Archie wrote: ↑Thu Oct 17, 2024 6:34 pm
SanityCheck wrote: ↑Thu Oct 17, 2024 6:47 am
Archie, in syllogistic terms what is being objected to is the reverse claim in one of your syllogisms
The Jews were either holocausted or they were resettled
They were not holocausted
Therefore they were resettled
It's not symmetric, imo.
Search Domain
There is the familiar adage "you can't prove a negative." This adage is incorrect, but the intuition behind it is not totally off base. It is true that open-ended propositions with a wide search domain are often very difficult to verify. In history, this actually comes up all the time. Say the earliest document referring to X is dated 1827. More precisely that is the earliest that I am aware of. To be safe, I would hedge by saying something like "the earliest known document" etc. Maybe someone else is already aware of an earlier example. Maybe an earlier example will be discovered. The point being is that it's hard to make an absolute statement "this is the earliest" or "there is no document X" because we are usually dealing with a wide search domain (all potentially relevant written records). If I can't check everything I can't conclusively rule out there being an example from prior to 1827.
On the other hand, it is easy to "prove a negative" if the search domain is narrow and well-defined.
"There isn't an elephant in my backyard." This is easy to prove because
the domain is limited.
"There are no elephants in New Hampshire." Harder because
the domain is much wider. You'd probably have to start calling some zoos. And could there be a privately owned elephant somewhere? If that is not legal, could someone have an illegal elephant? You can see how this gets difficult.
"There are no [insert some small, hyper-specific, non-native species] in Australia." Potentially very hard to disprove. Elephants are hard to hide and so you can make very reasonable assumptions to cut down the search domain. But if we're talking about a subspecies of rat or something, it becomes a lot harder to prove that there are in fact zero of them in Australia.
In the case of the Holocaust, I think the search domain is much more limited for the Holocaust than for resettlement (or more precisely survival). The extermination areas of TII, Belzec, and Sobibor are not very large. Only some tens of thousands of square meters. If the story is true, I say the proof would be right there in the ground, and it's not going anywhere. And I'm convinced it's not there (realizing of course that this is a hotly contested point). The German documents are a somewhat wide domain (it is for one person) but they are reasonably well searched by now (much more so on the pro-Holocaust side) and since the extermination program is BIG, we should find some proof without too much trouble. It's not quite "elephant in the backyard" but surely it's much closer to that than "rats in Australia." And I think "resettlement" is closer toward the latter. You all seem to view it the opposite way (like resettlement is an elephant in the backyard, but I totally disagree with that).
One problem here is the discussion especially from the 'revisionist' side keeps slipping to the Reinhard camps only, as in your post above which mentioned BST and did not mention Auschwitz, Chelmno, the other KZs, T4 or the mass shootings. The Reinhard camps appear to be the weak spot, one reason being because there aren't clear-cut documents referencing gassing as there are for Auschwitz and Chelmno, but they're bracketed by the other camps and the wider east with numerous mass shootings through to the Caucasus, and tied in to the rest of the history in various ways. Key sources and witnesses from Korherr to Hoess, Blobel, Eichmann and others tie in the Reinhard camps with the rest.
Geography is more decisive since it would be truly anomalous if the Jews of annexed western Poland had been exterminated by gas (going by the prima facie documents) and the Jews of eastern Poland and further east into the Soviet Union were slaughtered in mass shootings, but we somehow decide to engage in mystery-mongering about the Jews of central Poland.
Like it or not, the parts therefore provide indirect corroboration for each other. This does not work as well in the opposite direction, since sooner or later one runs into a very well documented aspect, or one that has even more source types. Birkenau isn't after all just about Hoess, it's also about the Sonderkommando manuscripts, photos, a detailed set of files on the construction of the crematoria, the ZBL photos, and the Auschwitz album photos, just naming a few examples, little of which has any equivalents for Treblinka
However: I have pointed out just in the past day that research has not stood still on the Reinhard camps any more than it's stood still on Auschwitz, Chelmno, other KZs, T4 or the mass shootings. The example of the Treblinka gold rush photo is a good one: on its own it is not 'decisive', but it emerged at a time when deathcamps.org had published many but not all of the 1945 photographs of the investigation of Treblinka. Those photos were not in Hilberg, who has no photos whatsoever, and were not really included in Arad.
There were no museums and researchers working on the Reinhard camps until 20-25 years ago, now these exist for all three camps in Poland, while interest has grown elsewhere, e.g. in Russia because of the Sobibor revolt, the state archives published various sources, and this paralleled editions on Treblinka and Majdanek; there's also now a developing Russian archives website on the Warsaw ghetto uprising. Compared even to 2011, there is just a lot more material available.
This also applies to the range of archaeological studies *across* Poland as well as studies of the environment or local society surrounding these camps; the Poles especially are going beyond just the key camps and that needs to be factored in here as well, but they're also underlining facts about the Reinhard camps which should be front and centre of the discussions. For sure, it is now impossible to claim that there were no cremations and no mass graves at these camps, and that has realistically been the case ever since the Kola investigations of Belzec. So I think non-'revisionists' are entitled to dismiss 'revisonists' who keep on insisting there were "no mass graves" and who fail to acknowledge there clearly were cremations.
The proportion, size, extent is what should be discussed, not the all-or-nothing bollocks or goalpost moving that has cluttered a few parts of the internet for the past two decades. As I have definitely observed recently, but also repeatedly over the years, the question of scale matters immensely.
I might have a slight bias in pointing to Chelmno but not without good reason: the scale is into six figures, there are documents about gassing and cremation, there were archaeological digs, it was terribly situated if someone wants to claim it was a 'transit camp' for real, and separated from its property sorting depot at Pabianice (so Prudent Regret cannot really make one of his hobby-horse arguments about it), the 1945 investigation was much more extensive and the 'camp' integrated into the local area more directly. Even an issue like the supply of firewood is nonexistent for Chelmno as Heinrich May's testimony indicates he was tasked with supplying the camp with firewood. Plus the cremations were observed in diary like notes recorded by a villager.
And the Germans demonstrably lied and contradicted themselves about where the deportees from Lodz were actually being sent.
It's obvious that Chelmno is significantly better sourced and fewer objections can be raised to it, so it's unsurprising it has received much less attention from 'revisionists'. While it was a little obscure 30 years ago, the 2000s totally changed that especially considering German research.
But the issues raised by Chelmno do help point to what to look for with the Reinhard camps. I do have for example a testimony noting the supply of firewood to Treblinka brought locally by horse and cart, which was likely one of many sources for keeping things fuelled. I have just pointed to seven contemporary Polish underground sources which reference mass cremations beginning and ongoing at Treblinka, and there are likely more. The same with the other Reinhard camps; studies of Belzec have noted that a CO bottle was found onsite at Belzec, which also happened with Majdanek, as pointed out recently, with a blatant T4 connection.
The Ortskommandantur Ostrow report mentioning that "the Jews in Treblinka are not adequately buried and that, as a result, an unbearable body stench befouls the air" was first known in the 1960s in West German research, and was certainly used from at the latest 2000 with Browning's report for Irving vs Lipstadt. The phrasing becomes significant when compared with a document about Chelmno: "From a reliable source, the Forschungststelle has now learned that the police guards there later re-exhumed the Jews buried in a little wood near Kulmhof and had to burn them in specially constructed furnaces."
The fact of burial can be determined from the shape of mass graves that can be detected archaeologically today, it is obviously testified to extensively and was reported by contemporary sources as well. So it's not very likely that these German documents noting burials of Jews in two of the four pure extermination camps/sites were retrospectively forged, especially as nobody made a fuss about the Chelmno document until I blogged about it in 2017. +
Who Controls the Evidence?
"The evidence" doesn't exist in a vacuum. Especially with something like testimonies, most of the ones that are available exist because somebody collected them for a purpose. Understanding that context and selection bias is essential and this point is never addressed on your side. At all. The effort that went into the Nuremberg prosecution and other trials is huge and it dwarfs the cumulative efforts and resources of revisionists many times over. And since then I think it's fair to say that by the time a revisionist gets to see something, an army of Jewish scholars etc have probably picked it over several times. There has possibly been some suppression of documents. The Germans could have destroyed some documents and obviously would done so selectively. And the Allies might have had some incentive to suppress or at the very least not publicize inconvenient documents.
On the contrary, conventional historiography, especially German scholarship, *has* to address the selection bias issue when introductions survey source collections and observe what has and has not survived from the official/business type documentation, and the different collections of testimonies and personal accounts. This is a core part of conventional historical methodology. The Germans may be better at this than the Anglo-Americans whose books tend to have some of the wissenschaftlich parts lopped off, but the discussions are certainly there.
The point about suppression of documents by the Allies does not convince me, since the more striking feature is the dispersal of the captured document collections across much of the length and breadth of Europe, as well as the very many regional, local and business archives within Germany/Austria - neither the Americans nor the Soviets hauled off absolutely everything to Washington, DC or Moscow. US microfilming was also sometimes more selective than appears to be the case at first glance, so considerable numbers of files within particular collections then only got noticed in their German cataloguing.
The unspoken presumption that 1940s investigators or archivists knew what to suppress is also not convincing, since I don't detect a relentless obsession with the Holocaust from US, Soviet, Polish investigators in the 1940s, as their investigations were far more broad front. There are many examples of initial confusions or overconfident certainties which were chipped away and reduced by subsequent historical research showing that the surviving paper trail indicated a lesser figure. I don't get the impression that 1940s investigators would have known what to weed out, or indeed that there wouldn't have been intermediate positions. Certainly any hint that more had survived would have been greeted with joy by Jewish organisations, especially if the survivors also emerged.
Exploring the history of postwar document processing and the chain of custody, one soon comes across the fact that much of the Luftwaffe records as well as the Wilhelmine Army records of WWI went up in smoke in a RAF raid on Potsdam in 1945, while one ship bringing captured German documents to the US sank. The patterns of destruction seem to fit firstly German efforts, with the surviving caches sometimes being an obvious small sliver of what must have once existed, and secondly the effects of war or accidents, as with the above examples.
The general pattern with 'incriminating' documents that have sometimes been labelled as forgeries by 'revisonists' is that there are further examples which remained in the archives to be discovered much later on by historians.
I also need to remind you of past discussions of testimony collections, especially 1940s historical commissions, but also the function of subsequent archives. This applies both to Jewish accounts and any other accounts from WWII. Basically, this is what archives are for. The Imperial War Museum put out a book with edited highlights from WWII-era British diaries, and a blurb noted it possessed over a thousand such diaries from WWII. Just diaries, not unpublished memoirs or oral histories or letters, which the IWM also has in abundance for both world wars and other conflicts involving Britain. There are similar museums and archives around the world which collect letters, diaries, manuscript memoirs and so on. This is true for Poles leaving manuscripts about their war experiences as for Polish Jews who might have given their MSes to the Jewish Historical Institute in Warsaw, to Yad Vashem, to USHMM or YIVO, or German Jews who donated their MSes to the Leo Baeck Institute. The same practices existed and exist in Ukraine, Russia and other countries. It's quite apparent that a lot of material for WWII and the Holocaust has come tumbling out of attics in recent decades, once great-grandparents and grandparents pass away, and the war generation disappears.
This material has to be sifted and worked through, but that's also true for the surprise caches and collections of extra material which keep coming to light because of research. The bugged conversations in British and US POW camps for German prisoners of war are one example. Another are the interrogation protocols of German deserters who fled to Switzerland. So these can be woven together alongside diaries, field post letters, and postwar memoirs, with all of these categories seeing a major surge of publications in the past two decades, again, as the veterans reached the end of their lives or their families decided to publish the letters etc. A non-negligible number record hearing about or witnessing killings of Jews and other target groups, with the longest Swiss military interrogation, of a SD officer, not only conveying knowledge of the Einsatzgruppen, Auschwitz and gas vans, but also insider details about Nebe's role in helping instigate them - independent evidence, which remained stuck in a Swiss archive for decades.
The days when the IMT-NMT documentation and witnesses were 'it' are long over; even Hilberg in 1961 was drawing on other archival collections, and the balance has definitely flipped since then.
I'd also say that going through 1940s investigations/trials, then the 1960s cases, both in West Germany as well as the DDR, Austria, Soviet Union, then later cases (e.g. denaturalisation proceedings), one sees a considerable expansion of knowledge and use of sources, which is then overtaken with the 1990s-era opening-of-East-European-archives research. By the 2000s, conventional attention shifted a little towards contemporary non-German and unofficial German personal accounts, or rather the volume of such contemporary sources reached a critical mass. This alongside factoring in the 1940s historical commissions, etc.
As there were numerous opportunities for German and other non-Jewish historical witnesses to record or deposit their experiences and potentially take a contrarian stance in safety, as well as numerous opportunities to do so when grilled in 1960s investigations, then the absence of accounts pointing towards anything different is significant. The excuses about living in fear and potential threats of prosecution make zero sense when the far right press, NPD and other groups were actively denying the extermination of the Jews in West Germany. But for some reason these interested parties with their own 'selection bias' failed to present counter-evidence, otherwise we would have heard about it long, long ago. While one could save the delusion by claiming that the far right of 1960s West Germany was a 'controlled opposition', this tips over into cloud cuckoo land. Not everyone on the far right could have been a Bundesverfassungschutz informer, nor was every former Nazi even living in West Germany through the postwar era.
Hypotheses, Hunches, etc
It is common with a complex and wide-ranging topic to have some gaps. Both sides have some gaps, imo. Often the way research works is that you SUSPECT something, then you look, then you might either confirm or disconfirm it or it remains inclusive. Criminal investigations work like this as well. I would argue that it is not only okay to have hutches, this is ESSENTIAL. It's fine as long as you offer the appropriate caveats and don't overstate your case.
Those should really be ongoing research hypotheses. Really, any researcher should know the hunches and hypotheses and keep an eye out for how sources could fit in with them. Having read the 'revisionist' oeuvre in the mid-2000s after my PhD and having done a lot more research since then, I have certainly kept an eye out for anything that might support 'revisionist' claims, as much as seeing how conventional claims are reinforced by considering expanded ranges of sources.
"Resettlement"
Like I mentioned, I don't like either/or set-ups. You are correct that there are implications of the revisionist thesis. And I suppose if the implications were totally absurd, then, sure, we would need to reassess some things. But in its simplest form the main implication (or alternative hypothesis) is that they survived (or a lot of them did). And I don't see that as an inherently crazy proposition.
Proving "no resettlement"
If you want to do the "no resettlement, therefore holocaust" argument (to be fair, this doesn't apply as much to you since you are not a johnny-one-note like some anti-revisionists), I would recommend trying to prove the negative. It's usually phrased as a demand for proof of resettlement from revisionists. If it were me, I would go further and try to argue that they could not have survived. That seems way, way harder than just looking at the killing sites, etc. And I don't think it would ever be conclusive (just as I don't think the Sanning style approach on the revisionist side can ever be conclusive). But if someone wants to present that case thoroughly, I would take it seriously.
Conventional history doesn't make a 'no resettlement, therefore holocaust' argument. The overviews cover both Poland and the Soviet Union, the wider literature includes numerous studies of occupations of countries and regions. These add up to an implicit refutation of 'resettlement' claims because none of the occupation studies further east have uncovered any evidence for it. Historians can't include a discussion of something for which there are no sources, they do discuss the known transfers and labour deportations (eg the Warsaw-Bobruisk deportations in 1942, which bypassed Treblinka entirely).
'Revisionism' in recent decades has been overwhelmingly focused on the key extermination camps, and research into 'resettlement' has stagnated since Thomas Kues vanished in 2013. But the not-Holocaust core claim relies on keeping resettlement/transit as a get out of jail free card, which amounts to dumping problems onto a large vague space called 'the east' which few have any intention of ever researching or reading about. Mattogno wrote a big book on 'the Einsatzgruppen' originally 7-8 years ago (2016-2017 in Italian) and nobody has really advanced this theme further. But that book basically ignores the 'resettlement' claims Mattogno makes in other books when he needs to move deported Jews or registered Auschwitz prisoners rapidly away from selections and gas chambers.
From my perspective, having explored German occupation policy and themes such as food, forced labour and forced evacuations, then the 'resettlement' claim, which is certainly present from at least Butz onwards, and arguably in Rassinier, is quite bemusing, since the counterfactual of deporting the well documented numbers of Jews onwards would have resulted at the very least in a Transnistria type scenario, more likely something like the Armenian genocide, and over 1942 to mid 1944 could very easily have caused the total extinction of all of the 'resettlers'. The Nazis definitely *had* contemplated this scenario and were still clinging to parts of the vision into early 1942.
Neither the Polish underground nor the Soviets had any reason not to report broadly accurately on this scenario, if that is what had happened. The Poles didn't, because it wasn't in the end the policy the Germans adopted, starting with the Warthegau and Chelmno. That is what they reported on. That much should be clear from any narrative history of the Holocaust structured largely chronologically (Gilbert, Friedlander, Cesarani in particular).
From this basic narrative history perspective, by the time one gets to July-September 1942 and the Great Deportation from the Warsaw ghetto to Treblinka, and the acceleration of Aktion Reinhardt, one is also dealing with the acceleration of extermination by shooting in western Ukraine and Belarusian Polesie, right next door to the Lublin and Galicia districts. It so happens this phase also coincides with the battles of Stalingrad and the Rzhev salient, intensitified partisan warfare in Belarus and Russia, and so on. This would have been a very curious time to shift large populations, especially as Goering was demanding increased food requisitioning *everywhere* for the new harvest year. That is why Hans Frank chaired a meeting on 24 August 1942 at which it was noted that the feeding of 1.2 million non-working Jews in the GG would soon cease, and 300,000 working Jews would be kept alive - figures very similar to the final Korherr numbers as it happens.
One possible implied argument from 'revisionists' which used to be much more widely heard from Germans is the assumption that the Germans were too moral to contemplate genocide or mass death. That seems ludicrous when they were casually accepting the potential deaths from starvation and exhaustion of up to 30 million Soviet city-dwellers and noted the deaths of millions of Soviet POWs over the winter of 1941-2 (Goebbels and Rosenberg both had things to say about this).
So, either the evidence for callous indifference through to deliberate planned starvation is all faked *as well*, or it forces the question why the Jews would be treated any differently. Thus 'revisionism' only goes out of the frying pan of Treblinka into the fire of mass starvation and massive deaths in expulsion operations.
From a German POV, killing unwanted populations of Jews was neater, more hygienic, less likely to trigger epidemics as the movement of Soviet POWs had, and was going to expose fewer Aryans to the grimness of watching large populations be malnourished or starve, whatever the intensity. No fuss about finding spaces to hold Jews in, whether ghettos, camps or reservations, to guard them or anything.
In principle, the killing could have been done by shooting at various destinations, and this was in fact done in Riga and Estonia (Raasiku) with a few transports in the summer of 1942, clearly squeezed in to tight railway schedules. Shooting was also used in combination with gas vans for the May-October 1942 deportations to Minsk-Maly Trostenets. The Germans also had a shooting gallery for local train deportations in the Polesie at Bronnaia Gora.
All of that was happening alongside waves of mass shootings locally in the east, as well as decimatory shootings at departure ends for deportations to the Reinhard camps, and the 'Judenjagden' hunting down fugitive Jews or rousting them from hiding places, while also mowing down train jumpers. Or indeed machine-gunning transports arriving at Treblinka, as recounted in some testimonies from the breakdown there.
I don't know if this is 'not resettlement therefore holocaust' as much as it's a bad habit of mine to try to put myself in 'revisionist' shoes and imagine the counterfactuals, what-ifs and alternatives, which alas I do find ridiculous.
Approaching this conventionally means not narrowing to only some aspects of the key camps, but thinking regionally and describing many trends unfolding in parallel. And yes, one could revisit the narrative histories (Gilbert, Friedlander, Cesarani) to thicken up the evidence and forestall various objections. That also goes for the wider issue of mass graves and cremation - bearing in mind the most extensive study of this runs to 1400 pages and still didn't use all the evidence available.
