gl0spana wrote:My goal is not to argue in this thread about these documents' legitimacy, rather that one of two things are probably true from a revisionist perspective
a) most of these "incriminating" documents are real and on the whole do not present anything suggestive of genocide
b) most of these documents are fake, and therefore you have to explain why so many exist, when so few were fabricated for mass gassings, something with 0 physical evidence and completely unprecedented in human history. The only explicit document is FG report. Why didn't they fabricate a similar amount of documents to evidence an altogether more unbelievable story?
Needless to say, whether real or fabricated, these documents perhaps pose an insurmountable problem, owing mainly to just their sheer number. This is the point I was driving at it with my topic post, in addition to a (less important) critique of how revisionists consistently ignore many of the most damning einsatzgruppen documents.
Documents can be altered, modified, doctored. They don't have to be fabricated from scratch. Many of the IMT/NMT documents are copies of copies, have been retyped, etc. Additionally I would again mention the possibility of the reports being numerically inaccurate. I'm not sure why you refuse to acknowledge this as a possibility.
Whatever the case, I do not see why it would pose an "insurmountable problem" for revisionists. The Einsatzgruppen has never been the key battleground. The main reason they've tried to pivot to this "Holocaust by Bullets" is because the main pillars of the Holocaust--the Six Million, the Final Solution, the Concentration Camps, the Gas Chambers--all got demolished by revisionists in the 70s and 80s. They are trying to move the goalposts and turn it into a debate about whether some Jews were killed. No. The story is six million etc and that's what needs to be defended. But they can't so they try to talk about more marginal points where they feel they can put together some sort of case. Einsatzgruppen, euthanasia, etc.
In Hoax of the Twentieth Century, Einsatzgruppen is discussed in a chapter called "Et Cetera." As evident from the chapter title, Butz rightly treats the topic as the secondary matter that it is.
The remaining part of the extermination legend is that the Einsatzgruppen exterminated Russian Jews in gasmobiles and by mass shootings. This is the only part of the legend which contains a particle of truth.
The main evidence for exterminations is a huge amount of documentary evidence which is simply funny.
As we see here, contrary to what you say, even at this early point in 1976, Butz acknowledges the "huge" amount of documentary evidence. And he points out that this is "funny" because it's so anomalous compared to the glaring lack of documentation for all other aspects of the Holocaust. His treatment of the issue is fairly brief and he ultimately dismisses the documents as likely forgeries, largely for circumstantial reasons. I do not think Butz by any means definitively proves his case here, but his general conclusion is correct. Some number killed in the East. Not part of any broader extermination program. Mostly counter-partisan action though with some women and children killed. The exact numbers are not possible to determine but probably well short of what's claimed.
In terms of the big picture, the claim is that Einsatzgruppen and other shootings accounted for around 1,500,000 Jewish deaths. Can we be confident in such a figure on the basis of the documentary evidence? In my opinion, no. At best we have some number (a few hundred thousand?) of deaths "on paper," with a lot of that paper coming to us via the USSR. There appears to be no justification for 1.5M other than the circular argument that such a figure is required to even begin to approach the 6M. But the physical evidence doesn't support this, nor is it very believable on practical grounds (the number of personnel, the amount of territory covered, etc).
