Amusing 1978 WP article on Gustav Wagner & Sobibor

[Waldgänger]

https://www.washingtonpost.com/archive/ ... d8d8708eb/

Sobibor was a killing center. Its production line was as sophisticated as a complex modern factory. In just 15 months, 250,000 men, women and children stepped off the train in the morning, were gassed by lunchtime and their corpses burnt before dawn the next day. By then their luggage had been sorted and packed for shipment to Germany. The victims were gassed by the carbon monoxide fumes of a captured Russian tank.

Yes, I mean amusing, despite the grim fantasy at hand.

How many of you have heard that the Holocaust was sleek as a contemporary factory assembly-line? How many normal extermination-believing people have you met that believe it was a ramshackle operation pieced together from whatever Germans found in the local area? Most people aren't aware that there are two sides to the mainstream story, and don't feel the need to harmonise them.

I find it amusing that the WP writer isn't even aware of the contradiction in their own paragraph. "Sophicated as a complex modern factory", "using the engine of a captured Russian tank". What? And wasn't it a "submarine" engine, per other sources? If it was as efficient as a modern factory, why not just build their own engine, or bring in an old or new German tank engine? And if it was so efficient and Reich-wide a plan, why were the Zyklon-B confirmations from Auschwitz not brought in immediately?

Of course, most people don't know anything except these legendary names: Dachau, Buchenwald, Auschwitz. The rest is a formal mystery to the normal person. It is a shame.

[HistorySpeaks]

I have read this article before, which is excerpted from Gustav Wagner's BBC interview. The most pivotal quote:

I didn't think it was right. One saw these people exterminated who were really innocent, but there was nothing I could do. The maxim was: the fuehrer's orders must be carried out.

Question for OP/other deniers:

Why would Wagner lie about having exterminated Jews at Sobibor? It's not as if he was on trial or being tortured; he voluntarily told this stuff to the BBC in an interview he was under no obligation to give. His trial was already over; he was sentenced to death in absentia. But he was a free man in Brazil, where he was protected from extradition until his death.

I can think of theoretically plausible reasons why a man falsely accused of participating in genocide would lie and say that he actually was guilty: perhaps he's being tortured, or wants to get a more lenient sentence by pleading guilty in a war crimes trial. But there is no coercion in a voluntarily given interview; Wagner never had to talk to the BBC, much less confess to them his knowledge of and participation in the genocide of the Jews.

Also, if the Nazis had really "resettled" the millions of Jews who went through the Reinhardt "transit" camps (including Sobibor), the resettlement would have amounted to a community (really, a country) of 2 million people. Wouldn't it be trivially easy for the defendants to prove that this country had existed? Surely a "settlement" of two million people living in 20th century Europe--a population considerably bigger than that of contemporary Estonia--would leave behind some economic, infrastructural, and communicative traces. For it to leave behind no trace is an absurdity to put it gently.

[Lamprecht]

Question for OP/other deniers:

Reminder that you have not answered 10 simple questions: viewtopic.php?p=105124#p105124

Why would Wagner lie about having exterminated Jews at Sobibor? It's not as if he was on trial or being tortured; he voluntarily told this stuff to the BBC in an interview he was under no obligation to give. His trial was already over; he was sentenced to death in absentia. But he was a free man in Brazil, where he was protected from extradition until his death.

The reason for lying was quite obvious, he says it right there. Basically "I didn't think it was right, I was just following orders, there was nothing I could do, etc."
This allowed him to stay in Brazil without being extradited, which Jews were demanding.

I can think of theoretically plausible reasons why a man falsely accused of participating in genocide would lie and say that he actually was guilty: perhaps he's being tortured, or wants to get a more lenient sentence by pleading guilty in a war crimes trial. But there is no coercion in a voluntarily given interview; Wagner never had to talk to the BBC, much less confess to them his knowledge of and participation in the genocide of the Jews.

Yes it is rather strange that a person being accused of mass murder would talk to the press AT ALL. The reasonable thing would be to hide, put on some sort of disguise, and never admit to being a person that was in a concentration camp at all.
However, in this case, someone who was falsely accused of being him was being targeted by a search, so he voluntarily handed himself in to the Brazilian police.
Also curious is that he didn't even change his name.
It's quite possible he didn't think anyone would care about what he did. Then he found out people were after him, saying he was involved in some extermination camp operation. You can look up the concepts of command responsibility and superior orders, but it has traditionally been a solid defense. The Nuremberg show trials were simply exceptions. People forced into military service are expected to follow orders. If these orders turn out morally wrong, then the person responsible is whoever gave the orders.

Again, this is not a "Confession" of guilt at all, quite the opposite. It's literally the "I was following orders" defense. Claiming none of the claimed exterminations happened at all is not even a better personal defense, although some took this route.

Also, if the Nazis had really "resettled" the millions of Jews who went through the Reinhardt "transit" camps (including Sobibor), the resettlement would have amounted to a community (really, a country) of 2 million people.

After the war, people moved around all over the place.

Wouldn't it be trivially easy for the defendants to prove that this country had existed?

Nobody is claiming such a thing. But yes, the USSR did exist and had plenty of Jews, some of them not even counted in censuses as Jews.

Surely a "settlement" of two million people living in 20th century Europe--a population considerably bigger than that of contemporary Estonia--would leave behind some economic, infrastructural, and communicative traces. For it to leave behind no trace is an absurdity to put it gently.

Indeed, to leave behind no trace is completely absurd. Except in the case of them moving around. This was a time before computers were everywhere, a time before GPS. People could move around and change their name and nobody would be any wiser. Europe was a chaotic place at the end of WWII.

What we would expect to see - regardless of whether the Jews were transited from these AR camps OR exterminated on the spot, is train records. One record for each time the trains came into these camps, and one for when they left (whether empty or full of Jews). We do not have these records, which is not incriminating. The Germans, according to your absurd conspiracy theory, used code-words like "resettlement" and "transit camp" to describe these claimed extermination centers in top secret correspondence. If they wanted people to believe they were transit camps, they could have easily fabricated such documents. Instead, the outbound train records are mostly all missing.

But that is not really that big of a deal, since your conspiracy theory claims that these hundreds of thousands of Jews were gassed, burned in giant outdoor pyres, and the millions of pounds of burnt remains dumped into enormous pits. Pits like this:



However, no such enormous pits full of human have ever been shown to exist at these so-called "extermination camps" of Aktion Reinhard.

[Waldgänger]

I find it interesting that in this same article, Wagner says pointedly that he didn't kill anybody. It was against the Rules. The Jews interviewed say he was a cruel monster of untold evils, and should at least man up and take responsibility, and stop lying. So, it really is a case of "he said she said". But because the official narrative is accepted a priori, he is called the liar and the "survivors" (loaded word) are his righteous judges. I notice this also applied to Mengele and many others who fiercely denied having taken lives or mistreated prisoners. Everyone said "yeah sure bud", and closed the case.

The Germans are blamed for being so rules-bound and hierarchical that they blithely carried on this mass-murder. But Wagner's very proof that he didn't kill anyone is that it was against Camp Rules. Why would he cite such a thing, when he already says the camp existed for mass murder? I think he was trying to hint that he didn't really believe mass murder had occurred either, but the main narrative was so established by 1978, and he was already under threat of so many potential criminal cases, that he didn't want to add Denialism to his charges. Perhaps it's a case of "I know there were no gassings, but of course if you say so, at least I didn't have anything to do with them!" so common at Nuremberg. Or perhaps the WP simply edited his denial of mass-gassings to fit the narrative. I don't trust journalists, myself.

[HistorySpeaks]

This is a new level of denial if you're actually denying that Wagner said Jews were being exterminated in the interview you linked to.

To quote the interview:

Today, Wagner says he was depressed seeing people going to be gassed, but there was nothing he could do to help any of them: "I didn't think it was right. One saw these people exterminated who were really innocent, but there was nothing I could do. The maxim was: the fuehrer's orders must be carried out."

All that Wagner denied is that he personally killed people, or did the kind of sadistic things the eyewitness described. He disputes the eyewitnesses on these points, but freely admits that Jews were being systematically murdered by gassing in Sobibor.

[hermod]

Why would Wagner lie about having exterminated Jews at Sobibor? It's not as if he was on trial or being tortured; he voluntarily told this stuff to the BBC in an interview he was under no obligation to give. His trial was already over; he was sentenced to death in absentia. But he was a free man in Brazil, where he was protected from extradition until his death.

I can think of theoretically plausible reasons why a man falsely accused of participating in genocide would lie and say that he actually was guilty: perhaps he's being tortured, or wants to get a more lenient sentence by pleading guilty in a war crimes trial. But there is no coercion in a voluntarily given interview; Wagner never had to talk to the BBC, much less confess to them his knowledge of and participation in the genocide of the Jews.

As if the Mossad needed extradition agreements to supply Israel (or a vassal state) with 'softened' victims for show trials...

There's nothing implausible in the theory of a secret deal with the Mossad offering Wagner an untold amnesty in exchange for a false confession helpful to the state of Israel.

And what proves that the BBC interview wasn't a complete forgery anyway? Wagner was found dead with a knife in his chest about a year after that interview (or alleged interview) was published. How convenient.

Also, if the Nazis had really "resettled" the millions of Jews who went through the Reinhardt "transit" camps (including Sobibor), the resettlement would have amounted to a community (really, a country) of 2 million people. Wouldn't it be trivially easy for the defendants to prove that this country had existed? Surely a "settlement" of two million people living in 20th century Europe--a population considerably bigger than that of contemporary Estonia--would leave behind some economic, infrastructural, and communicative traces. For it to leave behind no trace is an absurdity to put it gently.

The first post-World War II census held in the Soviet Union was conducted in 1959. A decade and a half was more than enough time to transfer millions of Jews to the new state of Israel, some big U.S. cities and elsewhere in the Anglosphere. Who can believe that the Soviet-Allied victors would have been stupid enough to release population data debunking their own war propaganda??? And why would deported Jews have registered their own Jewishness in the 1st place? To make any potential arrest and deportation of Jews easier?

Nobody today believes that Adenauer's six million Eastern Germans who had "vanished from the earth" in the 1950s were actually killed during WWII and the following months. Why would it be otherwise for Jews? Chosenness' privilege?

https://postimg.cc/0Mh4cfFW

[Lamprecht]

So basically "Yeah whatever was proven at the Nurember show trial happened, but I didn't do anything myself!"
It doesn't take a genius to figure out why someone would say this if being accused of such nonsense.
When people are accused of crimes, they sometimes say whatever they think will get them off the hook, true or not.

All that Wagner denied is that he personally killed people, or did the kind of sadistic things the eyewitness described. He disputes the eyewitnesses on these points, but freely admits that Jews were being systematically murdered by gassing in Sobibor.

[borjastick]

Arguing silly little details while playing a violin on the deck of a sinking ship.

Get away from these side shows people and demand from HistorySpeaks or in reality doesn't speak to him, the hard facts of gas chambers proof, method, means in terms of planning and sufficient supplies of coke etc to burn all these claimed gassed people and proof of where the truly enormous piles of ashes are because they would be there to this day. This is all fantasy land from a man who would know the truth if it bit him on the arse, or in his case spoke to him.

These people split hairs as a sideline, a distraction in an effort to mkae themselves look all knowing and clever. In reality it makes them very very obviously dumb.

Where's the beef History Speaks, I'm hungry.