't change the overall outcome - the enormous losses inflicted by the Germans on Soviet forces at Kursk did not translate into an operational breakthrough, much less a strategic shift in the initiative, which the Soviets seized permanently shortly afterwards.

And so the moral of the story is: since the tale of "hundreds of tanks" was initially told, this inflated figure easily carried through the official history until many decades later, once a handful of dispersed documentation converged to show lower figures. If these archives had been first raided and controlled for decades by people steadfast on getting the world to believe in "hundreds of tanks", do you still think this truth (of fewer tanks) would have ever been uncovered? Or would historians today be insisting still that the "hundreds of tanks" is legitimate, since there is no documentation left explicitly showing otherwise?

The "overall outcome" of Jews in WW2 is that they won the war, coordinated much of Allied postwar 'reconstruction' and retaliation, tightly-controlled data surrounding their population movement, and became the "world's greatest victims". There's your outcome.

Soviet losses on the battlefield in WWII were hardly revealed until the 1990s any more than the precise details of the GULag and Great Terror were. The military casualties were subsequently subjected to dispute by various Russian historians, the losses from Stalinist terror are generally considered to have checked out and been broken down. They simply couldn't be for decades.

It took the Bundeswehr's MGFA thirty years to produce the 13 volume history of WWII, Das Deutsche Reich und der Zweite Weltkrieg, between 1979 and 2008. The MGFA was located during the Cold War right next to the military archives in Freiburg but couldn't produce a single volume for the better part of two decades after the files were restituted.

I assume much of this reference to the historiographical development of other narratives is meant to show some [false] equivalence to what should be expected of the 'Holocaust'. But no, this would be a fallacy.

The Soviet Union was not 'conquered'. It always had a choice of which records to preserve or not. It's collapse may have entailed some 'inconvenient' records escaping into publication but this does not shed light on 'Holocaust' sources which have an entirely different range of motives, actors/'witnesses', custodial chains, and other circumstances involved -- a major departure in terms of scope, scale, and overall nature, compared to records of internal Soviet atrocities from different periods and initiatives.

So when Reitlinger, Hilberg and others who were either not academics or not in history departments arrived at prescient conclusions, this is a better track record than we can see for many Sovietologists, academic or otherwise. Robert Conquest significantly overestimated losses in the terror and GULag, his doctorate from Oxford and research fellowship at the Hoover Institution was no guarantee of accuracy. But he deserved a lot of credit for shaping recognition and memory of the Great Terror (as well as later on what became known as the Holodomor), working with incomplete sources. Reitlinger and Hilberg also didn't have access to all the sources when they first published.


Military history as well as the history of the Holocaust and other aspects of the 1930s-1940s are still not the exclusive preserve of academics, nor will they ever be.

There are for sure more significant unaffiliated, amateur or 'untrained' historians of the Holocaust who've made important contributions - H.G. Adler, Jean-Claude Pressac and Stephen Tyas spring to mind - than there have been 'serious revisionists'. Since the number of 'serious revisionists' in retrospect is basically a sample of one, Carlo Mattogno.

What does it take to be a 'serious historian', exactly? You've mentioned this more than once, and it's been chopped-down easily at each instance. Whether archival access, social support, financial or legal considerations, etc., there are maximum disincentives to challenge the 'Holocaust' narrative, and it is nearly impossible to make a successful career out of it. Mattogno has been fortunate to come from a family with some wealth, at least enough that he could essentially focus full-time on revisionism without having to generate income any other way. This is not going to be the case for 99% of would-be revisionists, and of those that could afford it financially, the many other personal/social incentives are enough to dissuade the remainder.

Your emphasis on a lack of 'serious historians' on the revisionist side comes off as a desperate, transparent cheap-shot. You know the reasons why revisionism lacks individuals with this degree of commitment (you'd surely admit more incentives means more people would be doing it), yet you still nonetheless keep presenting this condition as though it is evidence of revisionism lacking in evidence or valid interpretation. It comes off as a shameless and intellectually dishonest cheap-shot; I cannot think of another way to describe it.

How are you enjoying your salary, Nick? We both have a passionate interest in the exact same events and period in history, yet you are paid handsomely for it, praised by impressionable young adults for the 'wisdom' you impart upon them. The rest of us here (revisionists) have to work double-time to make ends meet.

[curioussoul]

How are you enjoying your salary, Nick? We both have a passionate interest in the exact same events and period in history, yet you are paid handsomely for it, praised by impressionable young adults for the 'wisdom' you impart upon them. The rest of us here (revisionists) have to work double-time to make ends meet.

On the taxpayer time, no less. Thank you for final calling this out. I wonder if his students know he literally plagiarized hundreds of archival and other sources and lied about having personally accessed them in order to bolster his own credibility when arguing with revisionists. I won't ask about the faculty staff because they obviously have no standards whatsoever.