Nessie wrote: ↑Sun Aug 10, 2025 8:42 am
ConfusedJew wrote: ↑Sat Aug 09, 2025 8:51 pm
The Polish Home Army (Armia Krajowa) was among the first to gather intelligence on the Nazi extermination efforts in late 1941 to early 1942...
In April 1944, two Jewish prisoners, Rudolf Vrba and Alfred Wetzler, escaped Auschwitz and wrote a detailed account describing the gas chambers, selection processes, and extermination procedures.
This is an issue so-called revisionists avoid. The earliest reports came from Polish non-Jewish and Slovakian Jewish sources. Even the hardest of hard core holocaust denier, cannot believe that Christian Poles and Jewish Slovaks successfully conspired to fool the word that there had been the mass murder of millions of Jews. So, those earliest reports somehow morph into being from the Soviets, who had a history of mass cover-ups and deceptions.
The issue is really epistemological. We have all this evidence in different forms that all have imperfections, like anything in the real world.
The question is how do you try to objectively evaluate and weigh each piece of evidence, in part and together with other independent sources?
Even when sources of information are not entirely independent, does having more people confirm the say recollection add to the credibility? Collective memory is certainly not perfect, but I do think that if tens of thousands of people report similar big facts, it increases the chance that it is true.
I'll be generous and help them make their case for them, but in social psychology there is a phenomenon that has been documented called the Mandela Effect which describes how specific false memories can sometimes be shared by a large group of people. They'd have to argue that the Mandela effect applies to the Holocaust, and I'm prepared to do that analysis, but I doubt that it will in any compelling way.
These people keep accusing me of being bad faith and lazy and dishonest but I'm literally trying to help them make their arguments stronger since I don't find any of their arguments compelling. But I guess I'm so confident that they are wrong, that I am just not threatened at all by trying to show them how impossible it is that the Holocaust could be either an intentional hoax unintentional false memory.