Archie wrote: ↑Sun Mar 15, 2026 2:55 pm
Nessie wrote: ↑Sun Mar 15, 2026 9:49 am
Katyn had a counter narrative. The Nazis produced evidence the Soviets were responsible, the Soviets had their evidence the Nazis were responsible. The reason why I reject the Soviet evidence, is because the Nazi claim is better evidenced, so much so that the Soviets ended up accepting the Nazi version was true.
It is the same process as to why I accept TII was a death camp. The historians produce a better evidenced case than the revisionist's multiple claims, and the Nazis accept the historical version as the correct one. They cannot produce an evidenced alternative.
The reason why the Soviets found contrary witnesses, was because they made up the story for those witnesses to tell. The reason why no contrary witnesses to the death camp process have been found is because there are none and no one has faked contrary ones, even the Nazis.
How are you able to miss the relevant point EVERY SINGLE TIME? It's really rather amazing.
You are the one who missed the point. There is no counter narrative for the death camps, because no evidence has been found to produce one. There was a counter narrative for Katyn, because the Soviets hoaxed one. It was not because they found evidence to produce a genuine counter narrative that revised the history of what took place.
There were competing Katyn investigations only because the territory changed hands. The German investigation was done in 1943 and the Soviet investigation was done in 1944. Both found what they wanted to find and got witnesses to support their story. That supports what I'm saying. At Nuremberg there was no competing investigation, not really.
You are mixing apples and pears. Katyn was the subject of a hoax, by the Soviets. A hoax is not a counter narrative, as in a historical revision. It is a hoax and it is what Holocaust denier/revisionists are perpetrating, making them comparable with the Soviets.
There is an evidenced history of what happened at Katyn and inside TII and there are hoaxes perpetrated by the Soviets and revisionists. In both cases, no evidence has been found to produce a historical revision.
At Nuremberg, it was stated that common facts did not need to be proved. The Soviet reports on Auschwitz and Majdanek (USSR-8 and USSR-29) were accepted into evidence by the tribunal and were referred to in the opening indictment. This, under the charter, was sufficient to "prove" millions were killed at Auschwitz. Later Hoess also testified to the same thing, and the defendants did not have any practical way to dispute this, nor would that have been wise to attempt. The defense tactics were to mitigate individual guilt without trying to contradict the Allies on their overall narrative.
Here are the comments by Charles R. Wennerstrum who as a judge at the NMT 7 case. His critical comments were published in the Chicago Tribune, much to the consternation of Telford Taylor.
“If I had known seven months ago what I know today, I would never have come here.
Obviously, the victor in any war is not the best judge of the war crime guilt. Try as you will, it is impossible to convey to the defense, their counsel, and their people that the court is trying to represent all mankind rather than the country which appointed its members.
What I have said of the nationalist character of the tribunals applies to the prosecution. The high ideal announced as the motives for creating these tribunals has not been evident.
The prosecution has failed to maintain objectivity aloof from vindictiveness, aloof from personal ambitions for convictions. It has failed to strive to lay down precedents which might help the world to avoid future wars.
The entire atmosphere here is unwholesome. Linguists were needed.
The Americans are notably poor linguists. Lawyers, clerks, interpreters and researchers were employed who became Americans only in recent years, whose backgrounds were imbedded in Europe’s hatreds and prejudices.
The trials were to have convinced the Germans of the guilt of their leaders.
They convinced the Germans merely that their leaders lost the war to tough conquerors.
Most of the evidence in the trials was documentary, selected from the large tonnage of captured records. The selection was made by the prosecution.
The defense had access only to those documents which the prosecution considered material to the case.
Our tribunal introduced a rule of procedure that when the prosecution introduced an excerpt from a document, the entire document should be made available to the defense for presentation as evidence. The prosecution protested vigorously. General Taylor tried out of court to call a meeting of the presiding judges to rescind this order. It was not the attitude of any conscientious officer of the court seeking full justice.
Also abhorrent to the American sense of justice is the prosecution’s reliance upon self-incriminating statements made by the defendants while prisoners for more than two and a half years, and repeated interrogation without presence of counsel. Two and one-half years of confinement is a form of duress in itself.
The lack of appeal leaves me with a feeling that justice has been denied.
[…] You should go to Nuremberg. You would see there a palace of justice where 90 per cent of the people are interested in prosecution.
[…] The German people should receive more information about the trials and the German defendants should receive the right to appeal to the United Nations.”
The problems with your Nuremberg narrative are;
1 - the Holocaust was barely part of the IMT trials, which were of senior Nazis for war crimes.
2 - those senior Nazi provided no narrative or other evidence to prove that millions of Jews who had been arrested 1939-44, were still alive in the camps and ghettos in 1944. The Allies knew that in 1945, they had liberated only a few hundred thousand Jews.
3 - by 1945, the claims from Polish Intelligence reports about the existence of death camps had been evidenced and corroborated.
4 - Nazi mass murder by shooting was already well established and evidenced, which along with their policies and open hostility towards Jews, and how they more than any other prisoner had been neglected and starved, meant motive was proven.
5 - the later trails of SS camp staff, the majority of which were run by German prosecutors in West, East and then unified Germany, produced more evidence that death camps had existed.
There has been ample time and investigations, many of which have been by people at least sympathetic towards the Nazis, or who are anti-Semitic, to come up with counter evidence. With digitisation and access to archives, it is easier than ever to find evidence. Plenty of revisionists have tried to produce counter narratives. So, you are wrong to claim that there has been no search for witnesses who have a counter narrative. You just claim that because no such witnesses have been found.