Eichmann and the Sassen Tapes

[ConfusedJew]

ConfusedJew, this is more AI slop. The document-evaluation framework I provided was for evaluating specific documents (e.g. those individually claimed as proof of 'extermination' events in Eastern territories). Your questions to ChatGPT are general and don't even mention any specific document, making any analysis from ChatGPT totally irrelevant here (in addition to your use of ChatGPT being largely inappropriate, in general). You lack even the most basic knowledge of historical analysis yet continue LARPing as though you have a clue. It's distracting and unproductive.

It's not "AI slop". If you don't have a response to the information, I don't know how I would refute it in your shoes, that's fine. But I think any reasonable person would see that you are backing down which would be an L.

[Stubble]

CJ, is an interview 20 years after the event a period document? As 'Fangers has kindly pointed out to you, you didn't read the framework and you misapplied it.

I don't know what to tell you.

[Wetzelrad]

At the very end, I asked it to make the best argument that it could that the Holocaust did not exist, based on the inconsistencies and inaccuracies of Eichmann's testimonies and it gave me and the answer you can see might surprise you!

The words "best argument" don't appear. What you actually asked was:

Can you really think very hard to find any way that this undermines the credibility of the Final Solution and existence of the gas chambers?

ChatGPT then proceeded to "steel-man" that position, or at least pretended to, but already within the first item it began arguing against itself.

Undermining Claim: If his most incriminating statements emerged after capture, in a trial with political stakes, they might have been influenced, edited, or selectively released. This could raise the possibility that postwar “confessions” were manipulated to support the narrative of the Final Solution. Counterpoint: But the earlier, private, non-coerced Sassen interviews are more incriminating, not less. That reverses the logic of fabrication. The trial statements were more defensive, suggesting a real trend away from confession under pressure, not toward it.

So this isn't really a "best argument" or a "steel-man" but an attempt to reaffirm the Holocaust, exactly as one would expect from an AI trained on Holocaust affirmation material. Therefore it is not surprising at all.

Moreover, the argument isn't very good. The interviews with Sassen were certainly not private or un-influenced. This has already been explained in the OP. I also doubt that Eichmann's earlier statements are more incriminating than his trial statements based on what I've seen so far. Habel's interview also destroys this argument.

For comparison, I presented Grok with several revisionist articles and asked it to evaluate Eichmann using the same framework (however inappropriately). Compared to your score of 81, it gave 51 for Eichmann's testimony and 57 for the Eichmann tapes. (It also amusingly gave a score of 30 to Eichmann's papers due to chain of custody concerns.) Grok's ultimate conclusion was that the tapes and transcripts "provide limited and compromised evidence about the Holocaust, primarily reflecting Eichmann’s self-justification and social motives rather than reliable historical facts." It admitted in particular that his victim numbers are not reliable. It then proceeded to regurgitate back to me facts that it had just been given, indicating that it simply accepts whatever it is told without critical faculty.

I shouldn't have to tell you this, but these LLMs are toys, not truth machines. They are biased by whatever they're trained and primed on. They're often factually wrong. They can be fooled very easily. I agree with Callafangers that this is AI slop. I am now in favor of restricting AI on the forum.

[ConfusedJew]

CJ, is an interview 20 years after the event a period document? As 'Fangers has kindly pointed out to you, you didn't read the framework and you misapplied it.

I don't know what to tell you.

The framework works very well. While a testimony may not be a physical object, it still is a piece of evidence.

The Sassen Tapes were from the late 1950s, not 20 years later.

[Stubble]

Still not a period document.

[Nessie]

If ever there was an opportunity for a senior Nazi to put the record straight, and to say what really happened to the millions of Jews supposedly not murdered, it was when Sassen interviewed Eichmann.

[Stubble]

Did you, just call eichmann a senior nazi?

[Nessie]

Did you, just call eichmann a senior nazi?

Yes. His various roles in the management of the operation of the Final Solution, meant he had detailed knowledge of the fate of the Jews.

[bombsaway]

Eichmann had the opportunity to set the record straight and do damage to his enemies, the Jews, by unraveling their conspiracy. This would have been a major achievement, even positive in my mind assuming he and Germany were innocent .This was Sassen's great hope going in. Instead, according to revisionists, he told them 'spooky stories' out of animus towards Sassen essentially. The tapes and transcripts show a conflict, but it emerged out of Eichmann s refusal to deny. I can't think of many better examples of the silliness of revisionists.

[Wahrheitssucher]

Eichmann had the opportunity to set the record straight and do damage to his enemies, the Jews, by unraveling their conspiracy. This would have been a major achievement, even positive in my mind assuming he and Germany were innocent. This was Sassen's great hope going in. Instead, according to revisionists, he told them 'spooky stories' out of animus towards Sassen essentially. The tapes and transcripts show a conflict, but it emerged out of Eichmann’s refusal to deny. I can't think of many better examples of the silliness of revisionists.

There are a fair few false premises, imprecise/vague implications and weasel-words here.

One, the claim that Eichmann said or wrote that Jews were his “enemies”. FALSE. He never did.

Two, the implication that revisionists must prove Eichmann and NSDAP-ruled Germany “were innocent”. But “innocent” of what exactly?
Innocent of wanting Europe judenrein? Nobody denies that.
Innocent of arresting and incarcerating whole jewish communities? Nobody denies that.
Innocent of using jews for labour. Nobody denies that either.

Thirdly, the ill-informed implication by Bombsaway is that Eichmann was in a position to “deny” something. Again it isn’t made clear what exactly.

What appears to not be understood by this faithful true-believer approach is that Eichmann wasn’t in a position to know exactly what happened in the concentration camps. He was in his offices in Berlin and Vienna during the war. His role was supervising deportation of jews to camps, to ghettoes and to eastern occupied Soviet territories. Not in overseeing mass-executions.

The holocaust narrative includes a fundamentally self-contradictory assertion within it that few notice:
1.) it asserts that the death camps and extermination procedures were top secret and so known only to those who planned and ordered it plus those who administered the executions;
and simultaneously
2.) it asserts that everybody knew, including the entire German civilian population.
And this self-contradictory assertion was the ‘story’ that the whole world was given; including ALL the Third Reich top-brass and high-level functionaries.

At Nuremberg the coerced Camp kommandant Rudolf Höß gave his infamous, physically impossible, now-refuted testimony. And at that time no NSDAP high-functionary other than tortured Höß and Herman Göring knew it was false. Therefore it was testimony that was believed by the defendants on trial. Defendants who all went into “emotional shock” at Höß’s ‘admission’. (We know they did because that was recorded in the published journal of Jewish Prison psychologist Captain Gilbert). Consequently their defence was of ignorance and non-involvement of this ‘top secret’ genocide.

Anyone who reads the interviews of Jewish psychiatrist Leon Goldensohn of the imprisoned defendants at Nuremberg will know that with the exception of Höß, ALL of them denied any knowledge or involvement in mass-murder at camps.

They all knew about the ‘final solution’ (Endlösung der Judenfrage), but not that it meant ‘extermination’/mass-murder.

This applies to all the defendants at Nuremburg, including Hans Frank, Ernst Kaltenbrunner, Albert Speer and even Herman Göring, the one who implemented the ‘final solution’ order to Heydrich.

For decades people couldn’t know this because Leon Goldensohn‘s interviews weren’t published until 2006 after his death.

SUMMARY: If the holocaust mass-gassing-extermination narrative is false, then Eichmann was like everybody else in that he couldn’t know whether there really had been ‘top secret’ death camps in Poland or not. He would have been in a similar position to people like Speer, Keitel, Dönitz, Jodl, Schacht, Schirach, Streicher, Hess, Ribbentropp, Rosenberg, etc.
They all knew there was a ‘final solution’ policy against jews, they all knew jews were arrested, transported to camps and ghettos. But WE the honest investigator have to decide whether they KNEW about a policy of mass extermination of Jews or not.

He did visit Auschwitz on one occasion in 1943. But if the Birkenau krema were top-secret extermination centres, was he informed?
Who knows for sure? That is what every honest, rational, unbiased investigator must decide.

And if there weren’t mass-executions in Auschwitz and that is a hoax, but he knew that some Russian PoWs and others definitely were gassed, (e.g. as Auschwitz accountant Oskar Gröning asserted) then he wouldn’t KNOW in 1950: a.) WHAT WAS FACT and b.) WHAT WAS EXAGGERATION and c.) WHAT WAS ATROCITY PROPAGANDA.

This ignorance explains his contradictory statements and testimony to:
- Sassen,
- to the Jewish Televised show-trial at Tel Aviv,
- to Pastor Rev. Hull,
- in his autobiography/memoir written in prison in Tel Aviv.

[Nessie]

....

What appears to not be understood by this faithful true-believer approach is that Eichmann wasn’t in a position to know exactly what happened in the concentration camps. He was in his offices in Berlin and Vienna during the war. His role was supervising deportation of jews to camps, to ghettoes and to eastern occupied Soviet territories. Not in overseeing mass-executions.

...

Why did he not provide any evidence of millions of Jews, in camps, ghettos and the eastern territories? His role of managing deportations, would entail knowing how many Jews went where.

[bombsaway]

There are a fair few false premises, imprecise/vague implications and weasel-words here.

One, the claim that Eichmann said or wrote that Jews were his “enemies”. FALSE. He never did.

[Eichmann:] I’m telling you, Comrade Sassen: I can’t. I can’t because I’m not ready. Because I am reluctant to say that we have done something wrong. No. I must tell you quite honestly, if we had killed 10.3 million Jews out of the 10.3 million Jews that [Reich statistician, Richard]Korherr, as we now know, discovered, then I would be satisfied and would say: Good, we have destroyed an enemy.

What Eichmann could have denied was the existence of a program of mass killing Jews. This is what Sassen had hoped to disprove.

It's one thing to say guards in one section of Auschwitz wouldn't necessarily know about extermination activities in another, but make no mistake Eichmann was high up in hierarchy, if not in title than responsibility, answering directly to Himmler, Muller, Kaltenbrunner. I don't know what the argument is here exactly. Even if he didn't know for sure it would still be silly (probably he would have to be psychotic) for him to take this route.

[TlsMS93]

Eichmann is declaring that if they had killed that number of Jews, he would not see it as a negative, he did not present it as if it had happened. And the transcript of this recording was not even accepted as evidence in court for various reasons, such as doubts about its authenticity and possible manipulation of compromising parts, unsworn recording and for propaganda purposes. The German authorities do not make the entire file available to the public, only parts “to ensure that it exists”.

Eichmann was convicted on various sets of evidence, such as Nazi documents that implicated his involvement in the Holocaust trains, witnesses and his reluctant admission to the trial “for following superior orders”, but that is all. He implicated himself but did not admit that millions of Jews were murdered since he was not inside the places participating in the extermination process. His arrest and trial location were clearly illegal and discussing this is a waste of time, I would say.

[bombsaway]

Eichmann is declaring that if they had killed that number of Jews, he would not see it as a negative, he did not present it as if it had happened. And the transcript of this recording was not even accepted as evidence in court for various reasons, such as doubts about its authenticity and possible manipulation of compromising parts, unsworn recording and for propaganda purposes.

I quoted that part to show the other poster that he was incorrect to say Eichmann had not referred to the Jews as enemies. It's quite obvious from the transcripts and recordings that Eichmann upheld the existence of a mass program of killing including use of gas chambers and Sassen was horrified by this.

Your other comments are tangential to my point. I guess you are inferring the recordings and transcripts are fabricated, which the op is not arguing.

[fireofice]

Not everyone has the end goal of "sticking it to their enemies". People have all kinds of motivations and desires. Bombsaway is doing history in a very silly way by assuming everyone must have his ends and goals in mind but just under different ideologies. Very ridiculous.