[Video] HistorySpeaks: Me methodically discrediting Holocaust denial (Debate)

[Omletenjoyer]

Is this guy telling the truth?



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[borjastick]

I like a good omelette too but haven't got the odd 90 minutes to watch all this. Can you therefore provide a general summary of the debate, the salient points you made and if you scored any killer blows.

[Otium]

No. He was here on the forum and got stomped, then he ran away.

Simple challenge for HistorySpeaks
viewtopic.php?f=2&t=14563

Gl0spana and his Holocaust Antics - The last eulogy
viewtopic.php?f=2&t=14468

He lacks critical thinking, particularly regarding sources. If you read any of the threads in which he posted and argued, it will be abundantly clear. He approaches talking points from his own preconcieved conclusions of what "must" have happened or been intended.

[Lamprecht]

I also don't have time at the moment to watch the entire thing, but I checked it out.

Very peculiar though, with OP creating an account a few days ago just to post this video and leave. It would have been nice to have a summary of the points at least.

HistorySpeaks / Cockerill begins (20:30) by outlining his 5 categories of evidence that he will use to prove the "Holocaust" beyond all reasonable doubt:

1. War-time communications between German leaders (including diaries)

2. Non-coercive "confessions" which means they weren't in a trial

3. Einsatzgruppen mass shootings

4. Operation Reinhardt camps

5. Auschwitz

---

Cockerill (21:50) gives his first example as the Hans Frank speech of 16 December 1941.
This speech has been discussed here: viewtopic.php?p=95476#p95476

What is glaringly obvious is that this is not any evidence for an extermination policy against the Jews, or that they were being genocided. Cockerill only quotes a few sentences, but in the preceding paragraph of the speech, Frank states:

[i]"My attitude towards the Jews will, therefore, be based only on the expectation that they must disappear. They must be done away with. I have entered negotiations to have them deported to the East. A great discussion concerning that question will take place in Berlin in January, to which I am going to delegate the State Secretary Dr Buehler. That discussion is to take place in the Reich Security Main Office with SS-Lt. General Heydrich. A great Jewish migration will begin, in any case."

He then later asks "what should be done with the Jews" and provides his opinion, which is what Cockerill is quoting.
So we see a government official revealing a Jewish resettlement policy, then stating his personal belief that they should be killed. This is the sort of language you would expect during a war from certain people, and it was used on both sides.

---

Cockerill (22:35) brings up a Goebbels diary entry, 12 December 1941.
A thread about this entry:

Goebbels' "die Vernichtung des Judentums" 12/12/41
viewtopic.php?t=13998

In this entry, Goebbels mentions Hitler's (30 Jan 1939) "Fuhrer prophecy" discussed here: viewtopic.php?p=93430#p93430

This "prophecy" was made before any alleged plan to kill the Jews was made. It precedes the outbreak of the war. I quoted exterminationists admitting in the link above that admitted, during this period:
"Hitler should not be understood to have been speaking in a genocidal terms"

This "evidence for the Holocaust" is nothing more than one man's personal opinion written in his diary.

---

Cockerill (23:15) quotes Hans Frank again, this time his diary. He is quoting IMT document 2233-E-PS: https://avalon.law.yale.edu/imt/2233-ps.asp

Cabinet session in Cracow on 24 August 1942
Subject: A new Plan for seizure and for food [Ernaehrung] of the General Gouvernement

The quoted portion:

"That we sentence 1.2 million Jews to die of hunger should be noted only marginally. It is a matter, of course, that should the Jews not starve to death it would, we hope, result in a speeding up of anti-Jewish measures."[/i]

The document is meant to be a transcript of the cabinet session. The topic of the meeting is "the almost catastrophic developments in the food situation in Germany" specifically:

"unless a considerable improvement in the food situation in Germany can be achieved in a short time, serious consequences as to the health of the people, especially the German working people, would result. In hundreds of thousands of sick cases, one can already see the tragic consequences not only of this food shortage but also a deterioration of foodstuffs which endangers health...
A serious situation, therefore, has arisen since Germany not only has to feed herself but also a large proportion of other European people. We must also take care that in the months to come and during the coming winter sufficient food will be distributed to the German people that they will be able to withstand the great nervous strain of the coming months in every case.
Under these circumstances you probably will not be surprised that the saying now has become true: Before the German people are to experience starvation, the occupied territories and their people shall be exposed to starvation.
...
The General Government therefore must do the following: The General Government has taken on the obligation to send 500,000 tons bread grains to the fatherland in addition to the foodstuffs already being delivered for the relief of Germany or consumed here by troops of the armed forces, Police or SS. If you compare this with our contributions of last year you can see that this means a six-fold increase over that of last year's contribution of the General Government.

The new demand will be fulfilled exclusively at the expense of the foreign population. It must be done cold-bloodedly and without pity; for this contribution of the General Government is still more important this year since the occupied Eastern territories-Ukraine and Ostland-will not yet be able to make an important contribution toward the relief of Germany's food problem. Even if a million tons of bread grains could be delivered from Ostland and Ukraine, it would in the face of Germany's food situation be only a "drop in the bucket".

For this reason I wanted to acquaint you, Gentlemen, here in this governmental session with the decisions which I have made known today to Party member Naumann. You will essentially find an additional increase of the quota of foodstuffs to be shipped to Germany and new regulations for the feeding of the population; especially of the Jews and of the Polish population, whereby, if possible, the provisioning of the working people, especially of those working for German interests, shall be maintained.

The step which we are taking together today, is one of the most decisive ones, because it will surely have certain consequences as to the internal order of this country in January or February of next year. These consequences have to be accepted, because before the German people be starved, others, as a matter of course, must undergo the same."

So Frank is discussing a catastrophic food shortage, and that they will be taking food from foreign populations to feed the German people. The reasoning is that before the German people starve, others will have to do so first. He also states that efforts will be made to ensure the Jews and Poles being used or labor will continue to be fed if possible.

Cockerill argues that Frank's position is that either 1.2 million Jews will starve to death, or they will more quickly be sent to the camps [and presumably be gassed]. The conclusion here is that the only goal is for Jews to die, so it doesn't matter if it's starvation or being sent to a gas chamber, it's all the same result.

Again:

"From this you realize how seriously the situation will develop. In this connection do not forget, however, that the food situation in the Reich is less favorable. In whatever difficulties you observe some place here, in the form of the sicknesses of your workers, the breakdown of your associations, etc., you must always think of the fact that it is still much better when a Pole breaks down than that a German succumb. That we sentence 1.2 million Jews to die of hunger should be noted only marginally. It is a matter, of course, that should the Jews not starve to death it would, we hope, result in a speeding up of anti-Jewish measures."

Consider the context. Frank is informing various officials that there is a serious food shortage, that the Germans are going to suffer as a result, but that food will be taken from other groups to minimize this problem.
As for "anti-Jewish measures" this does not have to be interpreted as killing all of the Jews. If, in fact, that was the goal, then why would they not simply kill all of the Jews so there would be fewer of them eating the already limited food?

Cockerill leaving this important context (massive food shortages) out makes it appear as though there is some deliberate starvation policy, rather than a catastrophic food shortage problem. No government, especially during war, is just going to allow their people starve when there are others they can take food from. A government with such a policy would be overthrown and replaced by one willing to take the food that is needed.
Anyway, for more information on the food shortages, I recommend this thread:

Starvation in Third Reich-controlled areas during WWII
viewtopic.php?t=13355

---

Cockerill's next example (23:45) is the Goebbels diary entry of 14 December 1942.

"Jewry must pay for its crime just as our Führer prophesied in his speech in the Reichstag; namely, by the wiping out (Auslöschung) of the Jewish race in Europe and possibly in the entire world."

Again, the Fuhrer prophecy (mentioned above). Cockerill points to the "entire world" portion of the quote, and says that resettlement does not make sense here because Jews cannot be resettled from the entire world.
This is true. What is also true is that Goebbels is, again, merely stating his beliefs. Writing in your diary "the Jews must be wiped off the face of the earth" does not mean that there is any policy of extermination going on.

What is interesting is that already, Cockerill has brought up the 12th and 14th of December 1942 entries. But what about the 13th? The English translation:

"The assassins in Paris haven’t been found. So General Stülpnagel finds himself forced to take a series of the harshest measures. The early curfew in Paris has been abolished, but many Jews are being deported from occupied France to the Eastern region. In many cases this is equivalent to a death sentence. The remaining Jews will think hard before stirring up trouble or sabotage against the German troops. Meanwhile General von Stülpnagel has 100 Jews and communists executed. He gives a very plausible and psychologically-clever explanation for the Parisian population, which won’t fail to have an effect."

So what do we learn from this? Jews being deported to the east is one of the harshest measures. If this merely meant being sent to the gas chambers, he wouldn't have described it as only sometimes equivalent of a death sentence. The conditions were harsh which caused many Jews to die in transit or of freezing/starvation/disease once they made it to these territories. Sending the Jews off and telling them to fend for themselves may be cruel (keep in mind this is a response to terrorist attacks) but it's not the same as sending Jews to a camp to be gassed.
Goebbels also mentions a reprisal execution of 100 Jews and communists in response to partisan activity. So he clearly does not hold back in his personal diary to note when Jews are being outright executed.

Here's an older post of mine that includes entries from Goebbels' diary mentioning policies of resettlement/deportation: viewtopic.php?p=96299#p96299 (scroll down past the first 3 quote boxes)

---

I stopped the video at 24:25 because it's getting late for me.
So far, it appears that Cockerill is pretending as if government officials, during war-time, expressing an opinion such as "we would be better off if all of the Jews were dead" is proof of a state-sponsored policy of Jewish extermination, mostly in gas chambers. This is obviously not the case. During WWII in the US, there was some public support for a genocide of the Japanese after their surrender and that did not happen. There were also calls for genocide against the Germans.
Right now I'm not impressed. There's still 1 hour remaining.

[Otium]

Cockerill (21:50) gives his first example as the Hans Frank speech of 16 December 1941.
This speech has been discussed here: viewtopic.php?p=95476#p95476

What is glaringly obvious is that this is not any evidence for an extermination policy against the Jews, or that they were being genocided. . .

Wasn't this one of them?

As far as the Jews are concerned, I want to tell you quite frankly, that they must be done away with in one way or another. The Fuehrer said once: should united Jewry again succeed in provoking a world-war, the blood of not only the nations, which have been forced into the war by them, will be shed, but the Jew will have found his end in Europe. I know, that many of the measures carried out against the Jews in the Reich, at present, are being critized. It is being tried intentionally, as is obvious from the reports on the morale, to talk about cruelty, harshness, etc. Before I continue, I want to beg you to agree with me on the following formula: We will principally have pity on the German people only, and nobody else in the whole world. The others, too had no pity on us. As an old National-Socialist, I must say: This war would only be a partial success, if the whole lot of Jewry would survive it, while we would have shed our best blood in order to save Europe. My attitude towards the Jews will, therefore, be based only on the expectation that they must disappear. They must be done away with. I have entered negotiations to have them deported to the East. A great discussion concerning that question will take place in Berlin in January, to which I am going to delegate the State-Secretary Dr. Buehler. That discussion is to take place in the Reich-Security Main-Office with SS-Lt. General Heydrich. A great Jewish mogration will begin, in any case.

Nuremberg Doc. 2233-D-PS; Office of United States Chief of Counsel For Prosecution of Axis Criminality (ed.), Nazi Conspiracy and Aggression (NCA), Vol. IV (Washington: United States Government Printing Office, 1946), pp. 891-892.

This expresses an obvious dislike for Jews, but nothing genocidal necessarily. People will say these kinds of things about literally anything all the time. You can think of hundreds if not thousands of examples in which you might say these exact words: "As far as X is concerned, I will tell you that X must be done away with in one way or another." That Frank is even talking about "one way or another" is clearly indicative of a lack of a decision, a kind of confusion about how it should be done, the only conviction is that it must be done.

When he says that his attitude on the Jews is that he expects that they must disappear he is again using noncommitant words to describe something that has to be done but he doesn't know how. This is obvious because he says he "expects it", which is key to understanding the right tense and knowledge he has, or is expressing. To "expect" is clearly indicative of something which has yet to pass/be decided.

At the end of the day we don't know what was going on in Frank's mind. We cannot know how he understood what he said. You can technically interpret these words any way you want, and that tells us absoloutly nothing about what actually happened with the Jews. The same problem here presents itself regarding Hitler's speech of January 30, 1939 which I will reiterate below.

Cockerill (22:35) brings up a Goebbels diary entry, 12 December 1941.
A thread about this entry:

Goebbels' "die Vernichtung des Judentums" 12/12/41
viewtopic.php?t=13998

In this entry, Goebbels mentions Hitler's (30 Jan 1939) "Fuhrer prophecy" discussed here: viewtopic.php?p=93430#p93430

This "prophecy" was made before any alleged plan to kill the Jews was made. It precedes the outbreak of the war. I quoted exterminationists admitting in the link above that admitted, during this period:
"Hitler should not be understood to have been speaking in a genocidal terms"

It's well known that Hitler's speech isn't taken to be evidence of an intent to kill Jews, primarily because it makes no sense chronologically.

I have gone well into how this speech is misused, and argued that it also tells us nothing, just like the comments by Hans Frank earlier. Speeches and diary entries like these, including the Goebbels ones are only effective once the person has been primed to interpret them within a particular context. Which is to say that they only have an exterminationist shade because of the import given to them in context of the Holocaust narrative, not because they can stand alone as 'proof' of anything in and of themselves.

Hitler's Reichstag Speech - Troubling Translation
viewtopic.php?f=2&t=13610&p=99265#p99264

Here are some quotes, but I use these and break it down further in the thread. So I would recommend reading that. Particularly because, as I show, Hitler actually employs examples in his speech which historians who wish to use it later on totally ignore. These examples provide a basis on which we can understand that Hitler was never speaking in the context of killing anybody.

Quotes from 'historians':

Nazi antisemitism certainly took a new turn in 1938, but it would be difficult to argue that by then plans had been drawn up to murder the Jews in specially created camps in east-central Europe. Some would say that Hitler had already made up his mind by January 30, 1939, when he delivered a notorious speech to celebrate the sixth anniversary of the Nazi takeover. Nevertheless, he had to find a means of putting his thoughts into action, and even then, German leaders were remarkably sensitive to foreign opinion. It is more likely that the speech, with its prophecies of Jewish suffering, was a warning to the United States that there would be trouble for the Jews if they continued to stifle German trade and rob the country of the foreign currency it so desperately needed to survive.

Words like vernichten (exterminate) and ausrotten (wipe out) came easily to Hitler’s lips. As a frontline soldier in the Great War, he had personally experienced the effects of poison gas, but even by the end of 1938 it was unlikely that he had considered using it on his racial enemies. Wartime conditions vastly accelerated the Nazis’ as yet unformulated projects, and only when the smoke was thick enough to obscure the activities of the zealots in the extermination camps did massive troop deployment, inadequate communications, inurement to violence and death, together with casualties on an unprecedented scale, all help remove the last moral barriers to genocide.

Giles Macdonogh, 1938: Hitler's Gabmle (New York: Basic Books, 2009), pp. x-xi

Macdonogh has to admit that these strong words used by Hitler were hyperbolic, and not literal.

Was Hitler announcing publicly and to the whole world his intention to murder the Jews in a coming war? At this juncture, the word ‘annihilate’ cannot be unequivocally interpreted in this sense. A few days earlier, Hitler had also spoken to the Czech foreign minister about ‘annihilating’ the Jews, but had meant their expulsion, quite apart from the fact that he had also warned Chvalkovský of the ‘annihilation’ of Czechoslovakia. When interpreting this passage, as with many other Hitler statements, one should be aware that Hitler was not simply announcing a decision taken in isolation, but rather that his ‘prophecy’ had several potential layers of meaning. Above all, in the first place, one must take into account the tactical motive of his speech, which should be seen in the context of the international negotiations concerning Jewish emigration.

His annihilation threat was intended, first of all, to increase the pressure on German Jews to emigrate and on foreign countries to receive them. [...] the main target audience of his prophecy was the United States.

Peter Longerich, Hitler: A Life (Oxford University Press, 2019), pp. 604-605.

And:

From 1938 onwards, in Hitler's public utterances, the Jewish question in its wider sense was emphatically a Western and above all an American question. As was shown in Chapters 8 and 9, from the Evian conference onwards and with ever greater intensity after Kristallnacht, President Roosevelt was identified as the chief agent of a worldwide Jewish conspiracy bent on the destruction of National Socialist Germany. It was no coincidence that Hitler's famous threat of annihilation of 30 January 1939 came as a direct response to Roosevelt's State of the Union address.

Adam Tooze, The Wages of Destruction: The Making and Breaking of the Nazi Economy (London: Penguin Books, 2007), p. 664.

My last post in the thread was to make the following point:

With nothing but hindsight from a position that favours their historical outlook can these people make the claims about this Hitler speech having the importance they ascribe to it. Only if you take the occurrence of the Holocaust for granted, in support of other evidence before this speech can it be taken, or viewed in any way as contributing to the lore of the Holocaust. By itself, it is worthless, by itself it means nothing and by itself cannot be taken to show that Hitler wanted or did kill any Jews.

If this speech was all we had, void of any supporting evidence, then no such claims could be made. So the question has to move on and we need to ask "well okay then, what evidence proves that Hitler had a plan to exterminate the Jews? And what is the evidence that this in-fact occurred?" The speech then has to take a backseat to the other questions surrounding this problem before the importance of the speech itself can be placed into its proper context. The speech itself cannot mean anything otherwise. So there's really little point in even discussing it.

The fact that these people have to use this speech to try and "prove" the Holocaust before providing any documents, or physical evidence for the crime shows how bankrupt they are when it comes to evidence. The position these people should be taking if this speech were related to any real Holocaust, is that it refers to the Holocaust because it happened for X Y Z reasons, and thus cannot refer to anything else. They shouldn't be relying on this speech as evidence in and of itself. Instead they make the poor argument, because they lack proof - that this speech is related to the Holocaust because Hitler says certain words, and these words lend credence to the narrative and this is why it's referring to the Holocaust. At that point it becomes an argument about interpretation that leaves us little room to move unless we're discussing other aspects of the debate.

The speech means nothing by itself. These people have made a very poor argument relying on nothing but appeals to social convention.

For most of the 'evidence' Cockerall relies on, this rule of thumb can be followed. It certainly can regarding not only Hitler's speech, but the Goebbels diary and Hans Frank.

[Lamprecht]

For most of the 'evidence' Cockerall relies on, this rule of thumb can be followed. It certainly can regarding not only Hitler's speech, but the Goebbels diary and Hans Frank.

Yes, these are the arguments I made in a post I linked previously:

- The opinion of one person on what to do about a specific group during a war is not the same as actual government policy. It likely is the case that many Germans did want to kill all Jews, just as it was the case that most would have found such a thing abhorrent. And the same could be said for Jews, some of which openly advocated for genocide of Germans. In a December 1944 poll in the United States, 13% supported "killing off" the Japanese after the war - Mattogno, Graf & Kues call Frank's statements "verbal thuggeries."

Frank was put on trial after the war and denied that he knew anything about Jews being exterminated. He said that his diaries (which he voluntarily handed over) were mostly ignored with just a tiny select few entries ever being brought up. He said that both Hitler and Himmler told him that Jews were being evacuated, rather than exterminated. What [he claimed] actually convinced him of an extermination policy was not his own observations, but the testimony of Rudolf Hoess.

But that was all from a short segment of the video. I stopped watching at 24:25 with an hour left. I'll check more of it out either tonight or over the weekend.

[Lamprecht]

24:25
Robert Ley quote, from his 3 May 1943 speech, discussed here: viewtopic.php?t=12653
Ley was a drunk and was not in charge of anti-Jewish policies. The war was pretty much lost at this point, since Feb 1943 when the Battle of Stalingrad was lost. This speech reads like a [drunken] pep-talk for the listeners, not a description of anti-Jewish policy outside of Germany.


25:00
Himmler's Posen speech, 6 October 1943. The Posen speeches have been discussed in multiple threads already, which can be found using the search function.
There is no audio recording of the speech. The document was supposedly discovered in the German archives in 1970, placed there by the Americans. The source was written to be Himmler's files, which were in Berlin. It's not clear how the US found these documents in Berlin when the Soviets (notorious document forgers) occupied this area.

Irving discussed the document:

Himmler saying: "The hard decision had to be taken to make this race disappear from earth." [...] the remarkable fact that precisely at this point the typescript changes, a page appears to have been inserted by a different typist, the numeration of the pages changes from a typewritten page number at the top to a pencilled page number at the top, and there are various other indications about that speech that make me queasy. [...] Irving pointed out that what was contained in these pages "changes very much the essence of the speech, depending on whether it is an authentic transcript of the speech or whether that has been tampered with for some reason...I don't think we need to know the motives of people tampering with speeches. It is sufficient for historians to look at a document and say 'This document has been tampered with'; for him then to say, 'In that case, I must set it aside.' [...] at that point in the script, the page relating that very damaging and incriminating sentence has quite clearly been retyped by a different typist on a different typewriter using different carbon paper, and that page has been numbered by pencil and inserted at that point [...] he doesn't make this statement anywhere else when he's delivering almost identical speeches to...similar audiences [...] this isn't just any page...I suppose it is probably the most important page of the most important speech in the whole of the Holocaust history, and this page, of all pages, when we look at it, turned out to have been tampered with.

- 'Did Six Million Really Die?' Report of the Evidence in the Canadian 'False News' Trial of Ernst Zündel, 1988. https://archive.ph/8SfVI

25:25
21 June 1944 - Himmler again (speech in Sonthofen to generals of the Wehrmacht). Speech is discussed here: viewtopic.php?t=7225
This was not part of any order to kill all of the Jews, these were reprisals in response to partisan activity. Similarly: bombing campaigns were conducted by the "Allies" with the full knowledge that women and children would be victims. This isn't evidence for genocide, just war.


26:05
Goebbels diary, 14 March 1945:
"Anyone in a position to do so should kill (totschlagen) these Jews like rats"
This was less than 2 months before Germany surrendered. The war had long been over at this point with no hope of Germany making it. It's obvious that he's upset. But yes, Goebbels did unambiguously call for killing all the Jews. He was just a bit late with it, describing all sorts of programs to deport and resettle them into the East.

Not convincing.

---

"Non-Coercive Confessions"
26:45

Cockerill says it doesn't make any sense for someone to confess to a crime outside of a trial. He has already made a thread on this subject:
How do You Explain Non-Coercive Confessions by Perpetrators?
viewtopic.php?t=14564


27:25 - Albert Speer
He references a supposed "private letter" from 1971 that was "found" in 2007. Speer was put on trial and sentenced to 20 years imprisonment after the war, and released in 1966. His defense strategy was to say "everything happened but it wasn't my fault"
The quotation he reads is just Himmler saying that he was present at the 6 October 1943 [Posen] speech, where "Himmler announced... that all Jews would be killed"
First (assuming it's genuine) this isn't a "confession" of anything except that he was present for a speech. He is supposedly remembering exactly what he heard at a speech almost 3 decades ago. This is not convincing.
Remember: Anyone put on trial in Germany for these offenses was liable to be tried again if they ever changed their testimony. That's what happened to Oberhauser after he recanted his Belzec testimony.


27:58
Adolf Eichmann - not a confession. Eichmann was giving multiple interviews after he saw how the Nuremberg trials went: anyone that denied everything was killed, those that used Speer's "everything happened but it wasn't my fault" defense had a chance. Eichmann was trying to be put on trial in Germany. Unfortunately for him, he was instead kidnapped by the Mossad and given a show Israel in Israel.


28:20
Franz Suchomel of Treblinka and a "secret" recording at his home. After the war, Suchomel was captured as a POW by the Americans and then released. He never left Germany, and in 1963, he was arrested. He was put on trial in the First Treblinka Trial (1965) and sentenced to six years in prison, released in 1969. The "secret" recording was made after he had been in prison already, for the purpose of being used in a film ("Shoah" from 1985).
See:
P. Winter Debunks Suchomel's Fake "Confession" & C. Lanzmann
viewtopic.php?t=9072

Holocaust Movie "Shoah" Exposed as Propaganda
https://codoh.com/library/document/holo ... aganda/en/


28:25
Gustav Wagner - the alleged "confession" was while under arrest in Brazil, which would not extradite him to Germany, where he was sentenced to death in absentia. He voluntarily handed himself over, and told a Brazilian newspaper (2 June 1978) that he didn't see any gassings ("Eu nunca vi nenhuma camara de gas em Sobibor"). Yet the BBC (19 August 1979) later reports him talking about gas chambers? They could have just written anything. About a year later, Wagner "committed suicide" by stabbing himself.


28:48
Hajj Amin al-Husseini - memoirs claim that Himmler in 1943 told him that 3 million Jews had been killed. Irving has an article here: http://fpp.co.uk/Himmler/Judenfrage/Mufti_memoirs.html

Now, as Müller points out, Himmler clearly did not use any Arabic word, he used a German word. From the connotations, it seems likely he used that multi-purpose, many-nuanced word, Ausrottung - roughly, extirpation.

If Himmler was referring to Operation Reinhardt, the disposal by whatever means of waste Jews in the camps along the Bug River demarcation line, the three million estimate would broadly agree with the popular consensus.

Note also al-Husseini's memoirs were published only after he had died, he did not share this

Part 3 starts at 29:22
I have to say, this format does not make much sense to me. I guess it was a livestream, but for some big, important "debunking" you'd expect some sort of presentation. Like a powerpoint with the document or quotation showing on the screen with the date, source, and all of that info. It's just 4 people taking up 1 corner each of the screen and 3 of them are just sitting around silently the entire time.

[EtienneSC]

Is this guy telling the truth?

This debate seems worth engaging with, though it goes over old and well-trodden ground. The format is two 25 minute presentations, pro and contra, followed by a bit of back and forth and a Q&A.

In the first few seconds of debate (18.00), we see that Mr Cockerill is obviously still a young man and he tells us in an American accent that he is a doctoral student of history, i.e. is just starting postgraduate work. Mr Cockerill's opponent says he has a BA in history. Mr Cockerill reads Arabic and German (28.50). Generally, academia is not propitious ground for revisionism at present. I cannot think of a single academic who supports revisionism publicly and none in a humanities department. However, I can think offhand of four retired or former academics who are sympathetic to revisionism. Mr Cockerill would be seen as a brave hero when he rejected revisionism, but a lot less favourably if he didn't, so he's riding a wave. He supports free inquiry. However, let's look at the content of the first presentation:

Opening statement
Cockerill describes five "categories of evidence" that produce "knowledge" "beyond a reasonable doubt" that 5-6 million Jews were killed by the Nazis and their collaborators during WW2. These are:
1. Wartime communications by German leaders, including diaries that refer to extermination as a policy
2. Non-coercive confessions (clarified as "outside of trials")
3. Evidence for the Einsatzgruppen killings,
4. Aktion Reinhard camps,
5. And Auschwitz-Birkenau.

Wartime communications
He instances an extract from the diary of Hans Frank, in which Frank was told "kill them yourselves" (22.30). Then he cites Goebbels' diary (12 December 1941) and later and 14 March 1945; a remark by Robert Ley; Himmler's Posen speech of 6 October 1943 and a speech on 24 June 1944.

Non-coercive confessions
A letter of Albert Speer in 1971, excluded from his memoirs and contradicting his testimony at Nuremberg that refers to a speech by Himmler on 6 August 1943; the diary of Adolf Eichmann; the secret recoding of Franz Suchomel (by Claude Lanzmann); Gustav Wagner in a BBC interview in 1979; a German collaborator Al Hussaini (?), who said he was told by Himmler in 1943 that 3 million Jews had been killed.

Mass shootings
Cockerill says that these happened and then discusses evidence. He comments that "Neo-Nazis" are Neo Nazis because of the Hugo Boss uniforms, not the ideology, "incidentally". He cites the reports (the Ereignismeldungen, presumably), which were found in several places after the war, "for example" the Gestapo office and "their authenticity is impeccable, even according to revisionists". Adding them up produces a figure of 1.3 million Jews killed in the East. He quotes 33,771 Jews killed in Kiev in two days from report 101 of 2 October 1941 (i.e. Babi Yar), Report 150 of 2 January 1942 and Report 173 of 25 February 1942. The reports are confirmed by a document from Himmler and a diary entry from 8 December 1941. All eyewitnesses support this.

The Aktion Reinhard Camps
The killing of 1.5 million people here is supported by a) a diary entry from Goebbels of 27 March 1942 that refers to Globocnik, b) the Stroop report of Spring 1943 (an "interesting document"), which he claims mentions being sent to Treblinka as a "means of execution" or "execution method"; c) Himmler described the Jews of Bialystok as having been killed, but they were sent to an AR camp, a discussion of Hitler and Horthy of 16-17 April 1943, where Hitler said that if they did not want to work they were killed (or "had to die") and Ribbentrop says something about Jews having to go to camps, e) "all the staff" from the Euthanasia program were sent to the Reinhard camps, f) the Korherr Report, which refers to Sonderbehandlung of 2,4 million people, which Heydrich in 1939 said meant "singled out for execution" and according to Himmler in 1942 was to be carried out by hanging.

Auschwitz
Orders for gas-tight doors, orders for doors with peep holes, document referring to a Vergassungskeller, report saying Poles can't be killed, but Jews can, study with photos of holes found in the roof of Krema II, document saying 2,000 per day cremation capacity is insufficient, studies showing far more cyanide in the gas chambers than in random buildings, the Auschwitz Chronicle (by Danuta Czech) which distinguishes Jews registered from others who were sonderbehandelt - which is distinguished from natural death and being sent to other camps (full references not given through lack of time).

This comes across as a competent speech for the prosecution with the material available. Many of the points have been well discussed on this forum. I may comment further when I have listened to the next presentation. However, this seems to be hampered by connection issues and is not at first responsive to Mr Cockerill's presentation, suggesting limited debating skills.

[EtienneSC]

Himmler's Posen speech, 6 October 1943. The Posen speeches have been discussed in multiple threads already, which can be found using the search function.
There is no audio recording of the speech.

Thanks for this post. A few years ago, there was a recording that purported to be the Posen speech available on the internet. French revisionist Vincent Reynouard made a video about it. Are you saying that the recording wasn't genuine, or just that you don't know of it?

[Lamprecht]

Himmler's Posen speech, 6 October 1943. The Posen speeches have been discussed in multiple threads already, which can be found using the search function.
There is no audio recording of the speech.

Thanks for this post. A few years ago, there was a recording that purported to be the Posen speech available on the internet. French revisionist Vincent Reynouard made a video about it. Are you saying that the recording wasn't genuine, or just that you don't know of it?

Probably the October 4th speech.

[EtienneSC]

Is this guy telling the truth?

I continue my summary of the debate:

Second presentation
There are two guys, so here I will respond to the second, pro-revisionist speech by Marshall Lore from New Zealand and the response segment. Mr Lore gets off to a poor start by not acknowledging the arguments of the proponent. However, he soon warms up to expound a string of revisionist talking points, which he acknowledges are drawn mostly from Holocaust Handbooks.

He asserts the priority of physical and documentary evidence over eye-witness testimony. There are then discussions of diesel exhaust in the AR camps, the cremation methods at the AR camps and Auschwitz-Birkenau, the reconstruction of Krema I at Auschwitz. Notably, Mr Cockerill snorts with amusement at the mention of Germar Rudolf's report. He cites Mattogno's argument that the crematory ovens were not rebuilt and could only cremate around 3,000 bodies before the brick gave out, leaving an upper possible limit of 156,000 bodies cremated. Outdoor pyres are not feasible owing to the marshy ground. German documents indicate a policy of deportation, not extermination. There were no orders, no plans and no budgets. The use of torture is illustrated by Rudolf Hoess and others. There were 42,000 ghettoes and camps to which people were deported. Demographic arguments are weak, notably because of changes of borders and migration. An Israeli study estimated that1,092,000 survivors were alive in 2003.

First Response
Mr Cockerill argues that Lore has been misled by Rudolf and Mattogno. Some witnesses say that gasoline was used rather than diesel, so it not true that "all" witnesses assert the use of diesel. He prefers to rely on a German document about cremation capacities over modern "Nazi napkin math by biased people who have been dishonest on the diesel gas thing saying all the witnesses say that when they don't". Commercial cremation is done in a respectful way and so cannot be compared to procedures in Auschwitz.

He objects (correctly) that his quotations from Goebbels, Frank and Himmler and instances of non-coercive confessions were not responded to. Nor has his opponent addressed the Einsatzgruppen figures, or the Korherr report, or his argument about Sonderbehandlung.

The inflated number of survivors is explained by the wide definition of survivor. He has given "tons" of evidence for his hypothesis. The ghettoes were cleaned out by the end of the war. He finds it "laughable" that there was no budget for any of this: the Jews were looted and the process profitable. There was no budget for establishing a new nation (in Eastern Europe) of deportees. The fact that some eye-witnesses were wrong "doesn't really mean anything", as people always make mistakes. There is archaeological evidence of bodies and human remains at Belzec and Treblinka.

Second Response
This cuts out a good deal and Cockerill snorts with amusement at several of the points made, e.g. the absence of wood to burn the corpses at the AR camps and the absence of ash. Cockerill interrupts to name two witnesses, Tauber and Polianov (?), who mention the red coloration of gassed corpses, whose names have just been passed to him. The debate fizzles out as a result of poor internet connectivity. The description suggests that there is to be a Part Two of the debate from January 2022. This appears to be available only on the Politically Provoked Odysee channel:
https://odysee.com/@PoliticallyProvoked:6/Holocaust:f
I'll analyse it if I can find time, but perhaps someone else can review it.

This would be worth commenting on further. However, the whole thing is essentially rehearsing arguments already familiar to the revisionist community (and some of its critics). This forum and the Holocaust Handbooks series set out the revisionist case in more detail.

There are a few other videos on the History Speaks channel (which has 98-subscribers in October 2022), including an interview with Norman Finkelstein in which Finkelstein discusses Raul Hilberg and Deborah Lipstadt ("she doesn't know what she's talking about"). The Politically Provoked Odysee channel is busier and has interviews with some interesting American right figures.

[Otium]

24:25
Robert Ley quote, from his 3 May 1943 speech, discussed here: viewtopic.php?t=12653
Ley was a drunk and was not in charge of anti-Jewish policies. The war was pretty much lost at this point, since Feb 1943 when the Battle of Stalingrad was lost. This speech reads like a [drunken] pep-talk for the listeners, not a description of anti-Jewish policy outside of Germany.

The Robert Ley quote is not only out of context, but it's also partially invented.

First off, let's trace the source. According to David Bankier:

Robert Ley, Head of the German Labour Front, 1933–45, formulated Germany’s war aims in the clearest terms: ‘We swear we are not going to abandon the struggle until the last Jew in Europe has been exterminated and is actually dead.’

David Bankier, "German public awareness of the Final Solution", in: David Cesarani (ed.), The Final Solution: Origins and Implementation (London/New York: Routledge, 1994), p. 224.

He in turn cites a secondary source:

Dr Robert Ley, leader of the Labour Front, was more outspoken : "We swear (he exclaimed in a public speech) we are not going to abandon the struggle until the last Jew in Europe has been exterminated and is actually dead".93 He was even more specific when some people seemed to fancy that "the problem" might be solved by way of "emigration" or confinement in a "reservation" — he insisted: "It is not enough to isolate the Jewish enemy of mankind — the Jew has got to be exterminated".

C.C. Aronsfeld, ""Perish Judah" Nazi Extermination Propaganda 1920-1945", Patterns of Prejudice, Vol. 12, No. 5, pp. 17-26, here p. 24.

The source Aronsfeld cites is a contemporary German newspaper article which I will reproduce in full, with a rudimentary translation:

Das Judentum trägt die Schuld am neuen Weltbrand

Reichsorganisationsleiter Dr. Ley sprach vor Betriebsführern und Betriebswaltern in Karlsruhe

Karlsruhe, 20. Mai

An der Gleichen Stätte, wo einst Gauleiter Robert Wagner mit einer Handvoll nationalsozialistischer Aktivisten dem bolschewistischen Mordbrenner Max Hölz eine blutige Saalschlacht lieferte, in der Karlsruher Festhalle, richtete gestern vormittag Reichsorganisationsleiter Dr. Ley einen packenden Appell dan das schaffende Deutschland. In der überfüllten Halle shaman Gauleiter Robert Wagner an der Spitze des Gaustabes der Partei, Ministerpräsident Köhler, den Karlsruher Wehrmachtskommandanten General Rittweger sowie etwa 3000 badische und elsassische Betreibsführer, Unterführer und Bewtriebswalter.

Nach Begrüßungsworten des Gauobmanns der Deutschen Arbeitsfront Dr. Roth, nahm Reichsorganisationsleiter Dr. Ley das Wort. Er erklärte u. a., daß es im heutigen Kriege nicht um Eroberungen, sondern um Sein oder Nichsein des deutschen Menschen gehe. Schwer und lang ist der Kampf, und unser Feind ist grausam, wie noch nie ein anderer. Zum ersten Male ist der Jude in seiner ganzen grausamen Nacktheit gegen uns angetreten. Wenn wir in diesem Kampf schwach werden, werden, werden wir kein neues Versailles erleben und Provinzen verlieren, sondern der Jude wird unser ganzes Volk ausrotten. Der Jude will seine Rache haben. Das Schicksal hat uns aber sehend gemacht. So wollen wir dankbar, tapfer und mutig den Kampf aufnehmen gegen den Juden und seine Trabanten bis zur letzten Konsequenz. Es genügt nicht, den judischen Feind der Menschheit zu isolieren, sondern der Jude muß vernichtet werden. Der Bolschewist zeigt und das Wesen des Teufels, der Jude hat Menschen zu Bestien gemacht und tausendjähriges Kulturschaffen in zwanzigjähriger Herrschaft zerstört. Nich gegen Menschen, sondern gegen wilde Tiere kämpfen unsere Soldaten.

Im letzten Winter, als sies ich gegen die Natur, gegen Stalins Horden und das größte Waffenarsenal behaupteten, zeigte sich, mit wem das Schicksal ist. Napoleon ist einst am russischen Winter zerbrochen, aber Adolf Hitler hat den russischen Winter niedergerungen. Der deutsche Soldat hat niemals versagt, weil ihm der Führer seinen Willen zum Durchhalten gab. Die siegreiche Winterschlacht ist eine Best ätigung für die Richtigkeit der Idee der Rasse, den der höhere rassische Wert, gepaart mit einem eisernen Willen, hat letzten Endes gesiegt. Wie sich aber unsere Soldaten in diesem härtesten Winterkampf behaupteten, so wird auch das schaffende Deutschland noch mehr arbeiten und noch mehr leisten als je zuvor. Möge der Krieg dauern, solange er will, der deutsche Soldat wird immer genügend Munition und die besten Waffen haben. Niemard darf in der Heimat über mehr Arbeit klagen, wo an der Front unsere Besten sterben! Wie der Soldat an der Front kämpft, so schafft jeder daheim für das Leben seiner Familie und seines Volkes. Dieser Kampf und diese Arbeit geht alle an: Arbeiter und Bauern, Männer, Frauen und Kinder. Sie alle müssen gehorchen und Ordnung und Disziplin halten, wie der deutsche Soldat. »Wir haben den besten Soldaten der Welt und wollen zeigen, daß wir auch den besten Arbeiter und Bauern haben!«

Wie die Wehrmacht, so hat sich auch die Partei im Krieg aufs höchste bewährt. Mitten im. Volk, in den Betrieben, Werkstätten und Bauernhöfen, überall, wo deutsche Menschen leben und schaffen, steht die Partei und hilft allen. Das Vertrauen des Volkes zur Pärtei ist deshalb gerade im Kriege gewaltig gewachsen. Unsere Feinde erkennen, daß sie es nieht mehr mit dem Deutschland von einst zu tun haben. Die Jäger des ersten Weltkrieges sind im heutigen Krieg die Hasen, und sie werden von unserer Wehrmacht und unseren mächt.gen und starken Verbündeten gejagt, bis ihnen der Atem ausgeht. Mit Moskau und London aber wird der jüdische Wellfeind fallen.

Nachdem der stürmische Beifall verlauscht war, schloß Gauobmann Dr. Roth die eindrucksvolle Großkundgebung.

Rudimentary English Translation

In the same place where once Gauleiter Robert Wagner with a handful of National Socialist activists delivered a bloody hall battle to the Bolshevik murderer Max Hölz, in the Karlsruhe Festhalle, yesterday morning Reichsorganisationsleiter Dr. Ley made a gripping appeal to the creating Germany. In the overcrowded hall, Gauleiter Robert Wagner, at the head of the party's Gaustab, Minister President Köhler, the Karlsruhe Wehrmacht commander General Rittweger, as well as about 3000 Baden and Alsace Betreibsführer, Unterführer and Bewtriebswalter.

After words of welcome from the Gauobmann of the German Labor Front, Dr. Roth, Reich Organization Director Dr. Ley took the floor. He explained, among other things, that today's war is not about conquests, but about the existence or non-existence of the German people. The battle is long and hard, and our enemy is cruel as never before. For the first time the Jew has come against us in all his cruel nakedness. If we become weak in this fight, we will not experience a new Versailles and lose provinces, but the Jew will exterminate our entire people. The Jew wants to have his revenge. But fate has made us see. So let us gratefully, bravely and courageously take up the fight against the Jew and his satellites to the last consequence. It is not enough to isolate the Jewish enemy of mankind, but the Jew must be destroyed. The Bolshevist shows and the essence of the devil, the Jew has turned people into beasts and destroyed thousand years of cultural creation in twenty years of rule. Our soldiers are not fighting against people, but against wild animals.

Last winter, when they stood up against nature, against Stalin's hordes and the largest arsenal of weapons, it became clear with whom fate is. Napoleon once broke on the Russian winter, but Adolf Hitler defeated the Russian winter. The German soldier never failed because the Führer gave him his will to persevere. The victorious winter battle is a confirmation of the correctness of the idea of race, because the higher racial value, coupled with an iron will, has ultimately won. But as our soldiers stood their ground in this hardest winter battle, so the creating Germany will work even harder and accomplish even more than ever before. May the war last as long as it wants, the German soldier will always have enough ammunition and the best weapons. No one may complain at home about more work, where at the front our best are dying! As the soldier fights at the front, so everyone creates at home for the life of his family and his people. This fight and this work concerns everyone: Workers and peasants, men, women and children. They all must obey and keep order and discipline, like the German soldier. "We have the best soldier in the world, and we want to show that we also have the best worker and peasant!"

Like the Wehrmacht, the Party has proved itself to the highest degree in the war. In the midst of. In the midst of the people, in the factories, workshops and farms, everywhere where German people live and work, the party stands and helps everyone. The people's trust in the party has therefore grown enormously, especially during the war. Our enemies realize that they are no longer dealing with the Germany of old. The hunters of the First World War are the hares in today's war, and they are hunted by our Wehrmacht and our powerful and strong allies until they run out of breath. With Moscow and London, however, the Jewish well enemy will fall.

After the rapturous applause had died down, Gauobmann Dr. Roth closed the impressive rally.

Straßburger Neueste Nachrichten, 1942/138, p. 2. (20th May 1942)

Nowhere in here is there any sentence which respembles the quotation, seemingly invented by Aronsfeld: "We swear we are not going to abandon the struggle until the last Jew in Europe has been exterminated and is actually dead." Moreover, there's clearly a disconnect between what Ley was saying and Aronsfeld's interpretation. Ley was talking about the Soviet Union, the Bolsheviks. This was a speech about the war, not about the Final Solution. He was clearly equating 'Jews' with the Bolsheviks - hence why he says "let us gratefully, bravely and courageously take up the fight against the Jew and his satellites" - using the terms interchangably. Whether he was referring to literal Jews, or a kind of Jewish spirit inculcated in Bolshevism is unknown, but that's the impression I'm getting from this. Because there's no way Ley actually thinks all Bolshevists are racially/religiously Jewish.

---

25:00
Himmler's Posen speech, 6 October 1943. The Posen speeches have been discussed in multiple threads already, which can be found using the search function.
There is no audio recording of the speech. The document was supposedly discovered in the German archives in 1970, placed there by the Americans. The source was written to be Himmler's files, which were in Berlin. It's not clear how the US found these documents in Berlin when the Soviets (notorious document forgers) occupied this area.

Irving discussed the document:

Himmler saying: "The hard decision had to be taken to make this race disappear from earth." [...] the remarkable fact that precisely at this point the typescript changes, a page appears to have been inserted by a different typist, the numeration of the pages changes from a typewritten page number at the top to a pencilled page number at the top, and there are various other indications about that speech that make me queasy. [...] Irving pointed out that what was contained in these pages "changes very much the essence of the speech, depending on whether it is an authentic transcript of the speech or whether that has been tampered with for some reason...I don't think we need to know the motives of people tampering with speeches. It is sufficient for historians to look at a document and say 'This document has been tampered with'; for him then to say, 'In that case, I must set it aside.' [...] at that point in the script, the page relating that very damaging and incriminating sentence has quite clearly been retyped by a different typist on a different typewriter using different carbon paper, and that page has been numbered by pencil and inserted at that point [...] he doesn't make this statement anywhere else when he's delivering almost identical speeches to...similar audiences [...] this isn't just any page...I suppose it is probably the most important page of the most important speech in the whole of the Holocaust history, and this page, of all pages, when we look at it, turned out to have been tampered with.

- 'Did Six Million Really Die?' Report of the Evidence in the Canadian 'False News' Trial of Ernst Zündel, 1988. https://archive.ph/8SfVI

A few things need to be cleared up.

First of all, when Irving is talking about this typescript of the Posen speech from October 6, what source is he citing for where exactly the typescript changes? I have seen both the original in the Bundesarchiv, and the microfilm copy in the National Archives and Records Administration (NARA) Microfilm collection, and both are the same document, there is absoloute continuity in the typescript for the pages on which this passage occurs. I will post the page from the two sources, and you can see that there is no "pencilled page number at the top" as opposed to the typewritten:

German:

Ich darf hier in diesem Zusammenhang und in diesem allerengsten Kreise auf eine Frage hinweisen, die Sie, meine Parteigenossen, alle als selbstverständlich hingenommen haben, die aber für mich die schwerste Frage meines Lebens geworden ist, die Judenfrage. Sie alle nehmen es als selbstverständlich und erfreulich hin, daß in Ihrem Gau keine Juden mehr sind. Alle deutschen Menschen - abgesehen von einzelnen Ausnahmen - sind sich auch darüber klar, daß wir den Bombenkrieg, die Belastungen des vierten und des vielleicht kommenden fünften und sechsten Kriegsjahres nicht ausgehalten hätten und nicht aushalten würden, wenn wir diese zersetzende Pest noch in unserem Volkskörper hätten. Der Satz 'Die Juden müssen ausgerottet werden' mit seinen wenigen Worten, meine Herren, ist leicht ausgesprochen. Für den, der durchführen muß, was er fordert, ist es das Allerhärteste und Schwerste, was es gibt. Sehen Sie, natürlich sind es Juden, es ist ganz klar, es sind nur Juden, bedenken Sie aber selbst, wie viele - auch Parteigenossen - ihr berühmtes Gesuch an mich oder irgendeine Stelle gerichtet haben, in dem es hieß, daß alle Juden selbstverständlich Schweine seien, daß bloß der Soundso ein anständiger Jude sei, dem man nichts tun dürfe. Ich wage zu behaupten, daß es nach der Anzahl der Gesuche und der Anzahl der Meinungen in Deutschland mehr anständige Juden gegeben hat als Oberhaupt nominell vorhanden waren. In Deutschland haben wir nämlich so viele Millionen Menschen, die ihren einen berühmten anständigen Juden haben, daß diese Zahl bereits größer ist als die Zahl der Juden. Ich will das bloß deshalb anführen, weil Sie aus dem Lebensbereich Ihres eigenen Gaues bei achtbaren und anständigen nationalsozialistischen Menschen feststellen können, daß auch von ihnen jeder einen anständigen Juden kennt.

Ich bitte Sie, das, was ich Ihnen in diesem Kreise sage, wirklich nur zu hören und nie darüber zu sprechen. Es trat an uns die Frage heran: Wie ist es mit den Frauen und Kindern? - ich habe mich entschlossen, auch hier eine ganz klare Lösung zu finden. Ich hielt mich nämlich nicht für berechtigt, die Männer auszurotten - sprich also, umzubringen oder umbringen zu lassen - und die Rächer in Gestalt der Kinder für unsere Söhne und Enkel groß werden zu lassen. Es mußte der schwere Entschluß gefaßt werden, dieses Volk von der Erde verschwinden zu lassen. Für die Organisation, die den Auftrag durchfuhren mußte, war es der schwerste, den wir bisher hatten. Er ist durchgeführt worden, ohne daß - wie ich glaube sagen zu können - unsere Männer und unsere Führer einen Schaden an Geist und Seele erlitten hätten. Diese Gefahr lag sehr nahe. Der Weg zwischen den beiden hier bestehenden Möglichkeiten, entweder zu roh zu werden, herzlos zu werden und menschliches Leben nicht mehr zu achten oder weich zu werden und durchzudrehen bis zu Nervenzusammenbrüchen - der Weg zwischen dieser Scylla und Charybdis ist entsetzlich schmal.

Wir haben das ganze Vermögen, das wir bei den Juden beschlagnahmten - es ging in unendliche Werte -, bis zum letzten Pfennig an den Reichswirtschaftsminister abgeführt. Ich habe mich immer auf den Standpunkt gestellt: Wir haben die Verpflichtung unserem Volke, unserer Rasse gegenüber, wenn wir den Krieg gewinnen wollen - wir haben die Verpflichtung unserem Führer gegenüber, der nun in 2000 Jahren unserem Volke einmal geschenkt worden ist, hier nicht klein zu sein und hier konsequent zu sein. Wir haben aber nicht das Recht, auch nur einen Pfennig von dem beschlagnahmten Judenvermögen zu nehmen. Ich habe von vornherein festgesetzt, daß SS-Männer, auch wenn sie nur eine Mark davon nehmen, des Todes sind. ich habe in den letzten Tagen deswegen einige, ich kann es ruhig sagen, es sind etwa ein Dutzend - Todesurteile unterschrieben. Hier muß man hart sein, wenn nicht das Ganze darunter leiden soll. - Ich habe mich für verpflichtet gehalten, zu Ihnen als den obersten Willensträgern, als den obersten Würdenträgern der Partei, dieses politischen Ordens, dieses politischen Instruments des Führers, auch über diese Frage einmal ganz offen zu sprechen und zu sagen, wie es gewesen ist. - Die Judenfrage in den von uns besetzten Ländern wird bis Ende dieses Jahres erledigt sein. Es werden nur Restbestände von einzelnen Juden übrig bleiben, die untergeschlüpft sind. Die Frage der mit nichtjüdischen Teilen verheirateten Juden und die Frage der Halbjuden werden sinngemäß und vernünftig untersucht, entschieden und dann gelöst.

English:

In this connection, I may comment before this very tightly knit group on a matter which you, my Party Comrades, all take for granted, and which is the most difficult task I have ever faced in my life, the Jewish problem. All of you gladly take it for granted that there are no longer any Jews in your administrative districts. All Germans — with a few individual exceptions — are aware that we could not have endured the bombings, the hardships of the fourth year of the war, and could not endure fifth and sixth years of war that are perhaps yet to come, if we still had this demoralizing pest in our national body. "The Jews must be eradicated ["ausgerottet"]." This brief sentence is easily said. But for the man who must carry out what it calls for, it is the gravest and hardest thing in existence. Now, look, after all they're Jews, only Jews. That's plain enough. But just think about how many people — including Party comrades — have addressed to me and other officials those famous petitions of theirs in which they say: The Jews are all bastards, of course, but so-and-so is a good Jew and should be left alone. I daresay, judging by the number of such appeals and the number of people who express such opinions, the number of "good Jews" in Germany must have exceeded the total Jewish population! In Germany we have millions and millions of people who each have their "one good Jew." I mention this only because you can see in the vital field of your own administrative districts how many respected and upright National Socialists have their "good Jew."

I ask that you assembled here pay attention to what I have to say, but not repeat it. The question came up: Well, what about the women and children? — I came to a determinedly simple conclusion about that, too. I did not believe that I had the right to wipe out ["auszurotten"] the men — rather I should say, kill ["umzubringen"] them or have them killed — and let their children grow up to avenge themselves on our sons and grandsons. The hard decision to wipe this people ["Volk"] off ["verschwinden"] the face of the earth had to be made. For us, the organization that had to carry out this task, it was the most difficult one we ever had. But it was accomplished, and without — I believe I can say — our men and their leaders suffering any mental or spiritual damage. That was clearly a danger. To become too brutal, too heartless, and lose respect for human life, or to be too soft and bring oneself to the point of a nervous breakdown — the path between these two ever-present possibilities is incredibly narrow, the course between Scylla and Charybdis.

We have turned over to the Reich Ministry of Economics all the wealth we confiscated from the Jews — the sums were staggering — right down to very last penny. I have always maintained: We have a duty to our people, to our race, we have a duty to a leader such as has been given to our people only once in 2,000 years, not to be petty here, but to go the limit, as we must do in all things if we are to win the war. Yet we do not have the right to take even one penny of the wealth confiscated from the Jews. At the outset, I laid down the line: Any SS men who take so much as a mark of it are as good as dead. In the past few days, I've had to sign a number of death sentences — I might as well say it, there were about a dozen. One has to be strict here, or everyone will suffer. I considered it my duty to speak very openly to you — the highest bearers of the will, the highest dignitaries, of the Party, of this political order, of this political instrument of the Führer — about this matter and to give the facts as they are. By the end of the year, the Jewish problem in the lands we have occupied will be solved. There will be left only remnants, individual Jews who are in hiding. The problem of Jews who are partners in mixed marriages and the problem of half-Jews will, in accordance with this policy, be rationally examined, decided upon, and resolved.

"Rede des Reichsfuhrer-SS vor den Reichs- und Gauleitern in Posen am 6. Oktober 1943" [Speech of the Reichsfuhrer-SS to the Reich and Gauleiters in Posen on October 6, 1943]: Bundesarchiv, Berlin-Lichterfelde (BA-BL), NS 19/4010, pp. 16-19. (Sheets, 174-177). Cf. NARA, RG 242, Microfilm Publication T175, Roll 85, Frames 2610167-70.

As can be seen, the pages don't change.

Secondly, in light of this, it's quite wrong to state as Jurgen Graf did at one point that "There are no original texts of the speeches." Clearly there are. It's also wrong to state that there's no audio recording for the speech of October 6. There actually is, but it's incomplete. According to the NARA website:

13. Himmler, Heinrich. "Speech to the Gauleiter" ("Rede auf der Gauleitertagung"). Posen, Oct. 6, 1943. Approx. 32 min. Item 242-189, 242-224. Incomplete. Only a very small section of the middle of the speech is reproduced. . .

Captured German Sound Recordings.

Whether it contains this "incriminating" section, I don't know. But there is a recording. And I think the authenticity of these recordings is probably in less doubt considering, as the archive states, there are multiple recordings from multiple speakers at these meetings. I think what's really up for debate is the interpretation of the speeches themselves, and in particular these controversial passages.

Often the quotation from page 17 of the October 6 speech is used to 'prove' that the quotation from the October 4 speech 'must' refer to mass murder. You can read the wikipedia page on the Posen speeches to read them claim this. For context, this is the following quotation they're referencing:

German:

Ich will hier vor Ihnen in aller Offenheit auch ein ganz schweres Kapitel erwähnen. Unter uns soll es einmal ganz offen ausgesprochen sein, und trotzdem werden wir in der Öffentlichkeit nie darüber reden. Genau so wenig, wie wir am 30. Juni 1934 gezögert haben, die befohlene Pflicht zu tun und Kameraden, die sich verfehlt hatten, an die Wand zu stellen und zu erschießen, genau so wenig haben wir darüber jemals gesprochen und werden je darüber sprechen. Es war eine, Gottseidank in uns wohnende Selbstverständlichkeit des Taktes, daß wir uns untereinander nie darüber unterhalten haben, nie darüber sprachen. Es hat jeden geschaudert und doch war sich jeder klar darüber, daß er es das nächste Mal wieder tun würde, wenn es befohlen wird und wenn es notwendig ist.

Ich meine jetzt die Judenevakuierung, die Ausrottung des jüdischen Volkes. Es gehört zu den Dingen, die man leicht ausspricht. - 'Das jüdische Volk wird ausgerottet', sagt ein jeder Parteigenosse, 'ganz klar, steht in unserem Programm, Ausschaltung der Juden, Ausrottung, machen wir.' Und dann kommen sie alle an, die braven 80 Millionen Deutschen, und jeder hat seinen anständigen Juden. Es ist ja klar, die anderen sind Schweine, aber dieser eine ist ein prima Jude. Von allen, die so reden, hat keiner zugesehen, keiner hat es durchgestanden. Von Euch werden die meisten wissen, was es heißt, wenn 100 Leichen beisammen liegen, wenn 500 daliegen oder wenn 1000 daliegen. Dies durchgehalten zu haben, und dabei - abgesehen von Ausnahmen menschlicher Schwächen - anständig geblieben zu sein, das hat uns hart gemacht. Dies ist ein niemals geschriebenes und niemals zu schreibendes Ruhmesblatt unserer Geschichte, denn wir wissen, wie schwer wir uns täten, wenn wir heute noch in jeder Stadt - bei den Bombenangriffen, bei den Lasten und bei den Entbehrungen des Krieges - noch die Juden als Geheimsaboteure, Agitatoren und Hetzer hätten. Wir würden wahrscheinlich jetzt in das Stadium des Jahres 1916/17 gekommen sein, wenn die Juden noch im deutschen Volkskörper säßen.

English:

I want to mention another very difficult matter here before you in all frankness. Among ourselves, it ought to be spoken of quite openly for once; yet we shall never speak of it in public. Just as little as we hesitated to do our duty as ordered on 30 June 1934, and place comrades who had failed against the wall and shoot them, just as little did we ever speak of it, and we shall never speak of it. It was a matter of course, of tact, for us, thank God, never to speak of it, never to talk of it. It made everybody shudder; yet everyone was clear in his mind that he would do it again if ordered to do so, and if it was necessary.

I am thinking now of the evacuation of the Jews, the extirpation of the Jewish people. It is one of those things that's easy to say: "The Jewish people will be extirpated" , says every Party comrade, "that's quite clear, it's in our programme: elimination of the Jews, extirpation ; that's what we're doing." And then they all come along, these 80 million good Germans, and every one of them has his decent Jew. Of course, it's quite clear that the others are pigs, but this one is one first-class Jew. Of all those who speak this way, not one has looked on; not one has lived through it. Most of you know what it means when 100 bodies lie together, when 500 lie there, or if 1,000 lie there. To have gone through this, and at the same time, apart from exceptions caused by human weaknesses, to have remained decent, that has made us hard. This is a chapter of glory in our history which has never been written, and which never shall be written; since we know how hard it would be for us if we still had the Jews, as secret saboteurs, agitators, and slander-mongers, among us now, in every city — during the bombing raids, with the suffering and deprivations of the war. We would probably already be in the same situation as in 1916/17 if we still had the Jews in the body of the German people.

"Rede des Reichsfuhrer-SS bei der SS-Gruppenfuhrertagung in Posen am 4. oktober 1943" [Speech of the Reichsfuhrer-SS at the SS-Gruppenfuhrer Meeting in Posen on October 4, 1943]: NARA, RG 238, NM-66 2A, Box 10. Cf. Nuremberg Document 1919-PS, published in: IMT, XXIX, p. 145. English from C.W. Porter's translation: Heinrich Himmler's Posen Speech from 04.10.1943.

The page above is the original found in the National Archives and Records Administration (NARA). Himmler's handwritten notes for this speech are also in the file. The Bundesarchiv only contains negative photocopies for the October 4 speech, however they do have the original notes for the October 6th speech.

Here is the page of the relevant handwritten note written by Himmler as a guide to the topics of the speech, corresponding to the above page:

As can be seen, right in the middle on the 5th line is written 'judenevakuierung' (evacuation of jews) as was pointed out in 1993 by Robert Wolfe. Why Himmler wrote this as the heading, rather than 'Ausrottung' or 'umbringen' is anyones guess. It certainly seems odd in light of the claim that he was intending to discuss the muder of Jews, and not their evacuation.

Anyway.

The reason I bring this up, is because clearly the exterminationist interpretation doesn't make any sense here. The mentioning of the party program completely throws it all off. The exterminationists claim that Himmler's use of the word 'Judenevakuierung' here is merely to contrast between the codeword and the true meaning being 'Ausrottung'. This is Himmler's 'mask-off' moment in their view:

The second reason is that it makes no sense in the flow of Himmler's speech. When he first refers to the "Ausrottung" of the Jews, Himmler has just spent a full minute impressing on his audience the importance of utter secrecy. (He has even invoked the memory of the "Night of the Long Knives," when traitors to the Nazi cause were arrested and shot on Hitler's orders, so his audience of SS Major-Generals is reminded that, in the Nazi war machine, top officers have no problem executing lower-ranking officers.)

Everyone in the world had known for years that Germany wanted to deport its Jews. If the only thing he was talking about was deportation, why was he emphasizing secrecy to his officers?

Listen to Himmler's voice as he explains the meaning of the code word "Judenevakuierung": his voice goes up on the code word, which everyone has heard of and most know is code; he pauses briefly for dramatic effect; and then as he reveals that it really means "extermination," the tone of his voice falls. Here is the euphemism, he is saying, and here is its meaning.

If he were simply saying the same thing twice in different words, why would the first version be phrased straightforwardly, and the second with such gravity?

Holocaust-History, "Holocaust-Denial, the Poznan speech, and our translation" | Archive

Most of what they say is pure supposition. You have to first accept that 'Judenevakuierung' is a code word, and that Himmler isn't simply using 'Ausrottung' to basically mean something synonomous to that idea. Which was how I understood it personally. There is no proof for what they're claiming.

The fact that Himmler's original handwritten note only says 'Judenevakuierung' can be seen to mean that this was the topic, the overarching mission which he's discussing. If the whole point of what he said was to openly discuss the killing of Jews, then his note - so it seems to me- would say something explicit. The reason I say this is because his notes are a guidline for the topic which he plans to discuss, and clearly the topic here is supposed to be murder not evacuation if we accept the logic of the exterminationists; yet Himmler made the decision to title the topic in regards to evacuation and not murder. It makes little sense.

As for why he emphasised secrecy, well why indeed? Because to speak about the 'Final Solution' in public would probably still be quite disturbing to many people. The claim is still that the Final Solution was a secret right? And because all the other documents which mention it are all talking about deportations, why can we not assume that Himmler here is also talking about keeping the discussions about evacuations and deportations a secret? There's no reason why "it ought to be spoken of quite openly for once" but only in relation to killing people. There's no reason to think that. The reason Himmler invokes the Rohem putsch is not because of the killing, but because the way they behaved in that instance is similar to how Himmler thought the SS and whoever else, should also behave in regarding to the deportation of the Jews. There doesn't need to be some rythmic connection. The point is 'don't talk about this either'. I think it's that simple. They say it makes no sense, but so what? Since when did Nazi maniacs think or behave logically right? Even if you argued that the 'Final Solution' was widely known, that doesn't mean Himmler couldn't be stressing secrecy about it. Perhaps there was a need to be reminded?

So yes, I think he was "saying the same thing twice in different words". The reference to the party program in the same sentence is the most obvious indication of that. As to why he used a word "with such gravity" is because the situation was one of such gravity. Since when was there a rule that one can't speak tautologically?

Another point is that in the October 4 Posen speech Himmler says:

German: Ich meine jetzt die Judenevakuierung, die Ausrottung des jüdischen Volkes. Es gehört zu den Dingen, die man leicht ausspricht. - 'Das jüdische Volk wird ausgerottet', sagt ein jeder Parteigenosse, 'ganz klar, steht in unserem Programm, Ausschaltung der Juden, Ausrottung, machen wir.'

English: I am thinking now of the evacuation of the Jews, the Ausrottung of the Jewish people. It is one of those things that's easy to say: "The Jewish people will be Ausrottung" , says every Party comrade, "that's quite clear, it's in our programme: elimination [Ausschaltung] of the Jews, Ausrottung ; that's what we're doing."

Himmler, October 4. 1943; NARA, RG 238, NM-66 2A, Box 10. Nuremberg Doc. 1919-PS; IMT, XXIX, p. 145.

And we know it's claimed that "Ausrottung" is the "reveal" of what Himmler allegedly "truly" meant:

Listen to Himmler's voice as he explains the meaning of the code word "Judenevakuierung": his voice goes up on the code word, which everyone has heard of and most know is code; he pauses briefly for dramatic effect; and then as he reveals that it really means "extermination," the tone of his voice falls. Here is the euphemism, he is saying, and here is its meaning.

Holocaust-History, "Holocaust-Denial, the Poznan speech, and our translation" | Archive

This explanation is nonsensical.

If everyone already knows "Ausrottung" is allegedly a "code word", then why when he uses the word in context of it's so-called "true meaning" (Genocide) after the "reveal" does he attribute it as already being used in a non-homicidal context by "everyone" (as evacuation), as Himmler states: "The Jewish people will be Ausrottung", says every Party comrade, "that's quite clear, it's in our programme". This is non-homicidal because it refers to the "codeworded" version (but as is my point, without the so-called "codeword") of the Jewish qestion in which Jews are merely to be deported, as it's quite ridiculous to claim that all the party comrades were openly talking about the genocide of the Jews, much less that it's in the party programme. So the alleged "reveal" that this word "Ausrottung" is the real word that should be understood only in a pure and explicitly murderous capacity is contradicted by this statement just quoted from Himmler when he uses the word "Ausrottung" in a capacity in which it cannot be used to refer to killing. This must be true otherwise it'd be unnecessary to clarify the intention of the word if as Himmler says, it was already being used by "party comrades".

One would still have to wonder why Himmler didn't instead say "There will be a Judenevakuierung" says every party comrade, "that's quite clear, it's in our programme". But he doesn't say this or some variation thereof to juxtapose with the "reveal" which is what these exterminationists are claiming he was doing, it makes no sense at all unless "Ausrottung" means more than one thing; and it must because the actual words Himmler uses doesn't differentiate between the wording of what supposedly "all" the party comrade are saying which is supposed to be representative of the "secret" outward presentation of Jewish policy (i.e. Judenevakuierung) and the alleged explicitly murderous reality which he supposedly felt compelled to reveal to them (i.e. "Ausrottung"). He uses the same word "Ausrottung" twice, in both cases, for both contexts; and in-fact when he says the belief among the party comrades is that: "The Jewish people will be [i]Ausrottung" , says every Party comrade, "that's quite clear, it's in our programme"[/i] he confirms it in this non-homicidal context following up immediately by saying: "Ausrottung; that's what we're doing."

What are we to assume? That Himmler was using the same word to mean two different things in the same sentence to refer to two different positions? This would then refute the claim already made by the exterminationists that "Ausrottung" can only refer to killing people. So seriously, what's happening? Is Himmler himself differentiating between two different uses of the word "Ausrottung"? Is that his point? Seems much too speculative to me.

Regarding the following paragraph:

German: Die Reichtümer; die sie hatten, haben wir ihnen abgenommen. Ich habe einen strikten Befehl gegeben, den SS-Obergruppenführer Pohl durch geführt hat, dass diese Reichtümer selbstverständlich restlos an das Reich abgeführt wurden. Wir haben uns nichts davon genommen. Einzelne, die sich verfehlt haben, werden gemäß einem von mir zu Anfang gegebenen Befehl bestraft, der androhte; Wer sich auch nur eine Mark davon nimmt, der ist des Todes. Eine Anzahl SS-Männer — es sind nicht sehr viele — haben sich dagegen verfehlt und sie werdendes Todes sein, gnadelos. Wir hatten das moralische Recht, wir hatten die Pflicht gegenüber unserem Volk, dieses Volk, das uns umbringen wollte, umzubringen, Wir haben’ aber nicht das Recht, uns auch nur mit einem Pelz mit einer Uhr, mit einer Mark oder mit einer Zigarette oder mit sonst etwas zu bereichern. Wir wollen nicht am Schluss, weil wir einen Bazillus ausrotteten, an dem Bazillus krank werden und sterben. Ich werde niemals zusehen, dass hier auch nur eine kleine Fäulnisstelle entsteht oder sich festsetzt. Wo sie sich bilden sollte, werden wir sie gemeinsam ausbrennen. Insgesamt aber können wir sagen, dass wir diese schwerste Aufgabe in Liebe zu unserem Volk. erfüllt haben. Und wir haben keinen Schaden in unserem Inneren, in unserer Seele, in unserem Charakter daran genommen.

English:The riches they had, we've taken away from them. I have given a strict order, which SS Group Leader Pohl has carried out, that these riches shall, of course, be diverted to the Reich without exception. We have taken none of it. Individuals who failed were punished according to an order given by me at the beginning, which threatened: he who takes even one mark of it, that's his death. A number of SS men — not very many — have violated that order, and that will be their death, without mercy. We had the moral right, we had the duty to our own people, to kill this people which wanted to kill us . But we don't have the right to enrich ourselves even with one fur, one watch, one mark, one cigarette, or anything else. Just because we eradicated a bacillus, after all, doesn't mean we want to be infected by the bacillus and die. I will never permit even one little spot of corruption to arise or become established here. Wherever it may form, we shall burn it out together. In general, however, we can say that we have carried out this most difficult task out of love for our own people. And we have suffered no harm to our inner self, our soul, our character in so doing.

Himmler, October 4, 1943; NARA, RG 238, NM-66 2A, Box 10; 1919-PS: IMT, XXIX, p. 146.

I'm unsure of how to interpret this.

On the one hand, Himmler is talking about SS men and Jews, more specifically about confiscating their wealth and then punishing the SS men who try to enrich themselves. Their punishment is death he says, and then he switches topic abruptly, which is strange.

Firstly though, Metapedia states that this key line makes little sense because:

...the National Socialist ideology and propaganda did not argue that the "Jews" planned to genocide Germans, but to subjugate and enslave them. Also, the sentence states that the Jewish people had been killed at the time of the speech, but also according to the politically correct view on the Holocaust, there were still millions of Jews alive in Europe at this time. Thus, it is argued, this sentence must be interpreted figuratively and not literally.

Posen Speeches, Metapedia | Archive

However, the rebuttal to this could be that "kill" in terms of what the Jews "wanted" to do was merely "spritual", so the Jews had wanted to spiritally "kill" the German people, and therfore this again makes sense! But then the problem arises that if "kill" is used to mean something spritiual in terms of what the Jews were doing, then that also means the whole thing is again, not literal, for Himmler could also be using "kill" from the German perspective to be a dramatically symbolic word to represent Jewish expulsion. No matter how you look at it, it's practically impossible to interpret this key excerpt in a way that makes literal sense the way Himmler says it.

Secondly, Hadding Scott poses the possibility that this part of the speech was edited, at least the sound recording was. He states:

I think that the recording was probably altered as follows. Himmler said, "We had the duty to our people to do it," in one context (probably about a past execution of corrupt SS-men, or the Night of the Long Knives), and in a different context, "We have the moral right to kill this (group of) people who would kill us," implying that the Jews were getting off easy by merely being deprived of wealth and deported. The former statement thus would have been inserted into the latter to change its significance, making it about a deed actually (already!) committed instead of an observation about how restrained and generous the treatment of the Jews was going to be.

It was completely feasible to edit sound recordings after Germany was defeated in 1945, since magnetic recording tape, which unlike wire recording or phonograph record is easily cut and spliced, had already been invented (by a German) in 1928. According to the U.S. National Archives (cited by The Holocaust History Project) the most common method of recording speeches in the Third Reich was direct recording to phonograph disc. Echos in this recording however indicate that the speech was stored for years on tape. Unless there is also an original disc-recording that has the same content as the tape, it means that the recording could have been edited.

Hadding Scott, The Improbable and the Impossible in Himmler's Posen Speech, April 9, 2009. Link | Archive 1 | Archive 2 (original)

If this is the case then it's perfectly possible that the Posen Speeches are legitimate recordings, but they're altered. This is plausible not only because the Allies had purposely frabricated things like film before (in this connection I'm thinking of the Anschluss footage, see: Irving, True Himmler, pp. 369, 572), but also because many of the recordings as we already know are incomplete for one reason or another. Something happened to the originals, and they were derived from somewhere and lost somewhere. If the verifiable original sound recordings cannot be shown to exist, then perhaps an eternal question mark will hang over the evidentiary value of these speeches. Of course, this matters much less when the physical evidence from the exterminationist side is severely lacking to corroborate their interpretations of Himmler's remarks.

Thirdly, it may be that 'umbringen' means to 'kill', but I found it interesting that in Wilhelm Stäglich's book it's translated as "destroy":

Just as incongruous is the statement in the second paragraph of the address: “We had the moral right, we had the duty to our people, to destroy this people which wanted to destroy us” (“Wir hatten das moralische Recht, wir hatten die Pflicht gegenüber unserem Volk, dieses Volk, das uns umbringen wollte, umzubringen”). Himmler allegedly said this when discussing the confiscation of the evacuated Jews’ wealth. In that context, it stands out as a foreign body. Since the Jews still residing in Germany and German-occupied territory were – considering that a war was going on – undoubtedly a security risk, as Himmler pointed out, their evacuation and internment in camps or ghettos was perhaps necessary, but not their murder, which is what the word “umbringen” (“destroy” “kill”) denotes.

Wilhelm Stäglich, Auschwitz: A Judge Looks at the Evidence (Uckfield: Castle Hill Publishers, 2015), pp. 112-113.

If 'umbringen' can be accurately interpreted and translated as "destroy", then this has a much more symbolic and figurative meaning because "destroy", of course, is often not used literally but to denote the destruction of certain ideas, or influence, which would be achieved by deporting the Jews rather than "killing" them.

Okay so, we have one speech on October 4 in which Himmler isn't speaking genocidally, another speech two days later in which he supposedly does speak genocidally because he says: "The hard decision to wipe this people off the face of the earth had to be made". But, perhaps we might be able to explain this quotation by introducing a discrepency for the exterminationist side, and an answer to the revisionist side?

A mere two months later on 16th December 1943, Himmler gave another speech. In it, he spoke again of the Jews, not of killing them, but their deportation to the East in conjunction with the great developments of Nationalsocialist Germany:

German:

Das SS-Hauptamt hat dann noch ein weiteres großes Aufgabengebiet: Die germanische Arbeit. Wir befinden uns in einer rasenden geschichtlichen Entwicklung. In einem anderen Zeitraum wäre die Gewinnung auch nur eines Gaues oder einer Provinz das epochale Ereignis dieser Generation gewesen. Wir haben, bescheiden oder vielmehr unbescheiden, wie wir nun geworden sind, uns an territoriale Gewinne gewöhnt. Wir haben dem Reiche die Ostmark mit 6 1/2 Millionen Menschen zurückgegeben, das Sudetenland mit 3 1/2 Millionen Menschen. Wir haben Böhmen-Mähren mit 7 Millionen Bewohnern eingegliedert. Wir haben die Ostprovinzen zurückgewonnen. Und die Geschichte nimmt in einem unerhörten Tempo ihren Lauf. Wir werten dies alles nicht mehr richtig. Dabei haben wir so manches Mal für das Nahestehende den Blick verloren, weil wir zu wenig von ihm entfernt sind. Wir stehen meines Er- achtens auch — auch das darf ich aussprechen — als oft unbescheidene und manchmal undankbare Zeitgenossen zu unmittelbar an dem Geschehen, an dem Genie Adolf Hitlers. [...] Wir stehen auch zu nahe an der Entwicklung, die sich in Europa vollzieht. Zum ersten Male, soweit wir es geschichtlich fest stellen können, seit etwa 2 1/2 tausend Jahren, sind wir auf dem Wege, die Germanen zu einigen. Ist nicht aus einem 65-Millionen-Volke im Jahre 1933 ein 85- bis 88-Millionen-Volk im Jahre 1941 geworden? Haben sich während des Krieges nicht einige große Völkerwanderungen vollzogen? 700,000 Deutsche sind eingewandert, zwei Millionen Fremde sind ausgewandert. So und soviele Juden wurden nach dem Osten gebracht. Völker bewegungen, die wir in der Geschichte mit großen Namen be- zeichnen, haben sich innerhalb dieser rasenden Entwicklung vollzogen. Wir werden nun aus einem 85-Millionen-Volke Großdeutschlands zum 120-Millionen-Volk der Germanen wer- den, zum Ordnungskern und zur Ordnungsmacht Europas, die mit den 85 Millionen Deutschen als Kernvolk im Rahmen dieses germanischen Reiches mit der Blutbasis von 120 Millionen Germanen dieses Europa mit seinen anderen Nationen beherrscht. Die Form, in der sich diese Entwicklung vollziehen wird, kennen wir nicht. In ein, zwei, drei Jahren werden wir sie genau wissen.

English:

The SS-Hauptamt then has another large area of responsibility: Germanic work. We are in a rapid historical development. In another period, the winning of even one Gau or province would have been the epochal event of this generation. We have become accustomed, modestly or rather immodestly, as we have now become, to territorial gains. We have returned to the Reich the Ostmark with 6 1/2 million people, the Sudetenland with 3 1/2 million people. We have incorporated Bohemia-Moravia with 7 million inhabitants. We have regained the Eastern provinces. And history is taking its course at an unheard-of pace. We no longer value all this properly. In the process, we have sometimes lost sight of what is close to us, because we are too little removed from it. In my opinion - and I may also say this - as often immodest and sometimes ungrateful contemporaries, we are too close to the events, to the genius of Adolf Hitler. [...] We are also too close to the development that is taking place in Europe. For the first time, as far as we can determine historically, for about 2 1/2 thousand years, we are on the way to unify the Germanic peoples. Did not a people of 65 million in 1933 become a people of 85 to 88 million in 1941? Did not some great migrations take place during the war? 700,000 Germans immigrated, two million foreigners emigrated. Such and such number of Jews were brought to the East. Movements of peoples, which we call by great names in history, have taken place within this rapid development. We will now become from an 85 million people of Greater Germany to a 120 million people of the Germanic tribes, to the core of order and the power of order of Europe, which with the 85 million Germans as the core people within the framework of this Germanic empire with the blood base of 120 million Germanic tribes dominates this Europe with its other nations. We do not know the form in which this development will take place. In one, two, three years we will know it exactly.

"Rede des Reichsführer-SS Heinrich Himmler, gehalten auf der Tagung der Befehlshaber der Kriegsmarine in Weimar am 16.12.1943" [Speech of Reichsführer-SS Heinrich Himmler, held at the meeting of the Kriegsmarine commanders in Weimar on 16.12.1943]: Bundesarchiv, Berlin-Lichterfelde (BA-BL), NS 19/4011, Sheets 222-223.

I quoted here the finalised version of the typewritten speech.

There are also Himmler's handwritten notes, another typewritten copy which is the original (i.e. the first typewritten version of the speech), and a copy with handwritten corrections that culminated in the final version.

The original is stamped 'Landtagstenograph Froherz' (State Stenographer Froherz) on every page. Also stamped on the first page is the following: 'Karl Froherz Landtagsstenograph' and his address in Weimar. So at least we know where this speech comes from. The reason I mention this, is because this version contains a different transcription which is worth quoting here for comparison. I will attach an image of the version with the handwritten corrections. It reads:

German:

Wir sind auch zu nahe daran an der Entwicklung, wie sie sich in Europa vollzieht. Zum ersten Male, soweit wir es geschichtlich festellen können seit etwa 2 1/2 tausen Jahren sind wir daran, daß die Germanen sich einigen, daß aus einem 65 Millonen Volke im Jahre 1933 ein 85 - 88 Millionen-Volk im Jahre 1941 geworden ist, das während des Kriegs einige große Völkerwanderungen sich vollzogen haben, eine Völkerwanderung immerhin von 700,00 Deutschen, die eingewander worden sind, von 2 Milionen Fremden, die ausgewandert sind, von so und sovielen Juden, die nach dem Osten ausgewandert wurden; Völkerbewegungen, wie wir sie in der Geschichte mit unendlichen Namen bezichnen, haben sich im Rahmen dieser rasenden Entwicklung vollzogen.

English:

We are also too close to the development that is taking place in Europe. For the first time, as far as we can determine it historically since approximately 2 1/2 thousand years ago, we are at the point where the Germanic peoples have united, from a 65 million people in 1933 which has become 85 - 88 million people in 1941, which during the war some big migrations have taken place, a migration of 700,00 Germans who have immigrated, of 2 million foreigners who have emigrated, of such and such many Jews who have emigrated to the East; Movements of peoples, as we call them in history with infinite names, have taken place within the framework of this rapid development.

BA-BL, NS 19/4011, Sheet 134. Cf. Sheets 183, 223.

The only killing of Jews Himmler mentions in this address is of partisans. So I would think that when he spoke of having to kill the women and children in the prior speech, he was probably also just referring to partisans, and not to Jews as a whole (Hadding Scott also makes this point, referring to the phrase "dieses Volk" in the October 6 address; see his replies in the comment section). Although it may not seem like it, I think that makes the most sense seeing as neither the first speech or second speech can be interpreted homicidally, nor can this speech a month later which flatly contradicts any exterminationist interpretation. Hence why it hasn't been quoted, nor translated more widely.

[Note: Post found on page 2: viewtopic.php?f=2&t=14727&start=15#p106349 added to this post. - M3]

So when, on October 6, 1943, Himmler said: "The hard decision to wipe this people off the face of the earth had to be made" [Es mußte der schwere Entschluß gefaßt werden, dieses Volk von der Erde verschwinden zu lassen] he was probably referring to partisans. If you read the preceding paragraph before the one which contains this paragraph, it doesn't read as if it's the natural progression of the speech. It just kind of cuts into a seemingly new topic in which Himmler discusses women and children. On that, it should be noted that when he says "The question came up: Well, what about the women and children? — I came to a determinedly simple conclusion about that, too." [Es trat an uns die Frage heran: Wie ist es mit den Frauen und Kindern? - ich habe mich entschlossen, auch hier eine ganz klare Lösung zu finden.]. Himmler is clearly talking about being asked a question. Now, if you had already made it plain that ALL Jews were to be killed indiscriminately, and if that was in-fact the basis of your whole plan, why would sparing women and children even be a question in the first place? Reading that section makes no sense at all unless he's talking about a specific group, probably partisans.

I say he was probably referring to partisans on October 6 because on December 16th Himmler said the exact same thing, but made explicit reference to who he was talking about (whereas on October 6, it's vague due to the strange continuity between paragraphs):

German:

Maßnahmen, meine Herren, um die wir uns heute drücken, werden unsere Enkel begrüßen. Wenn ich irgendwo gezwungen war, in einem Dorfe gegen Partisanen und gegen jüdische Kommissare vorgehen zu lassen - ich spreche dies in diesem Kreise aus, als lediglich für diesen Kreis bestimmt -, so habe ich grundsätzlich den Besfehl gegeben, auch die Weiber und Kinder dieser Partisanen und Kommissare umbringen zu lassen. Ich wäre ein Schwächling und ein Verbrecher an unseren Nachkommen, wenn ich die hasserfüllten Söhne dieser von uns im Kampfe von Mensch gegen Untermensch erledigten Untermenschen groß werden ließe.

English:

Measures, gentlemen, which we are shirking today, will be welcomed by our grandchildren. If I was forced to take action against partisans and against Jewish commissars in a village - I am saying this in this circle, as it is only intended for this circle -, then I gave the basic order to have the wives and children of these partisans and commissars killed as well. I would be a weakling and a criminal of our descendants if I let the hateful sons of these subhumans, who were killed by us in the fight of man against subhuman, grow up.

BA-BL, NS 19/4011, p. 21. (Sheet 224)

Here again Himmler is talking about secrecy. Funny isn't it? He's clearly not talking about "killing all Jews", and still stressing secrecy. This rather rubishes the idea that any talk of secrecy must be in connection with some program of wholesale extermination.

---

27:25 - Albert Speer
He references a supposed "private letter" from 1971 that was "found" in 2007. Speer was put on trial and sentenced to 20 years imprisonment after the war, and released in 1966. His defense strategy was to say "everything happened but it wasn't my fault"
The quotation he reads is just Himmler saying that he was present at the 6 October 1943 [Posen] speech, where "Himmler announced... that all Jews would be killed"
First (assuming it's genuine) this isn't a "confession" of anything except that he was present for a speech. He is supposedly remembering exactly what he heard at a speech almost 3 decades ago. This is not convincing.
Remember: Anyone put on trial in Germany for these offenses was liable to be tried again if they ever changed their testimony. That's what happened to Oberhauser after he recanted his Belzec testimony.

I have discussed this letter in the following thread:

Albert Speer Letter to Hélène Jeanty - 23 December 1971 - Speer Admits to the Holocaust?
viewtopic.php?f=2&t=14655

Also note that witnesses to the Posen speeches that deny Himmler spoke of "extermination" are more numerous than Speer who seems to be the only "witness" (of this it is doubtful, evidence says he wasn't there during Himmler's speech and left beforehand) who claims that Himmler said what the exterminationists claim.

[Lamprecht]

Good points Otium on the Oct.6 Posen speech. I am in a hurry right this moment so I can't fully respond. But I will make an important point which a lot of people miss out. This speech was made when the war was generally understood to be lost. Stalingrad was lost in Feb. 1943, a big blow, and then in August 1943, the Battle of Kursk was lost, which was really the coup de grace; there was really no hope of winning after that.
A lot of people understood this and that is the context that Himmler's speech has to be made in. Even if we accept "but Himmler said ____!" as true, it's nothing more than "Himmler said."
I have called it before a "damage control pep talk" and that appears accurate. He was telling his despondent brethren that the Jews will no longer be able to plague their children and grandchildren in Germany. Also, I think it was Irving but maybe not, suggested that Himmler said these things (in a "secret speech" that was apparently recorded with a transcript) to push the blame off of Hitler. I'm not entirely sure about that one, but I do wonder why there are copies of it.
Honestly, does anyone alive today believe that when it comes to politicians, everything they say is truth? Isn't it a basic requirement for a politician to be able to lie to a camera while keeping a straight face?
If you dislike Trump, check one of those "10 thousand lies by Trump" lists. If you dislike Biden, listen to what he says in his interviews. Lying is a very basic responsibility for these people.
Conversely, it makes no sense for documents to use these "code words" as alleged. The situation when it comes to documents is exaggeration or outright forgery.

[Lamprecht]

There is archaeological evidence of bodies and human remains at Belzec and Treblinka.

HistorySpeaks/Cockerill makes serious allegations like this, but refuses to justify them.
A livestream just isn't a good format to make this argument.
Why doesn't Cockerill write an article - or make a thread here - arguing in favor of the claim that the burnt remains of 100s of thousands is buried at Treblinka and/or Belzec?
It is because his position would be quickly exposed as fraudulent.

[Otium]

There is archaeological evidence of bodies and human remains at Belzec and Treblinka.

HistorySpeaks/Cockerill makes serious allegations like this, but refuses to justify them.
A livestream just isn't a good format to make this argument.
Why doesn't Cockerill write an article - or make a thread here - arguing in favor of the claim that the burnt remains of 100s of thousands is buried at Treblinka and/or Belzec?
It is because his position would be quickly exposed as fraudulent.

You already challenged him when he was on the forum to do something of the sort, and he couldn't. There's a reason he favours dubious secondhand sources which make claims about primary sources (false Ley quotation) and vague primary sources which are no good without hard physical evidence to back them up. None of it matters without the physical evidence and the planning documents, neither of which exist. Why doesn't Cockerill focus on that? If he feels he can make serious allegations, then he must have evidence to back himself up.