The case of Transnistria: resettlement and survival of Jews in Occupied USSR

[bombsaway]

viewtopic.php?f=2&t=14831&p=107581#p107581

Here Lampchrect asked why I brought up the Transnistria resettlement. What does it have to do with the alleged extermination camps?

I agree it has nothing to do with these camps, rather it has to do with the question of 'what actually happened', which I would say is the most vital question when you're doing history.

In previous threads Revisionists on this forum have stated it is no surprise that there is perhaps very little direct evidence of the mass resettlement of eg over a million Polish Jews as stated in the Korherr report. During war time records get destroyed, people move around without being tracked, and afterwards witnesses might not speak of their experiences because their experiences, though difficult, were common. Areas falling under Soviet control post-war would be subject to further suppression of information and voices.

Orthodox historians are skeptical of this.They believe even comparatively tiny resettlements should be traceable through documents and witness accounts.

The purpose of this thread will be to examine and compare the evidence for the resettlement of ~100,000 Jews in Romanian occupied USSR with the resettlement of 1.85 million in German occupied USSR (I'm using Thomas Kues's numbers from here https://codoh.com/library/document/evid ... in-the/en/)

If it turns out that there is a comparable level of evidence, revisionists will have exposed a hole in orthodox historiography. Why exactly do orthodox historians believe Jews were mass resettled in Transnistria with many surviving, but that those sent to "the Russian East" were instead killed en route?

[Lamprecht]

Do you intend on answering the following questions:

At least how many of them "spoke profusely" about it? Provide a number
When did they "speak profusely" about it? Provide dates
Where did they "speak profusely" about it? Provide locations
To whom did they "speak profusely" about it, and why? Explain
What percent of those transited in this cohort "spoke profusely" about it? Provide an estimate
Can you provide a list of every single train stop they were subjected to when transferring to this location?

As for:

the resettlement of 1.85 million in German occupied USSR

Consider the point I made multiple times: that no resettlement deep into eastern territories actually had to have taken place for that to be the plan. They could have been sent to Treblinka, Sobibor, or Belzec and then put into local ghettos or internment camps as a temporary measure, with the goal of eventually resettling them east (never happening).

They believe even comparatively tiny resettlements should be traceable through documents and witness accounts.

And I believe that millions of pounds of physical evidence cannot magically disappear by being covered with a layer of dirt. Actually, it's physically impossible.
Keep in mind that documents can be lost/destroyed very easily. As an exercise, take a piece of paper. Write something on it. Now, get rid of it so that nobody else could ever read what you wrote on this. There are many strategies that you can probably think of.

As for witness accounts, I do not see why these necessarily must exist. In fact, there is no reason why they must. From the previous thread:

The best evidence of mass resettlement in Russia is the Korherr report, but this seems compromised.

No, you have it completely backwards. From a previous post:

Remember the hierarchy of evidence. Here's a basic outline, in order of most definitive first:

1. Laws of nature – If someone contradicts the laws of nature, it did not happen. For something to have happened, it must first be possible. Simple

2. Common sense - If something makes absolutely no sense, it probably did not happen. For example, someone claims they avoided the gas chamber many times by being the 201st person in line but it only fit 200. That's just silly

3. Physical/material evidence - If someone says "Below my feet is a mass grave of 10,000 people" and then we dig and find nothing, it is not true. Even if 10 people agree with him, it just is not there

4. Documents - documents are generally more reliable than testimony, but even documents can be faked/forged: something the Soviets were notorious for. So when looking at them we must keep this in mind. Also, documents can be destroyed (both incriminating and exonerating) so relying solely on documents is problematic, but they do in general have more weight than testimony.

5. Neutral testimony - testimony of someone who has no skin in the game. A person who can not benefit or lose out no matter what they say. These people can lie, but are less likely to

6. Party testimony - a victim, a perpetrator, a prisoner, a vengeful enemy. These sorts of testimonies are the weakest forms of evidence imaginable. A victim or enemy may lie just for revenge. A perpetrator may lie just to seem innocent, and that may be denial or a "Yes it happened but I couldn’t stop it!" confession (whether you consider that a "confession" is a matter of semantics). A prisoner’s testimony is also very weak because he may just be saying whatever he thinks will get him out of jail.

We should never assume a testimony is false just because of who says it, but we should be very skeptical about testimony and make an honest effort to combine it with something more genuine, ideally physical evidence but if that is not possible then we should preferentially use documents.

The best evidence for resettlement is the lack of physical evidence for the alleged 'huge mass graves' claimed to exist at these supposed 'pure extermination camps'.
Additionally, there are plenty of documents supporting this interpretation.

Korherr's original study found that 1.5 million deported Jews had received "special treatment", self-evidently a code word

Korherr said "special treatment" did not mean killing. Also, there were Jews that we know were resettled that would only have fit into the "special treatment" category. So for your position to make sense, "special treatment" would have had to include resettlements along with gassings.

Himmler also wrote in another letter that the Korherr report would make "excellent camouflage" (you can ponder the meaning of this)

The report was for Hitler. Camouflage to trick Hitler into thinking Jews were not being killed, but instead were being gassed by the millions? Your conspiracy theory now is that Himmler is responsible for exterminating the Jews, and tricked Hitler into thinking it was a resettlement program?
Most likely, the numbers were just altered a bit to make his evacuation program look more effective than it was.

Finally the notion that 1.5 million deported Jews could simply be moved into camps and ghettos without leaving a trace of direct evidence (witness testimony or documents) doesn't make sense in the modern era

Actually it makes perfect sense. They were not dumped into pits at these camps, therefore they went somewhere else. The pits could not magically disappear. People can, however, travel to other places and then not mention it. Also, documents can be destroyed. People moving around without documentary evidence or any surviving testimony has happened quite often in history.

and is disproven by the substantial surviving record of the much smaller resettlement in Transnistria, which I detailed in the other thread and can continue to detail if there is interest.

How is the thesis that over 1 million Jews were not dumped into massive pits at Treblinka 2, Sobibor, and Belzec disproven by a small number of testimonies from Jews resettled into Transnistria? A resettlement that, notably, that you have dodged simple questions about. See:

At least how many of them "spoke profusely" about it? Provide a number
When did they "speak profusely" about it? Provide dates
Where did they "speak profusely" about it? Provide locations
To whom did they "speak profusely" about it, and why? Explain
What percent of those transited in this cohort "spoke profusely" about it? Provide an estimate
Can you provide a list of every single train stop they were subjected to when transferring to this location?

You have it completely backwards.
The way that you would disprove that the Jews left Belzec without being gassed and dumped into pits is by showing the alleged pits full of the remains of hundreds of thousands of gassed Jews.
As pointed out:

I find the following train of "logic" to be unsound:

1. Some Jews were resettled during WWII
2. We have post-war testimony about these Jews being resettled
3. There is no known post-war testimony of Jews claiming to have stopped at Belzec before being resettled
4. Therefore, 100s of thousands of Jews were dumped into enormous pits at Belzec (that cannot be shown to exist)

It's a completely ridiculous line of thinking.

It appears that your claim is that hundreds of thousands of Jews were gassed, dumped into pits, dug up, burned in giant outdoor pyres, and then dumped into pits at a specific site. This case for this hypothesis would be made by showing these alleged pits, which would necessarily exist. Claiming that this conspiracy theory must absolutely have happened because we do not have testimonies or travel itinerary documents fitting your particular demands is absurd. This is even more laughable after you posted a document contradicting your claim.
From another previous post:

I wanted to make a thread about a specific concept and probably will at a later date, and that concept is known as:
Falsifiability
Falsifiability means that for any hypothesis to have credence, it must be inherently disprovable.

In the case of
"These specific Jews who went to [specific location] 70+ years ago with [specific location 2] as an intermediate step"
it would be very difficult to prove if there are no relevant records and they were able to move around. But if that changes to
"They went to [specific location] and never left, and remain there to this day in some form"
it is now an easily testable theory. And that is precisely what is asserted by the "Holocaust" narrative. But the alleged pits are not shown to us. All we are given is pathetic excuses -- all the while those who speak out in Poland, Germany, France, etc are fined and imprisoned for it.

So when asked "Then where did they go?" it is perfectly valid to say "I do not know" - but it is invalid for someone to conclude "therefore, they are in these enormous pits, and no I don't have to show you the pits!"
First, they must show the alleged pits. Until then, they merely have a theory with an artificially contrived consensus based on legal [and social] penalties for those who publicly question it. It can be falsified in the same manner that it can be shown to be correct. They refuse to do such a thing despite having the resources and technology to do so. Therefore, their case is considerably weakened.

It can only be after these thorough archaeological excavations that the truth about these camps will be revealed, whether it is resettled "into mass graves" or "somewhere else." The image below is what we are told actually exists, today, under a layer of soil.



And if the investigations show that they did go "somewhere else" we can try to find out where. But we are unlikely to find new evidence 7+ decades after the fact (unless it was hidden rather than destroyed).
And in such a case, "Jews went wherever Jews are" still is not specific, but it would be perfectly accurate and valid. And I doubt many people would be interested in a more comprehensive answer after the "gassed and burned and dumped into huge pits" theory is completely discredited. Millions of pounds of physical evidence cannot vanish, unlike documents.

So if anyone has the right to ask the question "where did they go then?" it is the revisionists. The exterminationists claim to know where the 1.5+ million Treblinka 2, Sobibor, and Belzec victims went. Ask them to show you and they might provide a map with shapes on it they call "mass graves". Perfect, so they know exactly where they went down to the meter? Then they can show us a pit full of burnt human remains. If they can't do that, why believe them?

If 100s of thousands were dumped into massive pits, these pits would absolutely exist. There is no getting around that. Millions of pounds of physical evidence cannot magically disappear. This violates natural law.
For 100s of thousands to move from one place to another, and then never discuss it in a way that is recorded and documented so that this record exists in the present day for us to see it, that is certainly possible. I am saying, it does not violate natural law. Perhaps you could calculate a statistical likelihood that such a thing could actually take place in this manner. I do think that would be difficult. However, we all do things in daily life in the current year that nobody else could ever possibly know about.

[Lamprecht]

For the record, the questions I asked were from this post: viewtopic.php?p=107470#p107470

Well what I am pointing out is that the Jews deported into Romanian held USSR spoke profusely of their experiences and survival.

At least how many of them "spoke profusely" about it? Provide a number
When did they "speak profusely" about it? Provide dates
Where did they "speak profusely" about it? Provide locations
To whom did they "speak profusely" about it, and why? Explain
What percent of those transited in this cohort "spoke profusely" about it? Provide an estimate
Can you provide a list of every single train stop they were subjected to when transferring to this location?

That nothing exists for the far greater number of Jews apparently deported into German held USSR

Again, it is not necessary that they were deported deep into the USSR. They could have very well just ended up in the general area of the camps!
As you can see:



There were all sorts of ghettos that could have held Jews from other parts of Europe

That no such "huge mass graves" exist for the alleged hundreds of thousands of Jews claimed to have been sent to Belzec means they were not gassed and dumped into enormous pits!
The fact of the matter is that enormous mass graves full of millions of pounds of burnt remains, bones, teeth, wood ash, etc can not magically disappear.
Meanwhile, we know for a fact that people can move around all sorts of places without talking about it or producing documentation that survives many decades.

means this mass migration didn't happen, or that these witnesses were somehow targeted and silenced -- or had their memories suppressed through unknown means.

Indeed, they would have ended up under Soviet control. It's rather possible that they would not have lived for decades after WWII, given that they were "unfit for work" which is disproportionately the elderly. Most quite possibly did not know what the train stops were even named, or did not remember. They could have been hiding their Jewish identity. There are a lot of explanations. I don't recall anyone claiming to know exactly where they went, except the people insisting they were all dumped into enormous pits that can not be shown to exist.

Either 100s of thousands were dumped into pits or they were not. If 100s of thousands were not dumped into pits, that does not answer where they went. It is unfortunate for the people that wish to have complete travel itineraries for hundreds of thousands of Jews from WWII that we do not have this information. What is fortunate is that there is no reason to think that 100s of thousands of Jews were dumped into enormous pits at Belzec. This should be good news, right?
Although, we don't know what happened to them under Soviet control later on. If they were not dumped into enormous pits at Belzec, they must have necessarily went somewhere else. It is simply absurd to demand documentation of where they went as some sort of requirement for the thesis that they were not dumped into pits. The pits, if they existed, could be shown to exist. You posted a document explaining that they were to be expelled beyond the border. It has been pointed out that this may have been a future plan (which makes sense given the locations of T2+B+S) and they could have been in a sort of "temporary" arrangement in a ghetto close to one of these camps.
So there's 2 positions:
1) they were dumped into pits
2) they went somewhere else

#1 can be proven by showing the pits. The pits cannot be shown. Documents (some of which are missing) support position #2. #2 could be disproven very quickly, with very little effort, via a thorough archeological excavation revealing the alleged huge mass graves. They cannot be shown to exist, so the most reasonable position is #2 - again, supported by the documentary evidence (for example, the one you referenced). It should be noted that documentary evidence is only marginally more authoritative than party testimony (the weakest form of evidence) and material/physical evidence is far more definitive.

[Nazgul]

Not sure if this is relevant but hope it contributes. I wrote about a testimony regarding Transnistria
here. These were regarded as colonies rather than ghettos.

---

"The Transnistria Governorate was a Romanian-administered territory between the Dniester and Southern Bug, conquered by the Axis Powers from the Soviet Union during Operation Barbarossa and occupied from 19 August 1941 to 29 January 1944." In total, around 150 colonies and camps functioned in Transnistria"
link

In total, 380,000 – 400,000 Jews, including the Jews of Transnistria, were murdered in Romanian-controlled areas under the dictatorship of Antonescu. Yad Vashem

Yad Vashem would say they were murdered (their propaganda knows few boundaries), but the reality is different. Many Jews died of exposure, starvation, or disease during the deportations to Transnistria or after arrival. The testimony of Mihai Dumitru is interesting. link

---

Interview on the occasion of 2 August 2021, Holocaust Memorial Day for Sinti and Roma

– Uncle, what’s your name?
– Dimitru, Mihai Dimitru.
– And how old are you?
– Ninety-five.
– Were you also deported to “Russia”, to Transnistria?
– Yes, I was. I was in Trei Dube, Libașovca, Crivoi Oziero. I [forced] to work there for two and a half years.
– They put us in huts there, we were 3-4 thousand families, you couldn’t circle them one day.
– Many died, their dogs ate them.
– Our Roma ate the corpses, they died without candles, without being buried. Where I found them, I buried them.
– In the spring these huts began to crumble, the [roofs] were made of wood. The snow had melted, it was a snowy winter, and the wood fell on men, women and the children.
– And they died inside.
– They died inside. And no one had taken them out. Who was going to get them out anyway?
– Were you a big family?
– We were a big family.
– How many members were you?
“It was my father, my mother, my brothers who died there in the bombing.” We were cooking corn on the fire, a bomber saw us from above and bombed them.
“And who died?”
– Papa, mama died there, I fled. Several Roma died, many Roma died …
– Many died of hunger.
– Many died of misery, of typhus.
– Little children died, they could no longer be taken care of.
– Women, young women fell in the streets.
“There was a forest where I worked and cooked in a cauldron.” And from this cauldron a Roma of ours, an old man, took out food and poured some for the children, the women, for everyone. We ate there. We had it bad. Hope God doesn’t punish anyone like he punished us.
– My father and mother died there, my two brothers and my elder sisters.
– Your children know what you experienced in Transnistria.
– They know.
“But do the grandchildren know?”
– They don’t know!
– They don’t know.
– They don’t know anything!

[bombsaway]

As for:

the resettlement of 1.85 million in German occupied USSR

Consider the point I made multiple times: that no resettlement deep into eastern territories actually had to have taken place for that to be the plan. They could have been sent to Treblinka, Sobibor, or Belzec and then put into local ghettos or internment camps as a temporary measure, with the goal of eventually resettling them east (never happening).

Doesn't the Korherr report and Himmler correspondence contradict this hypothesis?

Korherr lists 297,914 remaining in Poland, and an additional breakdown of exactly what camps and ghettos they were in.

Korherr and Himmler correspondence took place in spring 1943, well after the brunt of deportations had finished (Korherr's numbers on Jews transported to the "Russian East" are sourced from December 1942.

I haven't seen any evidence that the resettlement plan was halted, the Jews were sent back, etc , so if you have anything here that would be interesting.

At least how many of them "spoke profusely" about it? Provide a number

To start with your first question, is there any way to answer this without doing hundreds or thousands of hours of research?

My use of the descriptor "profuse" was based on the large amount of testimony I saw from just a single community of resettled Jews, and comparing this for the testimony concerning resettlement in German occupied USSR from Poland (there is nothing here, as far as I know). I was extrapolating out, perhaps prematurely, and we can use this thread to assess whether my statement was truly fair.

[curioussoul]

What you should be asking yourself is, "Why were hundreds of thousands of Jews being transported to Transnistria?"

Consider the fact that Transnistria is located extremely deep into eastern Europe, in modern day Moldova and just south of central Ukraine. This was exactly the region into which reams of German documents attest that the National Socialist government was planning to literally resettle all of Europe's Jews as a "final solution to the Jewish question" after the war.

If, as you seem to believe, these plans were mere "code words" for extermination in the East, why would these Transnistria Jews be transported there and not exterminated?

[Lamprecht]

Doesn't the Korherr report and Himmler correspondence contradict this hypothesis?

The report is merely words types on a piece of paper. The report also does not argue the case that millions of Jews were dumped into pits, which contradicts the conspiracy theory claiming that 1.5-2m were dumped into pits at Treblinka, Sobibor, and Belzec.

Korherr lists 297,914 remaining in Poland, and an additional breakdown of exactly what camps and ghettos they were in.

OK. I even recently posted about why these numbers might not be accurate. You also recently posted a documents describing Jews being executed to further the war cause. If Jews were indeed being executed as part of a massive plan to execute them all, why not put it in this document? Oh, yes, didn't you say that the purpose of the document was to be "found" after the war to confuse people? Then why reference it at all, as if the numbers on it are something to be believed?

I haven't seen any evidence that the resettlement plan was halted, the Jews were sent back, etc , so if you have anything here that would be interesting.

I will be the first to tell you: I do not know where the Jews went. I think I've said that multiple times in the past week or two. I know I have said it many times before. I simply do not know where the 1.5m+ Jews went. It's most likely impossible to know exactly where they went, unless they were dumped into pits in specific locations. However, I do not believe that 1.5m+ were dumped into pits at Treblinka, Sobibor, and Belzec because those pits do not exist.
There are still trains that exist today, with train stations. Can you tell me, where all of the passengers on the train a week ago are now? I doubt it. But can you say for certain they were not dumped into pits next to the train station? I think so. And you don't need to actually know where they went to be able to conclude that they were not dumped into pits.

And, for the record, I haven't seen any evidence (that absolutely would/must exist, today) that they were instead dumped into pits. And I don't believe you have either. Because if you had such evidence, you wouldn't be going on this weird Transnistria tangent. The evidence would be presented and that would be the end of it.

Mass grave excavation guidelines / The "Mass grave excavations don't produce photographed bodies" lie
viewtopic.php?t=12889

To start with your first question, is there any way to answer this without doing hundreds or thousands of hours of research?

I don't know. I don't really see the point of this line of thinking: "they must have been dumped into pits if I can't find testimony that satisfies my curiosity."
If you're trying to promote the hypothesis that they were dumped into pits at Belzec, Sobibor, and Treblinka then you're wasting your time with this Transnistria stuff, in my opinion. You should be focusing on the pits they were allegedly dumped into. Size, shape, location, etc.

From Yitzhak Arad’s book “BELZEC, SOBIBOR, TREBLINKA” chapter 23, The Erasure of the Crimes:
“The camp command was confronted with the problem of disposing of the large piles of ash and bits of bone that remained… Ultimately it was decided to dump the ash and bits of bone into the ditches that had previously held the bodies and to cover them with a thick layer of sand and dirt… [Eyewitness] Abraham Goldfarb relates: …’we secretly placed in the walls of the graves whole skeletons and we wrote on scraps of paper what the Germans were doing at Treblinka. We put the scraps of paper into bottles, which we placed next to the skeletons. Our intention was that if one day someone looked for traces, they could indeed be found.’"

My use of the descriptor "profuse" was based on the large amount of testimony I saw from just a single community of resettled Jews, and comparing this for the testimony concerning resettlement in German occupied USSR from Poland (there is nothing here, as far as I know). I was extrapolating out, perhaps prematurely, and we can use this thread to assess whether my statement was truly fair.

If your position is that testimony unrelated to Treblinka, Sobibor, and Belzec supports the hypothesis that 1.5m+ Jews were dumped into pits at 3 sites, then you should focus on answering simple questions about the testimony.
Again, I think it's a waste of time. If you want to know where the Jews went, you can begin with a process of elimination. First, you can confirm/eliminate that they were dumped into enormous pits at Belzec, Sobibor, and Treblinka.
Surely some were dumped into pits if they went there at all, just from dying of disease in transit. I think we can all agree that some minority % of the people would have died on the trains.
But 100s of thousands dumped into pits at a specific site, such as Belzec, would produce massive quantities of human remains. This massive quantity of human remains is not present, however, so they must have gone somewhere else. That [possibly temporary] location may be an important thing for you to know, but I don't see why it should be. There are an infinite number of events in history where people moved around that we don't know all the details of.
The only reason I can imagine someone being concerned about where these Jews supposedly went is because they think that question must be answered or we all must assume they were in fact dumped into pits.
This is completely backwards, actually.
By default, we do not know where they went. Exterminations say "no, we actually know where they went, and they're still there, in a bunch of pits!"
But these pits actually do not exist. They are wrong. So the correct answer is "actually, we don't know."

[bombsaway]

What you should be asking yourself is, "Why were hundreds of thousands of Jews being transported to Transnistria?"

Consider the fact that Transnistria is located extremely deep into eastern Europe, in modern day Moldova and just south of central Ukraine. This was exactly the region into which reams of German documents attest that the National Socialist government was planning to literally resettle all of Europe's Jews as a "final solution to the Jewish question" after the war.

If, as you seem to believe, these plans were mere "code words" for extermination in the East, why would these Transnistria Jews be transported there and not exterminated?

Transnistria was not governed by Germans but Romanians. Apparently they didn't consider the existence of communities of Jews (sometimes ghettoized, sometimes just living out in fields or begging in cities) to be a mortal threat to the occupation. They were anti-semitic to be sure, but not at the level of Nazis.

OK. I even recently posted about why these numbers might not be accurate. You also recently posted a documents describing Jews being executed to further the war cause. If Jews were indeed being executed as part of a massive plan to execute them all, why not put it in this document? Oh, yes, didn't you say that the purpose of the document was to be "found" after the war to confuse people? Then why reference it at all, as if the numbers on it are something to be believed?

I never said that was the only purpose of the document, I was just offering an explanation for Himmler's use of the word 'camouflage'. Here's the full quote

The Chief of the Security Police and the SD
Berlin
NO-5197
Field Headquarters, 9.4.1943
Top Secret!
3 copies
3rd copy
I have received the statistical report by the Inspector of Statistics upon
the final solution of the Jewish problem.
In my opinion, this report is material, which we can perhaps use in the
future, and it is very good for camouflage purposes. At the moment the
report should neither be published nor distributed further.
It is most important as before to deport as many Jews to the East as is
humanly possible. The Security Police's short-term monthly reports shoul"d
report solely how many Jews we have deported and how many are left at
the end of each month.

Initialled by Himmler

So even if the report was going to be shelved in the short-term, it still had usefulness for Himmler who was very concerned with how many Jews were being deported and how many were left.

Why not put execution info into the document? Unnecessary. The Korherr report itself counts the Jews transported to the "Russian East" as population loss, not in Europe anymore.

I will be the first to tell you: I do not know where the Jews went. I think I've said that multiple times in the past week or two. I know I have said it many times before. I simply do not know where the 1.5m+ Jews went.

If you are being agnostic that's a fine and respectable position. My approach to history is that I generally go with the best evidenced hypothesis. If there are multiple equally evidenced hypothesis, only then is there a conflict. Until revisionists are able to argue for a historical narrative with evidence, the orthodox hypothesis as much more likely in my book.

(from what I've seen there is a lot more evidence of a genocidal program than there is mass population transfer and internment). The Kube document alone is stronger evidence than anything revisionists have offered.

Now if you have evidence that contradicts the orthodox hypothesis that complicates things, just like the Kube document complicates the narrative that Jews were being mass interned in Russia. Resettlement documents would contradict for sure, as would something like a study from Belzec archeologists saying they couldn't locate the remains.

It's most likely impossible to know exactly where they went,

Well that's what we're trying to evaluate here. Nazgul has begun by quoting excellent testimony concerning Jewish communities surviving in occupied USSR under non-genocidal conditions. Can we find anything comparable for resettlement in German occupied USSR, unless we are abandoning that hypothesis?

[Lamprecht]

Why not put execution info into the document? Unnecessary. The Korherr report itself counts the Jews transported to the "Russian East" as population loss, not in Europe anymore.

Because that was the stated purpose of the "Final Solution" - to remove the Jews from Europe. In fact, revisionists are the ones that are saying that the many documents describing the "Final Solution" are doing so accurately. Your position is that they are all using "code words" and that there are massive pits to prove it. Pits you cannot show actually exist.

If you are being agnostic that's a fine and respectable position.

No, I am not. I am saying outright that they were not dumped into pits by the millions. That is not "agnostic" - I am simply saying "we don't know exactly where they went" - which is what all revisionists are saying. The only people claiming to know where they went and are today are the exterminationists.

My approach to history is that I generally go with the best evidenced hypothesis. If there are multiple equally evidenced hypothesis, only then is there a conflict. Until revisionists are able to argue for a historical narrative with evidence, the orthodox hypothesis as much more likely in my book.

(from what I've seen there is a lot more evidence of a genocidal program than there is mass population transfer and internment).

But you just admitted that there is no evidence for any mass extermination program. See: viewtopic.php?t=14850

Your use of the term "genocidal program" is dishonest because you personally define normal conduct of a war as genocide.
The claim is millions of Jews being shoved into gas chambers, killed, and dumped into pits at specific sites.
You can not show that these pits exist. They do not exist. This alone completely discredits your conspiracy theory.

This entire thread is a complaint that revisionists do not have evidence that 100s of thousands of Jews went somewhere else besides being dumped into pits. Yes, they do: the alleged pits do not exist. Therefore, they went somewhere else. It's that simple.

How can it be the "best evidenced" when there is zero verifiable physical evidence at all for it, even though it should exist? Imagine I said:
"I have a specific, lost treasure chest full of gold + jewels buried in my back yard"
And I present documents of myself talking about it, and recordings of my neighbors saying I have it. Then you ask to see it. And I refuse to allow anyone to see it. In fact, there are no photos at all.
Why would you believe that I am telling the truth?
What if I ask you where the treasure is, and you can't show us where it actually is?

The Kube document alone is stronger evidence than anything revisionists have offered.

But the document itself contradicts the claim of a genocidal policy to exterminate all Jews.
Also, all of the documents describing the "Final Solution" describe it as a resettlement program.
Even so-called "pure extermination camps" were described as transit camps in the documents.

Now if you have evidence that contradicts the orthodox hypothesis that complicates things, just like the Kube document complicates the narrative that Jews were being mass interned in Russia. Resettlement documents would contradict for sure,

Documents are absolutely unnecessary. They can be so easily destroyed or fabricated. Huge mass graves can not be easily destroyed or fabricated. Party testimony is the weakest and least reliable form of evidence that exists. You are inverting the hierarchy of evidence. See my previous post.

as would something like a study from Belzec archeologists saying they couldn't locate the remains.

These sites have been analyzed and no huge mass graves have ever been shown to actually exist. This further destroys their credibility. You can no longer say they did not look. They looked and the end result was zero evidence of mass graves full of 100s of thousands. This completely discredits your conspiracy theory.
The fact is, we don't need to know where they went to know that they weren't dumped into pits. If the pits don't exist, and they don't, then they weren't dumped into them.

Well that's what we're trying to evaluate here.

This has been explained and you keep ignoring it. The exterminationists claim to know where they went. Except they aren't there! And we know they are not there. That means they're wrong.
You ignore:

Falsifiability
Falsifiability means that for any hypothesis to have credence, it must be inherently disprovable.

In the case of
"These specific Jews who went to [specific location] 70+ years ago with [specific location 2] as an intermediate step"
it would be very difficult to prove if there are no relevant records and they were able to move around. But if that changes to
"They went to [specific location] and never left, and remain there to this day in some form"
it is now an easily testable theory. And that is precisely what is asserted by the "Holocaust" narrative. But the alleged pits are not shown to us. All we are given is pathetic excuses -- all the while those who speak out in Poland, Germany, France, etc are fined and imprisoned for it.

So when asked "Then where did they go?" it is perfectly valid to say "I do not know" - but it is invalid for someone to conclude "therefore, they are in these enormous pits, and no I don't have to show you the pits!"
First, they must show the alleged pits. Until then, they merely have a theory with an artificially contrived consensus based on legal [and social] penalties for those who publicly question it. It can be falsified in the same manner that it can be shown to be correct. They refuse to do such a thing despite having the resources and technology to do so. Therefore, their case is considerably weakened.

It can only be after these thorough archaeological excavations that the truth about these camps will be revealed, whether it is resettled "into mass graves" or "somewhere else." The image below is what we are told actually exists, today, under a layer of soil.

Nazgul has begun by quoting excellent testimony concerning Jewish communities surviving in occupied USSR under non-genocidal conditions.

That does not matter, actually.

Can we find anything comparable for resettlement in German occupied USSR, unless we are abandoning that hypothesis?

Again, it is completely unnecessary. Further, you have failed to answer simple questions about the Transnistria testimony. They've been unanswered for a week.

Find something comparable? Really? You haven't figured it out yet?


From: viewtopic.php?t=14624

That is said to be a mass grave from near Soldau. The allegation is 8,000 are in there. That is up to debate, but nevertheless that is burnt material in a pit.

1. Can we find anything comparable for Treblinka 2 unless we are abandoning the "extermination camp with huge mass graves" hypothesis - YES or NO?

2. Can we find anything comparable for Sobibor unless we are abandoning the "extermination camp with huge mass graves" hypothesis - YES or NO?

3. Can we find anything comparable for Belzec unless we are abandoning the "extermination camp with huge mass graves" hypothesis - YES or NO?

You spoke of a "comparable level of evidence" in your OP. You keep bringing up evidence [the weakest forms] that allegedly should be expected to exist. However, using your own line of thinking, we must reject the claims of huge mass graves full of 100s of thousands at T2+B+S because there is absolutely no physical evidence whatsoever for this claim, despite attempts to locate the alleged pits. Relevant thread: viewtopic.php?t=14850

Again: The huge mass graves full of human remains MUST EXIST if your conspiracy theory is true. Millions of pounds of human remains cannot magically disappear. In contrast, people can and have moved around all over the place and did not speak of it. By default, you wouldn't necessarily expect them to.

[Butterfangers]

What you should be asking yourself is, "Why were hundreds of thousands of Jews being transported to Transnistria?"

Consider the fact that Transnistria is located extremely deep into eastern Europe, in modern day Moldova and just south of central Ukraine. This was exactly the region into which reams of German documents attest that the National Socialist government was planning to literally resettle all of Europe's Jews as a "final solution to the Jewish question" after the war.

If, as you seem to believe, these plans were mere "code words" for extermination in the East, why would these Transnistria Jews be transported there and not exterminated?

Transnistria was not governed by Germans but Romanians. Apparently they didn't consider the existence of communities of Jews (sometimes ghettoized, sometimes just living out in fields or begging in cities) to be a mortal threat to the occupation. They were anti-semitic to be sure, but not at the level of Nazis.

I think the point you are missing is that "I don't know what happened to da Jooz" does not mean "da Jooz were gassed". You are asking what is perhaps the most complicated demographic question of all time---that is, "where did subjects of the greatest mass separation, dispersion and diffusion of any population throughout history "end up"?".

Even if you, as a "believer", were to assume (just for argument's sake) that there was no Holocaust, you'd still have to admit "where did they go?" is a question we'd be completely buried in and hardly understanding the specifics of, even now. But you're turning this question to suggest that, "for any Jews we do not yet have the answer to (i.e. we don't know where they "ended up"), we can defer to the establishment view and indirect 'evidence' (i.e. lots of conflicted statements) that these people were 'gassed' or 'exterminated' by Germans.

This inference or conclusion is an obvious fallacy. It's such a fallacy that it's obvious only a very deep bias could produce it; one that likely requires an upbringing and perhaps multiple generations of indoctrination and propaganda to become so deeply-ingrained.

"Where did they go?" is easily countered by the question of, "Where did who go?", first of all, and then followed-up with, "if you're implying they were 'exterminated' (a crime), would you mind pointing me to any apparent crime scene or perhaps the fruits of any criminal (forensic) investigation?".

The reason we hear so much about the Korherr report, etc., is because these are among the only instances which even really look like we have a great deal of "missing Jews". And it looks much less like that (less than it already did), since we know that there were forced labor camps all along the route heading East from Warsaw, etc.

If you don't respect the importance of higher levels of evidence, you don't respect the most rational and accepted forms of justice in nearly every [decent] courtroom on the planet. If a Jew says I killed his sister and buried her in my backyard but says, "she's Jewish so we can't investigate by digging her up", but he swears he saw me do it (even writes it down in his diary), is that enough for a legal conviction, even if half of the Jews in town say the same thing? I think a fair trial would order some shovels and hard labor into my backyard. It's obvious why precisely zero shovels (other than the embarrassing, fruitless failure of Sturdy-Colls and the like) have ever been taken to key 'extermination' sites.

Jews were dispersed, dissolved, etc., ALL over the world but especially all over Europe after the war. Finding them, or them finding each other was an outrageously complex task. Top Zionists and other Jewish religious extremists had motives to perpetuate an 'extermination' and '6 million' myth to advance elements of their 'prophecy' which could promote the "return" of Jews to 'Israel'. Allied governments showed their motives quite clearly with the Buchenwald exhibit, Katyn, anti-German bombing, rape and mass murder campaigns, etc... with the literal all-time champions of "show trials" (Soviets) on the same winning side.

And it always comes back to the 'witnesses'. Lol. Have you actually sought to hear some of the more ridiculous 'Holocaust' claims? I challenge you to find ANY other historical narrative that has such a broad range of obviously-invented, preposterous inventions associated with it. Here's a good one. I have at least hundreds more just like it (no exaggeration):

Why would this author lie about this ^ ?? Simply put, he did it because he can. And why would he feel like he can? Think hard, I think you'll know the answer.

OK. I even recently posted about why these numbers might not be accurate. You also recently posted a documents describing Jews being executed to further the war cause. If Jews were indeed being executed as part of a massive plan to execute them all, why not put it in this document? Oh, yes, didn't you say that the purpose of the document was to be "found" after the war to confuse people? Then why reference it at all, as if the numbers on it are something to be believed?

I never said that was the only purpose of the document, I was just offering an explanation for Himmler's use of the word 'camouflage'.

If anyone was going to write out documents for the primary purpose of sprinkling them around as "evidence" during the war, why not Jews or other partisans, especially given this was among the few means of "fighting back" available to them? Why not sow an entire narrative about 'gassings' and 'extermination' [oh my!] and jot down the occasional diary entry about killings left-and-right, evil experiments, etc.?

Why not put execution info into the document? Unnecessary. The Korherr report itself counts the Jews transported to the "Russian East" as population loss, not in Europe anymore.

So... no. This is not clear in the document, at least not how you say it is.

Here is what the Korherr report actually says:

Notice the word, "through" (translation from German "durch" which can only reasonably mean "by"/"through"/"due to"/etc.). Jews were transferred "through" the camps in the GG. As already discussed (here: viewtopic.php?f=2&t=14794), there is no indication of how many Jews even made it to, say, Treblinka, given that there were reasonably major exchanges of prisoners at various labor camps all along the route. In addition to those camps immediately near to the rail line, there was a road network which expands the reach even further:

So we don't know when (or if at all) any particular Jew(s) made it across the border into the East. Let's take an example, we'll call him John Doeberg. John Doeberg is included in the figures sent "through the camps in the General Government" per the Korherr report (and supported by the Hoefle telegram, etc.). Mr. Doeberg's train, which has "T" (presumably "Treblinka") as its ultimate destination stops at numerous labor camp locations for lengthy periods along its eastbound route. There's no other reasonable explanation for the stops, so by default it is necessarily reasonable to suggest that Doeberg may have exited the train and was sent to work nearby. Doeberg could have worked at a camp immediately nearby the lengthy train stop, or he could have been put on a local transport (trucks, or simply walking/marching in groups, etc.) to go slightly further to yet another of any of the regional labor camps in the "greater Lublin district".

Korherr, himself, indicated these Jews were being taken to the "Lublin district".

Similarly, in his interrogation, Wisliceny perhaps deviates from what is controllers might have wished for him to say, with the following:

Interrogator: “What was Camp T?”
Wisliceny: “If I correctly recollect, that belonged to the complex Lublin system. I remember having heard the designation Camp T”.

So, we have statements of good authority indicating that transit as it is described in the Korherr/Hoefle documents refers to the [greater] Lublin district. Here's that district with the approximate location of AR camps:

Notice that Belzec, Sobibor sit right on the outer-borders of the Lublin district. Treblinka is the only exception (thought not far away) but Wisliceny seems to suggest this camp, too, belonged to the "complex Lublin system". What is the nature of this "Lublin system"? What made it so "complex"? No doubt the network of labor camps within the area were a contributing factor (note that many of the plotted points indicate sites of multiple camps):

Of course if Jews are being transited "through the camps in the General Government", it begs the question: "which [type of] camps?". Treblinka was not in the Lublin district proper. So, are we talking of the much broader camp network, labor camps included? Was it perhaps sufficient that all Jews sent to the "Lublin system" were thereby committed to the ultimate destination of the Russian East, thus indicated as being sent "to the Russian East" on Korherr's report? Note that the word here used for "to" (in "to the Russian East") is the German "nach" which can mean "toward" or "towards" in the right context:

Thus, Jews reflected in these reports can include those who were sent to the greater Lublin area, including those within the vague "Lublin system", whether or not they transited across the border at that time but still including those who had.

It's worth adding that Korherr states that he heard Jews were to be "settled in the District of Lublin". So it is not only the labor network that we would need to fully understand to calculate the many different locations Jews were dispersed throughout and in what numbers. We would have to look at any potential concentration or collection sites as well, of which there are manifold.

Many people thought the number of camps was around 10,000, but here we find a new number – upwards of 40,000.

https://www.holocaustchild.org/2013/03/ ... -shocking/

My approach to history is that I generally go with the best evidenced hypothesis.

The problem is, you don't seem to distinguish quality vs. quantity with regard to "evidence". Jews and other resentful parties saying "Germans did it!" (or writing this in their diaries), to you, along with frequently-coerced testimony in post-war [show] trials, is seen as equal to any question of physical evidence, or of explicit and official documentary records. Inferences about "code words" and "secret meanings" is sufficiently valid, in your mind, to incorporate into any "convergence of evidence" model you are building or accepting. The notion that some types of evidence (e.g. physical, forensic) far outweighs any quantity of dubious, oft-contradictory testimony (even when it's written down or said in court) seems incomprehensible to you.

The Kube document alone is stronger evidence than anything revisionists have offered.

Do you mean this report? It doesn't seem as "strong" nor favorable to your position as you make it out to be (from TECOAR, MGK, p. 671-672):

According to a report by Kube to Lohse dated 31 July 1942 (Nuremberg document 3428-PS), 6,500 Russian Jews and some 3,500 Jews from Vienna, Brünn, Bremen and Berlin found unfit for work were taken out of the Minsk ghetto and liquidated on 28-29 July 1942.1417 The so-called Gruppe Arlt activity reports gives the number of Jews from the Reich and Protectorate killed as 3,000 and the date of their killing as 29 July. Gerlach asserts that following this mass killing some 2,600 German Jews, mainly from Frankfurt and Düsseldorf, remained alive in the Minsk ghetto, but that the majority of them were murdered during “smaller operations from the beginning of 1943 and during the liquidation of the Minsk ghetto in September 1943.”1418 His source for the figure of 2,600 remaining Reich and Protectorate Jews is again document 3428-PS. This document, however, further gives the number of Russian Jews remaining in the Minsk ghetto as no more than 6,000. According to a report dated 31 May 1943, a total of 516 German and Russian Jews had been killed in Minsk from 13 April 1943 up to that date during the course of an unspecified number of “Aktionen.”1419 Following the statistics of 3428-PS, this would leave a maximum of (8,600 – 516 =) 8,084 Jews in the Minsk ghetto at the beginning of June 1943. However, as I have shown elsewhere,1420 there were at the very least some 10,000 to 12,000 Jews still present in the Minsk ghetto at the beginning of September 1943. This throws into doubt the reliability of the figures found in document 3428-PS, and accordingly we cannot say how many Jews from the Reich and the Protectorate were still alive in the Minsk ghetto at the point in time when Kruk’s two informants visited the city and were briefed by local authorities about the ghettos. It must be stressed that the original group of 7,000 could very well have been diminished by a number of reasons other than mass murder. It is clear, on the other hand, that the number of inmates which they gave for the “Russian ghetto” – only 3,000 to 4,000 people1421 – was a drastic underestimate, as seen above. Since the German authorities who, as Myers writes, permitted this inspection tour to the city “to encourage voluntary movement of skilled workers from Vilnius to Minsk” would not have had any interest in providing such an underestimate to the inspectors (as it might have triggered rumors about atrocities or deportations), the only two possible explanations are that the inspectors (or Kruk) misheard the figure relating to the Russian-Jewish ghetto inmates, or that the inspectors distorted the figure for whatever reason. Hence, while this diary entry is of a minor evidentiary value, it nonetheless supports, however tenuously, the fact that a considerable percentage of the Jews deported from the Reich and the Protectorate to Minsk in November 1941 were still alive in the city’s ghetto some 17 months later.


1417 IMT vol. XXXII, pp. 280-281.
1418 C. Gerlach, Kalkulierte Morde, op. cit., p. 755.
1419 Nuremberg document 135-R, IMT vol. XXXVIII, p. 373.
1420 T. Kues, “The Maly Trostenets ‘Extermination Camp’ – A Preliminary Historiographical Survey,
Part 1,” op. cit., section 2.3.
1421 H. Kruk, The Last Days of the Jerusalem of Lithuania, op. cit., p. 570.

[PrudentRegret]

Thanks Butterfangers, good post. I also agree that Jews who were deported to camps in GG would have absolutely counted as "sifted through the camps of General Government" in that report. It is a much bigger stretch for exterminationists to claim that this meant the number of Jews who arrived at Belzec, Sobibor, and TII. It also, as you said, squares with Korrher being told that they were settled in [Greater] Lublin.

To add to the statistical uncertainty regarding the scale of the population movement, it should also be pointed out that that Wannsee Conference reported Jewish population estimates that had no basis in reality- assuming 11 million Jews under German control when even historians do not put that number higher than 7 million- and Revisionists estimate that number to be lower than that. That's a big difference, more than a 35% difference.

There's no basis for exterminationists to claim that these statistical reports with wildly uncertain estimates are a substitute for physical evidence of what they are claiming. Even Korherr emphasized skepticism in the estimates.

[Butterfangers]

I don't know how I missed this initially... but this map above (which I clipped from the full-size map here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Administr ... g_1944.png ; archived here: https://archive.is/GETf9) has the precise portion of the area in question (the greater Lublin district area) actually labeled as "Arbeitsbereich" (meaning "work district" or "work area"). There is no other part of the map with this label.

This got me digging further into this question of labor and transit in Lublin district and the bottom-line seems to be that, based on the rail networks and overall geography, central Poland was necessarily positioned as the "transit center" of all of what became German-occupied territories. When asking the question, "why would the Germans build Treblinka, Sobibor, Belzec at the precise locations they did?", the answer makes perfect sense in this context of transit and also labor (as I'll explain). When you assume they are instead "death camps", the reasoning fails. One could at least argue Treblinka/TII was secluded but this isn't even the case for Belzec, so the typical justifications just fail to add up.

On the other hand, the Lublin district being ideally located near major (well-developed and high capacity) rail lines that ran east-west and north-south made it easy to transport resources and laborers to other parts of the occupied territories. The Radom district was also well connected by rail and road networks and is located at the crossroads of major transport routes that connect the region to other parts of the occupied territories (though, obviously, with the major front to the East, and with resources/labor being absolutely critical for the success of military operations, the eastern district, Lublin, was of more use).

These areas were also rich in resources such as coal and timber, which were needed for the war effort. There was a great deal of labor needing to be done locally, which made all the more sense to use the district(s) as labor collection and gathering points.

The location of these districts in the center of Poland (where SS and police units were already active in the area) also made it easier for Germany to control the surrounding region, as they could move troops and supplies quickly to respond to any resistance or rebellion in the region... again, the importance of these districts comes down to their purposes in transit.

The bottom-line is that the transit of labor (and other resources) is the most important function the Lublin district had... and if you were to try to pinpoint on a map the exact locations within that district (or its vicinity) where functions related to transit in and out of Soviet territories (i.e. further east) were necessarily a key issue, you'd be hard-pressed not to push a pin into the AR camp locations, specifically. You'd have the same problem when trying to pinpoint where it would make the most sense to sort and manage confiscated Jewish property (to PRs point in another thread regarding the true purpose of "Aktion Reinhard" relating to sorting property of Jews whom had already disembarked from the trains and/or would continue further east). The AR camps are, in fact, precisely where you would need / want to be for these purposes. There is absolutely zero special reasoning to any degree of comparison as to why you would need 'extermination camps' to be at these locations.

[bombsaway]

Putting this here from physical evidence thread

Mattogno and Kues were among the pioneers that really dove into the question of whether AR camps were transit camps, what evidence exists for this, etc. I don't think they ever claimed to have proven where all Jews went.

Thomas Kues: "Taken together, this means that the number of Jews who reached the occupied eastern territories almost certainly amounted to somewhere between 1,800,000 and 1,900,000."

I don't care that much about specifics, I know it's impossible to account for every person or community during a mass transfer, but you can paint a picture in 'broad strokes'. Kues and Mattogno definitely do, taking the Korherr report at its word. A question mark isn't satisfactory to me, because as I've said before I have an assumption that what happens to millions of people should be well traceable in terms of documents and witness testimony. If you're not able to produce a narrative, it's probably because there's very little evidence for your position, therefore its very likely to be false.

[Lamprecht]

A question mark isn't satisfactory to me, because as I've said before I have an assumption that what happens to millions of people should be well traceable in terms of documents and witness testimony. If you're not able to produce a narrative, it's probably because there's very little evidence for your position, therefore its very likely to be false.

The documents are very clear on the "Final Solution" being a resettlement policy. Even Sobibor has been described as a "transit camp" in the documents. Further, the alternative claim is that they were dumped into pits. However, these pits do not exist. Coupled with the absurd alleged method of mass killing (gas chambers) it's we can conclude that it's quite clear that they were not dumped into pits.

Note that you still continue to refuse to answer questions about the Transnistria testimonies.

physical evidence thread

Note that dozens of pits were brought up and you were asked to make a case for literally any of them, and you refused to even answer questions about just one of them. Your excuse appears to be that we should just ignore this glaring lack of evidence (again, which must exist if your conspiracy theory is true) and instead rely on more easily fabricated forms of evidence (especially party testimony). Naturally, this is exactly what we would expect from people that are lying to us.

It would be one thing if multiple pits were actually shown to exist at these sites. That would potentially lend credibility to the claims of other pits. But you have made the case for none of them.

[borjastick]

don't care that much about specifics, I know it's impossible to account for every person or community during a mass transfer, but you can paint a picture in 'broad strokes'. Kues and Mattogno definitely do, taking the Korherr report at its word. A question mark isn't satisfactory to me, because as I've said before I have an assumption that what happens to millions of people should be well traceable in terms of documents and witness testimony. If you're not able to produce a narrative, it's probably because there's very little evidence for your position, therefore its very likely to be false.

Bombsaway

Exactly. So where's the bodies? Not just for these 1.9m but the 6m. Where are they?

If the bodies cannot be produced along with hard unequivocal evidence of mass murder then it simply did not happen.