British Intelligence - war-time knowledge

[Keen]

Nessie is so roundly checkmated its embarrassing to see him continue arguing.

How? I have presented evidence to show what wartime knowledge the British Intelligence service had. Gathering and presenting evidence is something so-called revisionists cannot do, which is why they fail as revisionists.

We've moved beyond "evidencing" Nessie, and you know it.

We are now in the realm of proof.

That's why you are so afraid to debate Greg Gerdes.

[bombsaway]

I'll amend the bolded statement to this, that was a mistake:

"On the other hand we do know that the Germans are out to destroy Jews of any age unless they are fit for manual labour."
https://fpp.co.uk/Auschwitz/docs/Cavend ... tinck.html

That's cherry-picked. That's the only sentence in the entire document that sounds favorable to your position. The rest of it doesn't.

Now, as far as this one sentence, today with our Holocaust goggles on "destroy Jews" might sound like he "knew" about the Holocaust. But within the same document, it seems this guy simultaneously did not believe the gas chamber stories and in fact admits to amplifying gas chamber stories he knew to be false for propaganda purposes. So then he obviously cannot be saying here that he thinks the German government was executing Jews by the millions in gas chambers.

What then does he mean by "destroy the Jews"? Most likely this is a much more general statement about harsh conditions, perhaps some degree of violence, but more probably just an indifference to Jewish welfare and survival. This goes back to the problems I have mentioned before about the common approach to documents on the Holocaust side. For instance, many people might reasonably say right now that the Israelis are "out to destroy" the Palestinians, but there is a range of possibilities for what statements like this might mean and only with the Holocaust do we interpret this sort of thing to mean literal execution of nearly all Jews.

The statement is about destruction of Jews "of any age" unless they are fit for work. So within this cohort that would be children obviously. What does it mean to destroy a child? Taking someone in for manual labor (slave labor in this case) is pretty awful, so destruction is worse than that. Re your Palestinian analogy, anyone who would say Israelis want to destroy Palestinians "of any age" would likely be ascribing homicidal intent there. The issue is there are limitations for Israel, like all the media attention, which act as barriers to carrying out such a mission. Germany had no much more information control over occupied Europe, so less barriers.

The other context that you miss out (perhaps Sanitycheck can expand on this) is that the radio intercepts clearly state mass killing operations of an indiscriminate nature. Not partisan oriented, but about wiping out entire populations of the areas being cleansed.

The "eavesdropped" recordings are also telling, here's the one I quoted

NEUFFER: What will they say when they find our graves in POLAND?
The OGPU213 can’t have done anything worse than that. I myself have
seen a convey at LUDOWICE(?)214 near MINSK; I must say it was
frightful, a horrible sight. There were lorries full of men, women and
children–quite small children. It is ghastly, this picture. The women, the
little children who were, of course, absolutely unsuspecting–frightful! Of
course, I didn’t watch while they were being murdered. German police
stood about with tommy-guns, and–do you know what they had there?
Lithuanians, or fellows like that, in the brown uniform,215 did it. The
German Jews were also sent to the MINSK district, and were gradually
killed off, so far as they survived the other treatment. By treatment I
mean housing and food and so on. It was done like this: when Jews were
taken away from FRANKFURT–they were only notified immediately
beforehand–they were allowed to take only a little with them, a hundred
marks, otherwise nothing, and then the hundred marks would be
demanded from them at the station to pay the fare.216 But these things are
so well known–if that ever gets known in the world at large–that’s why I
was so surprised that we got so frightfully worked up over the KATYN
case!217
BASSENGE: Yes.
NEUFFER: For that’s a trifle in comparison to what we have done there.

Yes we have a description of the massacres but the statement in bold is particularly telling, those German Jews being sent into Belarus were all being killed.

You overlook all these details to defend your interpretation of the word 'destroy'.

We also have this, from Irving's site, the concern was more about methodology than the general act of killing.

Personally, I have never really understood the advantage of the gas chamber over the simpler machine gun, or the equally simple starvation method. These stories may or may not be true, but in any event I submit we are putting out a statement on evidence which is far from conclusive, and which we have no means of assessing.

[Nessie]

An often asked question, is why did the Allies not intercept lots of messages about mass killings and gas chambers?

https://www.nsa.gov/portals/75/document ... opping.pdf

"...Western inability to intercept and decrypt every
message sent by the police or SS units. As such,
much of the intercept came from the police and SS
units operating with the German Army Groups
Center and South. Very little was intercepted and
decrypted from the police units operating in the
Baltic area of operations.2 Also, the security mea-
sure slowly implemented by the Police command
eventually closed this pipeline of information.
The decrypts from the concentration and death
camps that the British analysts reviewed have
similar problems. These particular reports were
periodic accounts, usually in the form of a monthly
summary, of the day-to-day available slave labor
population at a particular camp. Often, a camp’s
population report was broken down further by
nationality or ethnic group. In some cases, the
report was further refined with a statement of the
totals from the beginning and end of each day.
Absent from these reports was information about
those groups who arrived at the camps and imme-
diately were sent to the gas chambers. Why this lat-
ter information about the gassings was withheld
from the camp reports is not clear. Quite possibly,
the SS hierarchy wanted to maintain as much secre-
cy as possible about the extent of the Final Solution.
Later German security precautions only added to
the silence. The result was that analysts at GC&CS,
using only SS and police decrypts, could not pro-
vide explicit intelligence about the mass extermina-
tion activities at Auschwitz/Birkenau and other
such camps.3"

I visited Bletchley and asked staff why so little was intercepted about the AR camps and A-B, and the reasons were;

1 - 1942-3, when the AR camps were operational, little was being intercepted and decoded.
2 - 1941-3, Bletchley's main task was to intercept messages about submarine and aircraft movements, not obscure camps in Poland.
3 - 1943-4, the main task switched to gathering intelligence that would assist D-Day.
4 - Nazi secrecy over the use of gas chambers, was greater than it had been about shooting operations in the east.

[Archie]

The December 1942 publicity stirred up an inconvenient public response in the UK, so the various organs of the British state including the Political Warfare Executive (dictating to the BBC as well as the governments-in-exile) backpedalled on further prominence for such reporting, suppressing or downplaying further reports from Poland including about Auschwitz in 1943. The British did not want to deal with millions of imaginary Jewish refugees descending via the Balkans and Turkey on Palestine, which further dictated the kick-into-touch behaviour at the Bermuda Conference and remained true into 1944. The British were not especially happy when FDR announced the foundation of the War Refugee Board, responding to delayed political pressures in the US.

Regarding the December 1942 statement,

• It resulted from pressure by the WJC
• The language of it was watered down
• They declined to mention gas chambers or anything else specific
• They declined to endorse Rabbi Wise's 2M dead or the 1M dead from Raczynski

Gilbert quotes Richard Law of the Foreign Office remarking in regards to Sydney Silverman's agitations that he was "afraid" that “unless we can make them some kind of gesture they will cause a lot of trouble.” Another said about the possibilty of a statement that it “should, in the absence of clearer evidence, avoid too specific a reference to the plan of extermination.” Ivan Maisky, the Soviet ambassador, when approached with the idea, felt that it “might give some
unhappy Jews some comfort.” Such statements make it clear that the stories were not considered well-substantiated at all and they put together a statement in response to lobbying by Silverman and the WJC.

In the US State Department, some of the comments about the proposed declaration were quite negative. R.B. Reams, for example.

I have grave doubts in regard to the desirability or advisability of issuing a statement of this nature. In the first place, these reports are unconfirmed and emanate to a great extent from the Riegner letter to Rabbi Wise. While the statement does not mention soap, glue, oil and fertilizer factories, it will be taken as additional confirmation of these stories and will support Rabbi Wise’s contention of official confirmation from State Department sources. The way will then be open for further pressure from interested groups for action which might affect the war effort.

[Archie]

Nessie is so roundly checkmated its embarrassing to see him continue arguing.

You know it's bad when SanityCheck has to jump in with one of his proof-by-word-count posts to try to save it.