Here is Where They Went

[Butterfangers]

In the course of debates surrounding "Aktion Reinhard" and the fate of the Jews, the notorious question of "where did they go?" remains a central focus. From the orthodox Holocaustian perspective, absence of [documentary] evidence regarding transit to the East always equals evidence of absence of such an operation; in other words, if we cannot show the documentary trail of where large numbers of Jews sent East actually traveled or ended up, they were necessarily killed as suggested by numerous bits of oft-contradictory testimony and extraordinary claims made by Allied nations, Jews and their comrades throughout the war and thereafter.

We ignore the fact that the 'official' answer to the question "where did they go?" is not supported at all by physical evidence in 2/3 of these AR camps (Sobibor, Treblinka), and is 99% unsupported in 1/3, Belzec (where only scattered remains amounting to thousands or low ten thousand(s), at most, can be reasonably inferred based on on-site excavations) where such a small amount of remains fits well-within the Revisionist thesis (accounting for thousands of Jews undoubtedly dying of epidemic and other causes in-transit over time). Note that the former two (Sobibor, Treblinka) have also had excavations, but despite almost a million 'gassed' corpses allegedly interred there in bone meal form, the total identified were: zero.

But the physical evidence isn't what this thread is about. Exterminationists often suggest that it's just silly to think that 1.4 million Jews could have transited through the AR camps without some substantial documentary record (other than the numerous official German documents explicitly announcing this as their official policy) demonstrating exactly where these Jews ended up in the Eastern-occupied territories. What I'd like us to discuss here is the fact that suggesting such a population transfer has occurred is not silly at all and, in fact, there are obvious factors which can easily explain how this number of Jews certainly could have been transited as described by Revisionists with very little documentary record to show for it.

First, with the assumption that transit did, in fact, occur as per official German policy, let's consider the ultimate fate of these Jews and how we might hypothesize a most reasonable apportionment as such, based on an informed understanding of conditions in the Eastern territories under German occupation and thereafter. Here is what that might look like:

• Subjected to German forced labor in Eastern territories until death: 15%
• Unauthorized killings of deported Jews by Germans in Eastern territories: 1%
• Killed in the crossfire as the Soviet army advanced: 7%
• Killed by the Soviet army deliberately during the advance: 1%
• Killed through the course of Stalin/Soviet purges: 5%
• Died after deportation to gulag: 15%
• Subjected to Soviet forced labor leading to death (other than gulag): 5%
• Death due to war and immediate postwar conditions (scarcity, disease, local violence, etc.): 22%
• Joined partisan resistance movements and died in combat: 4%
• Joined partisan resistance movements and died as POWs: 1%
• Included in reprisal killings (e.g. by Einsatzgruppen): 3%
• Children "reeducated" and losing Jewish identity: 3%
• Survived for years, decades in hiding or integration with local populations or Soviet system: 14%
• Escaped to other nations and survived for years, decades: 4%

Remember, if you feel that any of these categories should (or could) be a higher percentage (e.g. that more than 15% of the 1.4 million could have been killed by German forced labor, or in Soviet gulags), it means the other categories must be lowered, proportionally.

In this hypothetical breakdown above, in addition to any initial records of transfer kept by the Germans, there are only a small portion of these Jews whom we might expect could ever potentially leave a documentary trail of "where did the AR Jews go?". That would be the last two categories shown (survived for years/decades in Soviet Union, or abroad), amounting to a [highly-speculative yet generous] total of 18%, about 250,000 Jews (about 200,000 in the Soviet Union; 50,000 emigrating abroad). Surely, even with this figure, we would expect some clear documentary trail of where these Jews had come from, right?

Not so fast. Here is a breakdown of some of the myriad different reasons we should expect to see limited (if any) documentation in this regard (some of which are individually sufficient to account for an absence of these records):

• Records deliberately destroyed by the Germans near the end of the war
• Records maintained in the East kept secret, destroyed, or lost due to Soviet practices
• Records lost in the chaos and destruction of the war, generally
• Records not maintained due to the complex post-war geopolitical upheaval in the Soviet Union (including Cold War factors)
• Silence of Jewish "survivors" due to trauma, fear of retribution/antisemitism, desire to "move on"
• Disruption of family memory (families torn apart, loss of shared personal and oral histories)
• Jews changing their identities, assimilating into new communities, losing Jewish identity (difficult to track)
• Lack of interest or awareness among historians/researchers or the broader public about the fate of these individuals
• Lack of preservation, decoding or awareness of records actually produced
• Language and cultural barriers limiting documentation of experiences
• Limited literacy and access to education preventing the documentation of experiences
• Short life expectancy of Jews in these areas due to overall conditions throughout the postwar years
• Lack of social and institutional support or recognition of Jewish experiences to encourage recording

Note that the interest of the Soviet Union in promoting the suffering of their own "patriots" over that of Jews is known via the early 'Holocaust' narratives and propaganda they produced, which focused more on Soviet POWs in concentration camps than it did on Jews. This emphasis must have persisted internally within the Soviet Union, with the focus set upon the collective suffering and Soviet resistance during the war. At least early on, this led to a lack of interest in (or active suppression of) stories of Jewish experiences and struggle, including that of transit and resettlement.

No one denies the Soviet government imposed their will upon the population, after all.

Also, note that many of these survivors would not know they had come from (or through) "Belzec", "Sobibor" or "Treblinka", all the more suggesting the diminished sense of relevance of their experiences, hence little motive to document their travels, even once the names of these camps gained popular attention decades after the war.

Altogether, it is quite clear that it is by no means unreasonable to suggest this number of Jews (totaling 1.4 million) were transited East, as per the official, well-documented German policy.

One more thing I'd like to add or explore is that, had the Germans won the war, it would be very easy for them to sift through millions of captured Soviet documents, coerce captured POWs in postwar trials, empower inventive "eyewitnesses", etc. to paint a picture that many of the mass executions Germany had done were actually done by the Soviets, or to invent a pattern of mass executions altogether. Surely, many exterminationists would agree Germany could have pulled this off, had they won the war -- after all, both sides had mass graves within their occupied territories and millions of documents (and perhaps eager "lie-witnesses") from which narrative could be fabricated or woven. But there is a moral bias at work, a lens through which most people today are unable to see the Allies (or Jews) being capable of the same behavior as what they would ascribe to Germans.

And so, again: reason is on the side of Revisionism.

[Butterfangers]

Critically, I forgot to include the fact that the estimated number transited East was already leaking at the seams by the time they even reached the AR camps, given the numerous stops at Zwangsarbeitslagers where Jews were offboarded and/or exchanged all along the way. See here:

viewtopic.php?f=2&t=14794&p=106764

[bombsaway]

• Records deliberately destroyed by the Germans near the end of the war
• Records maintained in the East kept secret, destroyed, or lost due to Soviet practices
• Records lost in the chaos and destruction of the war, generally
• Records not maintained due to the complex post-war geopolitical upheaval in the Soviet Union (including Cold War factors)
• Silence of Jewish "survivors" due to trauma, fear of retribution/antisemitism, desire to "move on"
• Disruption of family memory (families torn apart, loss of shared personal and oral histories)
• Jews changing their identities, assimilating into new communities, losing Jewish identity (difficult to track)
• Lack of interest or awareness among historians/researchers or the broader public about the fate of these individuals
• Lack of preservation, decoding or awareness of records actually produced
• Language and cultural barriers limiting documentation of experiences
• Limited literacy and access to education preventing the documentation of experiences
• Short life expectancy of Jews in these areas due to overall conditions throughout the postwar years
• Lack of social and institutional support or recognition of Jewish experiences to encourage recording

All the reasons you just described apply to Transnistria, for which there are hundreds of documents + hundreds of testimonies getting into specifics about their lives there. This can be compared to the zero direct evidence in support of resettlement of any part of the Reinhard Jews (the 1.4 million you're concerned about) in Russia. So you're going to answer why this much smaller resettlement generated thousands of times more evidence than the above.

You listed factors that make Transnistria different in a previous thread, but you said you didn't want to discuss them with me. That's fine probably because it's a losing argument. If there was half as much evidence, or quarter as much, maybe you could argue this, but the difference in evidence is monumental. Transnistria isn't Pluto. It was part of the Ukraine and in the Russian Empire before the USSR was formed.

It also might be interesting to compare this to any mass migration that took place in the last 200 years. Is there a single one for which zero direct evidence (getting into specifics about what happened) was generated? Even small migrations are going to be represented somewhere in the record.

In the other thread you likened the lack of evidence for material shipments to the Reinhard camps to the lack for resettlement. This was a specific aspect of the Reinhard camps (and one for which the destruction of this evidence was documented) whereas any direct evidence at all would suffice for resettlement. Yes you provide "reasons" for why this evidence could have been destroyed or not generated, but even here it doesn't make sense. It seems like you're just saying it wouldn't happen eg with the 4% of Jews you speculated "escaped" out of the USSR (presumably to Israel - 150,000 moved in the 70s https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1970s_Soviet_Union_aliyah) You simply assume that these people (tens of thousands) wouldn't talk about their experiences in a totally free country. Jews in Israel spoke about Transnistria from my readings.

I appreciate that you're spending time thinking about this -- most revisionists simply say yeah the Jews went where they went -- but I think your treatment here is substandard -- eg you don't provide any specifics for the thread title "Here is Where they Went". The entire post is hypotheticals + justification for the lack of available evidence. Imagine if I posted a thread, "This is How They Died" and presented something like this. That's not my position of course, I think the Holocaust is the most evidenced genocide in history, so I rarely need to speak in hypotheticals and don't think the evidentiary case is substandard on the whole. Certain aspects of course could be more documented but this applies to all historical subjects.

[Hektor]

Critically, I forgot to include the fact that the estimated number transited East was already leaking at the seams by the time they even reached the AR camps, given the numerous stops at Zwangsarbeitslagers where Jews were offboarded and/or exchanged all along the way. See here:

viewtopic.php?f=2&t=14794&p=106764

I recall Jews being saying that they were moved from camps to work facilities. I think that's even in the videos the "Shoah Foundation" or so is putting out.

[curioussoul]

All the reasons you just described apply to Transnistria, for which there are hundreds of documents + hundreds of testimonies getting into specifics about their lives there. This can be compared to the zero direct evidence in support of resettlement of any part of the Reinhard Jews (the 1.4 million you're concerned about) in Russia. So you're going to answer why this much smaller resettlement generated thousands of times more evidence than the above.

One crucial difference between the Occupied Eastern Territories and Transnistria is that Transnistria was under Romanian control for most of the war, which naturally generated a torrent of correspondence between German and Romanian authorities pertaining to the treatment of both Romanian Jews and Jews deported by the Germans. There are also indications in a document written by Adolf Eichmann in regards to Transnistria that the Transnistria Jews were to be deported somewhere else at some later point, making Transnistria just another temporary reserve for Jews pending a German victory.

In the other thread you likened the lack of evidence for material shipments to the Reinhard camps to the lack for resettlement. This was a specific aspect of the Reinhard camps (and one for which the destruction of this evidence was documented) whereas any direct evidence at all would suffice for resettlement. Yes you provide "reasons" for why this evidence could have been destroyed or not generated, but even here it doesn't make sense. It seems like you're just saying it wouldn't happen eg with the 4% of Jews you speculated "escaped" out of the USSR (presumably to Israel - 150,000 moved in the 70s https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1970s_Soviet_Union_aliyah) You simply assume that these people (tens of thousands) wouldn't talk about their experiences in a totally free country. Jews in Israel spoke about Transnistria from my readings.

Most movements of peoples into exact localities during the war are not documented. For example, Hungarian Jews ended up in hundreds if not thousands of camps across German-occupied territories after their deportation in 1944. No one knows how these Jews ended up there and their travel routes are practically unknown except for the fact that many of them were originally sent to Auschwitz. Likewise, the mass-deportations and expulsions of ethnic Germans after the war, as highlighted in another thread, are practically unknown and it's not certain where these millions of ethnic Germans ended up. Similarly, Stalin's large-scale deportations of entire ethnic groups (including Jews) to "Siberia" are accepted by all historians of the Soviet Union, yet very little documentation in this regard is actually known. Obviously, most the GRU archives are still closed, but even so, news reports and hints about these deportations make them a historical certainty. Your claim that "nothing" is known about the Jews processed through the Reinhard camps is simply not true. Thomas Kues has documented hundreds of hints, news reports, witness testimonies, diary entries, documents and other evidence proving the presence of Jews in places in the former Occupied Eastern Territories where there definitely should not be any Jews, let alone Western Jews.

I appreciate that you're spending time thinking about this -- most revisionists simply say yeah the Jews went where they went -- but I think your treatment here is substandard

If you think revisionists are treating the Reinhard problem in a less-than-satisfactory manner, would you concede that most of orthodox scholarship on the Reinhard camps (and the Holocaust in general) is less-than-satisfactory and often times outright pseudohistorical?

[Butterfangers]

All the reasons you just described apply to Transnistria, for which there are hundreds of documents + hundreds of testimonies getting into specifics about their lives there. This can be compared to the zero direct evidence in support of resettlement of any part of the Reinhard Jews (the 1.4 million you're concerned about) in Russia. So you're going to answer why this much smaller resettlement generated thousands of times more evidence than the above.

You listed factors that make Transnistria different in a previous thread, but you said you didn't want to discuss them with me. That's fine probably because it's a losing argument.

bombsaway, I don't feel you are being honest here.

I discussed Transnistria with you over the course of multiple pages in your long-winding and disjointed thread about your "case for orthodoxy". I don't even need to add much here, I will simply quote-post what I said earlier, which you seem to have "forgotten":

What you keep referring to is missing Jews, for whom there are no precise, credible estimates of how many are missing, no precise location they are missing from, or at what time they went missing. It is presumed at least several hundreds of thousands may have ended up either at or around the AR camps or somewhere east of Poland.

Predictably, you ignore all of the points I have already outlined, again trying to compare a unique set of circumstances to your own inferences about other events in history. At minimum, you ignore:

• administrative factors
• diffusion/dispersion
• Jews used for labor (light or heavy)
• Jews in other camps and collection sites
• motivations to document or lack thereof
• cover-ups by Germans, Allied governments, the Soviets, and/or Jews themselves
• Allied victory and handling of evidence
• Soviet factors

Let's break those down into question format:

• How many fewer reports should we expect with such stark differences in administration (between Transnistria and other Eastern-occupied territories)?
• How many fewer should we expect when Jews were diffused/dispersed all throughout a massive region (i.e. relatively low numbers to each area)?
• How many of the "unfit" Jews actually were used for labor in the East (hence, housed within the massive labor camp network through the end of the war)?
• How many of the remaining Jews ended up in any of the thousands of other camps or collection sites which are known to have existed (remember, 40,000+ in Europe)?
• Who would have been motivated to document Jews that were resettled? Did the Germans have any real motivation to document these placements?
• Who had motivation to actually cover-up these placements? How many could have been covered-up by the Germans? By the Allied governments? By the Soviets, in particular? By Jews themselves, wishing to remain in hiding long after the war?
• How many were quite literally "erased" from the historical record by the Allies through the course of post-war trials and their dishonest historiography?
• How many of these Jews did the Soviets kill immediately, imprison indefinitely, or otherwise wipe from the record?

Each and every one of these items is a gaping hole in your narrative that ____ million/thousand Jews were gassed at Treblinka, Sobibor, Belzec, Beijing, Atlantis, or the Moon.

Remember, it was the proponents of your position who first made the extraordinary claims you now defend. Not only do these lack the requisite extraordinary evidence in terms of that which is physical/forensic, and not only is the witness pool saturated with countless proven liars, but your documentary trail is fatally broken, as is your suggestion that documentation which opposes your hypothesis should be present (for the reasons shown above).

Even more specific to Transnistria, here is what I last said on the topic, which you never responded to:

To start with Transnistria vs other SSRs, how did you determine the great difference you're describing? Would it be possible to verify and quantify this difference? eg we might look at population density, GDP, proportion of population that are Jews, urbanization levels , etc ...

I determined the difference by using Google for five minutes and actually trying to be honest and objective in my research. The Romanian government was an ally of Germany and thus was much more cooperative in developing administration related to Jewish policy. They also occupied the area of Transnistria very early in the war (mid-late 1941), and this area was adjacent / in very close proximity to the Romanian heartland. The Centrala Evreilor ("Jewish Center") was established by January 1942, as a centralized administration which dealt specifically with Jewish policy. No such centralized administration existed in the Baltic states and Ukraine, which were, rather, makeshift "puppet administrations" and only did what they were essentially forced to do, specifically related to the requirements as set forth by German officials. These areas were also vast, with Jews occasionally concentrated in major city areas however often vastly spread out over thousands of kilometers.

On the Centrala Evreilor, from USHMM:

During the period of 1941-1944, the Jewish Central Office in Romania was the only institution authorized to represent the interests of the Jewish community in Romania. To the Jewish Central Office in Romania there were subordinated all institutions of public interest, charity, cultural and religious societies of different Jewish communities across the country.

https://portal.ehri-project.eu/units/md-002886-1594_1


More information/insights about the Centrala Evreilor and its function, role in Transnistria:

• https://collections.ushmm.org/search/catalog/irn513156
• https://www.jewishgen.org/databases/Hol ... rohoi.html

It would be interesting to compare the number of Jews you accept as 'gassed and murdered' with absolutely zero physical evidence for each of them, compared to the number of Jews you deny as simply having gone missing and unreported for any of the reasons I have outlined earlier.

To pretend the resettlement of Jews in Transnistria is remotely comparable to the resettlement in the East per "Final Solution" policy is total nonsense. You are dealing with entirely different government, initiatives, and infrastructure on either side, which entailed different resources, circumstances, and different motives altogether.

In the case of resettlement in the East, both sides wanted to cover-up this operation. In the case of Transnistria, neither did. And the conditions in the Soviet Union near the end of the war are by no means comparable to those in Romania much earlier.

Your assumption that we would only expect "half as much evidence, or quarter as much" documentary evidence for resettlement in the East is therefore unfounded.

[bombsaway]

One crucial difference between the Occupied Eastern Territories and Transnistria is that Transnistria was under Romanian control for most of the war, which naturally generated a torrent of correspondence between German and Romanian authorities pertaining to the treatment of both Romanian Jews and Jews deported by the Germans.

Yep, there's a reason why I'm using Romanian occupied USSR as an example and counterpoint to German occupied.

Most movements of peoples into exact localities during the war are not documented. For example, Hungarian Jews ended up in hundreds if not thousands of camps across German-occupied territories after their deportation in 1944. No one knows how these Jews ended up there and their travel routes are practically unknown except for the fact that many of them were originally sent to Auschwitz.

Yep. Within the orthodox framework it's not a coincidence that there's no evidence here.

Likewise, the mass-deportations and expulsions of ethnic Germans after the war, as highlighted in another thread, are practically unknown and it's not certain where these millions of ethnic Germans ended up. Similarly, Stalin's large-scale deportations of entire ethnic groups (including Jews) to "Siberia" are accepted by all historians of the Soviet Union, yet very little documentation in this regard is actually known.

Don't just assume there's no evidence. Put this to the test. To be conservative, let's look at a comparatively small subset of people, , eg the Volga Germans by Stalin or the Germans of Memel. If I am correct I will easily be able to find strong evidence related to at least part of these people being moved and ending up in a discrete areas. You can choose the subset.

I appreciate that you're spending time thinking about this -- most revisionists simply say yeah the Jews went where they went -- but I think your treatment here is substandard

If you think revisionists are treating the Reinhard problem in a less-than-satisfactory manner, would you concede that most of orthodox scholarship on the Reinhard camps (and the Holocaust in general) is less-than-satisfactory and often times outright pseudohistorical?[/quote]

Most of it? I don't know, pop history tends to be bad. The more niche academic stuff is good.

I don't even need to add much here, I will simply quote-post what I said earlier, which you seem to have "forgotten":

If you want to have a discussion about it, I'll respond. In that thread you said you weren't interested in talking about it, when I said I wanted to move the conversation there.

"I'm not following you back into Transnistria where you have already been thoroughly demolished. I am not interested in quote-posting my earlier statements on the subject which you will undoubtedly have "forgotten" or "conveniently ignore"."

[Butterfangers]

It seems like you're just saying it wouldn't happen eg with the 4% of Jews you speculated "escaped" out of the USSR (presumably to Israel - 150,000 moved in the 70s https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1970s_Soviet_Union_aliyah) You simply assume that these people (tens of thousands) wouldn't talk about their experiences in a totally free country. Jews in Israel spoke about Transnistria from my readings.

I do not assume anything. I should mention the 4% was as generous as I was willing to be with these figures, although this may have been way too high. From what I understand, escape from the Soviet Union was no simple task. I did not research much of the data in this regard before putting together this hypothetical breakdown in the OP. I'd not be surprised to find a more accurate estimate is far less than 1%. But again, my goal was to be as generous as possible toward the exterminationist perspective, to avoid unnecessary objections.

You assume these escapees would go to Israel (rather than parts of Asia or elsewhere, any of the dozens of countries Jews emigrated to post-war). You assume they would then talk specifically about having been sent into the Eastern territories, via AR camps in particular. You assume this information would be published and that it would remain published. There are myriad reasons why this would not necessarily happen (even at all). No one was asking about AR camps, for the most part, in the first few postwar decades. No one was collecting "survivor" testimony in earnest until the late 70s and beyond. How many would have survived that long and recalled enough useful information? And finally, perhaps most importantly, if a relevant witness sees that a narrative is being peddled, promoted, and believed by their fellow Jews and the world abroad and, furthermore, if they are collectively benefiting from this narrative, are they more (or less) likely to go out of their way to contradict it?

Similarly, are Jewish journalists and researchers in Israel likely to go out of their way to contradict this beneficial narrative by seeking out AR camp survivors to contradict "extermination" claims? We might ask: how many historians in Israel ever sought to prove a Holocaust, and how many ever sought to refute it?

The answer is obvious. You don't get answers to questions that nobody is asking. And if it's granted that there are liars who have invented claims of "extermination" at AR camps, it follows that there will also be those who remain silent about witness to "non-extermination" at AR camps. Incentives matter and we know they were abundant with respect to the "Holocaust", for certain parties.

[Hektor]

....
Similarly, are Jewish journalists and researchers in Israel likely to go out of their way to contradict this beneficial narrative by seeking out AR camp survivors to contradict "extermination" claims? We might ask: how many historians in Israel ever sought to prove a Holocaust, and how many ever sought to refute it?

The answer is obvious. You don't get answers to questions that nobody is asking. And if it's granted that there are liars who have invented claims of "extermination" at AR camps, it follows that there will also be those who remain silent about witness to "non-extermination" at AR camps. Incentives matter and we know they were abundant with respect to the "Holocaust", for certain parties.

Exactly, Exterminationists try to use the 'lack of known contradiction' as an argument that the promoted narrative must be true. They don't realise how stupid that argument actually is. It's akin to a Muslim arguing that if Islam was untrue, more Muslims would contradict it in Islamic countries. Yet, they don't. And this isn't only, because it's suppressed. It's because it's the generally believed narrative.

Whenever older Jews realize that their WW2 biography doesn't fit that well into the Holocaust narrative, they probably think they were just 'lucky' and an exception to the rule. And well, if they open the mouth, what do you think they'll be told.

[borjastick]

The entire post is hypotheticals + justification for the lack of available evidence. Imagine if I posted a thread, "This is How They Died" and presented something like this. That's not my position of course, I think the Holocaust is the most evidenced genocide in history, so I rarely need to speak in hypotheticals and don't think the evidentiary case is substandard on the whole. Certain aspects of course could be more documented but this applies to all historical subjects.
Top

Yawn. It is YOU the believers who ad nauseum bang on and on about the jews having died in the camps as claimed because we the sensible adults in the room cannot show you where they lived after the war behind the Iron Curtain in the Soviet Union. Jesus please stop this nonsense! It makes you look so stupid.

Jut how much information on anything on anything, and much the same to this very day, was available from Soviet era post war Russia? Yes the answer is fuck all.

I remember a friend at my school, went on a school trip to Ukraine in about 1974, highly controlled and manipulated so the kids saw exactly what their minders wanted them to see. In the port of Odesa I think, on the Black Sea they were looking out at lots of Russian navy warships and when the kids asked about them their minder said 'there are no ships'. Full stop, end of discussion.

That was what you got from Russia. Yet you keep going on about this stupid theory of yours and James Hunt's no Eric Hunt's that jews must have been killed as claimed in the camps because we cannot tell you where they were re-settled to.

Please grow up and stick to your obligations to prove what you think happened in your holocaust, this is obfuscation at its finest. You must be a politician...

[Hektor]

The entire post is hypotheticals + justification for the lack of available evidence. Imagine if I posted a thread, "This is How They Died" and presented something like this. That's not my position of course, I think the Holocaust is the most evidenced genocide in history, so I rarely need to speak in hypotheticals and don't think the evidentiary case is substandard on the whole. Certain aspects of course could be more documented but this applies to all historical subjects.
Top

Yawn. It is YOU the believers who ad nauseum bang on and on about the jews having died in the camps as claimed because we the sensible adults in the room cannot show you where they lived after the war behind the Iron Curtain in the Soviet Union. Jesus please stop this nonsense! It makes you look so stupid.

Jut how much information on anything on anything, and much the same to this very day, was available from Soviet era post war Russia? Yes the answer is fuck all.....

Yeah. They insist that the Holocaust is "most evidence genocide in history", but can't show were those people did die. Can't prove that they died and only drag circumstantial evidences in this, which are actually open to interpretation. If they were/are so adamant on this, they had to prove this already long ago, instead they rely on the effects of atrocity propaganda. They'd have to concede that they didn't have evidence for what they hypothesized and that would mean their favorite Myth would lose its edge. And that can't be allowed. So rather perpetuate the Holocaust narrative, even if they still can't prove what they assert.

The motive should be clear... They are themselves deceived to believe this. But that story gave them a feeling of 'moral superiority', so they can't let go having to face being deceived and having peddled lies for decades.

[Whodunnit?]

Let's look at how accurate demographic numbers post WW2 are.

Let's look at the case of Soviet war casualties.

I quote Wikipedia. Here the numbers that the Russian historian Krivosheev calculated are highlighted:

8,660,000 Red Army-soldiers dead, among them 1,283,000 POWs.

The editors of Wikipedia know that most people only do a "quick look up" and never read the entire article, so you can hide information in large texts from the majority.
Deep down in the article you also find the following:

Criticism of Krivosheev

S.A.Il'Enkov at the Russian military archives believes total losses were 13.850 million
[...]
On 14 February 2017 at a hearing of the Russian State Duma a presentation by legislator Nikolai Zemtsov, a member of the non-governmental organization Immortal Regiment of Russia, maintained that documents of the now defunct Soviet Gosplan indicated that Soviet war dead were almost 42 million (19 million military and 23 million civilians)
[...]
In 2017, the Russian historian Igor Ivlev put Soviet war dead at 42 million people (19.4 million military and 22.6 million civilians). According to Ivlev, Soviet State Planning Committee documents put the Soviet population at 205 million in June 1941 and 169.8 million for June 1945. Taking into account the 17.6 million births and 10.3 million natural deaths, leaving almost 42 million in war-related losses according to his research.
[...]
In 1990, General I. A. Gerasimov published information from the Russian Military Archives database that put losses at 16.2 million enlisted men and 1.2 million officers. Korol also cited historian-archivist Iu. Geller who put losses at 46 million, including military dead of 23 million.[86] and A.N. Mertsalov's estimate of 14 million military dead based on documents in the Russian Military Archives
[...]
A compilation made in March 2008 of the individuals listed in the card files put total dead and missing at 14,241,000 (13,271,269 enlisted men and 970,000 officers
[...]
Also noteworthy:
Mark Solonin maintains that Krivosheev covered up casualties that were three to four times greater than Germany's. Solonin claimed that Russian official sources that list deaths of 13.7 million civilians due to the German occupation include victims of Stalinist repression. He points out that the current figures for civilian war dead are taken from Soviet-era sources. Solonin estimates total losses as somewhat under 20 million. Military dead numbered at least 10.7 million,[c] excluding 2.18 million soldiers who are unaccounted for, half of whom he assumed died. He asserted that some deserted or emigrated and that a higher death toll is possible. Solonin's estimate is that 5–6 million civilians were killed by the invaders (including 2.83 million Jews) and over 1 million civilians perished in the Siege of Leningrad and in Stalingrad. He claimed that 6–9 million Soviets fell to Stalin's repressions, although in contemporary Russian official sources they are included with civilian war dead
[...]
Viktor Zemskov maintained that the population loss due to the war was 20 million, including 16 million direct losses and 4 million deaths due to the deterioration in living conditions. He maintains that the Russian Academy of Science figure of 26.6 million total war dead includes about 7 million deaths due to natural causes based on the mortality rate that prevailed before the war. Zemskov maintains that military dead numbered 11.5 million, including nearly 4 million POWs. He maintains that the figure of 6.8 million civilian deaths in occupied regions was overstated because it included persons who were evacuated to the rear areas. He submitted an estimate of 4.5 million civilians who were Nazi victims or were killed in the occupied zone. Zemskov maintains that the government figure of 2.1 million civilian deaths due to forced labor in Germany was inflated compared to German wartime records that put the deaths of forced workers at 200,000


So what's going on here? Well, maybe someone - and we are talking about the Russian Military Archives and their central planning insitution - was lying. Maybe they are all lying. Who knows?

OR not even those insitutions were able to figure out how much of their male population, basically their pool of conscriptable males and their male workforce, they lost and still had left. This is not 5-10% more or less, we are talking about deviations of 266% or 26 million people here.

But whatever is the reason: we have a case where millions of Russians just disappeared - statistically. Like I said in this thread viewtopic.php?f=20&p=110309#p110309 , at this point HistorySpeaks would have to ask "where specifically do [historians] think the missing Russians went".


In most European countries you have a problem with large disparities when it comes to figuring out how many people died in WW2. Even in developed countries it looks like there is a problem.
For example: how many civilians died in the "Blitz"? English wikipedia says 23,004, German wikipedia 27,450. I also read numbers that go as high as 43,000. This is England, and those people would be among the population of some of their most developed cities.
In France there seems to be a problem. How many battlefield losses did the french army suffer in the "Blitzkrieg"? Numbers of french soldiers range from 58,000 to 120,000. How is this possible?

And why aren't these disparities possible for the Jewish population? If somebody wanted to count all the Jews in his country, how would they have done it? How do you cathegorize a Jew? By religion? What if the Jew says he's an atheist? By ethnicity? How do you define the enthicity? Is a Jew only someone with a Jewish mother, or is it enough to have one jewish parent, or just a jewish grandparent? Or is a jew someone who identifies as a jew? What if the Jews says he's just an American or a Russian? If anybody with a jewish parent is a jew, is Feldmarschall Erhard Milch a Holocaust survivor?

So even if you don't want to believe that the Holocaust is a propaganda- and social engineering-tool, then you have to accept that figuring out how many jews were still left after WW2 was a problem, likely to be impossible to accurately assess.

[borjastick]

Good post Whodunnit? You make a very strong case for the madness of statistics for any type of conflict or war. Not related to the holocaust but I recently did some research into the Irish famines of the 19th century, I'm half Irish and was interested in this sad period of their history. I won't go into details here as it isn't holocaust related but I noticed that depending on which side you wanted to follow the numbers of deaths varied enormously.

[curioussoul]

Good post Whodunnit? You make a very strong case for the madness of statistics for any type of conflict or war.

Holocaust affirmers are dishonestly implying that every other people-movement during the war is extremely well-documented and that it is easily possible to pinpoint exact destinations - whereas the Reinhard Jews are conspicuously "gone without a trace". This is far from the case. Not only has bombsaway been forced to admit that nothing has been preserved in regards to the Reinhard camps - including any evidence of shipments of goods - but it is also a fact that hundreds of thousands if not millions of people were deported all across Europe in different directions throughout the war. Many of these deportation routes are practically unknown. We do not know how the Hungarian Jews ended up in hundreds of different camps all across Europe, yet - evidently - there they were. How? We don't know. The same thing goes for the millions deported by Stalin to unknown destinations in "Siberia", the expulsions of ethnic Germans, etc.

The informational "black hole" in regards to the Reinhard camps is not unique. And as Butterfangers convincingly demonstrated in this thread, there are different ways to explain the very scarce information about the fate of these Jews. Just consider the fact that the American Jewish Yearbook published a complaint to the U.N. in 1949 which estimated Stalin's Jewish deportations to 400,000 people. This would account for more than all of the surviving Jewish deportees that Butterfangers estimated in this thread. These numbers might obviously be exaggerated, but just the fact that Stalin's mass-deportations of Jews were widely reported during the 40's and 50's, yet remain almost unknown to this day - despite being accepted as fact by most historians on the Soviet Union - is proof enough that mass-movements of peoples do not necessarily generate massive amounts of evidence.

[bombsaway]

We do not know how the Hungarian Jews ended up in hundreds of different camps all across Europe, yet - evidently - there they were. How? We don't know. The same thing goes for the millions deported by Stalin to unknown destinations in "Siberia", the expulsions of ethnic Germans, etc.

The informational "black hole" in regards to the Reinhard camps is not unique. And as Butterfangers convincingly demonstrated in this thread, there are different ways to explain the very scarce information about the fate of these Jews. Just consider the fact that the American Jewish Yearbook published a complaint to the U.N. in 1949 which estimated Stalin's Jewish deportations to 400,000 people. This would account for more than all of the surviving Jewish deportees that Butterfangers estimated in this thread. These numbers might obviously be exaggerated, but just the fact that Stalin's mass-deportations of Jews were widely reported during the 40's and 50's, yet remain almost unknown to this day - despite being accepted as fact by most historians on the Soviet Union - is proof enough that mass-movements of peoples do not necessarily generate massive amounts of evidence.

Well I am saying it is unique (except when looking at other deportations of Jews during the alleged Holocaust, eg the non-employable, non-registered Hungarian Jews deported to Auschwitz). Do you want to look at the Volga Germans, or the Jews deported by Stalin, to see how much evidence there is of their transfer?