fireofice wrote:bombsaway wrote:He doesn't provide any such reasoning.
You can clearly see the reasoning here. You are just denying what the document says.
you said about the Rademacher Document: "Their reasoning was that there was more space in the east than anywhere else."
Here's the document again,
In August 1940 I gave you for your files the plan for the final solution of the Jewish Problem, drafted by my office, for which purpose the Madagascar Island was to be demanded from France in the Peace Treaty, while the Reich Security Main Office was to be charged with the actual execution of the task. In accordance with the plan, Gruppenführer Heydrich has been ordered by the Führer to carry out the solution of the Jewish Problem in Europe.
In the meantime the war against the Soviet Union has offered the possibility of putting other territories at our disposal for the final solution. The Führer accordingly has decided that the Jews shall not be deported to Madagascar but to the East. Therefore it is no longer necessary that Madagascar be taken into consideration for the final solution.Where does it say anything about space? You may be making an arguably logical inference here (though also illogical, see below), but it's not in the document.
fireofice wrote:bombsaway wrote:In fact there's no documents around this time that do, or that specify on any level of detail what is going to happen to the resettled Jews, or what did happen to them. There's more documents that have Nazis asking for clarity regarding resettlement plans.
OK and? Not being clear on the details of what will happen is expected.
I think my point is that no documents describe what resettlement is in concrete terms (the Rademacher is actually the most explicit) from 1942 on, the period in which supposedly 1.5 million Polish Jews were brought into Russia.
The reason for such documents existing is that moving this many people in less than a year is logistically challenging, and then there is the challenge of housing them. Millions of pounds of food and water would have to be delivered to them every week, vast camps built to house them, firewood or some other fuel provided for keeping them warm enough to survive in winter time. All of this in near a warzone where frontline troops were already at a logistical bottleneck. I was just listening to an audiobook about the German retreat from Moscow in 1941 and this passage stood out to me
If the German troops retained a general measure of faith in their commanders, this is not
to say it came without qualifications. The most common complaint was the absence of
winter clothing, which by early December 1941 was a criticism that had been dragging on
for two months. The extent of the problem justified, in the starkest of terms, a questioning of
faith in the German leadership. More than a month earlier, on November 1, the army’s
senior quartermaster-general, Major-General Eduard Wagner, gave absolute assurances that
the Ostheer would be adequately supplied for the winter. Goebbels was thrilled and wrote in
his diary: “Everything has been thought of and nothing forgotten. If the enemy places his
hopes in General Winter and believes that our troops in the east will freeze or go hungry he
is completely mistaken.”31 However, Wagner’s assessment went beyond the wildly
optimistic; it was simply impossible. According to Colonel Wilhelm von Rücker, attached to
the planning staff of the quartermaster-general’s office, “a few hundred additional trains
would have had to be sent” to meet the needs of the troops for the coming winter.32 Not
only was there not the transport capacity for winter equipment, but also other high-priority
matériel, such as fuel and ammunition, were already failing to arrive in the required
quantities, and the quartermaster-general had to have known this.33
By November 13 Wagner had had a complete change of heart and acknowledged there
were nowhere near enough trains reaching Army Group Center, meaning the urgently
requested winter clothing could only be transported to the front at the expense of other
supplies and in any case would not arrive until February 1942
They had clothes but lacked the ability to get them to their troops. All this makes me automatically gives me serious doubts about the practicality of housing millions of Jews in this area. Was the army even informed of this, was there any deliberation?
Some might also say there was no need to specially house these Polish Jews, they could have been put in Russian ghettos or just left to their own devices a la the Jews deported into Transnistria.
The ghetto theory doesn't hold water for me, because as far as I know, there's not a single ghetto in Russia that wasn't totally depopulated by 42/43.
The 'left to their own devices' theory is even less plausible due to the massive security risk Jews supposedly posed to the the German army. We remember Kube's report on the killing of most of the Jews in Belarus. This included German Jews incapable of work. But according to Kube, Polish Jews were far more threatening:
The Polish Jew, exactly like the Russian Jew, is an enemy of the German nation. He represents a politically dangerous element, a danger which far exceeds his value as a skilled worker. If these people were even going to be kept alive, one can be certain they would be tightly guarded. This is why the reasoning they were sent to Russia because there was more space there doesn't make sense -- they would have have to have been concentrated in internment and labor camps, otherwise guarding them would have been impossible.
Merlin300 wrote:To shift direction a bit, the orthodoxy of the International Military Tribunal trial at Nuremberg is clearly in tatters.
Does BA still believe that the Germans were responsible for the Katyin murders?
Does BA still believe that 1.4 million people were murdered at Majdanek?
Does BA still believe that 4,000,000 (or 2,500,000) people were murdered at Auschwitz.
Does BA still believe that there was human soap produced by the Germans during the War?
Does BA still believe the debunked Intentionalist theory?
The above were all "proven" at the IMT trials or were points in the Indictment (in the case of Katyin)
All are now abandoned by all but the most obdurate Believers.
So, BA, are you willing to admit that the Orthodoxy of the IMT circa 1946 is fraught with gross inaccuracies?
Yes of course. My historical approach is 'evidence based' so any uncorroborated rulings by the IMT are groundless.
Regarding your first example, Katyn, the US and British side did not render a verdict here against the Germans, but we can still look into this.
So did any Germans confess to Katyn at Nuremberg? Were German documents presented in support of the Soviet theory?
The same applies to your other examples. There's very little witness testimony or documentary evidence (or archeological studies a la Kola) backing up say 1.4 million dead at Majdanek. This is why Hilberg in 1960 put a figure of I believe 60k killed there (mostly during Aktion Erntefest, which is heavily corroborated by witness testimony)
hermod wrote:
Your theory that Goebbels had misunderstood what was actually happening to the deported Jews makes sense. But one can see that the matter had been fully clarified to him a few months later. In December 1942, when Rabbi Stephen Wise (the co-founder of American Zionism) and his Zionist colleagues were arousing Britiain and the United States with Holohoax atrocity propaganda lies for the postwar Zionist seizure of Palestine, one can't seriously believe that Goebbels would have called that campaign of atrocity propaganda in his own diaries "the alleged atrocities" perpetrated on the Jews in Poland (see December 1942 entries in the link above) if he had really believed that the Germans had been butchering millions of Jews of all ages and genders for many months in some German-run slaughterhouses located on Polish soil. If Goebbels had really believed in the death-camp theory, he would have referred to the December 1942 Zionist & Soviet-Allied accusations of mass slaughter as a fully-deserved punishment, but not of "alleged atrocities" as he did.
I think certainly some of the atrocities Goebbels refers to were false - eg the widespread rumors that Jews were being turned into commercial soap. But others very well may have been true
What do you make of these December 1942 entries? (bold mine)
Dec 12, 1942 (II.6.434)
The atrocity propaganda concerning Poland and the Jewish Question is taking on abnormal forms on the other side. We will not, I fear, be finished with this thing in the long run by remaining silent. We already have to answer to some things, if we do not want to run the risk of becoming gradually discovered. It is best now to go on the attack, and bring up the British atrocities in India or the Middle East. In any case we will have changed the subject.
Dec 13, 1942 (II.6.438-439) **
The question of Jewish persecution in Europe is being given top news priority by the English and the Americans…. At bottom, however, I believe both the English and the Americans are happy that we are cleaning up (aufräumen) the Jewish riff-raff. But the Jews will go on and on and turn the heat on the British-American press. We won’t even discuss this theme publicly, but instead I give orders to start an atrocity campaign against the English on their treatment of Colonials.
On Dec 12 he explicitly says that they have to answer to some of the 'atrocity propaganda' and there are further things that might become "gradually discovered". What is he talking about?
And why wouldn't they provide some level of evidence for Jews being maintained and resettled in the East? We know this was something they were interested in doing with regards to
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theresienstadt_(1944_film)
Lastly let us return to the Goebbels diary entry which might be a result of him "misunderstanding" what happened to the Jews (he thought they were being killed but they weren't.
Beginning with Lublin, the Jews in the General Government are now being evacuated (abgeschoben) eastward. The procedure is a pretty barbaric one and not to be described here more definitely. Not much will remain of the Jews. On the whole it can be said that about 60 percent of them will have to be liquidated (liquidiert) whereas only about 40 percent can be used for forced labor.
Clearly, in Goebbels' mind, evacuation eastward does not preclude mass killing. To me this is blatant use of euphemistic language and casts doubt about similar language seen in his diaries. But at times he is explicit about the fate of the Jews
Mar 14, 1945 (II.15.498) ***
The Jews are reemerging. Their spokesman is the well-known and notorious Leopold Schwarzschild; he is now arguing in the American press that under no circumstances should Germany be given lenient treatment. Anyone in a position to do so should kill these Jews like rats (wie die Ratten totschlagen). In Germany, thank God, we have already thoroughly attended to this. I hope that the world will take this as an example.
Goebbels diaries are not helpful to revisionists I think
PS I have posts here that haven't been responded to, owing I think to the very long time it takes my posts to be approved
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